As the area joins the nation in celebrating its 250th anniversary, it might be worth mentioning that if it weren’t for a decision made in New Jersey, many of us Pennsylvanians might be Connecticut Yankees.

That’s because some time between when King Charles II was doling out charters in the colonies and the revolution that helped those colonies separate from the motherland, he set up one of what became perhaps the young nation’s strangest territorial battles.

By charter, Connecticut once claimed a strip of land across northern Pennsylvania that extended straight through what is now Lansford, Summit Hill, Nesquehoning and coal-rich lands that would later fuel the Industrial Revolution.

Long before coal and the canals, and before the mines and Mollies, King Charles II granted Connecticut a wide-ranging, “sea-to-sea” charter that drew a line westward to the Pacific Ocean.

A few years later, when William Penn got his charter to “Penn’s Woods,” the boundaries overlapped.

Nobody – Charles, Penn, or the folks in Connecticut – knew what the territory’s interior looked like, and that turned into a real problem.

As Connecticut folks pushed south and west into the Susquehanna Basin, they moved into the Wyoming Valley, claiming their charter gave them the right to settle anywhere north of the 41st parallel.

That’s a line that pretty much cuts in half Hickory Run State Park, and sits square atop the Rockport access on the D&L Trail through the Lehigh Gorge.

But settlers weren’t surveyors, and their claims often crept into the Panther Valley.

Connecticut even tried to govern the area and attempted to establish a colony here in the 1770s, much to the dismay of future Keystone State residents.

It’s the stuff wars were made of.

And the armed conflicts between Pennsylvanians and Connecticut settlers weren’t minor scuffles. Sometimes they were sieges, burned homesteads, expulsions or arrests. Newspapers in London called it a kind of “internal war.”

While much of the fighting took place a little to the north in the Wyoming Valley, it spilled into the land that would eventually become Carbon County, including the Panther Valley corridor.

The fighting endured, and by the time the Revolutionary War broke out, the argument became so twisted that neither colony could resolve it by themselves.

United in the cause of the revolution, the Pennamite-Yankee Wars faded for a few years, but afterward, the members of the new confederation of colonies took up the battle again.

To settle the matter, a new Congress – via the Articles of Confederation – set up a special interstate court, the first of its kind in the new nation, and the world.

Court commissioners met in Trenton in 1782 hearing weeks of arguments over land issues that included charters, Indian deeds, maps and how a former king’s decree would hold up in the new republic.

When the dust settled, the Decree of Trenton they issued was unanimous.

Connecticut had no rights to the lands involved in the controversy and the entire disputed strip – including the Panther Valley – became purely Pennsylvanian.

It took Connecticut almost 20 years to fully abandon its claims to the area and by 1800 it surrendered all rights it once claimed in Pennsylvania.

When the book closed on that decision, its effects shaped everything that followed.

Without it, the anthracite boom may have been credited to Connecticut. Companies like Lehigh Coal and Navigation would’ve been registered in Hartford, not Harrisburg.

Our school systems, boroughs and county lines might look different.

Our cultural identity could’ve taken a different path. No Pennsylvania German influences. No patch towns. Different politics.

In those early days of our new nation, borders and institutions weren’t set in stone. They were argued over like neighbors fighting over a fence line and ultimately settled with a combination of conflict and compromise.

The decision handed down in December of 1782 in Trenton stands as a prime example of how the new nation chose to resolve conflict in court instead of with ammunition.

It’s one that helped shape the future of Carbon County and its neighbors – and certainly one that’s worth celebrating during this milestone year.

Think about it.

Had things gone the other way, instead of Coal Crackers, they’d be calling us Nutmeggers.

ED SOCHA | tneditor@tnonline.com