Lord Carteret.
“North Carolina was a proprietary colony originally, with eight ‘Lords Proprietor’ owning the land from 1663 to 1729. In 1729, seven of those eight lords were persuaded to sell their land back to the English Crown. The eighth Lord Proprietor at that time was John Carteret, Baron Carteret of Hawnes in the County of Bedford; and he refused to sell his share back to the Crown, although he never visited his land in North Carolina during the course of his lifetime.
“Originally, he was entitled to one tract of land in NC, a second tract of land in SC, and yet another in GA (all of which were originally part of ‘Carolina’). Samuel Warner, a London surveyor, was hired to calculate the size that one continuous tract would be, and he determined that Carteret’s one-eighth share should be from the northern boundary the current VA/NC line (36 degrees 30 minutes), and the southern boundary, 35 degrees 34 minutes. In 1743 the initial boundary line was surveyed by a commission. The line was extended westward in 1746, and again in 1753. The sixty-mile-wide tract of land was to extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. [actually it’s a little over 64 miles. Emphasis added– Ed.]
“…In 1744, Carteret had inherited the title of ‘2nd Earl of Granville,’ and the district became known as ‘Granville District.’
“…Granville died in 1763. Granville’s son Robert, 3rd Earl Granville, inherited the land, but the will’s terms did not give him control over it.
“…By the time the younger Granville died in February 1776, the Granville proprietorship was seen as representing British interests, during the time immediately prior to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. In 1777, the North Carolina assembly declared the new state sovereign over all lands between Virginia and South Carolina. Though it did recognize claims to land granted by the crown and proprietors before July 4, 1776, it later confiscated all lands and property of persons who supported the British Crown during the Revolutionary War.”
‒from THE HISTORY OF THE GRANVILLE DISTRICT at:
GUILFORD COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA
GRANVILLE DISTRICT AND ITS GRANTS
In our area, the Granville District would have extended from the Virginia line to the little land bridge where I-77 crosses Lake Norman. (That southern border here, is actually around 69 miles from the current state line.)
So figuring, 64 miles x 2500 miles
(the approximate width of the US at that latitude)
= 160,000 square miles.
160,000 Sq. mi. = 102,400,000 acres
102,400,000 acres x
(a conservative) $2200 per acre =
$225,280,000,000.
That’s two hundred twenty-five billion, two hundred eighty million dollars.
(According to Forbes.com, Elon Musk’s net worth in 2022 is somewhere around $219 billion.)
In 2020, an average price per acre of the ten states with “the most affordable rural land per acre” equaled $3019. At that rate, in today’s dollars, the Granville District would be worth over $309 billion in land alone.
This doesn’t even take into account the fact that the entire Granville District, as it was defined, includes sites like Kitty Hawk, the Triangle, the Triad and the Tri-Cities, Asheville, Nashville, Tulsa, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Lake Mead, the Hoover Dam, the Los Alamos Laboratory, Sequoia National Park, the entire Grand Canyon and Alleghany County, North Carolina.
It could be argued that John Carteret, 2nd Earl of Granville, and later, his son and heir, Robert, 3rd Earl Granville, were the greatest individual North American landowners ever- after the first Asian immigrant that set foot in Alaska, who- at least for a time- had two continents to himself.
