It started with merchants who had lost everything. During Pontiac's Rebellion of 1763-1766, native warriors had seized trade goods from British traders across the Ohio Valley. The traders, calling themselves the suffering traders, organized to recover their losses through land grants instead of cash. In the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the British pressured the Iroquois to cede land along the Ohio River as compensation. The biggest beneficiaries were Samuel Wharton and William Trent. They took this Indiana Grant to London in 1769, joined forces with the older Ohio Company, and emerged as the Grand Ohio Company - also called the Walpole Company, after one of its prominent investors. Their territory had ballooned to roughly 20 million acres.

The speculators first wanted to call their colony Pittsylvania, but they thought better of it and chose Vandalia, an act of pure royal flattery. Queen Charlotte was rumored to have Vandalic ancestry - the Vandals being the Germanic people who had once ruled North Africa and Spain, more famous to Britons as the barbarians who plundered Rome. The name was meant to honor the queen by tying her, however loosely, to a fierce ancient warrior people. The irony writes itself: a colony designed to displace native peoples named for invaders who displaced Romans. The colony was never approved by the British Crown, but Virginia and Pennsylvania families had already begun settling there, planting corn in soil that no government quite owned.

The American Revolutionary War killed Vandalia. With London's authority broken, the settlers reorganized and tried again. During the war, they petitioned the Continental Congress to admit them as a new province called Westsylvania, covering nearly the same ground as Vandalia. Both Virginia and Pennsylvania claimed the territory under their colonial charters and blocked the petition. After the war the Indiana Company tried to sue Virginia in equity, but the Supreme Court's ruling in Chisholm v. Georgia triggered the Eleventh Amendment, which forbade citizens of one state from suing another. The justices applied it retroactively and tossed the case. The colony that almost was had become a colony that legally could not be.

The federal government ultimately split the Vandalia land between Pennsylvania and Virginia along the Mason-Dixon line. Kentucky, settled mostly by Virginians, became a state in 1792. West Virginia broke from Virginia during the Civil War and was admitted as a state in 1863, finally realizing the political identity that Vandalia and Westsylvania had imagined a century earlier. Some West Virginians still call their state the closest descendant of that lost colony. The Kanawha Valley, where the proposed Vandalia capital might have stood, is now wrapped around Charleston, the West Virginia capital. The colony exists only in old maps and in the curious knowledge that the United States nearly had a 14th original colony - named, of all things, for the people who sacked Rome.