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A region of northeast Ohio bordering on Lake Erie. It was retained by Connecticut after other western claims were ceded to the U.S. Congress in 1786. Much of the area was given or sold to immigrants from Connecticut (1786–1800), and the remainder of the territory was ceded to Ohio in 1800 and became part of the Northwest Territory.
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The Western Reserve, a part of northeastern Ohio lying along the south shore of Lake Erie and once belonging to Connecticut, is an irregular quadrilateral—with Conneaut, Youngstown, Willard, and Port Clinton at the corners. The charter that the Connecticut river towns obtained from Charles II in 1662 fixed the colony's boundaries north and south by parallels extending westward to the "South Sea" (Pacific Ocean). With royal disdain for the inconveniences of geography, King Charles granted parts of the same region to the Duke of York and to Admiral William Penn, while King James had already given Virginia a basis for a claim to all the territory included in Connecticut's boundaries beyond Pennsylvania.
Following the American Revolution, these overlapping claims left the thirteen states to face serious territorial disputes. Small states without western lands, particularly Maryland, were loath to enter a union with great inequalities in public lands. Congress proposed that states cede their western lands, all or in part, to the Confederation, promising to admit the territories as new states on equal terms with the original thirteen. The states accepted the plan, launching the Confederation.
In 1786 Connecticut ceded its lands west of Pennsylvania except for a portion, the Western Reserve, that it attempted to keep as recompense for its relatively small size. It proceeded at once to plan for an advantageous disposal of its western estate. In 1792 it assigned 500,000 acres from the western end to the inhabitants of the Connecticut towns along the Long Island Sound as compensation for losses inflicted by British raids during the revolution. The "Firelands," as they called this western region, drew a steady stream of immigrants from Connecticut. In 1795 the Connecticut Land Company purchased the remaining portion of the Western Reserve, estimated at the time at more than 3 million acres.
Moses Cleaveland, one of the purchasers and general agent of the company, went west in 1796 to supervise a survey and other preparations for sale and settlement, finding a heavily forested area along the south shore of Lake Erie that was long unfavorable for extensive sale. The absence of any form of local government also for many years created a barrier to settlement. In 1800 Connecticut and the United States arranged by a joint agreement that the Western Reserve should be attached as a county to the newly formed Ohio Territory. Governor Arthur St. Clair gave it the name Trumbull County and proceeded to organize local government. Later, particularly after the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, the population grew, resulting in Trumbull County's division and redivision into multiple counties.
The term "Western Reserve" ceased to have any territorial meaning and later lingered in the names of various commercial and banking enterprises, or in such instances as the Western Reserve Historical Society and the Western Reserve University. But Connecticut's Western Reserve developed as an extension of New England into the West. Names of families, towns, architecture, and social customs carried evidence of this transfer of population from the East and marked Western Reserve apart from other parts of the country until later industrialization and immigration blurred its origins.
Bibliography
Campbell, Thomas F., and Edward M. Miggins, eds. The Birth of Modern Cleveland, 1865–1930. Cleveland, Ohio: Western Reserve Historical Society, 1988.
Lupold, Harry F., and Gladys Haddad, eds. Ohio's Western Reserve: A Regional Reader. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1988.
Van Tassel, David D., ed. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. 2d. ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.
The Connecticut Western Reserve was land claimed by Connecticut in the Northwest Territory in what is now northeastern Ohio.
Although forced to surrender the Pennsylvania portion (Westmoreland County) of its sea-to-sea land grant following the Yankee-Pennamite Wars and the intercession of the federal government, Connecticut held fast to its right to the lands between the 41st and 42nd-and-2-minutes parallels that lay west of the Pennsylvania border.
Within the state of Ohio, the claim was a 120 mile (190 km) strip between Lake Erie and a line just south of Youngstown, Akron, New London, and Willard, about three miles south of the present-day U.S. Highway 224. Beyond Ohio the claim included parts of what would become Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California.
In its deed of cession (the states gave up their western claims in exchange for federal assumption of their American Revolutionary War debt) dated September 13, 1786, Connecticut retained more than three million acres (12,000 km²) in Ohio. In 1796, Connecticut sold that land to investors, who formed the Connecticut Land Company. However, the Indian title to the reserve had not been extinguished. Clear title was not obtained until the Greenville Treaty in 1795 and the Treaty of Fort Industry in 1805. The west end of the reserve included the 500,000 acre (2,000 km²) Firelands or "Sufferers Lands" reserved for residents of several New England towns destroyed by British-set fires during the Revolutionary War.
The land company arranged for the surveying of the balance of the land into townships five miles square (25 square miles). To this day, the townships of the Western Reserve differ in size from those of most of the rest of the state, which are six miles square (36 square miles).
The following year, a team from the land company led by Moses Cleaveland traveled to the Reserve to prepare surveys. The group also founded Cleveland, which would become the largest city in the region. (The arbitrary decision to drop the "a" in the name of the community was done by a printer early in the settlement's existence, Cleveland taking less room on a printed page than Cleaveland.)
Over the next few years, settlers began trickling into the territory. Youngstown was founded in 1796, Warren in 1798, and Ashtabula in 1799.
In 1800, the Northwest Territory established Trumbull County. Because Warren was made the county seat, the city calls itself "the historical capital of the Western Reserve." Later, several more counties would be carved out of the territory.
Architecture in the Western Reserve mimicked that of the New England towns where settlers came from. Many of the buildings were designed in the Georgian, Federal and Greek Revival style. Towns such as Aurora, Canfield, Gates Mills, Hudson, Milan, Norwalk, and Painesville exemplify the mixture of these styles and traditional New England town planning.
Early settlers called the territory "New Connecticut," but that name was later discarded in favor of "Western Reserve." Western Reserve College (founded 1826 in Hudson), which merged with the Case Institute of Technology (founded 1880) in 1967 to form Case Western Reserve University, is an example of that tie to the past. (The Hudson campus became home to the preparatory school, Western Reserve Academy.) The Western Reserve Historical Society works to preserve history and historical items relevant to the area.
The following publications are in the collection of the Connecticut State Library (CSL):
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 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| US History Encyclopedia. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ Read more |
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| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Connecticut Western Reserve". Read more |
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