The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission. Find all our stories from this project on the Cardinal 250 page. You can sign up for our monthly newsletter:
In June 1775, John Connolly, a representative of Virginia’s governor, was arrested at gunpoint by Pennsylvania authorities who raided his room in Pittsburgh after midnight. In return, Connolly’s supporters seized three Pennsylvania officials, loaded the hostages onto a leaky boat and sent them down the Ohio River.
“Eventually cooler heads prevailed, and the prisoners were exchanged,” said Turk McCleskey, a professor emeritus at Virginia Military Institute. But why the tit-for-tat arrests — and what was Connolly even doing in Pittsburgh?
See our previous story on Connolly.
The answers to those questions reveal a surprising history about Colonial geography: When the United States of America was founded 250 years ago, Virginia claimed land far beyond its present borders — as far north as the Great Lakes and west to the Mississippi River.
Virginia said its domain included what is now Michigan, Wisconsin and five other states as well as swaths of Pennsylvania and Minnesota — an area bigger than current-day California and Texas combined. If those boundaries were in effect today, Virginia would encompass Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, East St. Louis and part of Minneapolis and share a border with Canada.
Not surprisingly, other jurisdictions — like Pennsylvania — contested Virginia’s claims.
During the American Revolution, under pressure to form a nation and help pay for the war, Virginia agreed to relinquish its rights to Pittsburgh and the Northwest Territory — the land northwest of the Ohio River, east of the Mississippi and south of the Great Lakes.
Later, Kentucky separated from Virginia to achieve statehood in 1792, and four dozen counties broke away to side with the Union and become the state of West Virginia during the Civil War.
As a result, Virginia went from about 469,000 square miles to less than 43,000 square miles. Here is the back story to how Virginia extended, and then gave up, its claims to more than one-third of the land east of the Mississippi River. It’s a story that features a somewhat bumbling George Washington in his 20s, lead plates buried along the Mississippi by the French and resentments that fueled the Revolutionary War.
At first, Virginia spanned ‘from Sea to Sea’
In 1606, King James I granted the Virginia Company of London a charter to colonize North America between 34 degrees latitude (approximately Cape Fear, North Carolina) and 41 degrees latitude (the current New York City).
Three years later, he reissued the charter to say that the Colony’s borders stretched “from Sea to Sea” — from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. (In 1612, the charter was revised to include even the Bermuda Islands, but that ended three years later.)
Never mind that only a fraction of North America had been explored; that France, Spain and Holland also were planting their flags in the New World; that the British monarchy would grant overlapping swaths of Virginia’s territory to other Colonies; and that indigenous peoples already had settled on the land and considered it theirs.
Back then, the continent’s size was “dimly understood, and the distance ‘from sea to sea’ was imagined to be a matter of just a few hundred miles at most,” according to Michael Doran, author of the Atlas of County Boundary Changes in Virginia, 1634-1895.
Virginia started as a private Colony — a business hoping to turn a profit by selling land (successfully) and finding gold and silver (which didn’t pan out). In 1624, it became a royal Colony, giving the king of England direct control.
The king then decreed Virginia’s southern border as 36 degrees latitude (approximately today’s North Carolina line) and created the Colony of Maryland north of the Potomac River.
But Virginia asserted that its western and northwestern borders still reflected the 1609 charter — from Ohio Country (south of Lake Erie) to the Mississippi and beyond.
England wasn’t the only nation with its sights set there. France began colonizing America in the 1500s, eventually establishing settlements that would become Quebec and Montreal in Canada; Detroit and Green Bay, Wisconsin, south of the Great Lakes; and St. Louis and New Orleans along the Mississippi River.
Virginia took notice, and offense. In 1613, for example, Colonists sailed from Jamestown to destroy a French settlement on Mount Desert Island, now part of Acadia National Park in Maine.
A rivalry, and war, with France
In 1682, France claimed the Mississippi’s entire drainage basin — challenging Virginia’s insistence that it spanned the continent. Given the vast geography, there were no immediate conflicts between the French and the British. But by the middle of the 18th century, frictions arose.
