I recently came across the following joke map online:

Surprisingly, and probably unintentionally, there’s a grain of historical truth to this “Megachusetts”. Massachusetts’ original colonial charter specified northern and southern borders, and that the colony should extend all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, or rather: “…from the Atlantick and Westerne Sea and Ocean on the East Parte, to the South Sea on the West Parte;” The grant wasn’t quite the line depicted in the meme, but it was a line across the continent nevertheless.

Massachusetts wasn’t the only New England colony to get such a “sea to sea” grant. Connecticut’s colonial charter of 1662 granted the young colony all English territory “…from the said Narrogancett Bay on the East to the South Sea on the West parte, with the Islands thereunto adioyneinge…”

Besides the creative spellings of “Narragansett” and “adjoining” (from before standardized English spelling), this line gave Connecticut a basis to claim its own narrow strip of the entire continent, again hypothetically reaching the Pacific ocean. And like any reasonable government of the era, the colonial governments of Connecticut and Massachusetts kept on claiming this land as long as they feasibly could.

Several colonies had western claims along these lines. New York and Virginia claimed the most western land, but North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia all had claims, too. Many of these seven state claims overlapped. The southern states in particular actually had access to land past the Appalachians, and several of them tried to actually settle those areas and enforce their claims after American independence.

Connecticut and Massachusetts, however, had no way to enforce most of their claims. The clearest issue was that French Louisiana and Spanish New Spain were in the way of the westernmost section, but also Pennsylvania and New York territory cut off direct access between New England and the old Northwest. (And of course, there were numerous indigenous nations in the territory as well, but in the Americans’ minds they were going to be conquered eventually either way.)

But even without direct access Connecticut didn’t entirely give up on its long western extension. States of the young USA started ceding their western land claims to the federal government in the decades following independence. This kept the peace between states and gained goodwill from the union, and made it easier for Americans to expand into the area. Connecticut ceded most of their claim, too, but held onto a small piece of what would become Northeast Ohio.

Connecticut even started sending settlers to the area in the 1790s, under the auspices of the “Connecticut Land Company”. A few towns were even founded, most notably one on the banks of the Cuyahoga river by a certain Moses Cleaveland. Even today, Cleveland, Ohio¹ maintains its original New England-style common grazing land as its central plaza, Public Square.

This area, known as the “Connecticut Western Reserve”, eventually was ceded to the federal government as well. It was just too impractical for Connecticut to manage an exclave on the other side of the Appalachians. But the legacy of this last bit of Long Connecticut (Disconnecticut?) remains, most notably in the name of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Coming soon: The elementary school in a nuclear bunker