The Story of U.S. Business Is the Story of Real Estate THE STORY of American business is the story of real estate — a story of more than 200 years of claiming, seizing, developing, settling, and speculating in vast areas of land. Even though business histories often give more attention to the history of the manufacturing industry, real estate has been the more dominant factor. Wealthy colonials organized massive land companies well before the American Revolution. Land had been the source of power and wealth in the Old World, and so for Europeans, the vast acreage of the New World held great promise, whether for farming, housing, or other ends. The early colonial years included land charters and grants, such as those to William Penn and George Calvert, but these often went to absentee landlords. From the outset, ambitious American colonists well understood that buying land and waiting for the population to increase was a path to riches. Dating the beginning of true American business correlates not to the first mills or manufactories but to the Ohio Company of Virginia, which was formed in 1748 to acquire hundreds of thousands of acres of land. Many of its shareholders and administrators — Virginia’s elite, including George Washington — were born on American soil. The American Revolution itself was in large part about land, as land speculators including Washington and Patrick Henry bristled under edicts imposed on colonists in 1763 and 1773 that restricted their ability to buy and settle on lands west of the Appalachians. Rights to the land instead were...
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