In 1748, a group of wealthy Virginians, including Washington’s family, created the Ohio Company. It planned to sell land for settlement and farming in the Ohio River valley, beginning with 500,000 acres promised by the British crown in present-day Pennsylvania, Maryland and West Virginia.
France responded by digging in. The following year, it sent the explorer Pierre-Joseph Céloron de Blainville, with 230 soldiers and Indian guides, down the Allegheny and Ohio rivers. Along the way, they buried six lead plaques claiming the territory for the king of France.
Then, in 1753-54, the French built four forts in the Ohio River valley: Fort Presque Isle, on the shores of Lake Erie; forts Machault and LeBoeuf, on waterways leading south; and Fort Duquesne, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers converge to form the Ohio River – now Pittsburgh.
“It’s one thing to put a plate in the ground to mark a claim,” said Michael Plumb, vice president for education and engagement at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, which owns the only Céloron plate still intact. “When you start to build forts, that becomes a whole different ball game.”
Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Robert Dinwiddie, wrote a letter declaring that the French were trespassing on British territory and had to leave. On Oct. 30, 1753, Dinwiddie dispatched Washington, then a 21-year-old major in the Virginia militia, to deliver the letter to Fort LeBoeuf.
Washington was a newbie: He had no diplomatic experience or prior military service and didn’t speak French or any Indian languages. But what he lacked in skills, the redheaded Washington made up for in enthusiasm. At the time, he was eager for a commission in the British Army.
On Dec. 12, 1753, Washington gave Fort LeBoeuf’s commander, Jacques Le Gardeur, Dinwiddie’s ultimatum to vacate Ohio Country. Le Gardeur’s answer was polite but firm: no.
As Washington set out on his return, the weather turned brutal. Washington wrote in his journal that “it rain’d or snow’d incessantly” and he fell into an ice-clogged river. “This young ambitious kid who doesn’t have much to lose almost loses his life,” said Charlie Grymes, who taught geography at George Mason University and created a website that details the evolution of Virginia’s boundaries.
It took Washington a month to reach the Colony’s capital, Williamsburg, to deliver Le Gardeur’s disappointing reply to Dinwiddie.
Dinwiddie didn’t back down. He sent workers to build Fort Prince George at the “Forks of the Ohio” 380 miles from Williamsburg and told Washington to raise an army of 200 men to defend the installation.
Recruitment was tough — many Colonists opposed fighting a war in a distant wilderness — and progress was slow. It took Washington’s force of 159 men, hauling cannons and wagons, 15 days to bushwack just 20 miles through the Allegheny Mountains.
While Washington’s regiment was marching toward Fort Prince George, the French captured the site and started converting it to Fort Duquesne.
Washington made camp at Great Meadows about 50 miles south of the fort. The French sent a contingent of 35 soldiers, led by Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville, on a supposedly diplomatic mission: to meet with Washington and tell him to leave Ohio Country.
Tanacharison, who was chief of the Mingo tribe (an Iroquois branch) and had accompanied Washington on the expedition to Fort LeBoeuf, warned the Virginians that Jumonville’s party was nearby. Washington’s men and Tanacharison’s warriors surrounded the French encampment and, before dawn on May 28, 1754, attacked.
The French surrendered after about 15 minutes of fighting left Jumonville and several of his men wounded. Jumonville tried to explain that he had come in peace to deliver his eviction notice (Washington was skeptical and suspected the French of spying). What happened next is a matter of dispute.
According to Washington and the British, Tanacharison, who wanted to drive the French out of Ohio Country, approached Jumonville, saying in French, “Thou art not yet dead, my father.” The chief suddenly raised his tomahawk and split the officer’s skull. Tanacharison’s men then proceeded to kill and scalp the other wounded French soldiers.
But according to a Mingo warrior and a Frenchman who escaped, it was Washington’s men who slaughtered Jumonville and his troops as Tanacharison tried to stop the bloodbath.
What’s not in dispute is that at least 10 French soldiers were killed — and the “Jumonville affair” was the opening battle of the French and Indian War.
