One had been selected by Crawford in 1767 and was "a fine piece of land on a stream called Chartiers Creek" in the present Washington County, southwest of Pittsburgh.

Crawford surveyed the tract and marked it by blazed trees, built four cabins and cleared a patch of ground, as an improvement, about each.

Later Washington, casting round for some one from whom to obtain a military title with which to cover the tract, bought out the claim of his financially embarrassed old neighbor Captain John Posey to three thousand acres, paying L11.11.3, or about two cents per acre.
Crawford, now a deputy surveyor of the region, soon after resurveyed two thousand eight hundred thirteen acres and forwarded the "return" to Washington, with the result that in 1774 Governor Dunmore of Virginia granted a patent for the land.
In the meantime, however, six squatters built a cabin upon the tract and cleared two or three acres, but Crawford paid them five pounds for their improvements and induced them to move on.

To keep off other interlopers he placed a man on the land, but in 1773 a party of rambunctious Scotch-Irishmen appeared on the scene, drove the keeper away, built a cabin so close in front of his door that he could not get back in, and continued to hold the land until after the Revolution.
By that time Crawford himself was dead--having suffered the most terrible of all deaths--that of an Indian captive burnt at the stake.
The other tract whose history it is worth our while to follow consisted of twelve hundred acres on the Youghiogheny River, likewise not far from Pittsburgh.

It bore seams of coal, which Washington examined in 1770 and thought "to be of the very best kind, burning freely and abundance of it." In the spring of 1773 he sent out a certain Gilbert Simpson, with whom he had formed a sort of partnership, to look after this land, and each furnished some laborers, Washington a "fellow" and a "wench." Simpson managed to clear some ground and get in six acres of corn, but his wife disliked life on the borderland and made him so uncomfortable with her complaints that he decided to throw up the venture.