Francis Whiting Halsey

“ They brought not only skill with the axe, but certain arts and refinements in domestic life before unknown to the frontier, and with those arts a spirit of enterprise and invention, with an initiatory energy which carried their own fortunes far and which, more perhaps than all other human forces, have made the central and western parts of New York State what they now are.
Owing to delays in concluding the Treaty of Peace, the tide of immigration from New England did not set in until the spring and summer of 1784. ”

“ Men Who Came from New England (1783-1800)
ON the old frontier, as on those lands westward from the Fort Stanwix line now first open to settlement, a new race was about to plant homes. They were of English ancestry, but had had a far older racial experience in the new world than the Palatines and Scotch-Irish. They came from New England and by them, in the years immediately following the war, was poured forth a tide of migration that completely dominated for long years afterward Central and Western New York. ”

“ But it was Connecticut that made the largest contribution to the settlement of the frontier. As Virginia was the mother of Presidents, so has Connecticut been a mother of States. From the Hudson River westward to the Pacific through the line of Northern States, there is hardly a town, says Trumbull, "in which persons may not be found whose ancestral roots dip back into Hartford County." In the New York Constitutional Convention of 1821, a majority of the 127 members were either born in Connecticut or were sons of fathers who were born there. ”