Loses Land Holdings and Home
Despite vast land holdings that were worth a fortune, changing money values on mortgages held on the tracts of land sold and a depressed land market caused Phelps to get into financial difficulty. In about 1800, the reverses forced him to sell his Suffield home and his interest in the Hartford National Bank and Trust Co. Phelps moved to Canandaigua, where he built a grist mill and endowed an academy. He was also appointed the first judge of Ontario County.
After additional entanglements in western real estate ventures which resulted in "personal embarrassment" and, for a time, the prospect of debtor's prison, Phelps settled down in Canandaigua in 1802.
His troubles were not over, however. Purchasers of his land had continued difficulty paying off the mortgage loans which he held. He was generous in extending terms to them, to his own detriment.
Read more about this topic: Oliver Phelps
Famous quotes containing the words loses, land, holdings and/or home:
“In America a woman loses her independence for ever in the bonds of matrimony. While there is less constraint on girls there than anywhere else, a wife submits to stricter obligations. For the former, her father’s house is a home of freedom and pleasure; for the latter, her husband’s is almost a cloister.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“The land of shadows wilt thou trace
And look nor know each other’s face
The present mixed with reasons gone
And past and present all as one
Say maiden can thy life be led
To join the living with the dead
Then trace thy footsteps on with me
We’re wed to one eternity”
—John Clare (1793–1864)
“Polarized light showed the secret architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the mind is opened, now one color or form or gesture, and now another, has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In ten thousand years the Sierras
Will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion.”
—Gary Snyder (b. 1930)