Roaming Shores, Ohio

When King Charles II granted Connecticut its colonial charter in 1662, the language was breathtakingly ambitious. Connecticut's borders extended from sea to sea, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. After the Revolution, most states with these absurd claims ceded their western lands to the federal government. Connecticut did too, with one exception. It kept a 120-mile-wide strip of northeastern Ohio totaling 3.3 million acres. This was the Connecticut Western Reserve. Connecticut held onto it for a practical reason: it could sell the land to raise money. In 1795, Connecticut sold the bulk of the Reserve to the Connecticut Land Company for 1.2 million dollars. Moses Cleaveland was sent to survey and settle it, founding the city of Cleveland in 1796. Connecticut also set aside 500,000 acres at the western end called the Firelands, reserved to compensate residents of Connecticut towns that the British had burned during the Revolutionary War. New London, Fairfield, and Norwalk had been torched. Their residents received Ohio farmland as reparations. The Reserve's boundaries encompass all of modern Cuyahoga, Ashtabula, Erie, and eight other counties. The name lives on in Case Western Reserve University. If you are driving through northeastern Ohio and wonder why the town names sound like New England, this is why. Connecticut literally colonized this part of Ohio.