Connecticut's Western Reserve Trivia Quiz

Answer: One degree of latitude

In 1662, Connecticut's new charter combined the New Haven Colony (capital: New Haven) and the Connecticut Colony (capital: Hartford). The new charter granted Connecticut the land between 41 degrees and 42 degrees (which in practice became 42 degrees 2 minutes) north latitude, although the grant did not include the land that was expressly claimed by the Dutch as New Netherland (later New York).

The grant ran all the way to the "South Sea", now known as the Pacific Ocean, so Connecticut claimed the land between those lines of latitude all the way across the continent.

This is the charter that Connecticut lawmakers reportedly hid in the Charter Oak in Hartford in 1687 to prevent a representative of King James II (who was trying to revoke the charter to incorporate all of the colonies along the Atlantic coast east of the Delaware River into a dominion called "New England") from reclaiming it.

The "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 that overthrow King James II ended that bid.

Answer: Pennsylvania

After England's defeat of the Dutch and conquest of New Netherland, King Charles II expressly granted some of the prior Dutch-claimed land that was not in New York to William Penn in 1681 for the colony of Pennsylvania. Because of overlap in the royal grants, both Connecticut and Pennsylvania claimed the northern half of the current state of Pennsylvania, especially the Wyoming Valley area. Both states settled it in the mid-1700s, and Connecticut settlers founded the town of Wilkes-Barre in 1769. Connecticut considered the land to be "Westmoreland County" and gave it a representative in the state legislature. Three times between 1769 and 1784, the rival settlers fought wars that became known as the "Pennamite-Yankee Wars" (Yankees being the Connecticut settlers), and Yankee settlers were also massacred by natives in the Wyoming Valley during the American Revolution.

In 1782, the Continental Congress awarded the Wyoming Valley land to Pennsylvania under the "Trenton Decree" (which also included a proviso that it would have no impact on the settlers' land titles), but Pennsylvania's brutal attempt to evict the Yankee settlers in 1784 (on behalf of Pennsylvania land speculators) led to the Third Pennamite-Yankee War, which even turned Pennsylvanians against the Pennamites.

Answer: New Connecticut

Although the United States Congress demanded that each of the states surrender its western claims to the government in return for the United States agreeing to pay its Revolutionary War debts, Connecticut - as a result of the Third Pennamite-Yankee War - wanted to sue Pennsylvania under the Articles of Confederation to reverse the "Trenton Decree", which Pennsylvania hadn't followed. To resolve this, Pennsylvania and Connecticut agreed that Connecticut would surrender its claims in Pennsylvania (but that land ownership under those claims would be respected by Pennsylvania) if it were granted a portion of the Ohio territory, beginning at the Pennsylvania border, between the same lines of latitude (41 and 42 degrees north).

This reserve would approximately equal the size of the disputed Wyoming Valley lands.

The risk to the "perpetual union" among the states posed by the threatened lawsuit persuaded Congress to agree. The name "New Connecticut", originally assigned to Connecticut's claim to Vermont, was reused for the new western Connecticut territory.

However, New Connecticut was technically just part of Connecticut, and its residents were residents of Connecticut.

Answer: Toledo

Toledo is about 150 miles (as the crow flies) from Pennsylvania, so it would have been outside of New Connecticut. Other current cities that would have been included in the Western Reserve range from Ashtabula to Sandusky along the lake shore and Medina, Oberlin and Kent further inland. Of course, none of these cities existed in 1786.

Answer: Native American raids

Some Native American tribes (Wyandotte, Delaware, Chippewa, and Ottawa) had signed a treaty at Fort McIntosh (present-day Beaver, Pennsylvania) in 1785 to permit the settlement of New Connecticut and neighboring lands. However, the Spanish, the French, and especially the British objected to the spread of American settlers, but none of them were willing to commit their own troops to prevent it.

Instead, their agents stoked the grievances of other Native American tribes, particularly the Shawnee, which led to the Northwest Indian War (1785-95), also known as the Ohio War.

