Dutchess, the more northerly portion of the Patent,* was thus for the first hundred years of its existence a privately owned fiefdom within the Royal Colony of New York—the Philipse family essentially owning by kingly courtesy and historic right the real estate; and the Crown back in England owning by divine munificence and fine-tuned hubris the real property, enjoying the fundamental seat of ownership. This effectively meant that until 1776—when of course most Americans threw off their colonial yoke and won independence, and the Philipse ownership was ended and their lands confiscated by the new-made state—anyone wishing to live and work in this corner of Britain’s new possession could do so only as a tenant. The temper of the times was very clear: tenancy was welcome, but the notion that any individual could own, could have title to the land, was both impertinent and absurd.

  4

  Exploitation

  The economic development of the region was as a result lackluster, at best. The incentive for improvement, a virtue common to owners rather than to tenants, is systemically lacking when absentees hold the title—an axiom that goes to the heart of the very principle of landownership. Yet here in and around the New York Oblong, the colonial economy, lackluster though it may have been, was far from negligible. This was largely due to a happy accident of geology—the presence of an abundance of a fair-to-middling quality material that was much needed both at home and abroad: iron ore.

  Caught up in the tortured rocks that were twisted and hammered by the Taconic Orogeny, 450 million years ago, there were and still are huge deposits of fair-quality hydrous iron oxide. Insignificant by the standards of Minnesota’s immense mother lodes, the bodies of ore that were found in and around the Oblong were sufficient in the eighteenth century to tempt English ironmasters to cross the ocean, panting for business. They had the expertise and now they had the lure: they could mine the ore, smelt it in charcoal-fired blast furnaces, cast it into cannon and anchors—and nails for the building of houses—and in the process make themselves a fortune.

  The first iron was found near Salisbury, Connecticut, in 1731: the first blast furnace, a monster of firebrick and cement thirty feet tall, was built soon thereafter. Within a decade the region had become the principal iron-making region of America. Its first products—ploughshares to penknives, hammers to nails, guns to teaspoons, and ships’ anchors, taken by horse-hauled wagons to the wharves at Poughkeepsie and thence down the Hudson to New York—were used by the colonists initially; but then the American revolutionaries captured the furnaces and turned the smelters and the forges to the manufacture of their own necessities—cannon and flintlocks and musketry—for warfare and for struggle. Then the new independent government of the United States took control, and the business of arms manufacture—and the making of more delicate machine parts for the inventions of the Industrial Revolution, which had been born, by happy coincidence, in the very same year as the Declaration of Independence*—became ordered and dependable and imbued with what would become an awful power.

  Four basic ingredients were needed for the making of iron goods: iron ore, lime, water, and fire. The ore was geologically abundant in and around far western Connecticut and eastern New York; the lime was quarried from the Stockbridge marble deposits close by; there was water everywhere, in lakes and rivers and rivulets and brooks. And the fire was made from charcoal—which could be made in fire pits excavated in the forests on the hillsides in places like Wassaic. The men and women who came to Wassaic and who first settled near my land in the mid-1700s came there principally to make charcoal. They made huts for themselves; they cut and felled the trees; working in concert with one another they hauled up enormous stone-compassed charcoal pits, ten yards in diameter, and in these they stacked the logs and slow-cooked them to make the high-temperature fuel that was needed by the foundries down in the valleys. The circular pits were in fact called coal pits locally, even though there was no coal for miles, and charcoal was the man-made substitute. It required two tons of ore and limestone—and 150 bushels of charcoal, most of it made in the woodlands that I and others now possess—to make one gross ton of iron.

  All of these coal pit workers were rightly pioneers. As to whether any or many of them claimed or wished for actual ownership of the land they farmed, the records of that long ago do not tell. All one can surmise with certainty is that up to a certain well-remembered moment in late-eighteenth-century history, and possibly before that, possession of the land in what was first New Netherland, and then New York, was claimed by the titular head of the nation that been the colonizing power: until the Dutch surrendered their colony in 1664, there were a succession of stadtholders—Maurice of Orange perhaps the best known—after which it was England’s turn, and the titular local landowner was King Charles II, and then James II after him, and their successors until the hapless George III, who in 1776 famously lost it all.

  In reality the charcoal makers up in the forests, whether in Dutch or English times, were originally tenants of the Philipse family, given the existence of the Philipse Patent. But that all changed, not in 1776 when independence was proclaimed, but four years later, by which time the government had organized itself well enough to announce that the Philipse lands and property had all been confiscated—the family having been, rather ostentatiously and vocally, loyal to the British Crown. Their tenants were in consequence, and from March 10, 1780, quite free actually to buy their farms and the surrounding lands. Impertinence and absurdity were cast aside. The locals could at last own a portion of the new United States and be fully invested in the nation’s future.

  5

  Demarcation, Eviction, Possession

  The first title deeds were written; the Philipse estate was divided up by a new government body called the Commission of Forfeiture, and some two hundred new parcels, some of them existing farms and smallholdings, others newly surveyed and deemed ripe for building, were created.

