Although this call was sent out three years after the Newburgh Petition, the prompt response of the officers showed that there had been no decline in interest. The Ohio Company of Associates resulted from this meeting.
It has been pointed out that most of those attending were also members of the military Society of the Cincinnati, so named because the Revolutionary soldiers thought they resembled the Roman soldier Cincinnatus in leaving their farms and work to save their country. No doubt the hope of western migration had been kept alive by discussion at the meetings of the Cincinnati. Most of those men also belonged to the Masonic Lodge, and this association also unified and perpetuated the ideas included in the Newburgh Petition of which most of them had been signers.
At the meeting in Boston on March 1 the delegates elected Putnam chairman and Major Winthrop Sargent clerk. One thousand “shares” were planned, and no person was permitted to hold more than five shares or less than one share, except that several persons could own one share in partnership. To facilitate the transaction of business, one agent was elected by each group of 20 shares to represent their interest at meetings of the company. Putnam, Manasseh Cutler, and General Samuel Holden Parsons, were appointed directors to manage the affairs of the company. Sargent was elected secretary and later General James M. Varnum was made a director and Colonel Richard Platt treasurer. All land was to be divided equally among the shares by lot. One year after the organization of the company 25 shares had been subscribed, and Parsons, Putnam, and Cutler were appointed to purchase a tract of land from Congress.
Although largely responsible for shaping the beginning of the new colony, Cutler did not move to the tract he purchased; he later visited the infant settlement, however, and his sons, Ephraim, Jervis, and Charles, became pioneer residents of the Northwest Territory.
Cutler contracted to purchase for the Ohio Company a million and a half acres at one dollar per acre, less one third of a dollar for bad lands and the expenses of surveying. Because the public securities with which payment was to be made were worth only twelve cents on the dollar, the actual purchase price was eight or nine cents per acre. The tract was bounded on the east by the Seven Ranges, which had been surveyed and offered for sale under the Land Ordinance of 1785, on the south by the Ohio River, and on the western side by the seventeenth Range; it extended far enough north to include in addition to the purchase one section of 640 acres in each township for the support of religion, one section for the support of schools, two entire townships for a university, and three sections for the future disposition of Congress. An interesting phase of this provision of the contract with the government was that the Ordinance of 1787 itself made no specific provision for public school lands, lands for support of religion, or for university purposes. The Land Ordinance of 1785 had provided for the setting aside of one section in each township for public schools, but for neither religion nor universities. But, so earnest of purpose were the men who had written into the Ordinance of 1787 “Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall be forever encouraged,” that in their bargaining with the land commissioners, insistence was made upon these specific reservations. And so, perhaps outside the formal tenets of law, was furthered a public land policy which has done much to make our public school and university educational system an integral and distinctive feature of this government.