“The Tonawanda Seneca Nation is currently fighting a plan to build a data center next to their woods.”
Phelps and Gorham, a group of New England speculators, bought 2.6 million acres of Seneca country at a bargain price and paid Hugh Maxwell to walk 1,100 miles of straight lines through it. The grid became deeds, and the deeds became Brighton’s whites-only covenants. The brickyards left arsenic and lead under a high school soccer field. The Senecas are still here, now fighting a data center, because the land office never really closed.