Claim Club
Claim clubs, also called Actual Settlers' Associations or Squatters' Clubs, were a nineteenth century phenomenon in the American West. Usually operating within a confined local jurisdiction, these pseudo-governmental entities sought to regulate land sales in places where there was little or no legal apparatus to deal with land-related quarrels of any size. Some claim clubs sought to protect squatters, while others defended early land owners. In the twentieth century sociologists suggested that claim clubs were a pioneer adaptation of democratic bodies on the East Coast, including town halls.
Famous quotes containing the words claim and/or club:
“Chippenhook was the home of Judge Theophilus Harrington, known for his trenchant reply to an irate slave-owner in a runaway slave case. Judge Harrington declared that the owner’s claim to the slave was defective. The owner indignantly demanded to know what was lacking in his legally sound claim. The Judge exploded, ‘A bill of sale, sir, from God Almighty!’”
—For the State of Vermont, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
—Mme. Ellen Louise Demorest 1824–1898, U.S. women’s magazine editor and woman’s club movement pioneer. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 203 (January 1870)