My wife graduated from Western Reserve University (now Case-Western Reserve) The first day of student orientation included explaining what a “Western Reserve” was.
Yea, if you’re on the Ohio River, you should never assume which state you’re in.
Some states came very close to war over border disputes.
Michigan got the last laughs, with getting the UP and all.
The Ohio, like the Potomac, had the original border set along the one bank, rather than through the deepest channel or center as in most river borders. In the case of the Ohio, it was the northern bank, rather than the southern one like the Potomac. The Chattahoochee River also had the original border between Alabama and Georgia set along one bank, the western one, in that case.
Looking at Google Maps, though, why did Ohio get so screwed? The border is almost always along the Ohio bank/shoreline.
Much as Senegal got screwed when the colonizers drew The Gambia’s entire border around the river.
You didn’t pay attention to the post directly above yours. I’ll repeat: the original border was drawn along the northern bank of the river. As for who did it, I think Charles II or whichever king was friendly with Lord Baltimore. He gave all the Potomac to Maryland and all the Ohio to Virginia as compensation. At least that’s my understanding of what happened.
That’s another interesting border drawing. The eastern part of that border was drawn ten miles away from the navigible part of the river. Why ten miles and why only the navigible part? Ten miles was the range of the best ship in the British Navy at the time. (I forget the name of the vessel off hand.) That also explains why only the navigible part of the river. The river actually goes further east, past the border, but it wasn’t navigible by that ship.
One wonders if they actually sent the ship upriver, firing off boundary markers from its guns. But I suspect they didn’t do that.
Cities tend to grow on rivers, often on both sides. If a river is a border, that splits the city between two political entities.
It was later than that. Virginia claimed land on both sides of the river until after the revolution. It eventually ceded the land north of the river, but not the river itself.
My point was where Maryland got the claim to the entire river, not how the dispute was settled. And I had the king wrong; it was Charles I who gave Maryland, including the river, to Lord Baltimore. This was in 1632. The dispute over the border was not a simple thing:
I’ve heard a similar story about the Montana-Idaho border. Supposedly, the border was originally supposed to follow the Continental Divide, and at first, it does. But a divide is a global feature, not a local one, so when one ridgeline splits into two, it’s not always easy to tell which is the right one. The story is that they thought they were following the divide, until a river crossed their path (which couldn’t happen with the real Divide), so that’s when they realized that they had gone astray at some unknown prior point, and rather than going back and figuring it out, they just went straight north from there.
True enough.
But rivers have been used as borders since forever. They are one of the few obvious lines in nature. yes, they shift over time. But it’s only in the last relatively short time, ~300 years, that the idea of rigid-forever borders became practically doable.
The Internet told me that Ontario shares a 1,682 mile (2,727 km) border with various US states. The article claims that the border runs entirely on water with the exception of less than a 1 mile (1 km) land border. If this is true - where is this tiny land border?
Google’s bullshit generator seems to think it’s true, and gave this response:
I found Height of Land Portage and Watap Portage on Google Maps, so this does appear to be accurate.
There are probably some other spots, though, where the border used to be a river, but the river has since changed its course enough to put the border on shore.
That’s a myth. The divide was following the Bitterroot Range and was established by act of Congress.
Rather than start a separate thread that might cover much of the same ground surveyed here, I’d like to know how many other places in the world have circular borders, like the Twelve-Mile Circle that forms the northern border of Delaware. That article points out that the borders of Plains, GA, and some other southern towns are full circles, but doesn’t discuss anything outside the U. S.
A short section of the border between Zimbabwe and Botswana is formed by a ten-mile circle centered on the town of Tuli, Zimbabwe. See here:
It’s already come up in this thread, but the border between Senegal and The Gambia has circular parts. As I said, the eastern part of that border is ten miles from the river. That makes for a wormlike profile with some circular sections where the river makes a turn. And then at the eastern end of navigation, there’s a semi-circle.
Just occured to me: The border between Massachusetts and New Hampshire is in part set as a displacement from a river. In this case it was 3 miles and I can’t remember the name of the river off-hand. But like the Senegal-Gambia case, there is probably some circular sections where the river makes a turn.