70 RURAL NEW YORK 



meantime made extensive improvement was likely to 

 resent the intrusion of such claims by the nominal 

 owner. This was the feudal tenure of the Patroons, 

 the practice of which between individuals was pro- 

 hibited by acts of the legislature of 1789. But that 

 act did not abolish the difficulties already started. 

 They were aggravated wherever there were large 

 estates in the ownership of absentee landlords. Con- 

 flicts of this sort fermented during the first part of 

 the nineteenth century in the Hudson Valley region 

 and later spread to the lands owned and disposed of 

 on contract by the Holland Land Company in west- 

 em New York. These culminated in the anti-rent 

 wars of 1836 to 1845 during which there were armed 

 conflicts in the east resulting in bloodshed, such as 

 those at Grafton, Rensselaer County and at Reidsville 

 in Albany County in 1839, and the burning of the 

 office and records of the Holland Land Company at 

 Mayville, Chautauqua County in 1836. In 1846, the 

 legislature set a limit of ten years to leases and abol- 

 ished all feudal tenures. This principle is now es- 

 tablished in the Constitution of the State. 



The ownership of the farm land of the State is now 

 almost exclusively in small areas suitable for indi- 

 vidual farms or at most a very few farms, except in 

 the Genesee Valley where many thousand acres are 

 owned by the Wadsworth families, title to which 

 has come by inheritance from the pioneer acquisition. 

 Even these areas are divided into relatively small 

 farms and are operated under the ordinary lease 

 system. In this region is the nearest approach af- 



