Moral geography: The Plan of Union mission to the Western Reserve, 1787-1833

This dissertation chronicles the Connecticut Missionary Society's Plan of Union mission to the Western Reserve in northeastern Ohio. The study opens with the 1787 Land Ordinance and closes with the establishment of Oberlin College in 1833. Throughout the dissertation I refer to missionary letters, surveyors maps and town plans, travel narratives, architecture, geographies, and missionary publications to trace the Connecticut Missionary Society's desire to recreate an idealized Puritan New England on the frontier. In each chapter I consider the missionary society's efforts to create paradigmatic New England towns by simultaneously shaping the physical and moral landscape. I argue that frontier settlers and missionaries of competing denominations resisted and responded to the moral and spatial control in ways that are apparent not only in their written correspondences, but in their sustained presence in the region, and their shaping of the natural and built landscapes. In each chapter I include statements or actions by frontier settlers who objected to the Connecticut Missionary Society's plans for the region. At the center of this investigation is the relationship between religion and space. Two themes run through this study that link moral discourse to the physical landscape. One theme is the connection between spatial and moral control of the frontier through the creation of models, or "maps" of piety and behavior. A second theme is the home missionaries' dual aim to create moral communities and to shape the physical landscape.