Equivalent Lands

The Equivalent Lands were several large tracts of land that the Province of Massachusetts Bay made available to settlers from the Connecticut Colony after April, 1716. This was done as compensation for an "equivalent" area of Connecticut-claimed territory which had been inadvertently settled by citizens of Massachusetts. The problem had arisen due to errors and imprecise surveys made earlier in the seventeenth century. The Equivalent Lands were never mapped.

The area from which the Equivalent Lands were created belonged to the Abenaki people prior to colonial settlement.

The border between Massachusetts and Connecticut was first surveyed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1642, following Springfield, Massachusetts' 1641 alliance with Boston. (Springfield left the fledgling Connecticut Colony during the late 1630s, following several disagreements with settlers from Hartford, Connecticut.) For the next seventy-two years, the Massachusetts Bay Colony controlled lands as far south as Warehouse Point at Windsor Locks —the northernmost point on the Connecticut River controlled by the tides. In the 1690s, Connecticut Colony officials performed their own survey, discovering errors that were made in Massachusetts's 1642 survey.

Finally, the boundaries between Massachusetts and Connecticut were cooperatively surveyed (beginning in 1713). At that time, it was found that of the large seventeenth century land grants that had been made available to Springfielders by the Massachusetts Bay Company, 107,793 acres (436.22 km²) actually belonged to the Province of Connecticut. The affected settlers had established themselves in and about the towns of Springfield, Westfield, Suffield, and other areas west of the Connecticut River, believing themselves to be in lands belonging to the Massachusetts Bay Company. Because a change of jurisdiction was unappealing to an overwhelming number of those already inhabiting the area, it was popularly agreed that Massachusetts would retain administration over the settled lands, and in return, a grant of property ownership should be made to Connecticut of an equal number of acres, "as an equivalent to the said colony."

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