John Cleves Symmes
Record of the Week for March 29, 2020
This week’s record is a patent issued in 1800, but tells a story that started years before. John Cleves Symmes, born in 1742, became a wealthy man and helped fund the United States during the Revolutionary War.
With the Land Ordinance of 1785, the United States began to convey public lands. This ordinance was the birth of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS), which subdivides large areas using a system of principal meridians, and base lines, from which grids are constructed. An example of the Principal Meridians and Base Lines used in Ohio can be seen in the next image.
Symmes purchased several large parcels of land north of Columbus, Ohio, but these patents are far from his largest purchase.
While serving as New Jersey's delegate to the Continental Congress from 1785-1786, he helped decide how to split up the lands newly acquired from Great Britain.
On October 15, 1788, Congress granted Symmes and his partners their largest purchase, located between the Great and Little Miami Rivers north of modern day Cincinnati.
At the time, the Symmes Purchase was the second largest transfer of land from the United States to a private party. The largest was in 1787, when Congress sold 1,000,000 acres to the Ohio Company. Symmes’ original contract was also for 1,000,000 acres, but ended up being just over 300,000 acres after he and his partners could not afford the original price.
The Ohio Company eventually ended up purchasing 1,500,000 acres though multiple transactions and donations from Congress.
The competition for settlers between the Ohio Company and Symmes drove down the price per acre significantly. Settlers stopped purchasing land from the federal government because they could get it cheaper from Symmes and his competitors.
Symmes followed the PLSS that the Ohio Company used, but altered his surveying strategy to focus on speed rather than accuracy and precision. This decision resulted in final surveyed plats that varied +/- 100 acres. You can see errors in his surveying by comparing his township lines, to the ones west of the Symmes purchase.
Because of these errors, Symmes sold land that was not his to sell, and created conflict between settlers who believed they had purchased more land than what they were now being told. He later resurveyed the land, but an Ohio Supreme Court decision deemed that the original survey would take precedence. These errors reaffirmed the need for a more accurate and precise surveying methodology, and a governing body to oversee surveying and distribution of public land.
As a response to the mismanagement of the Symmes purchase, Congress called on Alexander Hamilton to create a plan for disposing public lands. It was Hamilton who created the Office of the Surveyor General in 1790, which led to years of improvement and refinement to the PLSS. Each of these improvements helped lead to the creation of the General Land Office in 1812.
We hope you enjoyed this Record of the Week! For more story maps, visit the BLM Record of the Week Shortlist . For more information on John Symmes, check out our sources below!
