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Collection :
HYATT, JACOB, PAPERS
Rutherford County
1825
P.C.
622
Physical Description: 11 items: letters, journal, land descriptions
Acquisition: Gift, Leila Mechlin, Washington, D.C., November 30, 1943.
The two copies of letters from Hyatt to his wife were transferred from
the Southern Historical Collection to the Archives on May 11, I960.
Description: In 1796 Tench Coxe of Philadelphia made a speculative invest¬
ment in North Carolina lands by purchasing and taking out grants to a few
hundred thousand acres in Buncombe and Rutherford counties , and by purchasing
from William Polk seventeen patents he owned totaling 20,445 acres in
Mecklenburg County. As with many other speculators of the period , Coxe
over extended himself financially, and he was obliged to put the speculation
lands into the hands of trustees in 1801. The trustees conveyed the land
to Augustus Sacket of Sacket Harbor, New York, in 1819, and Sacket entered
into a mortgage with the trustees to pay the promissory notes he gave them
in payment for the land. Sacket was unable to make his payments, so the
land was conveyed by Coxe's trustees in late February, 1825, to a group of
New York entrepreneurs: James Thompson, Goold Hoyt, James B. Murray, and
Arthur Bronson. The new owners sent Jacob Hyatt (d.1825) of West Chester,
New York, to North Carolina in the spring of 1825 to attend to preliminary
business on their behalf. Hyatt, a farmer, had been in North Carolina
earlier, and appears to have moved his family to Rutherford County and to
have lived there briefly. One assumes he had hope of becoming resident
agent for the New York syndicate that now owned the speculation lands. The
new owners instructed Hyatt to correspond with, and make his reports to,
Arthur Bronson (1801-1844), attorney, land speculator, financier, and
promoter of western expansion.
Hyatt's first business was to commence an action in equity in the
Rutherford County Superior Court against Sacket so as to be able to foreclose
his mortgage. He was to get the necessary documentation of the transfer of
land title recorded in the courts of the appropriate counties, to identify
interlopers on the land so that ejectment proceedings against them could
be instituted , to examine and report on the physical and agricultural prop¬
erties of the land, to arrange for the payment of taxes on it, and to look
about for established, potentially profitable farms that might be pur¬
chased for use of the New York syndicate.