Holland Land Company
The Holland Land Company was an unincorporated syndicate of thirteen Dutch investors from Amsterdam who in 1792 and 1793 purchased the western two-thirds of the Phelps and Gorham Purchase, an area that afterward was known as the Holland Purchase. Aliens were forbidden from owning land within the United States, so the investors placed their funds in the hands of certain trustees who bought the land in central and western New York State, and western Pennsylvania. The syndicate hoped to sell the land rapidly at a great profit. Instead, for many years they were forced to make further investments in their purchase; surveying it, building roads, digging canals, to make it more attractive to settlers. They sold the last of their land interests in 1840, when the syndicate was dissolved.
The tract purchased in Western New York was a 3,250,000 acre (13,150 km²) portion of the Phelps and Gorham Purchase that lay west of the Genesee River. It was purchased in December 1792 and February and July 1793 from Robert Morris. Morris was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence and a financier of the American Revolution, and at the time was the richest man in America. Morris had purchased it from Massachusetts in May 1791, after Phelps and Gorham failed to extinguish Indian title to this tract and had defaulted on payment in 1790.
Morris purchased all lands west of the Genesee River except for the 185,000 acres (750 km2) Mill Yard Tract, which Phelps and Gorham retained, along with their other lands east of the Genesee. Morris paid Massachusetts $333,333.34 (about $4.7 million today). Morris' purchase from Massachusetts was for some 3,750,000 acres (15,200 km2), but Morris kept back some 500,000 acres (2,000 km2) for himself in a tract 12 miles (19 km) wide and running the breadth of Western New York from Lake Ontario to the Pennsylvania. This 500,000 acres (2,000 km2) tract was known as the Morris Reserve.
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