36 The Financial History of Connecticut. 



is included in the present state of Pennsylvania. The dispute arising 

 from this fact was not finally settled until November, 1782, when 

 a commission appointed by the two states decided it in favor of 

 Pennsylvania. Connecticut still claimed a strip of land about two 

 and one-third miles wide and two hundred twenty miles long situated 

 west of the Delaware river, south of the imaginary line made by 

 projecting the southern boundary line of Massachusetts, and north 

 of the northern boundary of Pennsylvania as claimed by that state. ^ 

 It also claimed all lands west of Pennsylvania, as far as the Missis- 

 sippi, which lay between the northern and southern lines set by the 

 charter of 16G2. In 1786, Connecticut, following the lead of New York 

 and Virginia, ceded to the United States all of the lands it claimed 

 west of the western boundary of Pennsylvania with the exception 

 of a tract of about thirty-five hundred thousand acres comprising 

 what are now the counties of Ashtabula, TrumbuU, Portage, Geauga, 

 Cuyahoga, Medina, Lorain, Huron, and Erie in the state of Ohio.^ 

 In 1792 the general assembly granted five hundred thousand acres 

 from this reserved tract to citizens of Danbury, Fairfield, Norwalk, 

 New London and Groton to indemnify them for losses arising from 

 the burning of the towns by the British at the time of Arnold's raid 

 into Connecticut. The general assembly, at its May session in 1795, 

 appointed a committee to sell the remainder of this land known as 

 the "Western Reserve." The committee was instructed not to sell 

 unless it should obtain at least one million dollars, specie value, and 

 if there were more than one contract, the contracts must be made 

 together and the purchasers must hold their respective parts in 

 common. The legislature also voted that the principal sum received 

 from the sale of these lands should remain a perpetual fund, and 

 that the interest of this fund should be appropriated to the support 

 of schools in the different school societies. The distribution of this 

 sum was to be based on the hst of polls and rateable estate of the 

 different school societies.^ 



Another example of the tendency, even at this period, of the state 

 to maintain a paternal interest in the church is seen in this act 

 relating to the sale of the Western Reserve. The act reserved to 

 the general assembly the right to grant the request of any society 

 which, by a two-thirds vote at a legal meeting called for that 

 purpose only, should resolve to ask from the general assembly 

 the privilege of using, for the support of public worship, the whole 



^ Annual Report of American Historical Association, 1898, p. 142. 



^ Niles' Register, vol. 56, p. 344. 



3 Conn. Laws, May 1798, p. 482, sec. 3. 