  And, however brutally, the land had essentially been emptied for their use. By now almost all of such Mohicans as had lived here had been turned out—a few hardy settlements of what Henry Hudson had called these “gentle people” did manage to cling on well into the eighteenth century, after independence, but before too much longer the exodus got properly under way, with families moving either to the west, and the far side of the Hudson River; north to a mission in Stockbridge, Massachusetts; or joining the larger pilgrimage and final exodus across the Mississippi, to Wisconsin. There was the single local exception of the Schaghticoke, whose influence persisted long after Chief Squantz’s death in 1724, the legacy of whose stubborn determination to retain lingers even to this day. Otherwise, in what was now postcolonial America, the hills were given over wholly to wild animals and birds, to ferns and shrubs—and a superabundance of wood.

  Little more than the vaguest shadows of Native American occupation, centuries-long perhaps, maybe even millennia-long, can be discerned or surmised, even though they would be, should by right and human decency be, the true owners of the land. The first owners, one might say. In recent times some communities in New England have taken to offering—with a brief speech, a short homily, a moment of silence before a public meeting—a token of respect to those Native Americans who came first. This has already been done for years in Australia and New Zealand, countries whose treatment of their own aboriginal predecessors is no less lamentable than America’s has been. That the notionally redemptive practice is now spreading slowly up to—and by way of New England now into the public fabric of—the United States can do little but good, even if it comes a century or more too late. If nothing else the pause it brings serves to remind us that when we reach back so far in time, questions about the precise nature of the ownership of land, in the United States and elsewhere, become necessarily ever more vague and the answers less fathomable than they are today.

  My own land, possibly at first no more than a hunting ground for the Native Americans, was for the white settlers typical of what they expected, if topographically somewhat harsher than tracts at a lower altitude. Higher and less hospitable meant, perhaps, that it was cheaper. Then as now, it comprised a north-facing hillside, steep, thickly forested and liberally strewn with glacial erratics. In all likelihood it had never been properly settled, probably had seldom been trekked over other than by barefoot huntsmen. The fact that today there are, except in the deepest recesses of the forest, a scattering of decayed fences and moss-covered walls and boulder piles and, tucked secretly away in the recesses, the pits of the charcoal makers, suggest it was owned and used. Just not lived in, full-time. Not at first.

  The land was also mapped in only the most rudimentary manner. That changed swiftly, though: the craft of mapmaking, already instilled and taught by the departing British army cartographers, was keenly adopted in the infant America, and maps and charts and surveys of the individual plots were soon drawn and engraved and lodged—as items of singular beauty, as well as of legal necessity—with the record-keeping authorities.

  A map in the Library of Congress published in 1850 shows, where my land appears to be, a farmstead belonging to a family called Wilcox and another to Wilson. But these are low down on the east side of the hill, and there is no evidence of a track leading up to the mountain. The presumption has to be that this mountaintop land—rich with rattlesnakes, it is noted today—was seen as unattractive, and was almost free for the asking. And though some local aristocrats had their eyes on the mountain, as a means simply of augmenting their existing landholdings and showing off the areal dimension of their wealth, they were soon seen off by men of humbler means, who felled trees and built pits and made charcoal, and kept outsiders at bay. It is claimed that groups of freed Black slaves were given parcels of the nearby land after the end of the Civil War; but few long-settled African American families are to be found in these hills today, and if slaves did come, it seems that they left in short order.

  A nineteenth-century survey map of Dutchess County, New York. The land under discussion is in Amenia, in the northeast.

  I soon found that my land enjoys a border—marked with colored blazes on some taller trees and nothing more—with that of a family called Brasher, the patriarch of which was Rex Brasher, famed locally for drawing birds in the style of, but most would say more competently and artistically than, the mid-nineteenth-century ornithologist John James Audubon. In 1911 Brasher spotted an advertisement in the For Sale section of a New York newspaper: FARM: One hundred fifty acres, half wood, half brook pasture, good house, barn and buildings. Terms reasonable. It was in a community of which he had never heard: Wassaic, home to an iron foundry, and the country’s first-ever condensed milk factory, run by Bordens. And surrounded by woods full to bursting with birds.

  So Rex Brasher bought it, for a song: and twenty years later he published, privately, his twelve-volume Birds and Trees of North America, widely regarded today as the greatest and most definitive set of paintings of every major bird species living in the country. His relatives still own the farm: they liked to walk through my woods during the autumn hunting season in bright orange clothing, to warn off hunters. They abhorred—as Rex Brasher did, vehemently—the practice. Wildlife was for painting and recording, they said, not for killing for sport.

  But their mission was in vain. Hunters did come, in droves. There is still the wreckage of an old hunters’ cabin on one spur of flattish land, leading me to suppose that parties of men with guns arrived from New York City, a hundred miles away, to shoot and carouse happily after a successful day’s killing. One owner of whom I came to know was a Sicilian immigrant named Sebastiano Vacirca. From what I gathered Mr. Vacirca, who came in the middle of the twentieth century, was a keen hunter, and since even now the woods are thick with deer one imagines a few trophies, and a few thousand pounds of venison, were taken over the years.

