Thisey
The Holland Land Company consisted of a group of Dutch investors. They bought the 3.3 million acres of land from Robert Morris shortly after the American Revolution. Morris was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and was known as the financier of the Revolution.
Joseph Ellicott managed the Holland Land Company holdings in Western New York State. The building in Batavia that you see above housed his office. A modest-sized creek flows behind this building. Ellicott proposed a plan for a southern route for the canal. Fortunately, the decision-makers chose a route that relied on Lake Erie Water directly instead (learn more).
William Peacock and Franciska Safran
Much of our information about The Holland Land Company connection with the Erie Canal is about the work of early surveyor William Peacock as told by Franciska Safran. Her story related how Joseph Ellicott sent Peacock to survey a route that was more southern than the one that Albany planned. Unfortunately, his transit instrument lost a screw and Peacock fixed it with a small stick. We don’t know if that contributed to Albany’s decision to reject the southern route. If it did, all Americans should thank God for that lost screw. Today it’s obvious that a southern Erie Canal could not have kept up with the quantity of water needed for the high level of traffic it eventually realized.
Ms Safran was a Hugarian immigrant who chose William Peacock’s work as her Master’s thesis at Fredonia. My thirty-minute video summarizing her story was called “The Peacock Papers”. Unfortunately, the last time I checked, that video has apparently dropped out of circulation altogether.