Let's look at this from a (common) law perspective:
The land is held absolutely by the territorial sovereign.
This stems from the English Common Law doctrine that the king owns all land by radical title.
Subjects (citizens) hold (tenure) an abstract of the land titled an estate.
The representation of this grant is a deed. There are six different types of deeds in the U.S.
The deed has rights attached there to. These bundles of rights are called titles. A title is a bundle of rights.
In addition to rights, there will be obligations attached to ownership of this abstract. In medieval times, it may have been serving in the king's army, paying a quit-rent, or paying a rent charge.
Today, this obligation, in part, is taxes assessed by the county. The county being an administrative sub-division of the state. The state being a (public) corporation.
We could get into the financing aspect of all this from a legal perspective, but I'll save that for later if anyone is interested.
If anyone is interested, ask me about land patents.