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not have to have built a dwelling in order
to have ‘settled’ the land.
He could return to the East and resume living with his
family.
But on this
basis he could present the Commonwealth’s Land Office with a
statement of his settlement, and get a warrant for the land,
which would then require surveying and registration.
Virginia’s Corn Right law, which had started its
evolutionary development in colonial times, provided a prototype
for the National Homestead Act.
Political and Social
Changes Which Influenced the
Development of Land
Law in Virginia
At the core of this evolving real estate law in Virginia
were the related issues in England of the relationship of the
monarchy, the associated lords, the emerging private financiers,
the private citizen, and corporate law.
It was an era of rapid change.
During this era the English Civil War occurred.
All the above issues were part and parcel of this
revolution.
A
significant practical aspect of this turmoil was that affairs in
Virginia were allowed to evolve pretty much on their own.
Two events came to flower at about the same time, and
together they were to shape British American, and even
international history.
After a number of false starts, the English monarchy
began to reestablish itself under the reigns of the House of
Hanover.
The second
set of events was that the lands in Virginia whose waters flowed
directly into the Atlantic became largely taken up by settlers.
Explosive pressures to settle further west, into the
region drained by the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, came
to bear.
At this
very point in time, France began to try to expand into these
“western waters”.
From the beginning of the start of the French colony of
Quebec, the French gained practical ownership of the Great
Lakes.
It was a
short canoe portage from a creek emptying into Lake Erie near
the current city of Erie, Pennsylvania to the headwaters of the
Alleghany River.
From there one could float down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers
all the way to New Orleans.
The French had little excess population to settle this
country.
Nevertheless they floated down the Ohio burying metal tablets
asserting their claim to the region.
Over time they established small settlements up and down
these waterways, even up the Cumberland River to present
Nashville, and up the Tennessee to the ford of the Broad River
(now the French Broad) east of Knoxville, Tennessee.
The geographic line between these ‘western waters’, and
those flowing to the east was such that the entire present State
of West Virginia (then part of Virginia), the present State of
Kentucky, and all of present Virginia west of Christiansburg
were ‘western waters’, and were in disputed ownership between
the French and the English.
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