The Connecticut Genesis of the Western Reserve, 1630–1796

Connecticut's long, successful fight for land in the west was impressive. For years prospective settlers and investors, thwarted at nearly every turn, continued to fight. They survived rival claims of other colonies, particularly New York and Pennsylvania. They cleverly expanded the seemingly innocuous requests of several Connecticut townsfolk for more land into a claim for a huge tract of land in Pennsylvania supported by a large land company. Indians and Penamites threatened them constantly over a thirty-year span, but they either fought them off or retreated only to return in greater numbers. The fight that left a cadre of wounded and partially abandoned Connecticut residents in Pennsylvania continued in the Continental Congress. Here a savvy Connecticut delegation summoned all its powers to claim other land in the west in compensation. A private deal confirmed the sagacity of the policy of "firmness and prudence" that gave the state a western reserve in Ohio. Even then the fight was not over. Disagreement over who would benefit from the sale of the land raised hackles in Connecticut. Finally, in 1796, the reserve was sold and was soon ready for settlement. Its dimensions and north-south geographical position copied the size of the colony of Connecticut. So, in one sense, the struggle ended when the state acquired and then sold a virtual duplicate of itself farther west.

The Charters and Their Western Limits

The first portion of the struggle pitted rival claims of several colonies against each other. The precise bounds of the colony of Connecticut were unclear from the beginning. Its western edge was particularly vague. The initial grant of land that became Connecticut, called the Warwick Patent, was probably made in 1631 by the Council of New England to a group of eleven proprietors. It gave "all that part of New-England, in America, which lies and extends itself from a river there called Narraganset river, the space of forty leagues upon a straight line near the sea shore towards the southwest, west and by south, or west, as the coast lieth towards Virginia, accounting three English miles to the league; . . . north and south in latitude and breadth, and in length and longitude of and within, all the breadth aforesaid, throughout the main lands there, from the western ocean to the south sea." Significantly, this 120-mile (forty league) length remained constant throughout the colony's subsequent evolution and was applied to later claims for its reserve in the west.¹

The Warwick Patent included some land occupied by Dutch inhabitants from the colony of New Amsterdam. In an attempt to affirm English control over the lands and to allay fears that the original patent was not valid, a new grant was sought. A failed attempt in 1645 was resubmitted in 1661 after the restoration of Charles II to the English throne. The new charter, issued by Charles II in 1662, described boundaries differently than had the Warwick Patent, but, like the earlier document, it mentioned the western ocean. The colony encompassed "all that parte of our Dominions in Newe England bounded on the East by Norrogancett River comonly called Norrogancett Bay where the said River falleth into the Sea, and on the North by the Lyne of the Massachusetts Plantation and on the South by the Sea, and in longitude as the Lyne of the Massachusetts Colony runinge from East to West that is to say, from the said Narrogancett Bay on the East to the South Sea on the West parte."²

This new charter was on much firmer legal ground than the earlier patent, even though these boundaries were understandably vague. Charles II complicated matters when he continually granted lands that overlapped with the borders of Connecticut. He gave a generous charter to his brother, the Duke of York, after the English captured the colony of New Amsterdam from the Dutch in the late 1660s. The document fixed the eastern border of New York far inside Connecticut along the western bank of the Connecticut River and named the same South Sea as the western boundary of the new colony.³ [End...