isorder of an agrarian nature extended down to the
Revolution. There were likewise great speculative holdings, conditioned
on seating a certain proportion of settlers, into which the frontiersmen
were drifting.[95:2] But this system also made it possible for agents of
later migrating congregations to establish colonies like that of the
Moravians at Wachovia.[95:3] Thus, by the time settlers came into the
uplands from the north, a land system existed similar to that of
Virginia. A common holding was a square mile (640 acres), but in
practice this did not prevent the accumulation of great estates.[96:1]
Whereas Virginia's Piedmont area was to a large extent entered by
extensions from the coast, that of North Carolina remained almost
untouched by 1730.[96:2]

The same is true of South Carolina. By 1730, settlement had progressed
hardly eighty miles from the coast, even in the settled area of the
lowlands. The tendency to engross the lowlands for large plantations was
clear, here as elsewhere.[96:3] The surveyor-general reports in 1732
that not as many as a thousand acres within a hundred miles of
Charleston, or within twenty miles of a river or navigable creek, were
unpossessed. In 1729 the crown ordered eleven townships of twenty
thousand acres each to be laid out in rectangles, divided into fifty
acres for each actual settler under a quit-rent of four shillings a year
for every hundred acres, or proportionally, to be paid after the first
ten years.[96:4] By 1732 these townships, designed to attract foreign
Protestants, were laid out on the great rivers of the colony. As they
were located in the middle region, east of the fall line, among pine
barrens, or in malarial lands in the southern corner of the colony, they
all proved abortive as towns, except Orangeburg[96:5] on the North
Edisto, where German redemptioners made a settlement. The Scotch-Irish
Presbyterians who came to Williamsburg, on Black River, suffered
hardships; as did the Swiss who, under the visionary leadership of
Purry, settled in the deadly climate of Purrysburg, on the lower
Savannah. To Welsh colonists from Pennsylvania there was made a
grant--known as the "Welsh tract," embracing over 173,000 acres on the
Great Pedee (Marion County)[97:1] under headrights of fifty acres, also
a bounty in provisions, tools, and livestock.

These attempts, east of the fall line, are interesting as showing
the colonial policy of marking out towns (which were to be
poli