Cazenovia and the Holland Land Company
Near Syracuse, New York
Cazenovia was planted in seventeen ninety-three by John Lincklaen, a young Dutch naval officer working as an agent for the Holland Land Company, the Dutch banking consortium that had purchased millions of acres of western New York to sell to American settlers. Lincklaen named the village after his employer Theophile Cazenove. He then built himself an estate overlooking Cazenovia Lake, a Federal-style mansion called Lorenzo, completed in eighteen oh nine, which still stands as a New York State historic site.
The Holland Land Company's operation here was part of a much larger transformation: within a generation, the company had surveyed and sold off most of western New York, turning wilderness into farmland and small cities. The Lincklaen and Ledyard families occupied Lorenzo continuously for well over a century before it passed to the state.
