The area of what is today extreme…
1766 CE
By the late seventeenth century, Europeans may have entered the area as a result of the establishment of the Dutch patroonship owned by Kiliaen van Rensselaer, the Manor of Rensselaerswyck, which extended west and east out of Albany and the fur trading community of Beverwyck.
Rensselaerswyck had passed into English control in 1664.
The first European settlers may have entered the area in the 1730s.
Those settlers may have been Dutch or other Europeans who leased land within Rensselaerwyck.
On January 28, 1760, New Hampshire Governor Benning Wentworth had chartered the region as Pownal, which he had named after his fellow royal governor, Thomas Pownall of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
Thereafter, settlers, primarily of English descent, had begun to arrive from Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island.
In 1766, one hundred and eighty-five male heads of households in Pownal send a petition to George III, asking that their land claims be recognized and that the fees required to do so be waived.
Since Wentworth has granted to settlers land that the Province of New York also claims, legal and physical conflicts break out between "Yorkers" and settlers in the New Hampshire Grants (or "The Grants").
As a result, a number of Pownal residents join the Green Mountain Boys under Ethan Allen.