What's your American accent? The 41st parallel - gotten from owlspirit13
What American accent do you have?
Created by Xavier on Memegen.net
Northern. Whether you have the world famous Inland North accent of the Great Lakes area, or the radio-friendly sound of upstate NY and western New England, your accent is what used to set the standard for American English pronunciation (not much anymore now that the Inland North sounds like it does).
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This quiz got it right: I was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. The map of the dialect area is probably accurate too, since people from nearby southeastern Ohio always sounded to me like they spoke with a foreign accent. I came from that really thin area of coastal plain where the Appalachian Plateau reaches almost to Lake Erie.
On the map, note that the northeastern corner of Pennsylvania talks like me. This accent is no accident. At one time Connecticut (third-smallest state in area) was fixing to become the third-largest. In 1662 King Charles II granted a charter to the Connecticut colony that extended between 41° and 42°2′ N latitude clear out to the Pacific Ocean.
If that had gone through, I figure dimensions of 72 miles (116 km) north to south, by ~2600 miles (~4200 km) east to west (let me know if my rough measurements are too inaccurate) makes for a claimed western area of ~187,200 square miles (~487 200 km²). This added to the state's actual area of 5,544 square miles (14,371 km²) would have made a grand total of roughly 193,000 square miles (~500,000 km²). Compare this to Alaska at 663,267 mi² (1 717 854 km²) and Texas at 268,820 mi² (696 241 km²). The full western extent of Connecticut's charter (not counting the triangular chunk that New York took out of it) was going to be about 35 times bigger than the actual size of Connecticut.
If that had gone through, places that would now be in Connecticut include
Wilkes-Barre, PA
Cleveland, OH
Niles, MI
South Bend, IN
Chicago, IL
Des Moines, IA
Omaha, NE
Cheyenne, WY (note the name Wyoming in what follows)
Paradise Valley, NV
Eureka, CA
They actually got the first two places on the list... briefly.
In the 1760s Connecticut was a small colony, with a growing population and poor soil. I guess it seemed a no-brainer for them to settle people in their western claim, where there was plenty of good land. Once they leapfrogged New York, the first nice place to settle they found in Western Connecticut was the Wyoming Valley. Soon Wilkes-Barre and the other Yankee settlements around it acceded themselves to Connecticut. At first it was part of Litchfield County and then formed its own county called Westmoreland. (They went West because they needed more land, get it?)
Unfortunately, King Charles had also granted William Penn a charter in 1682 that extended Pennsylvania north into the same territory. Methinks Your Majesty did like totally space it out, dude. Both colonies purchased the same land from the Indians. Connecticut and Pennsylvania actually fought a series of little wars (1769-71, 1775, and 1784) over the Wyoming Valley. As as result of the dispute, the Yankee side tried to establish the new State of Westmoreland in 1783, but gave up the idea after a few months. Finally, in 1786 or 1787 (sources differ), Connecticut ceded its western claims to the federal government as part of the state cessions deal by which states ceded their trans-Appalachian claims in exchange for the federal government assuming their debts. Connecticut ceded its western lands as far as the Mississippi. The rest of their land grant that supposedly extended to California had been dropped earlier by the British in 1763 in a treaty with Spain. They probably just realized it could never work, given the dimensions of the continent. The area from Long Island Sound to Pacific Ocean is about 38 times longer than it is wide.
So as a consolation prize for losing the Wyoming Valley, Connecticut's Plan B was to leapfrog Pennsylvania and settle the next chunk of land to the west. This is how the Western Reserve came to be: the land of my birth. The Connecticut Land Company bought the Western Reserve from the state and sent Moses Cleaveland there with a party of surveyors and a few settlers in 1796, which is how Cleveland got to be there.
In 1792 the Connecticut legislature set aside the western end of the Western Reserve as land for people in several Connecticut towns whose homes were torched by the Redcoats during the Revolution. The area is known as the Firelands. Thirty years later, a very few of those folks or their heirs had actually moved out there. This explains the transplanted names of those burnt towns way out in the middle of northern Ohio: Norwalk, New Haven, North Fairfield, New London, Danbury Township, Greenwich. When I was young my maternal grandparents lived in the Firelands, in Sandusky, and we often visited. So as far as I can tell, that was the farthest west any of the original 13 states reached in realizing their western claims. Unless Virginia went further west into Kentucky during that period, I don't know. That was Daniel Boone and all. When I was about 6 years old, I got a book from Scholastic Book Services about Daniel Boone as a young boy, how he made friends with Indian kids. Since Boone had been the big poster boy for westward expansion and the destruction of most of those Indians, maybe that 1960s kids' book about him was motivated by a guilty white conscience.
I live in Virginia now, the state that spawned all of my native Ohio, except for the Yankee-ized corner that I was born in. The Western Reserve is noted for its New England architecture. I attribute the cultural traditions of Cleveland--that gave us a world-class art museum, university, symphony orchestra, hospitals, public library, and extensive urban parks called the Emerald Necklace--to New England concepts of the public good. This sets us apart from the rest of Ohio. I wonder how much this contributed to forming my intellect, being raised in such a culturally rich environment and participating in it from childhood. I can trace this boon back to Connecticut needing western expansion more urgently than most other states. (Although if Connecticut's problems were being tiny and finding their western expansion obstructed, I have to wonder how Rhode Island, for crying out loud, felt about that.)
In the early days of the USA, the trend was to move from Virginia to Ohio. William Henry Harrison is an example of this. He is counted among the Virginia presidents because he was born there, but among the Ohio presidents because he lived there. Recently this trend has reversed. Ohioans have been moving back to Virginia. I moved here from Cleveland in November 1991. My first next-door neighbor was from Ohio. The number of Virginia vanity license plates celebrating the Cleveland Browns or other Ohio nostalgia was amazing.
The very same day I moved to Virginia, there was news in the Washington Post about results of the 1990 census. Northeast Ohio lost the Congressional district I had just moved from, because of declining population... while Northern Virginia gained a new Congressional district right where I moved to. I felt like one molecule in a huge wave of humanity. Once we flowed out, now we flow back. Like the tides.
Now, is it just a coincidence that the state capital of Wyoming is at about the same latitude as the original Wyoming Valley? Maybe it isn't a coincidence that the state of Wyoming got that name from back East. It looks like Connecticut's Drang nach Westen extended a hint of itself all the way out to 111° W longitude. I started looking into this topic because I felt such a connection within me to the land I come from. I wanted to know more about its background. I felt connected to a current of American history that was specific to the band between the 41st and 42nd parallels. Maybe there is something to that British occult concept of ley lines, and this one just happens to run due east and west.