LAND LESSONS- Land Ownership
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Your right to own property started in 1779 with the establishment of the Virginia Land Act.
The area of land known as the American Colonies was established by the King of England and owned by degree under the feudal system. The king would issue land grants to noble men, or generals and these people would then allow someone to lease a plot of land to farm it or build a house, paying the noble landowner an annual ground rent. The farmer or tenant never had the chance to purchase the land.
In 1649, all the land we call Virginia was owned by just seven men. By 1775, Thomas Fairfax, Lord of Cameron had consolidated much of that land under his ownership – some 5 million acres.
With the defeat of the British at Yorktown in 1781, our new government seized the land from the British nobles who owned it as spoils of war, and since the new government hadn’t yet given itself the right to collect taxes, it generated income by this selling land to farmers, merchants or laborers.
For the first time in history, any free person had the right to purchase land. The Land Ordinance of 1785 is historic for many reasons, but first and foremost it held the premise that all lands were freely alienable, title was given to an individual who had certain rights, among them the right to sell his land to anyone else. This allowed landowners to create wealth and transfer it within families without being royals.
In addition to the free and easy access to land ownership, the United States had an abundance of land after the Revolutionary War. No other country on earth enjoyed those two coinciding factors – lots of land and no restrictions on ownership.