Land Speculation
Through a company he owned called the Omaha Abstract and Trust Company, Benson accumulated a great deal of land around Omaha. In 1887 Erastus Benson purchased approximately 900 acres (3.6 km2) of farm land approximately nine miles northwest of Omaha from John Creighton, an important businessman and philanthropist in the city. Benson Place, a suburb of Omaha, was platted on March 4, 1887. Benson's application to run a streetcar line connecting the suburb with Omaha was approved the same day. Benson attracted buyers by hiring Charles Jesse "Buffalo" Jones to graze herds of buffalo along Military Road.
Read more about this topic: Erastus Benson
Famous quotes containing the words land and/or speculation:
“When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, “I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,” you may indeed set over you a king whom the LORD your God will choose. One of your own community you may set as king over you; you are not permitted to put a foreigner over you, who is not of your own community.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Deuteronomy 17:14,15.
“Many expressions in the New Testament come naturally to the lips of all Protestants, and it furnishes the most pregnant and practical texts. There is no harmless dreaming, no wise speculation in it, but everywhere a substratum of good sense. It never reflects, but it repents. There is no poetry in it, we may say, nothing regarded in the light of beauty merely, but moral truth is its object. All mortals are convicted by its conscience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)