The Land Laws.

The land laws which the Virginia Legislature enacted about this time [Footnote:  May, 1779; they did not take effect nor was a land court established until the following fall, when the land office was opened at St. Asaphs, Oct. 13th.  Isaac Shelby’s claim was the first one considered and granted.  He had raised a crop of corn in the country in 1776.] were partly a cause, partly a consequence, of the increased emigration to Kentucky, and of the consequent rise in the value of its wild lands.  Long before the Revolution, shrewd and far-seeing speculators had organized land companies to acquire grants of vast stretches of western territory; but the land only acquired an actual value for private individuals after the incoming of settlers.  In addition to the companies, many private individuals had acquired rights to tracts of land; some, under the royal proclamation, giving bounties to the officers and soldiers in the French war; others by actual payment into the public treasury. [Footnote:  The Ohio Company was the greatest of the companies.  There were “also, among private rights, the ancient importation rights, the Henderson Company rights, etc.”  See Marshall, I., 82.] The Virginia Legislature now ratified all titles to regularly surveyed ground claimed under charter, military bounty, and old treasury rights, to the extent of four hundred acres each.  Tracts of land were reserved as bounties for the Virginia troops, both Continentals and militia.  Each family of actual settlers was allowed a settlement right to four hundred acres for the small sum of nine dollars, and, if very poor, the land was given them on credit.  Every such settler also acquired a preemptive right to purchase a thousand acres adjoining, at the regulation State price, which was forty pounds, paper money, or forty dollars in specie, for every hundred acres.  One peculiar provision was made necessary by the system of settling in forted villages.  Every such village was allowed six hundred and forty acres, which no outsider could have surveyed or claim, for it was considered, the property of the townsmen, to be held in common until an equitable division could be made; while each family likewise had a settlement right to four hundred acres adjoining the village.  The vacant lands were sold, warrants for a hundred acres costing forty dollars in specie; but later on, towards the close of the war, Virginia tried to buoy up her mass of depreciated paper currency by accepting it nearly at par for land warrants, thereby reducing the cost of these to less than fifty cents for a hundred acres.  No warrant applied to a particular spot; it was surveyed on any vacant or presumably vacant ground.  Each individual had the surveying done wherever he pleased, the county surveyor usually appointing some skilled woodsman to act as his deputy.