Series 1158: West of Pearl River District Land Records. 1794-1849; undated.
Secretary of State (RG 28). Public Lands Division.

Series 1158: West of Pearl River District Land Records. 1794-1849; undated.
Secretary of State (RG 28). Public Lands Division.

      Surveys, plats, field notes, lists, and other records concerning lands in the district west of the Pearl River, which comprised all or part of the following present-day Mississippi counties: Adams, Amite, Claiborne, Copiah, Franklin, Jefferson, Lawrence, Lincoln, Marion, Walthall, Warren, and Wilkinson counties. The land office for this district was located at Washington, Mississippi in Adams County. The surveys of claims in Boxes 3209-3211, 10012, and 10016 are arranged alphabetically by surname of claimant (see index of names below). Certain oversize surveys of claims have been relocated to Box #10046. Many of the surveys in this series pertain to multiple claims, and thus it was not practical to index them all by name of claimant.

      In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new land that was opened up for settlement was first surveyed to establish major township and range lines. This work was carried out under the orders of the General Land Office in Washington, D.C. Local land offices were set up, and each land office was responsible for surveying lands and keeping the appropriate records in its assigned land district. The local land offices operated with clerks and two officials, the Register and the Receiver. The Register took land applications from settlers, made notations in the tract and plat books, and produced monthly reports. The Receiver took payments for the land, and he also produced monthly reports. Unclaimed land, called the “public domain,” was considered the property of the Federal government until it was sold at public auction.

      In 1803, the United States Congress established two land offices in the Mississippi Territory, one in the town of Washington (Adams County) for lands lying west of the Pearl River, and another at St. Stephens (now in Alabama) for lands east of the Pearl River. The land office officials of this district were faced with the problem of disentangling the many private land claims in the area, which had to be established before the public domain lands could be identified and sold. Some of the land had been settled long before the United States gained dominion over the area, and many of its inhabitants held land claims from the British or Spanish governments.

      The policy of the United States was to honor land claims granted by former governments in its newly acquired territory, if the legitimacy of such claims could be confirmed. Land claims could also be confirmed simply “by virtue of inhabitation and cultivation.” Such confirmations, called “preemptions,” were necessary, since some of the inhabitants were actually squatters who had no legal claim to their land other than that they had lived on it and cultivated it for a number of years. While preemptions did not establish ownership of a particular piece of land, they did grant the squatters currently inhabiting it first rights at buying the land from the government.

      Officials called Commissioners were appointed to deal with private claims of land. Their job was to sort out the legitimate land claims from the fraudulent ones and to make sure that settlers who held their lands from previous governments were treated fairly. They would establish themselves near the local land office, advertise their presence, and all with private land claims could seek out the Commissioners to have their claims confirmed. Typically, the Register acted together with two other appointed or ex-officio commissioners as a Board of Commissioners to disentangle and judge conflicting land claims. The claims usually resulted in the creation of three documents: warrants of survey (instructions to the deputy principal surveyor to survey or have surveyed a particular piece of land); certificates of confirmation (which state that the individual’s claim is valid and that he or she is entitled to a patent); and certificates of survey (which usually include a plat of the tract of land, and certify that the land has indeed been surveyed by the proper authorities).

      A note about land measurements: Though most land measurements in these records were made in acres, a fair number of claims were made in arpents, a French unit of measure. One arpent is roughly equivalent to 0.85 acre. The word is usually spelled arpens in these documents.

      For further information, researchers may wish to consult the following sources:

American State Papers: Public Lands. Vol. 3.

Hone, E. Wade. Land and Property Research in the United States. Salt Lake City, UT: Ancestry, 1997.

Gates, Paul W. History of Public Land Law Development. Washington, D. C.: Public Land Law Review Commission, 1968.

-----------------. “Private Land Claims in the South,” Journal of Southern History 22 (1956): 183-204.

Long, John H., ed. Mississippi Atlas of Historical County Boundaries. Compiled by Peggy Tuck Sinko. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

Rohrbough, Malcolm J. The Land Office Business: the Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789-1837. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1990.

White, C. Albert. A History of the Rectangular Survey System. Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, n. d.

Below is a list of names of individuals who are represented significantly in the land records contained in Boxes 3209-3211, 10012, and 10016 (with oversize materials in Box 10046). Please be aware that names on the list are spelled as they appear in the documents; this does not mean that they are spelled correctly. If the spelling of an individual’s name is inconsistent within the document(s), variant spellings have been noted in parentheses. A question mark (?) denotes uncertainly of spelling due to indecipherable handwriting. As mentioned previously, it was not practical to make an index of every name appearing in these records, since many of the documents show multiple claimants.