After the battle, Washington returned to Great Meadows and erected a circular wooden rampart called Fort Necessity. On July 3, 1754, a force of 600 soldiers led by Jumonville’s half brother, Louis Coulon de Villiers, captured the fort and forced Washington to surrender.
Washington signed a capitulation statement scribbled in French on rain-soaked paper — and inadvertently confessed that he had Jumonville and his men assassinated. (Washington insisted that his English translation said he was admitting only to Jumonville’s “death” or “loss.”)
While the French scored a propaganda victory, they ultimately lost what became known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War. In the process, Washington got his revenge: Under the British banner, on Nov. 24, 1758, he led an advance group that helped capture Fort Duquesne as the retreating French burned it to the ground. The British then built Fort Pitt there.
In the Treaty of Paris of 1763, France forfeited its claims in North America. England got Canada and the land east of the Mississippi River — including Ohio Country and the Northwest Territory claimed by Virginia. (Alas, Virginia had to relinquish its claims west of the Mississippi; that half of the continent went to Spain, England’s ally.)
Lord Dunmore pushes into Kentucky and Pittsburgh
While Virginians rejoiced that the war had ended, they groused about an action taken the same year by the British government. In 1763, King George III issued a proclamation that barred Colonists from settling west of the Appalachian Mountains and reserved those lands for Indian tribes.
Virginians largely ignored the Proclamation Line. In the fall of 1773, frontiersman Daniel Boone led about 50 settlers up the Powell River into the Kentucky region claimed by Virginia. They were attacked by Indians — Boone’s son was killed — and the expedition was aborted.
The following spring, surveyor George Rogers Clark and other Virginians assembled at the mouth of the Little Kanawha River in what is now West Virginia. They planned to go downriver and settle in Kentucky but got spooked by reports of ambushes by Native Americans. Abandoning their expedition, the settlers launched assaults against indigenous people — including murdering a pregnant woman and a Mingo leader’s brother.
The cycle of violence prompted Virginia’s royal governor, John Murray, an earl known as Lord Dunmore, to declare war against the Indians in May 1774. The war involved a half-dozen battles along the Ohio River over the next five months, with at least 75 settlers and 40 Native Americans killed, and a peace treaty eventually was signed at Fort Pitt.
The fort was the focus of simultaneous conflict initiated by Dunmore — against another Colony.
In early 1774, Dunmore proclaimed that the Pittsburgh region was part of Virginia and designated the area as the District of West Augusta — an extension of Augusta County. A Virginia militia occupied Fort Pitt, renaming it Fort Dunmore.
The governor appointed John Connolly, the militia’s commander, to create a court and other governmental offices for Virginia to administer taxes, elections and legal matters around Pittsburgh. Virginia authorities even installed a ducking stool to punish people deemed disruptive, usually outspoken women, by dunking them in the Ohio River.
But Pennsylvania maintained that it had jurisdiction over Pittsburgh. The territory had been included in Westmoreland County, which Pennsylvania created the previous year, said McCleskey, who taught history at VMI for nearly three decades before retiring in 2023.
Virginia and Pennsylvania had been feuding over this area since William Penn received his royal charter in 1681. Under the charter, the western boundaries of Penn’s Colony were unclear. Virginia consistently published maps putting the Ohio River and the Pittsburgh area under its domain.
When Dunmore asserted authority over the overlapping territory, as a historical account noted, “there were, west of the Alleghanies, not only two different sets of magistrates, with their subordinate officers, constables, assessors, and organized companies of militia, over the same people in the Monongahela valley, but within a few miles of each other had been established two different courts regularly (or irregularly) administering justice under the laws of two different governments.”
That was the backdrop when Pennsylvania officials arrested Connolly in June 1775 — and it wasn’t the first time. They had briefly jailed him the previous year after he arrived in Pittsburgh, declared the area part of Virginia and called on residents to join his militia.
Resentments, revolution and resolution of border issues
Besides the Proclamation Line, another move by the British government irked Virginians: In 1774, Parliament passed the Quebec Act, negating all Colonial claims north of the Ohio River and putting that area under Quebec’s administration.