Not until United States victory in that war was confirmed by 1795's Treaty of Greenville, which extinguished most of the native claims in New Connecticut and surrounding areas, could the Western Reserve safely be settled.

Answer: Firelands

The Firelands (or Fire Lands) comprised about 500,000 acres in the western part of New Connecticut. However, the area was still wild except for trading posts along Sandusky Bay and the Marblehead Peninsula, and it wouldn't even be surveyed for settlement until 1806-08. Most recipients of these land grants simply resold them to land speculators, especially since the Treaty of Greenville with the natives was still three years in the future (and it didn't conclusively resolve native claims in the Firelands; that wasn't accomplished until the Treaty of Fort Industry in 1805, in return for a $1,000 annual payment).

After this grant, only the section of New Connecticut to the east of these grants continued to be referred to as the Western Reserve; maps of New Connecticut after this grant separately designate the "Western Reserve" and the "Fire Lands".

By the way, one of the mysteries of the "Treaty of Fort Industry" is the actual location of Fort Industry, which is lost to history.

Answer: $1.2 million (40 cents an acre)

Before this sale, the only lands in New Connecticut that Connecticut had disposed of were the Firelands (by grant) and a salt tract in the Mahoning Valley (by sale). Connecticut justified the sale price by earmarking the money and notes received from the Connecticut Land Company for use in improving and expanding public education in the state, and it assigned the payments and notes to a school fund. Members of the Connecticut Land Company were mostly from Suffield, Connecticut, on the Massachusetts border.

However, their purchase of the Western Reserve generally proved to be a poor investment, especially because the members of the Connecticut Land Company had no experience in selling real estate claims and even failed to set up a sales office within the Western Reserve, and the company collapsed in 1807.

Answer: Moses Cleaveland

Cleaveland was one of the investors in the Connecticut Land Company, and his mission was to survey the land from the Cuyahoga River east to the Pennsylvania border, as well as to repel or buy off any renegade natives (which proved to be necessary). He chose to survey 25-square-mile township tracts instead of the 36-square-mile tracts that were standard under the Land Ordnance of 1785, which he could legally do because the land was part of the state of Connecticut, not a territory of the United States.

He also founded a settlement at the Cuyahoga River harbor named Cleaveland after himself, although the first "a" in his name was later dropped from the settlement's name for unknown reasons. His group further established the settlement of Port Independence (now Conneaut) along Lake Erie before they reached the Cuyahoga.

Answer: Warren

All of New Connecticut was designated as Trumbull County (named after then-Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull Jr.), and it needed an administrative center, referred to as either a capital or a county seat. However, because of continuing tensions with both the British and the natives, the Connecticut authorities felt that an inland settlement such as Warren, which wouldn't be vulnerable to sea raids, would be a safer location than a port settlement such as the other three choices. Warren had been founded by Ephraim Quimby, who purchased the land from the Connecticut Land Company and named the town after its surveyor, Moses Warren. Today, Warren is still the county seat of the realigned (and much smaller) Trumbull County in Ohio.

Answer: Connecticut transferring New Connecticut to the United States

Settlers believed that Connecticut should enforce their land titles against squatters and rival claimants, but they didn't want to have to refer their disputes to courts and a state government around 500 miles away in Hartford and New Haven. Connecticut believed that the United States government's troops in the neighboring Northwest Territory (which had been formed in 1787, a year after New Connecticut) should do it (along with defending the frontier).

However, the government felt that its troops shouldn't cross Connecticut's state borders.

The Quieting Act of 1800 resolved all of these issues, because Connecticut gave up sovereignty over New Connecticut, which was then incorporated into the Northwest Territory, and the United States agreed to recognize and enforce the land grants and land titles previously awarded under Connecticut law in that area (and to treat Trumbull County as a separate unit of Ohio Territory). And the number of people living in the Western Reserve, when added to the number of people living in Ohio Territory along the Ohio River from Cincinnati eastward to Pennsylvania, was over 45,000 in the 1800 census, which was sufficient to make Ohio a state less than three years later, in 1803.