Connecticut

Connecticut's original charter gave it all the land west to the Pacific Ocean, and it tried to collect.

historical

Connecticut's charter of 1662 granted the colony every acre westward to what the document called the South Sea. That meant the Pacific Ocean. Most colonial royal grants were written as long east-west strips, and most colonies treated the far end as a formality. Connecticut did not. It took the grant seriously and set up a ninth county on land between the Susquehanna and Delaware rivers, well inside what Pennsylvania considered its own. The county was named Westmoreland. Pennsylvania disagreed, and the argument turned into fighting known as the Pennamite-Yankee Wars. There had been an earlier boundary problem on the other side. A treaty with the Dutch in 1650 set Connecticut's western line running north from Greenwich Bay for twenty miles, provided it came no closer than ten miles to the Hudson River. Both sides honored that until England and the Netherlands went to war in 1652. The quarrel over colonial limits only ended when the Duke of York seized New Netherland in 1664.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from

Connecticut took its grant seriously and established a ninth county between the Susquehanna River and Delaware River named Westmoreland County. This resulted in the brief Pennamite-Yankee Wars with Pennsylvania.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

Broad Street Historic District (Middletown, Connecticut) 3.8 mi Middletown's river port was dying, so the town's leaders founded a university and turned their vegetable gardens into a neighborhood.
Wesleyan University 3.8 mi A small Connecticut college keeps the personal papers of Martin Scorsese, Frank Capra and John Waters in its archives.
Downtown New Britain 5.9 mi New Britain became an industrial powerhouse without a river to power it.
New Britain Museum of American Art 6.5 mi A museum in New Britain bought a famous five-panel Thomas Hart Benton mural for five hundred dollars, less than the cost of the crane needed to move it.
Central Connecticut State University 7.2 mi Connecticut's oldest public university was shut down by the state legislature after eighteen years, and stayed closed for two.
Southington, Connecticut 9.3 mi In 1942 the War Department picked this one Connecticut town to represent all of America, and dropped the pictures over occupied Europe from airplanes.