The developer's frontier

by William Wyckoff

This book tells how one nineteenth-century group of developers, the Holland Land Company, promoted and organized a settlement of vast wilderness tracts in western New York state. Wyckoff shows that the experience of eastern developers was distinctive from that of other frontier settlers; unlike the isolated pioneer of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier model or the land speculator in search of quick profits that other historians have described, eastern frontier developers fostered long-term settlement and regional growth by means of carefully formulated and comprehensive plans. - Jacket flap.