\nSome time ago I spoke on this program about the Bingham Purchase, whereby in the last quarter of the 18th century William Bingham of Philadelphia bought two million acres of Maine land and held an option on a third million. During the past year new information has come to light about that huge sale of Maine acres, and I want to share it with you today.<\/p>\n
William Bingham was the leading American member of a wealthy British family that had close connections with the nobility and even royalty of England. Born in 1752, Bingham had become an important land owner even before the Revolution. Both his father and his wife’s father had owned large acreage near Philadelphia that came into Bingham’s own hands soon after the Revolution. Before 1800 he had increased his Pennsylvania holdings to 1,160,000 acres and since 1780 had invested more than 50,000 pounds in some of that added acreage.<\/p>\n
In 1802 he had bought in a single purchase 340,000 acres in the western part of the state, then just opening up to settlement. Like the earlier 17th century cavaliers of Virginia, William Bingham was convinced that American wealth lay in land.<\/p>\n
After 1790 the largest land area up for sale lay in the Massachusetts District of Maine. During the Revolution Bingham had become friendly with General Henry Knox, George Washington’s commander of artillery and our nation’s first Secretary of War. Knox, before the war an impoverished Boston bookseller, had made a fortunate marriage to Lucy Flucker, one of the major heirs to the vast lands of the Waldo Patent from Muscongus Bay up into the interior. Knox was just as ambitious for more land as was William Bingham. So in 1791 he contracted with the State of Massachusetts to buy a million acres on the upper Kennebec, and 52 townships constituting another million acres east of the Penobscot.<\/p>\n
Unlike Bingham, Knox was a lavish spender, preferring to live like a British lord, and making his mansion, called Montpelier, at Thomaston a showplace among New England homes. Knox’s delusions of grandeur outran his pocketbook, and he soon failed to meet the conditions of his contract with the Massachusetts land office. In distress he appealed to his friend William Bingham. Knox already had a partner in this deal, Col. William Duer of New York. The two pieces for which they had contracted were theirs for the absurdly low price of ten cents an acre. A year later they took option on another million acres at 20 cents. At the time of purchase Knox and Duer had made a down payment of only $5,000, giving their notes for $237,802, which figure included interest at 6%.<\/p>\n
Duer was so heavily involved in the financial crash of 1792, which ruined many investors, especially in New York, that he was already in debtor’s prison when the first of those notes fell due, leaving Henry Knox to meet it alone. It was then that Knox appealed to his Revolutionary friend, William Bingham of Philadelphi a.<\/p>\n
At first Bingham granted loans to Knox, but when Knox couldn’t even pay the interest on those loans, Bingham saw that his best hope lay in getting complete ownership into his own hands. So Bingham got the deeds, but with the stipulation that when the lands were sold to settlers or otherwise, Knox should have one-third of the proceeds and Bingham two-thirds. The papers passed at the time numbered 16 deeds covering the two million acres, and a number of options covering a third million.<\/p>\n
Let us now see where those lands were located. The first — and that was the tract ever since known as the “Million Acres” — was a huge rectangular area on both sides of the Kennebec north of the present town of Bingham. It contained 49 townships totaling actually 1,128,960 acres. The second tract, described as being east of the Penobscot River, had the present towns of Machias and Gouldsboro on its south line, the town of Alexander in its northeast corner, and Calais just beyond its east line. That big tract had a total of 1,107,396 acres. The third tract, which Bingham never actually purchased, preferring later to give up his option, was an area north of his Penobscot tract. It was 60 miles long and thirty-six miles wide, enveloping another million acres in six fullsized townships.<\/p>\n
The negotiations, some of them rather complicated, by which Bingham acquired the first two of those immense tracts, resulted in a price of 12 cents per acre, and required a down payment of $30,983. He expected to sell to settlers and perhaps other speculators at anywhere from 40 cents to a dollar an acre. In short, William Bingham envisioned a magnificent profit on his Maine lands.<\/p>\n
