How Connecticut lost its Western Reserve

1662 royal charter said colony extended west to the Pacific

There was a time when Connecticut extended all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

Imagine a narrow strip of land the width of Connecticut, beginning at the New York border and extending west all the way to the California shoreline.

When Connecticut was granted its charter in 1662 by King Charles II, it included the land all the way “to the South Sea on the West Part.”

That land, which was for a time actually part of Connecticut, encompassed what is now Detroit, Akron, Cleveland, Chicago, Omaha, Salt Lake City and more.

“The ‘South Sea’ was the Pacific Ocean, although they didn’t know it,” said Connecticut State Historian Walt Woodward. “They did not have any real idea. No one would have believed that the continent of America was as broad as it was.”

“To say the least, they were geographically challenged at the time,” Woodward said.

It’s not that Connecticut residents in the 1600s didn’t have any idea about geography. “They knew from the voyages of Francis Drake and others that there was a Pacific coast,” Woodward said, but they did not understand the scale.

It wasn't until Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led the Corps of Discovery Expedition across the entirety of the continent in the early 1800s that the dimensions of America were truly understood.

“No one really expected the great Midwest to be as great as it was,” Woodward said.

The Connecticut charter of 1662 did not just set the boundaries of the colony, but decide on a system of government. Charles II, who had only recently become king, granted Connecticut what was considered an unprecedented amount of autonomy.

Connecticut used that charter to hold on to both its extensive land claims and autonomy for more than a century. Of course, it wasn’t that simple.

“When they issued charters they often issued them with overlapping claims, conflicting boundaries,” Woodward said.

Two years after the charter was signed, King Charles II granted his brother James, the duke of York, land extending all the way to the Connecticut River.

That decree was “disputed immediately and vociferously between Connecticut and New York,” Woodward said. Long Island, part of Connecticut until then, was ceded to New York when that dispute was resolved.

When James succeeded his brother he was unhappy with the autonomy that had been granted Connecticut. He sent Edmund Andros to merge all the colonies from Maine to Delaware, but Connecticut was reluctant to fall in line.

As the story goes, as Andros debated the charter in Hartford, the lights suddenly and mysteriously went out.

“Magically, the charter had disappeared,” Woodward said. “It had been spirited away and hidden in an oak tree,” which is the origin of the legend of Connecticut’s Charter Oak.

Oak tree or no oak tree, King James II put Andros in charge of what he called the Dominion of New England, though he was overthrown in the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, leaving Connecticut to enforce the charter originally granted by Charles II in 1662.

Connecticut was enforcing those land claims during the American Revolution, during a series of armed conflicts between Connecticut and Pennsylvania called the PennamiteYankee War.

Ohio, too, had some disagreements with the Nutmeg State, when Connecticut — claiming two large tracts in Ohio as per the 1662 charter, resettled refugees whose homes had been burned by the British to what was called the “fire lands,” and the Western Reserve.

It wasn’t until the new nation was formed that Connecticut — along with every other state — gave up its land to the west.

“As part of joining the new government, all of the new states gave up their western land claims,” Woodward said.

“No one would have believed that the continent of America was as broad as it was.” Walt Woodward, state historian