It doesn't matter if it was defunct.
The M&St.CR held the rights to those land grants. That was its only asset. It probably spent years selling stock to try to get something going. Like a penny stock mining company today that only owns the rights to a mining claim but needs money to develop it. Most of the time, they go bankrupt, but someone always winds up with the rights to the property. Yet that asset was still, at the beginning, a United States Goverment Land Grant. Given as stimulus program to expand the United States' GNP. And this stimulus program was started by a Republican.