Eureka, Connecticut--in the land of the Western Reserve; or, States' Western Cessions

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

At one time Connecticut (third-smallest state in area) was fixing to become the third-largest. In 1662 King Charles II granted a charter to the Connecticut colony that extended between 41° and 42°2′ N latitude clear out to the Pacific Ocean.

If that had gone through, I figure dimensions of 72 miles (116 km) north to south, by ~2600 miles (~4200 km) east to west (let me know if my rough measurements are too inaccurate) makes for a claimed western area of ~187,200 square miles (~487 200 km[sup]2[/sup]). This added to the state’s actual area of 5,544 square miles (14,371 km²) would have made a grand total of roughly 193,000 square miles (~500,000 km[sup]2[/sup]). Compare this to Alaska at 663,267 mi² (1 717 854 km²) and Texas at 268,820 mi² (696 241 km²). The full western extent of Connecticut’s charter (not counting the triangular chunk that New York took out of it) was going to be about 35 times bigger than the actual size of Connecticut.

If that had gone through, places that would now be in Connecticut include
Wilkes-Barre, PA
Cleveland, OH
Niles, MI
South Bend, IN
Chicago, IL
Des Moines, IA
Omaha, NE
Cheyenne, WY (note the name Wyoming in what follows)
Paradise Valley, NV
Eureka, CA

They actually got the first two places on the list… briefly.

In the 1760s Connecticut was a small colony, with a growing population and poor soil. I guess it seemed a no-brainer for them to settle people in their western claim, where there was plenty of good land. Once they leapfrogged New York, the first nice place to settle they found in Western Connecticut was the Wyoming Valley. Soon Wilkes-Barre and the other Yankee settlements around it acceded themselves to Connecticut. At first it was part of Litchfield County and then formed its own county called Westmoreland.

Unfortunately, King Charles had also granted William Pitt a charter in 1682 that extended Pennsylvania north into the same territory. Methinks Your Majesty did like totally space it out, dude. Both colonies purchased the same land from the Indians. Connecticut and Pennsylvania actually fought a series of little wars (1769-71, 1775, and 1784) over the Wyoming Valley. As as result of the dispute, the Yankee side tried to establish the new State of Westmoreland in 1783, but gave up the idea after a few months. Finally, in 1786 or 1787 (sources differ), Connecticut ceded its western claims to the federal government as part of the [state cessions deal by which states ceded their trans-Appalachian claims in exchange for the federal government assuming their debts. The Wikipedia article on state cessions says that Connecticut ceded its western lands as far as the Mississippi. I still haven’t found out what happened to the rest of their land grant that supposedly extended to California. They probably just quietly dropped the idea when they realized it could never work, given the dimensions of the continent. The area from Long Island Sound to Pacific Ocean is about 38 times longer than it is wide.

So as a consolation prize for losing the Wyoming Valley, Connecticut’s Plan B was to leapfrog Pennsylvania and settle the next chunk of land to the west. This is how the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Western_Reserve]Western Reserve](]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_cessions[/url) came to be: the land of my birth. The Connecticut Land Company bought the Western Reserve from the state and sent Moses Cleaveland there with a party of surveyors and a few settlers in 1796, which is how Cleveland got to be there.

In 1792 the Connecticut legislature set aside the western end of the Western Reserve as land for people in several Connecticut towns whose homes were torched by the Redcoats during the Revolution. The area is known as the [url=]Firelands. Thirty years later, a very few of those folks or their heirs had actually moved out there. This explains the transplanted names of those burnt towns way out in the middle of northern Ohio: Norwalk, New Haven, North Fairfield, New London, Danbury Township, Greenwich, Willard. When I was young my maternal grandparents lived in the Firelands, in Sandusky and we often visited. So as far as I can tell, that was the farthest west any of the original 13 states reached in realizing their western claims.

2

I’m pretty sure they didn’t know it would extend all the way to the Pacific Ocean in 1662, or how far that actually was, but I could be wrong

3

They had no bleepin’ clue at all! :o

4

Virginia’s original charter was also to the Pacific Coast. I am amused at the idea of a very, very long, very narrow Virginia stretching across the entire continent.

5

That’s right, Kyla, I had second thoughts after posting that the Firelands were the furthest west that any of the 13 realized their claims. Maybe Virginia’s settlements and establishment of counties in Kentucky went farther. Daniel Boone and all that. In this country, at least when I was a kid, we were raised to believe that D. Boone was this great mythological archetype, the supreme frontiersman of western expansion.

