By Zara Vox, Special Correspondent, Rolling Stone — May 25, 2440
When critics demand to “see the books,” they miss what makes the Freehold unique: there are no books to show anyone but its owner.
The Marmaduke Freehold is not a corporation, not a co-op, not even a trust.
It is a sole proprietorship—founded in 1997 and still legally continuous under the original Confederated Corporations Agreement (CCA).
That distinction matters, because it explains why a polity that now feeds and employs more than a million souls still files its own internal ledgers under the same business license number it used five centuries ago.
The Freehold predates the collapse and the rebirth.
It survived the Plague of ’73, the Grid Shutdowns, and the corporate implosions of the early 2100s because it never depended on outside shareholders or debt.
Its assets—land, water rights, infrastructure, and all the contracts governing them—belong directly to the Freeholder as private property.
When the banks fell, the Freehold’s ledgers stayed balanced on paper.
When the courts vanished, its arbitration clauses kept working.
When the governments dissolved, the title on record never changed.
Continuity, not revolution, is what made it a state.
Today, only three Freeholds remain under the original CCA charter, and all three share that legal DNA.
Each is a self-funding polity born from a single proprietorship that never defaulted, never diluted ownership, and never surrendered its right to govern the land it held.
Their existence is the quiet proof that the post-collapse world did not replace law with chaos; it reverted to the oldest kind of sovereignty—ownership.
Separate Names, Separate Ledgers
Here is where outsiders consistently err: the Marmaduke Freehold is not the same thing as Marmaduke Inc. or the Marmaduke Family Trust.
They share a name and a history, but they are distinct legal bodies.
- Marmaduke Inc. is a logistics conglomerate incorporated in the late 1900s, operating ports, rail, and freight systems across the former heartland.
- The Marmaduke Family Trust is a multigenerational holding and investment trust managing media, energy, and agricultural stakes across several CCA states. The trust Chairman must sell a successful business to the family trust to be selected. Matthew Marmaduke sold Marmaduke Media to the family trust a company he started at 17.
- The Marmaduke Freehold is the sovereign territory itself—roughly central Missouri and its dependent lands—recognized as an independent entity under Section III of the CCA Charter. The Marmaduke Freehold is not the same as Freehold Inc, either. Freehold Inc is a property management company which is 51% owned by Matthew Marmaduke as part of his personal inherited portfolio, 40% by the Marmaduke Freehold, 5% by Marmaduke Inc, and 4% by The Marmaduke Family Trust.
Matt Marmaduke happens to be the largest individual shareholder in both the Family Trust and Marmaduke Inc., but those holdings do not grant him his sovereignty.
They merely reflect a family’s parallel fortunes.
The Freehold’s authority is rooted in its own continuity as a sole proprietorship; it does not issue stock, it has no board, and it cannot be sold outside of the Boone-Marmaduke line or merged per a contract signed in 2030 between the two corporations.
The Freeholder’s power ends only with death as there are no provisions for them to stepdown or set aside as such actions would inspire a neglectful death by potential heirs.
To confuse them is to misunderstand the system.
The corporations may cooperate with the Freehold, share infrastructure, even lend or lease equipment, but their profits and losses are not its treasury.
The Freehold has no shareholders to appease and no quarterly reports to release.
That is precisely why it remains solvent while larger city-states with elaborate oversight structures collapsed under their own audits.
The CCA and the Privilege of Privacy
The Confederated Corporations Agreement was written for a fractured world.
It allowed companies and local cooperatives to function as sovereign entities so long as they could prove continuous operation and solvency.
Most failed within a century.
A handful consolidated into regional federations.
Only three—the Freeholds—still meet the original definition of “autonomous proprietorship with recognized borders.”
Under the CCA, such entities are exempt from compulsory public accounting so long as their inter-polity contracts clear through the global ledger.
That ledger—the CCA Clearinghouse—monitors transactions between states, not inside them.
It verifies solvency through fulfilled obligations, not by peering into private accounts.
The logic is simple: a Freehold that cannot meet its obligations loses its charter.
A Freehold that can is presumed healthy.
Transparency is measured in performance, not publication.
That exemption is what infuriates the Freehold’s critics.
To governments addicted to disclosure and debt instruments, a closed book looks like a cover-up.
To the Freeholders, it is the foundation of trust.
They operate on the principle that accountability flows downward to the people who live and work there, not outward to strangers who do not.
Residents sign annual contracts that define their rights, their obligations, and their method of arbitration.
If they find those terms unfair, they are free to leave.
No one is born into the Freehold; everyone there is present by consent.
The Persistence of Ownership
It is fashionable in foreign media to call Matt Marmaduke a benevolent autocrat or a philosopher-king, but the truth is more mundane: he is a landlord who never sold.
Every successive Freeholder before him—stretching back to Thomas Marmaduke IV in 1997—passed the same deed through direct inheritance, keeping the business alive as a going concern.
That single signature chain is what gives the Freehold its legal immortality.
In the worst years of the Collapse, when national governments defaulted and banks seized frozen assets, the Freehold was one of the few entities able to buy land, pay laborers, and maintain a working currency in goods.
When neighboring cooperatives failed, they were absorbed not by conquest but by auction.
When factories went dark, their titles reverted to whichever solvent party could pay the back taxes; the Freehold paid in full, sometimes with grain instead of cash.
That slow accretion turned a single proprietorship into a sovereign land trust spanning most of central Missouri and parts of the old river corridor.
None of that required a revolution—just good bookkeeping and patience.
Why the Books Stay Closed
Those who demand an audit usually come from two camps:
academics who think openness equals virtue, and opportunists who want the data to weaponize it.
Neither has standing.
The Freehold owes the world no explanation for how it keeps its accounts any more than a family owes the neighborhood its household ledger.
It is a privately held entity, not a publicly traded republic.
Its leaders argue that disclosure would invite espionage, blackmail, and speculation.
They are not wrong.
The last time an external agency attempted to model Freehold grain reserves, hackers nearly crashed the regional trade hub trying to intercept the raw numbers.
Since then, the policy has been absolute: external contracts are public, internal finances are private.
In any case, the proof of solvency is visible everywhere.
The lights stay on.
Farmers are paid weekly.
Roads are repaired within days.
No one goes hungry.
The Freehold has no debt and no slums.
Its reserves are rumored to run five years deep, but rumor is all anyone will ever get—and that, as Matt Marmaduke says, “is exactly how it should be.”
Legacy Without Justification
The Freehold’s critics call it secrecy; its citizens call it peace.
Either way, the model works because it rejects the modern obsession with public self-exposure.
The Freeholder is accountable through competence alone: if he fails, the contracts collapse, and the Freehold dissolves by its own rules.
That has not happened in 443 years.
Marmaduke Inc. will continue to trade.
The Family Trust will continue to invest.
And the Freehold will continue to govern quietly, under a business license no court on Earth can revoke.
The rest of the world can speculate all it likes, but the only audit that matters is visible in the harvest, the power grid, and the long unbroken line of signatures that made Missouri’s last private company the most stable nation left standing.
As one Freehold aide put it with characteristic bluntness:
“We don’t need to justify ourselves financially to outsiders or insiders.
We just need to keep the lights on and the books balanced.
The people who want a look inside usually want to steal the numbers, not understand them.”
And so the ledgers stay closed—
not from arrogance, but from the ancient right that built the Freehold in the first place:
the right to own what you can sustain, and to answer only to those who live under your roof.
