Everybody look around and remember what you are doing right now. For I hereby admit that I was totally, completely, dumbassedly wrong on this one. Tell your grandkids you were here.
Me too. Anyone know?
(I love these kinds of threads.)
That part of Kentucky on the right bank of the Mississippi, and the other odd little bits of states on the “wrong” bank, are due to the river having changed its course after the boundaries were set. The largest such piece is the Kentucky part near New Madrid.
In 1811-1812 the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded in the United States struck, with the epicenter at New Madrid. That made the Mississippi run backward for a while. Not surprisingly, the river wound up in some new channels afterwards. The old state border where the river used to be wasn’t changed.
The geophysics department at Saint Louis University has been monitoring seismic activity along the New Madrid Fault very carefully.
If you look at old maps, the northern border of Maryland used to stretch further to the north. When the colony of Pennsylania was chartered, conventional wisdom held that most of it was useless wasteland, so Maryland was gracious enough to let its border be lowered and also gave Governor Penn a slab of land on Delaware Bay, so that the new colony would not be landlocked.
Over time, the city of Philadelphia grew into one of the largest seaports on the Atlantic Seaboard, which made Maryland wonder why it had surrendered its northeastern corner in the first place. Maryland started to make noises that Philadelphia was actually in Maryland and that the borders ought to be redrawn. After all, Pennsylvania was not actually landlocked, since the Delaware River proved to be easily navigable (as did the Susquehanna River.) Pennsylvania was very averse to surrendering Philadelphia and its southern lands, so a dispute kicked up. Pennsylvania felt the land it had acquired from Maryland was Pennsylvanian for keeps. Somehow the compromise was struck that Pennsylvania’s southeastern panhandle should be taken away, but not given to Maryland. It was thus established that this disputed territory should be a colony of its own, and that’s how Delaware came into existance. (Why its northern border is rounded the way it is, I have no idea, except maybe to include Wilmington, which was the largest city in Delaware at the time—and still is.)
Maryland continued to fuss about its northern border over time, insisting that it should include southern Pennsylvania and thus the cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. This feud was eventually settled when the cartographers Mason and Dixon drew a line that established most of the southern border of Pennsylvania (the Delaware/Pennsylvania border notwithstanding, of course.)
Does that part of Kentucky have a name? It seems like every other border-related curiosity does. Some Kentuckian at some point must have said to his friend “Say, what do we call that odd bit near New Madrid?”
Thanks Dave. Having my WAG vindicated, I’ll take a stab at the Delmarva question.
Montford said
This sort of reminds me of the old joke- What’s the easiest way to make a small fortune? Start with a large fortune.
Virginia owns the tip of the Delmarva Peninsula because it originally owned the whole peninsula and that sliver is all it has left. In 1606 King James granted Virginia a northern boundary which covered all of present Maryland, Delaware and parts of southern Pennsylvania. In 1632 Charles I granted Lord Baltimore all of Virginia north of the south bank of the Potomac, which area became the colony of Maryland. West of Cheasepeake Bay the boundary obviously just followed the course of the Potomac. For the boundary east of the Cheasepeake they extended a line due east from the southernmost part of the mouth of the river where it met the Bay. Virginia was left with only the part of Delmarva which was south of that line.
The fact that the line in Delmarva today is not perfectly straight, as well as the variations in the present boundary along the Potomac as pointed out by Edward the Head, show there have been some small adjustments over the years, but the basic outline was set by that 1632 grant. And for the subsequent adjustments among MD, DE and PA see Chance the Gardner’s post.
Being a former resident of Delaware, I dimly remembered enough about the circular northern border to track down an explanation on the web:
Why does Nevada look so weird? Was this disputed land between CA, AZ, and UT that became it’s own state instead? Is Louisiana shaped like an L in memory of King Louis, or is this another myth?
I have seen old maps that show Alabama’s and Mississippi’s parts of land along the gulf used to be Florida, but I don’t know if the maps were real. Why are Alabama and Mississippi mirror images?
Those parts of AL and MS were, at least in part, the Spanish territory of Florida. In the early 1800s, American squatters steadily moved in, staged a revolt, and declared themselves the Republic of West Florida. They then conveniently asked to be annexed by the United States.
If this sounds familiar, it is because it happened more than once. California and Texas pulled similar tricks, each time with the United States officially claiming no complicity. I believe it was tried again in British Columbia (54’ 40" Or Fight!), but the Brits were having none of that.
There’s definately part of Kentucky on the western side of the Mississippi that was on the eastern side at one time. This is ENE of New Madrid, MO.
But the little knob south of New Madrid (Toneys Towhead, I think) is part of Kentucky, delineated by an old (and current) channel of the Mississippi River and a straight line border that’s an extension of the KY/TN border east of the first Mississippi crossing into Tennessee.
If the Mississippi ever cut through south of Bessie, TN, then we’d have a really have a strange situation: a landlocked part of a state completely surrounded by other states. (OK, they have it now, but the river is still in the picture.)
Yeah, that’s the key. It’s on the wrong side of the river to be in MO, and the border line between TN and KY is roughly horizontal. The river bends so severely that it loops up over the latitude line then completely beneath it, so that a “tongue” of MO separates the peninsula across from New Madrid form the rest of Kentucky. However, the KY/TN border is extended across the peninsula.
[BTW, I’m not sure “peninsula” is the right word for this sort of thing when formed by a river - what do you call the bit of land inside an oxbow?]
It’s worth looking at a map to see this peculiarity:
That link contains a buttload of wierd syntax. Here it is listed out in case it doesn’t work:
[link was screwing up the scrolling, and it was broken anyway --Chronos]
[Edited by Chronos on 11-17-2000 at 09:08 PM]
Well, I just demonstrated that you can’t cut and paste mapquest search URL’s. Sorry about that.
I think peninsula is a proper term, even if it’s a river that defines the structure. If a piece of land is in the middle of a river, it’s called an island, even if islands are made by being the tops of oceanic volcanos as well.
I thought “towhead” was the term, coming from the name Toneys Towhead that I had found. But after looking it up, it doesn’t appear so.
Hmmm. Your link has the same problem mine did - I just got a map of the US. Take a close look at that link - there’s a bunch of encrypted gobbledy-goo in it, including a user id. Mapquest searche results appear to be dependent on session info, and apparently can’t be pasted or bookmarked. A pity - that’s a good map which illustrates the anomaly quite well.
Why does Alaska have that leg of land along British Columbia? Was it an agreement between Canada, the US and Russia?
Squatter’s rights. Russia established themselves at Sitka, which was initially the capital of the whole Russian territory:
http://www.inalaska.com/d/sitka/history.html
It was obviously in Russia’s interest to grab as much of the coast as they could, and essentially, noone was up there to stop them.
I think Alaska’s outline looks like a bird-splat anyway.
Interesting. Of all the places there could have been a capitol, it was Sitka.
I’d still like to know what that disconnected bit of Kentucky is called. Does anyone know?
AWB - a “towhead” is a low alluvial island in a river - essentially a sandbar.
Name of that bit of Kentucky:
According to the topo map obtained at mapquest, the northern end of it is called, logically enough, if a bit prosaically, “Kentucky Point”. Other features on it include “Watson Point”, “Kentucky Point Bar”, “Stonewall Lake”, and “Watson Lake”.