Example: When I was about 6 years old I bought a Daniel Boone book from Scholastic Book Services. It told only a story about how D. Boone as a child made friends with Indian kids. Maybe that book is a product of whiteman guilt over what they did to the Indians, and a recognition that Boone is the main poster boy for western expansion. Maybe it would assuage the white conscience somewhat, to think that Boone was nice to Indians. But what was the real story with Boone and the Indians when he grew up? Please do not cite the 1950s Daniel Boone TV series. It blended historical fiction with science fiction, but nary a historical fact to be found.

I live in Virginia now, the state that spawned all of my native Ohio, except for the Yankee-ized corner that I was born in. The Western Reserve is noted for its New England architecture. I attribute the cultural traditions of Cleveland–that gave us a world-class art museum, university, symphony orchestra, hospitals, public library, and extensive urban parks called the Emerald Necklace–to New England concepts of the public good. This sets us apart from the rest of Ohio. I’m trying to evaluate how much this contribute to forming my intellect, being raised in such a culturally rich environment and participating in it from childhood. I can trace this boon back to Connecticut needing western expansion more urgently than most other states. (Although if Connecticut’s problems were being tiny and finding their western expansion obstructed, I have to wonder how Rhode Island, for crying out loud, felt about that.)

In the early days of the USA, the trend was to move from Virginia to Ohio. William Henry Harrison is an example of this. He is counted among the Virginia presidents because he was born there, but among the Ohio presidents because he lived there. Recently this trend has reversed. Ohioans are moving back to Virginia. I moved here from Cleveland in November 1991. My first next-door neighbor was from Ohio. The number of Virginia vanity license plates celebrating the Cleveland Browns or other Ohio nostalgia was amazing.

The very same day I moved to Virginia, there was news in the Washington Post about results of the 1990 census. Northeast Ohio lost the Congressional district I had just moved from, because of declining population. While Northern Virginia gained a new Congressional district right where I moved to. I felt like one molecule in a huge wave of humanity. Once we flowed out, now we flow back. Like the tides.

6

We were taught the same thing about Georgia. Looking at Google Earth, GA would now include all of Alabama, MS, a good chunk of AR, LA, TX (including Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio), New Mexico, Arizona, and SoCal including both LA and San Diego.

7

It wouldn’t have been so narrow, actually. Virginia, in her grandiosity, claimed the land both north and west of her original settlements. Given the post-1763 boundaries of British North America, this included what is now WV, KY, OH, IN, WI, IL, MI, and part of Minnesota.

Virginia ceded the land north and west of the Ohio to the national government in 1784, before establishing any effective government over it. But the early settlements in Kentucky were definitely governed by and considered part of Virginia. Not until 1792 was Kentucky hived off as a separate state. West Virginia, of course, broke away during the Civil War.

Regarding claims extending to the Pacific, the early colonists understood perfectly well that the land ended in water somewhere–after all, eastern China had a seacoast. Of course, they had no idea where. Any possible claims west of the Mississippi, however, were extinguished when Great Britain accepted the Mississippi as its boundary with Spanish Louisiana in 1763. Mercifully, after the Louisiana Purchase, none of the eastern states tried to revive them!

8

That was William Penn, not Pitt, of course, who got the Pennsylvania charter in 1682. Nobody caught that, didn’t anyone read my whole long post? I spent four or five hours last night writing that. I probably wrote Pitt instead of Penn because I had just been immersed in 1760s frontier history, having developed a fascination with the Wyoming Valley as the prototype for my Western Reserve. I have not visited there, though my mother likes to vacation in the Poconos nearby. My Pennsylvania roots on my mother’s mother’s side of the family are in Western Pennsylvania, originally in Cambria County circa 1800. My grandmother Anna was born in Homestead in 1895.

I was trying to get a sense of the Wyoming Valley’s lay of the land to understand why it was significant in history. It didn’t show clearly on maps, so I used Google Earth. Wow! It came out so bright green, showing as sharply and distinctly as a gash on the land made by a sharp knife. The Wyoming Valley is a long natural declivity between the folded mountain ridges across the Allegheny region. The Susquehanna River (longest river in the eastern United States) goes down from the Allegheny Plateau into the middle of the valley and flows through about half of it, then leaves it by a water gap before it gets to the end, and heads for the lower land of southeastern Pennsylvania. All this can be clearly seen on Google Earth. It’s incredible how much I love Google Earth!

