Jacob Hyatt Papers, 1825

Haftfh C&noLLna. Shvtz A/lc hivu> RaZzlgh, Notith Сало Lena 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.