When Bingham got control of those two million acres, Maine had slightly fewer than 100,000 people, of whom 85,000 lived in the three western counties, and most of them between Portland and the New Hampshire line. Bingham’s lands were then inhabited by only a handful of squatters. Boston investors, whose forebears had avidly picked up land in western and central Maine, considered the more distant Bingham lands wholly unfit for habitation. But Bingham optimistically thought otherwise. In 1793 he launched a publishing campaign for sale and settlement. He especially appealed to foreign investors, circulating his ads not only in England, but also in Germany, Holland and France. He in fact engaged an agent who called on prospects allover western Europe. His appeal to General Lincoln of Hingham, Mass., a popular commander in the Revolution, won the General’s endorsement of Bingham’s Maine lands. Gen. Lincoln declared that those lands were located in high, healthy terrain so that people there lived to old age, free from lowland diseases, that the soil was good for grain, and that fish were plentiful. Furthermore there was a lot of ginseng root, for which there was then world-wide demand. Also the harbors were accessible and deep, and water power was abundant. Bingham’s lands, said Lincoln, needed only two things: roads and capital development. What Gen. Lincoln said and much more was contained in Bingham’s big pamphlet entitled “A Description of the Situation, Climate, Soil and Production of Certain Tracts of Land in the District of Maine”.<\/p>\n
Bingham heard that Catholics in the Ulster section of Northern Ireland were being persecuted. So he made a fine offer to settle them on his Maine lands. He sent William Jackson there and to England as his agent. It was Jackson who first sought the interest of the great banking firm of Baring Brothers. He tried to get Sir Francis Baring to take a half interest in Bingham’s two million acres at 44 cents an acre. Sir Francis was slow to reveal any interest, but on Jackson’s persistence he agreed to send his son Alexander Baring to America to look over the lands. The House of Baring, then only 33 years old, was, like the Rothschilds, one of the outstanding banking firms of Europe. The founder, Johann Baring of Bremen, Germany, had come to England in 1717 and had married the daughter of a wealthy merchant. In 1763 two of his sons, John and Francis, founded an export-import firm in London. Francis became a director of the great East India Company, and Alexander a financial adviser to Prime Ministers Shelburne and Pitt. Francis was knighted by King George II.<\/p>\n
Because Sir Francis’ oldest son was not interested in business, it was the younger son Alexander who became his father’s successor in Baring Brothers. Despite his youth when he arrived in America, Alexander Baring was a shrewd bargainer, and he kept William Bingham guessing for several months. Alexander at first offered Bingham two shillings an acre (then equivalent of about 50 cents) for one-half interest in the Penobscot million acres, but he didn’t want the Kennebec tract at all. Then Alexander showed interest in the optioned but still unpurchased million acres north of the Penobscot tract, offering a shilling per acre for half of that tract and two shillings for half of the lower tract.<\/p>\n
Bingham was surely tempted. He felt that two shillings was too low a price for the more valuable lower tract, with settlements already established on it at Gouldsboro and Machias, and he hated to see the value of the Kennebec tract thus depreciated by having it left out of the package sale. Yet, since he would still own half of each of the two Penobscot tracts, he closed the deal.<\/p>\n
Before signing any papers, however, Alexander Baring demanded to see the Maine lands. Hence with Bingham he arranged a sort of grand tour. In the party were Mr. and Mrs. Bingham, Baring and Bingham’s niece, Abigail Willing, John Richards, and the Viscount de Noailles (a French speculator). With the party were more than twenty servants. The Party reached Boston on January 23, 1794, where they were greeted by Gen. Knox. A chartered ship took them to Thomaston, where they were all guests at Montpelier. There the ladies stayed while Baring, Bingham, Knox and some of the other men took a look at the lands.<\/p>\n
The final decision was not to take up the option on the upper Penobscot tract, but for the Barings to take co-ownership with Bingham on the lower million acres. The Bingham-Baring partnership was further cemented when in 1798 Alexander Baring married Bingham’s daughter Ann.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile Bingham held sole ownership to his Kennebec million acres, and attempts to settle them proved more profitable than on the more distant Penobscot lands. In 1799 Bingham paid Massachusetts the last installment of $32,800 on all his Maine lands. After Bingham’s death in 1804, his estate sued for and collected the huge Knox debt to Bingham, by taking over Knox’s interest in the Bingham lands. At once the estate sold 65,000 acres to a group headed by William King, who became Maine’s first governor. The trustees of the Bingham estate wisely abandoned all attempts at settlement of farms, but sold or leased vast acreage for lumbering. By 1850 they had disposed of most of the land.<\/p>\n
The Bingham estate was not finally settled until six years ago, in 1964, a hundred and ten years after William Bingham had died. At last in 1964 the trustees finally won court assent to distribute the remaining $838,000 among the 315 living heirs of William Bingham.<\/p>\n
As for Alexander Baring, he became Lord Ashburton, and was the man who represented Great Britain, while Daniel Webster represented the U.S., in settling the dispute over the boundary between Maine and Canada.<\/p>\n
Year: 1970<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #843, Broadcast on March 8, 1970<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1205,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9015"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9015\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}