So the river did not make the Wyoming Valley. The geomorphology comes from the folded structure of the strata. I believe the Wyoming Valley is an example of a syncline, if my memory of geology has not completely forsaken me.

The place got this romantic sentiment attached to it, thanks to its physical attractiveness on the Susquehanna, and the haunting memory of the infamous massacre of Yankee settlers by Tories during the Revolution. The verse romance “Gertrude of Wyoming” by the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell was popular in the 19th century but is now forgotten. I’ve just been reading Susquehanna: River of Dreams by Susan Q. Stranahan (OMG! Somebody’s parents actually named her Suzy Q? Unreal!). It seems the ecology and economy of the area in the 20th century turned into a real serious bummer, with horrendous mining disasters and lethal pollution. Where Campbell saw a shining sylvan paradise in the virgin wilderness of the New World, Stranahan sees tragic environmental despoliation caused by the foolish greed of man. Campbell romanticized a wartime atrocity. Stranahan seeks remaining traces of romantic nature through the devastation.

Now, is it just a coincidence that the state capital of Wyoming is at about the same latitude as the original Wyoming Valley? Maybe it isn’t a coincidence that the state of Wyoming got that name from back East. It looks like Connecticut’s Drang nach Westen extended a hint of itself all the way out to 111° W longitude. But even then Virginia won the name race to the West: Virginia City, Nevada is at more than 119° W longitude.

Johanna, granddaughter of Anna, dreaming of Susquehanna with Susanna Stranahanna.

9

Ah, that is the answer I was looking for. Thanks, Freddy! I see it’s true what Walter R. Brooks wrote about your exceptionally high intelligence. :wink:

I started looking into this topic because I felt such a connection within me to the land I come from. I wanted to know more about its background. I felt connected to a current of American history that was specific to the band between the 41st and 42nd parallels. Maybe there is something to that British occult concept of ley lines, and this one just happens to run due east and west.

10

Gee, not many people recognize my literary alter ego!

Those of us not from Ohio know the Western Reserve mostly from the odd-sounding name of Case Western Reserve University, which in turn we know from the famous Michelson-Morley experiment which took place there.

On the subject of history within college names, the hinterlands ceded by Virginia were organized in 1787 as the Northwest Territory. (Yes, we had one before Canada, although ours was named in the singular.) After the region was broken up and admitted as states, it remained known as the Old Northwest. Eventually, after the real northwest was settled, it became the Midwest. But the older designation lives on in Northwestern University.

And in the fight song of the University of Michigan, which insists on describing its football team as the “champions of the West”.

11

I noticed the Penn/Pitt thing, but I’ve only just seen the thread!

Anyway, thanks for explaining the Firelands - you’ve solved a reference for me in an obscure David Thomas (or maybe Pere Ubu) song from a few years back!

12

Given that Thomas was raised in Cleveland, (where he formed Pere Ubu), Wheeler, Mehlman, and Jones were all born in Cleveland, and Temple was born in Van Wert, I suspect that Winter in the Firelands (final cut) does refer to the area West of Cleveland.

Whether it was an actual allusion to the barren-seeming windswept country-side that flattens out away from the valleys of Eastern Ohio or whether it was simply a romantic sounding name, I couldn’t say. Travelling West from Cleveland on either the Turnpike or US-2 there are exits for the BGSU FIRELANDS CAMPUS at Huron, so the name (with no associated history) is familiar to anyone who has taken those roads on a regular basis.

13

The Big Ten was originally named the Western Conference, so don’t blame 'em for that.

Another part of Ohio was once called the Virginia Military District, whose land was donated to Revolutionary War veterans in lieu of back pay. A group of veterans, enthralled as most people once were with the classics, styled themselves after the Roman general Cincinnatus, who left his plow in the field to go fight a war, then returned home and went back to work where he’d left it. The Order of the Cincinnati named their settlement after their organization.

14

I love this since I live in CT and my sister lives just shy of Eureka- we could’ve been in the same state-

I bet I’d visit more if we were both in Connecticut… :confused:

15

Oh thank you, IvoryTowerDenizen, thanks to you this thread has achieved its purpose. We’ve connected a human ley line from Connecticut due west to Eureka.

Hey, now that you mention it, I live in Virginia and my sister lives in the San Francisco Bay area. Our latitudes just about line up. If Virginia had extended all the way west, I’d visit Sis more too, we’d both be in Virginia. :stuck_out_tongue:

16

My work here is done. :slight_smile: