Pulteney Estate Ledgers

In the 1790s, Sir William Pulteney led a consortium of British investors who purchased large tracts of land in Central and Western New York. In 1792, Pulteney, along with John Hornby and Patrick Colquhoun, bought the holdings of American financier Robert Morris, who had purchased the Phelps and Gorham tract a year earlier. Alongside this one million acre purchase, they would later add another 335,000 acres of land, mostly in the Morris Reserve tract to the west of the Genesee River. Aided by his Scottish-born agent Charles Williamson, Pulteney would carry out transportation improvements, plot out towns and sell the lands he had purchased at a profit. This plan, however, would turn out to be much harder than intially expected. Between the remoteness of much of the land and the poverty of its purchasers, Pulteney and his heirs would often find themselves struggling to bring in the funds they expected. Due to poor commodity prices and high initial land sale prices, farmers in the Pulteney Estate lands would carry out passive and, eventually, active resistance to the collection of their debts by the 1830s. These problems were exacerbated by both the disinterest of the Pulteney heirs in any active involvement in their investment and the varying skills of the land agents they appointed. Ultimately, the final agent, attorney Frederick Wynkoop of Bath, New York, would purchase the few remaining lots in 1903, closing the books on over a century of Pulteney land ownership in New York State.