Connecticut has a toe, down on its southwestern corner.
And it’s not a natural one.
(That second image is from Wikipedia, by the way, and so’s the third.)
The story behind the toe is a long one, with appearances by both the Dutch (who owned New Amsterdam) and the Pacific Ocean (because the colony of Connecticut’s original charter said it had all the land to the “South Sea,” which was the Pacific). My best understanding of what happened is that European governments were just claiming things and letting the details work themselves out later, and that because inland travel was so difficult by land, it both didn’t initially matter and everyone lived on the coast anyway.
You can get a pretty good summary of all the boundary disputes leading to Connecticut’s shape from this next map, and from Wikipedia articles here and here, but the part we want to talk about is the toe itself, and the story there is more or less that people in Greenwich and Stamford already thought of themselves as Connecticuters (yep, that’s the demonym) when the time came to talk borders. Must have just gotten a little too far west while still sending taxes back to Hartford or wherever. So, in 1683, New York took Rye and Connecticut took Greenwich and Stamford, and New York was told it’d get an equal area of land to the size of the toe in return for the joint error. When that equal area of land—the “oblong”—was eventually drawn out in the 1731 survey, it obtained a kink because the town of Ridgefield also thought it was Connecticut? That was a persistent problem, I guess, people thinking they were Connecticuters. That, or the line would’ve had to go straight through it.
So, that’s how the toe came to be. But I want to talk about something else here:
People are calling that area a panhandle??
Wrong.
Incorrect.
Despicable.
A panhandle is something you could hold a pan with. Oklahoma has a panhandle. Idaho has a panhandle. Texas’s panhandle is really wide, but use a couple hands and you can hold it. Connecticut’s…if Connecticut is a pan and you try to hold it by that handle, you’re burning yourself and you’re also dropping a state full of 3.6 million people. It’s not a panhandle. It’s a toe. Connecticut has a toe.
Thank you.
