Note 5 — Buttrick’s Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries 1812–1819

Batavia bore the same relation to the Holland Purchase that Canandaigua bore to that of Phelps and Gorham. These proprietors extinguished the Indian title to their land only as far, approximately, as the Genesee River. Being unable to pay for the remainder, they returned it to Massachusetts (March, 1791), which, two days later, resold it to Robert Morris. He, in turn, sold to a company of associates in Amsterdam (1793), and the tract became known as the Holland Purchase. The Holland Company marked off a village and opened a land office (October, 1800) at Batavia, in an unsettled wilderness fifty miles west of Canandaigua. Two years later they surveyed and placed upon the market a second village, called by them New Amsterdam, and located at the mouth of Buffalo Creek. This stream being well known on the frontier, the name was transferred to the settlement, and “New Amsterdam” never came into general use. Buffalo received a charter in 1813. See Turner, History of the Holland Purchase (Buffalo, 1850).—Ed.