Those policies, along with grievances over more familiar issues such as “taxation without representation,” prompted Virginia and other Colonies to declare their independence, triggering the American Revolution.
Five days before the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, Virginia adopted a state constitution reclaiming most of the land it had lost under the Quebec Act.
In that document, which cited the 1609 royal charter and the 1763 Treaty of Paris, Virginia reiterated that it extended west to the Mississippi River and north to the Great Lakes and incorporated the District of West Augusta.
On Oct. 7, 1776, the Virginia General Assembly demonstrated that it was serious about its dominion over the Pittsburgh area. The legislature carved the District of West Augusta into three counties: Yohogania, Monongalia and Ohio.
That’s how things stood as the Colonies went to war against Britain.
Having a common enemy prompted Pittsburgh’s dueling governments to cooperate. For example, Pennsylvania and Virginia officials created a joint “committee of safety,” said McCleskey, who is writing a book about the territorial dispute.
The Continental Congress said the rift between Virginia and Pennsylvania undermined the war effort and urged the newly declared states to resolve it.
Over five days in August 1779, officials from Virginia and Pennsylvania met on neutral ground in Baltimore, not far from the Mason-Dixon Line, which had been drawn in the 1760s as the boundary between the Penn family’s colony and Maryland. At the time, the line’s western terminus was a stream called Dunkard Creek.
As the boundary between their states, the Virginia and Pennsylvania negotiators agreed to extend the Mason-Dixon Line west by about 30 miles and then draw a line due north to Lake Erie. Under that map, Pennsylvania got most of the disputed territory, including Pittsburgh and its environs (almost all of Yohogania County and parts of Ohio and Monongalia counties).
“The Pennsylvanians were very quick to sign the document because it really favored them,” said Cassandra Farrell, the senior map archivist at the Library of Virginia.
Pennsylvania agreed to respect the property rights, including chattel slavery, of Virginians who were shifted into Pennsylvania by the new border. Still, many Virginia settlers were furious and, in a letter to the commonwealth’s government, vowed “not to pay allegiance to any other state.”
The controversy faded as surveyors finished marking the westward extension of the Mason-Dixon Line in 1784 and the northward line formally establishing the Pennsylvania-Virginia boundary two years later.
Around that time, the fledgling nation also was grappling with a bigger land dispute: what to do about the Northwest Territory.
During the war, Virginia buttressed its claim to that region by sending George Rogers Clark, then a lieutenant colonel in the state militia, on a secret mission to conquer the Northwest Territory, said Eric Monday, a member of the American Revolution 250 Commission, or VA250, the state agency tasked with commemorating the semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
“This was not gentlemanly European-style warfare. This was pretty brutal frontier warfare,” especially in its vicious treatment of Native Americans, said Monday, whose middle name, Helms, can be traced to an ancestor, Leonard Helm, one of Clark’s captains.
“Militarily, it’s an amazing story — that essentially 300 Virginians conquered a land mass that’s almost 25% of the continental United States and did it in essentially less than a year,” Monday said.
Clark’s troops captured British forts on the Mississippi and Wabash rivers in 1778-79. The Virginia General Assembly then organized the entire area — more than 360,000 square miles — as Illinois County.
Besides Virginia, other states — New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts — also claimed parts of the Northwest Territory.
Those claims became an obstacle when the Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation — the country’s first constitution — in 1777 and sent the document to the states for ratification.
Maryland officials feared that a supersized Virginia would dominate the country. After all, Virginia was the most populous state, giving it the biggest congressional delegation, until 1820, Grymes said. “So the other states are not going to be happy over the idea that Virginia would have kept the western lands and would have claimed the members of the House of Representatives from those western lands.”
As a result, Maryland refused to ratify the Articles of Confederation until Virginia ceded the Northwest Territory to the national government.
Virginia did so on Jan. 2, 1781, clearing the way for Maryland to complete the ratification of the Articles of Confederation on March 1 of that year.
