The 1828 Deed That Still Controls Your City's Land Use
Private deed restrictions, not municipal zoning codes, first locked American land into single uses—and that mechanism still governs your neighborhood.
When Edward Lloyd Thomas designated Church Square in Columbus, Georgia in 1828, he used a private deed restriction rather than zoning law to bind the land to church use only. That restriction survives today, with two churches still occupying the square. This reveals that private contractual restrictions predated public zoning codes by nearly a century, operating on identical legal logic to modern HOA CC&Rs. The article argues that zoning reform debates must recognize these perpetual private mechanisms, asking whether land use restrictions serve those they bind or only those who originally wrote them.
Edward Lloyd Thomas wasn't making a zoning law when he designated Church Square in Columbus, Georgia in 1828. He was writing a deed restriction—one that survives to this day. That's the part that gets lost when planners treat zoning as a 20th-century invention. Thomas had no municipal code to point to, no planning commission. He had a surveyor's pen and a legal instrument that could bind future owners. The mechanism was private, contractual, and perpetual—and it worked exactly as intended. Church Square sits where Thomas put it: bounded by 2nd and 3rd Avenues, 11th and 12th Streets. Two churches still occupy it—First Baptist and St. Luke United Methodist—because Thomas wrote "church use only" into the deed. The National Register listed it in 1980, which is another way of saying the city decided this 1828 choice was worth protecting from change. Now fast-forward to your HOA. Your CC&Rs—covenants, conditions, and restrictions—operate on the same legal logic. A developer records a declaration saying "residential only" or "no commercial uses," and that restriction binds every subsequent homeowner, often without their ever reading the document. The instrument is identical to what Thomas used. The target changed. The mechanism didn't. This is worth holding when we debate zoning reform. The tools for locking land into single uses were available long before Euclidean zoning. Private restrictions predate public codes. The question isn't whether we can restrict land use—history shows we can—but whether those restrictions serve the people they bind, or only the people who wrote them.