How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [40]
The commissioners appointed to fix the center and agree where the public buildings in the County of Buncombe should be erected have failed to comply with the above recited Act, and the inhabitants of said county much injured thereby.… For remedy … Joshua Inglish, Archibald Neill, James Wilson, Augustin Shotes, George Baker and John Dillard … [shall] be appointed commissioners in the room and stead of Philip Hoodenpile, William Britain, William Whitson, James Brittain and Lemuel Clayton.3
Ten years later, Brittain’s name crops up in another snafu over public buildings, as revealed in an 1802 directive issued by the Buncombe County Grand Jury:
The Court house and Jail, the former of which being 35 feet long, stands partly on the Town street, and partly on the lot of Samuel Chunn and Zebulon Baird, and the latter on the lots of James Brittain and Andrew Erwin, so that the County, after expending a very considerable sum of money in executing said Buildings, have not the slightest title to the ground on which they stand …
(Signed) William Whitson, Foreman4
Brittain subsequently appears to have opted to donate the land inadvertently used to build the county jail, unlike others on the list.
Brittain’s personal finances were considerably more involved in his state’s boundary dispute with Georgia. In 1802 he purchased 100 acres of land, and in 1806 an additional 200 acres, elsewhere in Buncombe County, North Carolina—or, from Georgia’s point of view, in Walton County, Georgia.
Technically, this land had originally belonged to South Carolina. But South Carolina had ceded the region to the United States in 1787. At the time, it was within the domain of the Cherokee nation. In 1798 the government “negotiated” a treaty with the Cherokees that required them to relocate to a reservation west of the Mississippi River—a forced migration now known as the Trail of Tears. In the absence of the Cherokees, the land South Carolina had ceded to the United States remained outside any state’s jurisdiction. It came to be called the Orphan Strip.
The difficult access in the mountainous Orphan Strip provided ideal terrain for people who didn’t want to be found. So many such people repaired to the region that, in 1800, a congressional committee proposed that it be given to South Carolina.
South Carolina, however, passed on the offer. It had no interest in extending its jurisdiction into this labyrinth of mountains, where many residents had repaired to escape jurisdiction.5 North Carolina and Georgia weren’t interested either. But in 1802 the federal government found a new solution. Georgia (which then still included present-day Alabama and Mississippi) had gotten in hot water regarding land fraud in its western region. The federal government offered Georgia a deal. In return for relinquishing the land that would become Alabama and Mississippi, the United States would let Georgia off the hook for land fraud if it also agreed to accept jurisdiction over the Orphan Strip.
The Orphan Strip
North Carolina did not protest this offer, though some North Carolinians suspected that the state’s border with Georgia had been inaccurately surveyed. The border was stipulated as being a line along the 35th parallel. As it turned out, the 35th parallel is twelve miles south of where the border had been located.
Still, the United States had rid itself of a pesky problem, and Georgia dutifully organized the land as Walton County (not to be confused with present-day Walton County, Georgia). Georgia went on to appoint officials to govern its new county. What had been a notorious no-man’s-land was looking better and better … to North Carolina. That state now declared that the land was part of its Buncombe County. North Carolina likewise appointed officials to enforce state laws and register land titles.
Among those buying land and having the title recorded in North Carolina was James Brittain. Such purchases by absentee investors were precisely what most fueled Georgia’s ire. Often the investors sought to charge rent