The territory of what is now Vermont…

1749 CE

The territory of what is now Vermont had been first permanently settled by European settlers when William Dummer, acting governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, ordered the construction of a fort roughly where Brattleboro is located.

Massachusetts laid claim to the territory west of the Merrimack River at the time, and it had settlers on the Connecticut River who were prepared to move further north.

The border between Massachusetts and the neighboring Province of New Hampshire had been fixed by royal decree in 1741 at a line three miles (four point eight kilometers) north of Pawtucket Falls, where the Merrimack River turns north.

This decision eliminated claims by Massachusetts to the north of that line.

The territory between the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain, however, was also claimed by the Province of New York, whose claims extend eastward to the Connecticut.

Also in 1741, New Hampshire native Benning Wentworth had been appointed the first governor of New Hampshire of the eighteenth century who was not also a governor of Massachusetts.

Wentworth has chosen to read New Hampshire's territorial claims broadly, construung the decree setting the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border to mean that New Hampshire's jurisdiction extends as far west as the jurisdiction of Massachusetts extended.

Since the Massachusetts boundary extends to a point twenty miles (thirty-two kilometers) east of the Hudson River, Wentworth assumes the area west of the Connecticut belongs to New Hampshire.

New York bases its claim on the letters Patent, which granted Prince James, Duke of York, brother of King Charles II, all of the lands west of the Connecticut River to Delaware Bay.

Wentworth makes the first land grant, Bennington, a township west of the Connecticut River, on January 3, 1749.

The grants are usually six miles (nine point six kilometers) square (the standard size of a U.S. survey township, although the Public Land Survey System is not used in Vermont) and cost the grantee(s) twenty pounds.

The grants are then subdivided among the proprietors, and six of the lots are set aside—one for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (a missionary organization of the Church of England), one for the Church of England, one for the first clergyman to settle in the township, one for a school, and two for Wentworth himself.

The permanent annual tax on each grant, called a quitrent, is one shilling, paid directly to the king or his representative.

Cautioned by New York to cease and desist, Wentworth promises to await the judgment of the king, and refrains from making more grants in the claimed territory until it is rendered.