The County's First Deed

On 20 December 1788, the first deed recorded in Tioga County conveyed 150 acres on the Chemung to Jabez Colver — a New Jersey Loyalist who, eleven years earlier, had pleaded guilty to sedition against the American cause.

This episode traces the five vanished years the family spent on the Chemung between the Revolution’s New Jersey and their walk to Canada: nearly 700 acres bought in a single season, a wilderness church organized at Wysox, and one winter evening in 1791 when Colonel Thomas Proctor set down — at Wynkoop’s fireside — the only portrait of Jabez Colver ever drawn by an outsider.

Read the full post, with the deed and Proctor’s journal: https://history.collver.biz/the-countys-first-deed/

Adapted from the forthcoming book We Are Doves: A Collver Family History.