Holland Land Office: Where Western New York Was Sold

From this building in Batavia, six Amsterdam banking houses sold three and a half million acres of western New York. The Holland Land Company had purchased the entire tract, known as the Holland Purchase, from financier Robert Morris between seventeen ninety-two and seventeen ninety-seven. The office opened here in eighteen hundred after surveyors spent two years mapping the wilderness west of the Genesee River.

Joseph Ellicott managed the surveys and the sales from this building, erected in its current form in eighteen fifteen. He designed the region's road network and chose the sites for most of its early towns, including Buffalo. The office closed in eighteen thirty-nine once the land was largely sold.

In nineteen sixty the building became the first National Historic Landmark designated in western New York and remains the only one in Genesee County. It now operates as a local history museum.