Land Owners of New England
Most of the original settlers of Connecticut arrived with the "Winthrop Fleet’ of the early 1730s. Unhappy with the strict Puritanism of Massachusetts and I believe a desire to create a society where land ownership was universal many moved to Hartford and Windsor in the middle to late 1630s.
Consider: "The land had been owned for centuries by a suprisingly small part of the population. The vast bulk of Englishmen have been, and still are (1937), tenants paying rent to some landlord. We have no reliable statistics for the ownership, in the mid-eighteenth century, of England’s thirty-six million acres; but in 1688 it was estimated, as we saw, that there were about 175,000 landowners out of a population of some 5,000,000, and in 1874 about 1,000,000 landowners in a population of some 23,000,000. Even these figures do not fully indicate the remarkable concentration of landowning in the hands of a favored few. In 1874, 250,000 persons owned nine tenths of the land while 4,200 owned half of it.
How had this little group come into possession of the land? Theoretically it had all belonged to the King. William the Conqueror, it will be recalled, had divided England among his followers, receiving military service and feudal dues in return for the land."*
Thus from a Country where land ownership comprised five percent of the population and one one-thousandth owned half of the land came a group of men intending to right this injustice. The careful and methodic division of the new lands reflected the animosity left behind in England. From a Country of landlords and tenants removed a collection of probably middle class men whose fairness is exemplified in the mathematical complexities of land shares.
In my home town the Windsor Proprietors divided the western half into two circular portions which resemble an inner and outer ring. I believe by chance of a drawing the rings were then cut into portions reflecting the assessed values of their Windsor properties as the sizes of the lots. The eastern or Hartford half was laid out by chance in the first division which awarded choice agricultural lots near the road or path through town. The remainder of the eastern half was chosen piecemeal in five more divisions with the settlers in turn picking a lot five more times. As the acreage was cut remaining parcels, in some cases, were not large enough to satisfy the share of the settler. In some instances in the 5th and 6th divisions of remaining lands not already chosen one man chose four parcels to make up one share. Attempts to trace lands of these original 25 settlers are very complicated as they averaged seven separate lots each. I cannot think of any other reason for this methodology, other than a complicated attempt at equality of the end result.
* A History of England and the British Empire by Walter Phelps Hall, Robert Greenhalgh Albion and Jennie Barnes Pope 1937.