[QUOTE=user_hostile]
Is New York county, in New York state, the smallest county in the country? Is San Bernardino county, in California, the biggest county in the US? Or does Alaska have larger counties?
[/QUOTE]
The smallest county in the US is Kalawao County in Hawaii (13 sq. miles). New York county is 22 sq. miles. The largest “county” is the North Slope Borough in Alaska (94763 sq. miles). San Bernadino county is 20,062 sq. miles.
Zev Steinhardt
There’s a similar situation in Yellowstone. Lake Isa (really more of a marshy pond) drains via a small trickle each way. I don’t think there’s any permanent waterway which feeds into Isa, though, so North Two Ocean Creek’s title as the only such creek might still be technically accurate.
5 Florida counties touch at one point in the middle of Lake Okeechobee. I believe this is the only place in the US where more than 4 counties meet at one point.
[QUOTE=user_hostile]
Is New York county, in New York state, the smallest county in the country? Is San Bernardino county, in California, the biggest county in the US? Or does Alaska have larger counties?
[/QUOTE]
San Bernardino County is the largest county in the contiguous 48 states. Back in the 1980s, there was an initiative about splitting up the county into two counties, San Bernardino (the Inland Empire area), and Mohave County (The High Desert and mountain areas). I wouldn’t mind seeing this initiative come back and succeed.
[QUOTE=Qadgop the Mercotan]
5 Florida counties touch at one point in the middle of Lake Okeechobee. I believe this is the only place in the US where more than 4 counties meet at one point.
[/QUOTE]
I can’t find a map with good enough resolution to tell for sure, but it looks like Delta, Franklin, Red River, Hopkins and Lamar Counties all meet at the same spot in Texas. On some maps, though, it looks like Delta and Red River don’t meet at all, and a very short straight line border exists Delta and Franklin, and thus removes the point and leaves Hopkins out of the mix.
[QUOTE=aktep]
I can’t find a map with good enough resolution to tell for sure, but it looks like Delta, Franklin, Red River, Hopkins and Lamar Counties all meet at the same spot in Texas. On some maps, though, it looks like Delta and Red River don’t meet at all, and a very short straight line border exists Delta and Franklin, and thus removes the point and leaves Hopkins out of the mix.
[/QUOTE]
Sorry, no.
A little polyp of Delta county keeps Hopkins from touching Lamar and Red River Counties: http://www.topozone.com/map.asp?lat=33.37787&lon=-95.3075&datum=nad27&u=4&layer=DRG25&size=l&s=25
Ah, there’s a nice detailed map. The best one I could find was from the Texas Highway department, and it made it look like that polyp, if it wasn’t in Red River, was in Franklin.
So they don’t all meet at one point, but they do pass within less than 1000 feet of eachother.
[QUOTE=Giles]
Perhaps it’s an Ohio thing. Can it happen / Does in happen in other states?
[/QUOTE]
At least one city in Michigan does this. Grosse Pointe Shores is a very affluent suburb of Detroit that’s mostly in Wayne county, but sticks up into Macomb county a bit.
[QUOTE=Chronos]
There’s a similar situation in Yellowstone. Lake Isa (really more of a marshy pond) drains via a small trickle each way.
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Yes - it sits astride the Continental Divide. Another interesting quirk here is that the water leaving this pond headed east ends up in the Pacific Ocean, and the water headed west ends up in the Atlantic.
[QUOTE=JustinC]
Can you get cabbages from them?
[/QUOTE]
I believe you can eat the young shoots and it tastes a bit like cabbage though I have never tried
At its narrowest point (Tysfjorden near Narvik) Norway is only 6 km, or around 4 miles, across - so it almost, but not quite, breaks into two bits at that point. (That 6km point consists of moutains and rocks, basically. You can hike there, but there’s no road or rail connection, and nobody lives there.)
The country is over 1700km long, and curves so severely that the usual ways of finding the “center” point would lead you to someplace in Sweden.
