Land fragmentation as an index of history in the Virginia Military District of Ohio

This paper investigates the process of land fragmentation for several counties and townships in the Virginia Military District of Ohio in the early part of the nineteenth century. It reports the ultimate patterns or configurations arising from individual decisions about properties, that is, conveyances of all or part of original large holdings to children by inheritance or to new settlers by sale. The distribution of land holdings rapidly stabilizes as lognormal with a Gini coefficient of about 0.6. An explanation for this result is offered based on breakage theory, the distribution of male offspring, and the behavior of the lognormal distribution with truncated inheritance distributions.