  And then, like the ground coming up fast for a parachutist, so the cascade of modern ownerships are recorded, quick-fire—the family of a man named Edward Doll, and then Cesare Luria, who owned the parcel for twenty years and would come up from the Bronx on autumn weekends in the 1970s and 1980s, to chase down the deer and after gralloching them and preserving the antlers for the mantle, to lug the venison in coolers back to his friends and associates on the streets of New York.

  And then one July day in 1999 I came along, fascinated by and longing for this land, which had been advertised as for sale itself, and I duly parted with my cashier’s check and my hard-earned, sedulously saved moderate pile of cash, and shook hands with Cesare to seal the deal. We began a friendship that still survives, cordially—and with permission to hunt sought annually by him and granted near automatically by me. Coolers of venison are left out for me, not infrequently with a bottle of cognac inside for good measure when the season has been a good one. All this, though, was for later: on this July evening in 1999 we shook hands, and Cesare turned on his heel and headed home, and suddenly I was the owner of his land.

  6

  Exploration

  Once the real estate closing ceremony was over and done with, I lit out westward down the road from Kent, and ten minutes later, just past the sign for Macedonia Brook State Park, and the granite state-line markers that indicated the beginning of New York—the beginning and eastern edge of the Oblong—and after I had turned down the little dirt road that Rex Brasher had once called Chickadee Road because of the swarms of such creatures in the trees, and after half a mile bumping along the gravel and the potholes, I was there.

  I stepped out of the car and into the cool shade of the evening. In a trice I was in my forest, thinking of what exactly I had just done. And wondering: What does my ownership of this land truly signify? What does it mean, to own land? Surely land, I said to myself, is an entity that cannot really be owned, by anyone.

  And yet, in legal terms, this tract had become possessed. This tiny morsel of the planetary surface, a barely significant three one-billionths of it at best, has, at various times in its maybe five thousand years of populated existence, been owned or claimed or settled, among others:

  by groups or families or communities of Mohican Indians,

  by groups or families of communities of Schaghticoke Indians,

  by—at least notionally—three Dutch stadtholders in the House of Orange-Nassau,

  then in a titular sense by a number of English monarchs, the Stuarts Charles II, James II, Mary II, William III, and Anne, and then after the English became British the sad Hanoverian trinity of the first three King Georges,

  and during this post-Dutch time the land was owned or presided over by the patriotic-Dutch-turned-English-loyalist Philipse family, as Patentees,

  then once these were booted unceremoniously from their holdings, the land formerly tenanted by lessees of Philipses came actually to be owned, in fee simple as will be explained later, by farmers and hunters and charcoal makers whose names have passed into undocumented oblivion until it was owned

  by a family named Brasher who came to live close by and then

  by a Sicilian immigrant named Vacirca, then

  by a German American named Doll after which it was bought

  by a Sicilian American named Cesare Luria—and finally,

  by the current owner—who became transfixedly fascinated with the notion of landownership, and of how such a thing could possibly be, and why so many all across the world seem to go to such great lengths to acquire, to mortgage themselves for, to fight for, to steal, to borrow, to buy, to marry for, to settle upon, to commune with an entity which, in truth, cannot possibly be owned, by anyone, ever.

  But it remains a reality that, in most societies today, ownership of land happens—even if the very concept of ownership reduces itself to one simple and popularly accepted fact, as a land lawyer put it: ownership means that you have the right to call the police to throw anyone else off what the title documents say belongs to you. It is not so much that you own it; it is just you own the right to tell everyone else to keep off it.

  There is rather more to it than that, naturally. There is the so-called Bundle of Rights, an aspect of landownership recognized in law at least by most western societies. You have the right of possession; the right of control; the above-mentioned right of exclusion; the right of enjoyment; the right of disposition. All of these are legal terms that extend in law far beyond their common-sense dictionary definitions, and which, to the enduring pleasure of the legal community, are still open to all manner of shades of interpretation. And ’twas ever thus.

  To begin the process of possession, control, exclusion, enjoyment, and disposition, once the very idea of ownership is accepted, as it has to be in the pages that follow, then a single cardinal rule applies. In order to own the land, you need to know where it is. You must know where it begins and ends, where its boundaries are. The land needs to be delineated and demarcated, and with great and unerring precision. Whether it is a meadow or a nation, a pasture or a principality, its size and shape and the length and direction of all of its edges need to be known.

  Enter, some thousands of years ago, men equipped with ideas, devices, and machines specifically designed to do just that.

  Part I

  Borderlines

  1

  When the Worm Forgave the Plough

  Nomadic shepherds, accustomed to the age-old traditions of the Island, would find the ploughman, his queer implement and his docile beast, profoundly disturbing. But these first ploughmen . . . had come to stay and to prosper, and to sow in strange straight furrows the seeds of a new civilization.