ohsettlement

All the emigrants who started in Conncticut, and some of the
others, ended up in a section of northern Ohio called the Connecticut
Western Reserve. And it happened like this:
During the Revolution, Connecticut towns made good targets for
the British, whose main base was in New York City. The British fleet
controlled the sea and often raided up the coast. Connecticut
provided a lot of rebels' supplies, and supplies from all over New
England passed through Danbury. Early in 1777, General Washington
established a forage depot and hospital at Danbury. The British, who
knew that Washington had to keep most of his troops in New Jersey to
counter a move against Philadelphia, and who needed stores
themselves, decided to attack it. They loaded six regiments, about
1,500 men, into transport ships off Manhatten, sailed up the East
River and into Long Island Sound, stopped at Oyster Bay to board
about 300 Loyalist American soldiers, sailed to Compo Beach on the
Connecticut shore, and landed on the evening of April 25th. They
marched that night and the next day, went through Weston, Redding,
Bethel, met small resistance, and entered Danbury about three
o'clock on the afternoon of Saturday, April 26th.1777.
Most of the inhabitants had fled Comfort Hoyt had a house and
store in the middle of town He was already prosperous and was at the
age of twenty five. He began to load his goods into wagons and carts,
but rebel officers came and requistioned them to move supplies from
the hospital. His goods were thrown down. His wife, who was
pregnant, hid her coin-silver spoons and other silver in the ashpit
of the chimney. In the Episcopal church across the street, supplies
for the Continental Army -- barrels of pork, beef, nails,
saltpeter,and tar, hogsheads of biscuits, rum, and brandy were piled
up to the gallery. Out of respect for the church of England, the
British took the supplies out before burning them. Hot pork fat ran
ankle deep in the street. The Brittish could find no wagons to carry
the spoils, so they spent that afternoon and night burning-- five
thousand pairs of shoes ad stockings, a thousand tents ad several
marquees imported from France, medicine,Indian corn, hospital
bedding, coffee and oats. maybe they marked crosses with a chunk of
lime on houses belonging to Torries to spare them from burning; in
any event, they did burn at least nineteen houses, including Comfort
Hoyt's house and store. At eight o'clock the next morning, they
marched out of town headed back to the seacoast. When the Hoyts
returned to their home they found nothing standing but the chimney,
the silver still safe in the ashpit. Near the ruin was their other
remaining possession, a round low table the British Officers had set,
in the meadow, to mix their drinks on. The family later said that
when they found it its top was custed inch-deep in brandy and sugar.
People who lost property petitioned the Connecticut legislature
for reparation, and in June the legislature sent agents to meet with
the sufferers and take statements. The legislature eventually
accepted 186 claims from Danbury.
The raid was so sucessful for the Brittish they later hit New
Haven, Fairfield, New London, Groton, and Ridgefield-- the destruction
escalated as the war went on. The Constinental Army could not spare
troops to guard all landing points on the coast, and the British
wanted to punish Connecticut for supporting the rebellion.As in
Danbury, the sufferers afterwards submitted claims to the
legislature; by the end of the war. the claims numbered more than
1,800. The legislature proposed to pay not in money but in Western
land. As a colony, and then a state, Connecticut had never accepted
the finality of her western boundary. She preferred to think that her
territory extended in a strip between the 41st parallel and two
minutes above the 42nd parallel --her northern and southern
boundaries-- clear across the continent, as per her original charter
from Charles ll. Conecticut Yankees had even vaultd intervening parts
of New York and New Jersey to start colonies in what they considered
their territory in Pennsylvania, causing all kind of trouble between
that state and theirs. During the revolution, nearly 300 of those
colonists in Susquehanna Valley were killed by a force of British,
Torries, and Indians in one of the worst massacres of te war.
After the war, when other states were giving up their Western
Lands, Connecticut said she would yield all but a strip of the Ohio
country 120 miles long and about 50 miles wide. She said she reserved
this section for herself, which is how it got its name Western
Reserve. Congress finally accepted this reserve, maybe because of the
massacre, maybe because Conneticut was so persistant it was just
easier to let her have her way. In 1792, Connecticut used half a
million acres of this western land to pay the suffers' claims. Many
of the sufferers sold their grants immediately for cash. In 1795,
Connecticut sold the 3 million acres of the Reserve, an estimate, as
none of it had been surveyed, to a syndicate of investors which later
became the Connecticut Land Company. The purchasers paid $1.2 million
in bonds to the State treasurer secured by mortgage. No cash changed
hands, although of course it would later, as the lands were resold
throughout New England. Purchasers were told they asumed the risk of
the conflicting Indian title, described as " unextinguished and
unquieted " which was to say that a lot of Indians still lived there.
Many of these Shawnees, Senecas, Onondagas, Wyandots, Miamis, Ottawas,
Massasagoes, Pottawattomies, Chippewas, and Delawares had helped the
French fight the British in the French and Indian War, and the British
fight the Americans in the Revolution. After that war was over, they
fought on; the Miamis and Shawnees and with British aid killed almost
700 militiamen led by General Arthur St. Clair in western Ohio in
1791, and an army led by General Anthony Wayne killed a lot of Miamis
and others in 1794 at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, which resulted in
a treaty and brief peace.
The Connecticut Land Company sent Moses Cleaveland west to buy
some of the Reserve from the Indians and make a survey. His party
met with representatives of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, whose
own claim to the land was debatable, at Buffalo, New York, in the
spring of 1796. The Connecticut men feasted the Indians from Tuesday
to Friday and provided whiskey. Among the Indians was Joseph Brant,
who had helped plan the attack on the Connecticut colonists in
Pennsylvania and translated the Bible into Mohawk. At the signing, a
Seneca, Red Jacket, said that the white people made a great parade
about religion, but all they wanted was money. The Indians received
$500 "New York currency," two beef cattle, and a hundred gallons of
whiskey; some also got provisions for the trip home. The Connecticut
Land Company got all of the Western Reserve from the Pennsyvania
border to the Cuyahoga River, about 400,000 acres. Seven years
later, representatives of that company, the war claim holders (
incorporated in a seperate company called the Sufferers ), and the
U.S. Government met with the other Indians to buy the rest of the
Reserve. They tried to persuade the Indians to come to a council
site on Lake Erie, but the Indians wouldn't, so the agents had to
come to them, at Fort Industry on the Maumee River. This time the
price for 2.75 million acres west of the Cuyahoga was about $19,000 (
$ 4,000 down, the rest installments)payable by the Land Companies,
and an annuity of some thousands payable by the Government from then
on. Witnesses said the Indians signed the treaty with reluctance and
afterwards many of them wept. No one pointed out to the Indians
that the lands they were giving up had already been sold, perhaps
resold many times, for a lot more. A photostat of the Treaty hangs
in the Firelands Museum in Norwalk. People talked about the Western
Reserve and traded its lands, but for many years not many moved
there. The new State of Ohio assumed legal jurisdiction in 1803.
Then the British lost the war of 1812, which removed any last danger
of Indian attack and the Real Settlement began.