In 1786, after the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War, the State of Connecticut ceded to the new federal government of the United State those western lands which had been part of its original royal charter, retaining only a portion in present northeastern Ohio.

 

Called the Western Reserve, Connecticut withheld this land as an incentive to their men who signed up to fight the British during the war. The reserve, stretching a120 miles west from the Pennsylvania line, was bounded on the north by Lake Erie and on the south by the forty-first parallel.

 

In the spring of 1807, a group of men from Waterbury, Connecticut pooled their funds and formed the Waterbury Land Company in order to participate in a complicated lottery to purchase an entire township in the Western Reserve. On April 4, 1807, they drew, by lot, the future “Columbia Township” southwest of Cleveland.