The Landed Classes
on the importance of land as an asset
One of my favorite things to do on vacation is take walks in the countryside, and I’m especially happy if I can talk to some sheep, wave at cows, and see some gardens along the way. But these walks always prompt me to think about the great amounts of land owned by a very small number of people at various historical moments. It’s easy to forget, in the age of a financialized economy in which assets are mobile and liquid, how important land has always been to wealth building and preservation.
The Inn where I’m staying in Vermont is a beautiful historic estate, Shelburne Farms, built by Lila Vanderbilt Webb and her spouse William Seward Webb. The happy couple started buying small farms outside of Burlington, on the shores of Lake Champlain, when Lila’s father died and she came into her inheritance in 1885. The couple amassed 4,000 acres of land for their personal use and landscaped the acreage accordingly. Workers “removed most of the original farm buildings” and the Webbs built a golf course and tennis courts for entertaining.
For the Vanderbilts, land acquisition was a family tradition. In 1890, when Shelburne Farms was at the height of its prosperity, Lila’s brother George bought 125,000 acres in North Carolina in order to build the Biltmore property. Frederick William Vanderbilt had just bought land in Hyde Park for a country home, and the Vanderbilt family owned the most sumptuous house in Newport, the Breakers, along with their Fifth Avenue “Triple Palace” that occupied a full city block between 51st and 52nd Streets (the house that inspired the Russell house in HBO’s The Gilded Age). All of these estates were sites for social performance but also for making and parking money.
And the Vanderbilts were not alone among the Robber Barons in scooping up land for personal use and financial gain (think of all the land they bought for railroads and other corporate purposes). Pointing to the critical importance of land as wealth, by 1900, one percent of the U.S. population owned more than half of the country’s land. In England and the United Kingdom, similar patterns prevailed. In 1873, members of Parliament commissioned a survey of who owned land, The Return of Owners of Land (the first one done in 1086 simply recorded that the King owned everything), and found that “rural UK was almost entirely owned and managed by family estates.” In point of fact, 4,000 aristocratic families and families of landed gentry owned half of England. For a point of reference, at the time of the French Revolution in 1789, one percent of the population owned about twenty percent of the nation’s land.
Since 1900, landowning patterns and practices have changed dramatically (thanks in part to increased estate taxation) and land is no longer the source of wealth that it once was- although real estate still has its place in the billionaire portfolio. Wealth these days is in corporate shares and financial investments. Nevertheless, recent studies, at least in the UK, show that a small number of families still own up to a third of the nation’s land and in the United States, elite families still buy up large swaths of land both for development purposes and to use for tax deductions through devices like conservation easements. The landed classes are still with us (their ghosts are everywhere, as I’ve written about). They just treat land differently now that there is less of it to colonize by cutting it up into parcels dividing them between friends and allies.