On June 25, 1776, nine days before the Continental Congress would adopt the Declaration of Independence, the Pennsylvania Council of Safety passed a resolution authorizing a committee to “purchase the whole or part of a Plantation at Billingsport on which said Fortifications are to be erected at the Expense of Congress.”[1] Ten days later, on July 5, the council ordered the purchase money paid: six hundred pounds Pennsylvania currency for ninety-six acres of farmland on the Delaware River. It was the first land purchase made by the United States of America, the day after independence was declared.[2]
The deed, recorded in Deed Book C at the Gloucester County Courthouse in Woodbury, New Jersey, tells its own story. The sellers were Margarett Paul, widow, and her son Benjamin Weatherby, both of Greenwich Township, Gloucester County. The buyers were George Clymer and Michael Hillegas, designated “Treasurers of the Thirteen United Colonies of America.” For six hundred pounds, the Paul family conveyed their plantation at Billingsport—a point of high land fronting the Delaware where the river narrows and turns—to the new nation, forever.[3] The Paul family had long been associated with this stretch of the Delaware; the locality itself bore their name, and the community that grew around the site would eventually become the borough of Paulsboro.[4]
The purpose of the purchase was military. A fort would rise on those ninety-six acres to anchor the southernmost line of underwater obstacles blocking the Royal Navy’s path to Philadelphia, the seat of Congress and the political heart of the Revolution. The transaction attracted little fanfare then and has attracted less since. Yet it marked the moment when American sovereignty ceased to be purely rhetorical and became territorial. With six hundred pounds and a deed to a New Jersey farm, the Continental Congress took its first step toward building the physical infrastructure of an independent nation.
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