King’s College Tract

I came across a tiny, minor footnote as I researched Yankee Doodle Dunce, an account of allegedly independent nations that joined the United States. This story involved Vermont specifically.

The situation occurred within the confusing, overlapping New York royal decrees and New Hampshire Grants. The turmoil of the American Revolutionary War further compounded the situation. And within all this stood the King’s College Tract.


The Setup

First, let’s start in the present-day Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City at Columbia University (map).

Columbia University. Photo by Harald; (CC BY 2.0)

Columbia is an Ivy League institution and one of only nine “colonial colleges” in the United States. That’s a select group tracing their foundation to a date before the American Revolution. Columbia came in sixth on that prestigious list and the first one in New York. It traced all the way back to a royal charter issued by King George II in 1754.

Why does any of that matter? Because Columbia’s original named was King’s College. The tract now located in Vermont had been set aside for its expansion.


Evolution of the Tract

I could not find the exact boundaries of the King’s College Tract. However, many sources mentioned that it covered about 20,000 acres in the vicinity of the current towns of Cambridge and Johnson, Vermont. That would place it east of Lake Champlain and north of a stretch of Interstate 89 from Burlington to Montpelier. It was reserved at the instigation of New York’s then-Lieutenant Governor, Cadwallader Colden (who should get a special award simply for his name). He granted this tract to the trustees of King’s College for an educational institution in 1764.

Colden was a powerful politician who strongly supported a college in New York. He was also part of a group that felt New York City was too unsavory and corrupt for this honor. Instead he favored a rural college far away from urban temptations. But of course he fell on the wrong side of that debate.

However, Colden didn’t give up after his loss. He sold numerous patents to individual New Yorkers under his authority within the disputed area and threw-in land for King’s College to boot. This would bolster New York’s claims while creating an avenue for pushing King’s College out of the city.

Today Columbia has a global presence with centers in Amman, Beijing, Mumbai, Paris, Istanbul, Nairobi, Santiago, and Rio de Janeiro. But it does not maintain a campus in a rural corner of northern Vermont.

So obviously something happened.


The Revolution and the Vermont Republic

Flag of the Vermont Republic. Mysid at en.wikipedia, revised version first uploaded by Lexicon., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Cadwallader Colden found himself on the wrong side of the equation, again. New York’s authority and governance dissipated with the establishment of the Vermont Republic in 1777. Colden probably wasn’t too concerned about it though. He died in 1776.

King’s College, meanwhile, hit difficult times. Loyalists controlled the college upon the outbreak of the revolution, and it suspended operations for several years. People in the new nation were still sensitive to things named after English royalty after the war.

So King’s College had to change its name. It became Columbia College, and later Columbia University. Don’t cry too much for the Loyalists that ran King’s College, though. One member of the college’s board of governors, Charles Inglis, relocated to Nova Scotia and founded a new King’s College in 1789. Today it’s called the University of King’s College with a campus in Halifax (map).


The Final Word

Vermont found a handful friends in the Continental Congress who represented its interests even if it wasn’t officially one of the 13 Original Colonies. William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, later a signatory of the U.S. Constitution became a particularly reliable supporter. So the Vermont Republic gave him the former King’s College Grant as a gift in 1785. The Town of Johnson, located within the original grant, bears his name as does Johnson State College (since renamed Northern Vermont University – Johnson).

Here’s another interesting turn of events: Johnson’s father, Samuel Johnson was the first president of King’s College in NYC. Also, Samuel himself became president of Columbia College in 1787. Thus, the King’s College Tract retained an odd connection to what later became Columbia University via the Johnson name long after the physical tie had been severed.

Comments

6 responses to “King’s College Tract”

  1. wangi Avatar

    You can make it out on the map on page 526 of The Documentary History of the State of New-York, Vol 1.

    http://archive.org/details/documentaryhist01ocal

    1. Jim Hood Avatar
      Jim Hood

      On my monitor I can see “KING’S COLLEGE” and it looks like it says something above, possibly “Property of” ? Can you read it?

  2. Peter Avatar

    Columbia’s campus has been in the present location on Morningside Heights only since around 1900. It originally was on Park Place in lower Manhattan, and then on Madison Avenue in Midtown.

  3. Joshua Avatar
    Joshua

    The elementary school in Flushing, Queens, P.S.214 that I attended is subnamed the Cadwallader Colden School.

  4. Jim Hood Avatar
    Jim Hood

    The King’s College tract is today loosely defined with parts owned by many parties. Because of a good bit of the tract is mountainous much of the land is forested and those portions probably look must as they did when the tract was defined. I attended Johnson State College (now Northern Vermont University) in the late 1970s and the term King’s College tract then was used to describe an area of land between Cambridge and Johnson, Vermont. It was used for hikes, cross country skiing, and a portion of the land was an active sugar bush _ used for the collection of the sap used to make maple syrup.

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