The Susquehannah Company

By Bruce P. Stark

By the middle of the eighteenth century, virtually all of the arable land in Connecticut was under cultivation. Since population continued to grow rapidly, Connecticut farmers had to look elsewhere for new lands to satisfy their children's needs. Between 1760 and the American Revolution, thousands of Connecticut inhabitants migrated to western Massachusetts and traveled up the Connecticut River Valley into New Hampshire and what would be Vermont. Smaller numbers moved to Nova Scotia and the Susquehannah territory of northeast Pennsylvania, an area claimed by Connecticut because its charter stipulated that the colony's western boundary was the "South Sea."

The Susquehannah Company, under whose auspices settlement in Pennsylvania took place, was organized in Windham in July 1753. It won the support of speculators, land-hungry farmers, and many well known political figures, most of whom identified with the New Light faction. In 1754 John Henry Lydius, a Dutch trader, secured a deed from the Indians to a tract of land along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. Attempts were made to distribute shares in the Susquehannah Company throughout the entire colony, but the Company's strength was in eastern Connecticut. As a result, the issue of western expansion split the colony between east and west, as had earlier disputes over paper money and religious revivalism. A massacre of settlers in Pennsylvania in 1763, a proclamation by Governor Fitch prohibiting further settlement, and troubles with Great Britain kept the Susquehannah issue in the background until 1769. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix in November 1768, however, fixed the Indian boundary west of the Susquehannah territory and set new efforts in motion to establish Connecticut's claim to the area. The Company had the support of a majority in the Upper House, but crucial to its success were the labors made in its behalf by Governor Jonathan Trumbull (1710-1785). Largely as the result of his influence, the Lower House, which for years had blocked efforts of the Company to obtain recognition for its claims, in October 1773 resolved to "assert their claim...to those lands contained within the limits and boundaries of the charter of the Colony which are westward of the Province of New York." Three months later the General Assembly formally extended its jurisdiction over the territory, established the new town of Westmoreland, and made the town part of Litchfield County.

The struggle over territorial expansion consumed Connecticut between 1769 and 1774, and each election was fought over this issue. The final defeat of the Old Party headed by former Governor Fitch in 1774, followed shortly by his death and the final crisis with Great Britain, removed Susquehannah from the political scene. The government of Pennsylvania, however, had never relinquished its claim to the region and appealed to the Executive Council of the Confederation. The Council ordered Connecticut in June 1782 to respond to Pennsylvania's charges. Both parties were heard at Trenton in November, and the court unanimously ruled in favor of Pennsylvania. Thus ended the Susquehannah affair, although Connecticut settlers had fought for two decades to secure title to the lands they claimed.

The territorial expansion question was an extremely divisive one with factional lines following those established more than a generation earlier. As Old Light Benjamin Gale (1715-1790) affirmed in 1766, factionalism in the colony originated "with the N London Society--thence metamorphised into the Faction for paper Emissions on Loan, thence into N Light, into ye Susquehannah & Delaware Factions--into Orthodoxy--now into Stamp Duty--the Actors the same, each Change drawing in some New Members."

For Further Reading

Boyd, Julian Parks. The Susquehannah Company: Connecticut's Experiment in Expansion. New Haven, 1935. Tercentenary pamphlet XXXIV.

Warfle, Richard T. Connecticut's Western Colony: The Susquehannah Affair. Hartford, 1979.

* Entry under revision.