To me, the craziest one is Province Point, VT.
Really seems like that one should have been ceded to Canada just out of practicality. The entire Alburgh peninsula is interesting in that it is fully accessible by land from Canada but can only be accessed by bridge from the U.S. but, specifically, Province Point is just crazy.
The same situation holds out west with Point Roberts, WA.
I just visited Point Roberts a few weeks ago. Had a lovely visit to the boundary marker on the west end, where I hopped back and forth between countries.
I hope to get to Providence Point on day, along with Angle Inlet and Saint-Regis too!
Oh, yes, I had also read about Point Roberts and found it interesting but forgot about it when posting to this Thread. The difference is significant, I think. Point Roberts is nearly 5 square miles, home to over a thousand Americans, and looks like it could be strategically advantageous (I don’t know why, really- fishing rights? It just seems worth holding onto).
Province Point, on the other hand, is all of 2 acres. From the satellite image it seems like it is unpopulated and without any structure except a standing marker showing it to be a U.S. exclave. Doesn’t seem worth holding onto except to amuse me personally.
And that should be a good enough reason, as it amuses me too.
But Kentucky Bend is still my favorite anomaly in the US.
Whether it seems worth holding on to or not, they actually didn’t have to. When the survey was conducted, and the anomaly discovered, somebody on the Brit side essentially said “That’s absurd - let’s offer the Americans an equivalent area of land above the 49th parallel on the eastern side of the bay in exchange for Point Roberts”. The Americans didn’t go for it - presumably they’d have wound up with a chunk of land in the vicinity of the present day town of White Rock and the Peace Arch Provincial Park. A glance at the map suggests that something involving the Campbell River as a border would seem equitable.
And let’s not forget the Twelve Mile Circle. A circular border is comical enough, but it winds up giving Delaware a tiny little area delimited by a circular arc in Maryland. And because somebody decided that Delaware gets all of the Delaware River inside the circle, rather than just out to the thalweg in the middle of the river, endless wrangling between Delaware and New Jersey ensued. As well as creating another of those silly peninsula tips.
One note - a lot of sources will say the anomaly was “created” by the New Madrid earthquake. That seems to be a matter of interpretation. The large earthquakes in that are occurred in 1811-12, and may have created the extreme oxbow. But Kentucky and Tennessee were still wrangling about their border past the Tennessee River several years after that - the border hadn’t been surveyed that far west yet.
Yeah, I’m dubious too. But history was a bit sketchy back then, for that tiny parcel of land in the middle of nowhere.
It eventually gave Delaware the Wedge too, a bit outside of the circle, which had been claimed by Pennsylvania. The boundary wasn’t settled between the states until 1921.
No, the bend was already there at the time of the quake. As my cite, here’s what I think is one of the prettiest geologic maps ever made: radicalcartography
(The Kentucky Bend is on the second panel. The solid colored units are historically-mapped channels of the river, with Green being 1880, red being 1820 and blue being 1765.)
The meander loop would have been a little narrower at the time of the quake, but it’s already well established in 1765. The meander loop being there is actually a big part of what made the “river running backwards” effect. If the fault had just cut across the river in one spot, it would have created a single dam or cataract and water would have backed up just like filling a reservoir. With the fault cutting across the meander bend, though, it made multiple dams and cataracts, which caused the water backing up behind the lower one to overtop the upstream ones, creating the waterfall-going-the-wrong-way effect that so impressed witnesses.
More generally though, the state boundaries on the bend don’t seem especially mysterious. The KY/MO border is defined by the river with Kentucky on the left bank and Missouri on the right and the TN/KY border is just a line of latitude. The exclave is simply a consequence of those two facts.