However, in the law ceding the Northwest Territory, Virginia included provisions unacceptable to Congress (including one that would have voided all land purchases from Indians in the area — a strike at two land companies with which Virginia was feuding). The General Assembly subsequently dropped those provisions and, on Dec. 20, 1783, passed the Virginia Act of Cession.
Congress accepted Virginia’s revised offer of the Northwest Territory on March 1, 1784. That marked the end of Virginia’s Illinois County and its 175-year-old claim to land as far north as the Great Lakes and west to the Mississippi River.
In 1787, Congress partitioned the territory into what became five states (Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin), with a section folded into Minnesota. That is why, besides being known as the “Mother of Presidents,” Virginia acquired the nickname as the “Mother of States.”
Following suggestions from Thomas Jefferson, the Northwest Ordinance created a democratic framework that guaranteed freedom of religion, public education and other rights. The ordinance also banned slavery in the region, Monday noted.
“It’s encouraging, given Virginia’s unfortunate history with slavery, that those territories came into the United States ultimately as free states instead of slave states,” he said. Although Jefferson, Washington and other prominent Virginians were slaveholders, Monday said, “they were not as militant about the concept of slavery” as the state’s leaders in the run-up to the Civil War.
The national government used proceeds from land sales in the Northwest Territory to pay off debts from the Revolutionary War. Those debts totaled more than $75 million — equivalent to $2.6 billion today.
Grymes said the Virginians “deserve a little credit” for putting the nation’s interests above their own. “They gave up their claim to the western lands in order to establish a stronger national government.”
But the General Assembly’s decision to relinquish the Northwest Territory wasn’t entirely altruistic, said Monday, the state chancellor of the Virginia Sons of the American Revolution. Virginia realized it would be hard-pressed to administer lands so far away. That was also the case when pioneers in Virginia’s District of Kentucky petitioned for statehood.
In 1789, the General Assembly allowed the district, which had been subdivided into nine counties, to separate from the rest of Virginia. Three years later, Congress admitted Kentucky as the 15th state — the first west of the Appalachian Mountains.
Also in 1789, Virginia gave the federal government 31 square miles on the Potomac River, with Maryland contributing twice as much, for the District of Columbia — the nation’s capital. Fifty-eight years later, the federal government returned Virginia’s donation (now Arlington County and the city of Alexandria) because Virginians wanted to protect their participation in the slave trade.
The final chapter in the evolution of Virginia’s boundaries involved slavery, too.
When Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861 to maintain slavery, many residents in the western part of the commonwealth disagreed. The following year, 48 counties broke away to form the state of West Virginia. In 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Congress admitted West Virginia to the Union. After the war, Congress added two more counties (Berkeley and Jefferson) to West Virginia.
Thus, Virginia was reduced to its current size of 42,774 square miles. But it’s fascinating to ponder what the commonwealth would have been like, besides possibly having a greater affinity for hockey and bourbon, if it had kept its Revolutionary War geography — and one could drive to the shores of Lake Michigan or the Kentucky Bend along the Mississippi River without leaving Virginia.
That thought experiment comes to mind when touring the VA250 Mobile Museum, where the exhibits include a map of Virginia’s land claims from the 1770s.
Breck O’Donnell, a staff member for the interactive “museum on wheels,” said most visitors are “very surprised” to see that 250 years ago, Virginia asserted that it was bounded by the Great Lakes on the north and the Mississippi on the west — an area with a current population of about 70 million people.
If it had retained its expansive borders, Virginia would have been the gateway to Canada and to the western United States, Sarah Poggi pointed out while walking through the VA250’s tractor-trailer museum when it stopped at the Madison County Fair in July. Poggi is a physician in Maryland and owns a farmhouse in Madison County.
Earl Ryder, a handyman in Gordonsville in neighboring Orange County, said that as a mega state, Virginia would have had outsize influence on national policies. “It would have been as much a powerhouse as Texas is,” he said on a visit to the county fair.
Instead, Virginia flexed its influence in a different way — by spawning more than a half-dozen states and producing political and military leaders in the fight for American independence. Plumb said the nation’s history was “in many ways shaped by Virginians.”
“Virginia’s story really is America’s story in a major, major way,” he said.