While the cost of purchasing land in Penn's Woods  was long touted by the Proprietaries as being reasonably inexpensive -- the purchase price for 100 acres of land at fifteen pounds ten shillings -- that cost still represented more than half a year's wages for the average laborer.

So, did our local settlers grudgingly pay for the land, or did they instead manage to find some kind of work-around solution?   As it turns out, there were many in our upper Northampton County region who took it upon themselves to locate and "improve" a vacant tract of land without obtaining any warrant whatsover for the land.   They paid absolutely nothing.  Zero. Zip. Nada. In other words, our initial area residents were more than quite comfortable being "squatters".

In time, Pennsylvania officials began to recognize the lay of the land and adopted measures designed to counteract this deleterious trend.  Accordingly, land policy shifted in 1765, permitting settlers who had squatted on unwarranted land, and who were willing to accept the results of a land survey, to be granted an official warrant for their land, upon application.  This resulted in the creation of the registry of "East Side" Applications (corresponding to land on the East side of the Susquehanna River), through which the warrantee was granted an official Pennsylvania warrant, agreed to abide by the subsequent land survey, and pay the original purchase price of the property, with back interest.

While still not an overly advantageous real estate deal, 160 such East Side Applications were ultimately tendered within the boundaries of today's Monroe County,   ...and yet the county still remained barely settled. 

What was clear was that full-tilt area settlement would not occur until land prices dropped dramatically.  This finally happened after the passage of the Vacant Land Law of 1792 that saw the cost of land acquisition drop to record low levels:

Shown in red below is the explosion of settlement that occurred after the passage of this law (with tract sizes often exceeeding 400 acres):  [apologies, map is not yet complete].