[QUOTE=An Arky]
A person standing on Memorial Bridge in Arlington is exactly as far from the Cumberland Gap, Virginia’s western extreme point, as they are from downtown Boston, Massachusetts – 394 miles. [Gomer] Gollllleeee![/Gomer]
[/QUOTE]
I do not agree…could you please cite?..If thats too gosh to ask…Just explain the math to me?
just askin’,
tsfr
Here’s one on a slightly more local scale. Here in Montreal we have something called “Montreal north.” Our streets are aligned to the Saint Lawrence River, which flows primarily west to east; however, at the Island of Montreal it flows northeast. We refer to directions according to the river and the street grid; accordingly, “north” is northwest in most of the island, varying depending on the layout of the local street grid. (It also helps that the island is elongated, so “north/south” means across the island widthwise, and “east/west” means across the island lengthwise.)
The oddity occurs in some parts of the island, like Pointe-aux-Trembles, where the street grid has gone so far off of true that the east-west streets actually run due north and south, or pretty damn close to it.
Similarly, Montmorency station, the “northernmost” station of the metro network, is actually by far the westernmost station in the network, despite being on the eastern branch of the orange line. Similarly, Honoré-Beaugrand, the “easternmost,” is substantially north of Montmorency; Longueuil, the only station on the South Shore, is just east of Honoré-Beaugrand; and Angrignon, the “westernmost” station, is much farther south than Angrignon.
Someone once called Montreal “the only city in the world where the sun sets in the north.”
Finally, here’s a bar question for Montreal. Between 2002 and 2006, when all the municipalities on the island were fused into Montreal, did Montreal have any land borders with other municipalities?
Answer: yes, one. The southern tip of Île Notre-Dame, near the Victoria Bridge, is joined to the rampart that separates the St. Lawrence Seaway from the river. At that point, Montreal (which governs the island) has a land border with Longueuil (which governs the rampart).
[QUOTE=OldGuy]
There is an integral part of France located in the Western Hemisphere
[/QUOTE]
There are a couple of them, actually, including a substantial part of Mainland South America, and a couple of vacation spots in the Antilles.
Here’s a bar fact for you Europeans: the French Republic and the Kingdom of the Netherlands border each other.
Just wanted to add something similar in Barcelona: since the city is oriented diagonally like Montreal, I’ve seen maps that instead of showing north, east, west, and south, describe the directions as Mar Mediterránia, Tibidabo (mountain bounding the city to the northwest), Besós, and Llobregat (rivers to the northeast and southwest).
[QUOTE=Polycarp]
A New York town … – a local government for a geographic unit smaller than a county, together comprising all the non-city land within the state, and much like a Midwest township.
[/QUOTE]
This is the point I was trying to make. A midwestern township (effectively) has no government of its own. Compared to cities, villages, and counties, a township has almost no (or very limited) traditional governmental authority, whether law enforcement, legislature, taxing authority, services, etc. This does vary from place to place, but very generally speaking, this makes a midwestern township very different from a New York/New England town.
[QUOTE=ThisSpaceForRent]
I do not agree…could you please cite?..If thats too gosh to ask…Just explain the math to me?
just askin’,
tsfr
[/QUOTE]
I got it from the Wikipedia entry for Arlington Co…
The “math” isn’t explained there, though it does not say downtown Boston and Cumberland Gap are equidistant by road, so I presume it’s as the crow flies.
I did a quick and dirty query at this site (Indo.com’s How Far Is It?)…it didn’t have Cumberland Gap, VA, so I used Cumberland Gap, TN. They’re adjacent. Plus, I’m sure measuring from Arlington uses the Court House as the starting point; maybe a couple of miles from the foot of the Memorial Bridge…dunno what’s meant by downtown Boston, either, exactly…
…anyway, it shows Arlington to Cumberland Gap as 392 miles and to Boston as 399 miles. Given the somewhat loose criteria, I think there’s likely an acceptable amount of truthiness to the original statement.
[QUOTE=matt_mcl]
(Re: France in the western hemisphere)
There are a couple of them, actually, including a substantial part of Mainland South America, and a couple of vacation spots in the Antilles.
[/QUOTE]
Er, actually, at least a quarter of mainland France is in the western hemisphere!
Croatia is an even more extreme case, though - It does actually narrow down to nothing so that the southern part is totally detached from the rest of the country.
Google Map link, and in close-up. The town of Neum is part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and gives that country a sea frontage.
[QUOTE=spoke-]
Not quite, but Cairo is closer to Birmingham, Alabama than it is to Chicago. That’s a bit unexpected.
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In more ways than one 
Baltimore, Maryland is not in any county.