The
Land Ordinance of 1785 was adopted by the
United States Congress
on
May 20,
1785. Under
the
Articles of
Confederation, Congress did not have the power to raise revenue
by direct
taxation of the inhabitants of
the United States.
Therefore, the immediate goal of the
ordinance was to raise money through the sale of land in the
largely unmapped territory west of the original colonies acquired
from Britain
at the end of the Revolutionary War.
In addition, the act provided for the political organization of
these territories.
The earlier Ordinance of 1784 called for the land west
of the Appalachian
Mountains
, north of the Ohio River
and east of the Mississippi River
to be divided into ten separate states. However, it did not
define the mechanism by which the land would become states, or how
the territories would be governed or settled before they became
states. The Ordinance of 1785, along with the
Northwest Ordinance of 1787, were
intended to address these political needs.
The 1785
ordinance laid the foundations of land policy in the United States of America
until passage of the Homestead Act in 1862. The Land
Ordinance established the basis for the
Public Land Survey System. The
initial surveying was performed by
Thomas Hutchins. After he died in 1789,
responsibility for surveying was transferred to the Surveyor
General. Land was to be systematically surveyed into square
"townships", six miles (9.656 km) on
a side. Each of these townships were sub-divided into thirty-six
"sections" of
one square mile (2.59 km²) or 640
acres. These
sections could then be further subdivided for sale to settlers and
land speculators.
The ordinance was also significant for establishing a mechanism for
funding public education. Section 16 in each township was reserved
for the maintenance of public schools. Many schools today are still
located in section sixteen of their respective townships, although
a great many of the school sections were sold to raise money for
public education.
In theory, the federal government also
reserved sections 8, 11, 26 and 29 to compensate veterans of the
Revolutionary War, but examination of property abstracts in
Ohio
indicates that this was not uniformly
practiced. The Point of
Beginning for the 1785 survey was where Ohio (as the
easternmost part of the Northwest Territory), Pennsylvania
and Virginia
(now
West
Virginia
) met, on the
north shore of the Ohio River near
East Liverpool,
Ohio
. There is a historical marker just north of
the site, at the state line where Ohio Route 39 becomes
Pennsylvania Route 68.
See also
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