Western Reserve was a strip of land bordering Lake Erie in what is today Ohio. The strip extended westward about 120 miles (193 kilometers) from the northwestern border of Pennsylvania and covered 3,667,000 acres (1,483,982 hectares). It was part of a larger piece of land granted to the colony of Connecticut by King Charles II of England in 1662. This area stretched westward from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. In 1786, Connecticut gave the new United States government all of this land except the Western Reserve.
In 1795, the Connecticut Land Company bought most of the Western Reserve for $1,200,000. In 1800, Connecticut and the U.S. government agreed to attach the land to the Ohio territory. The city of Cleveland was built on part of the Western Reserve.
