I always wondered who put the saw in Arkan-saw.
I see your Port of Tulsa, and raise you the (historical) Port of Fort Benton.
Recognizing that I’m responding to a person who hasn’t posted in 13 years . . .
But yes, this is true. At the time of independence seven of the thirteen American colonies had boundary claims that extended to the Mississippi River. (They had originally extended to the Pacific, but Britain and the colonies had recognized Spain as sovereign beyond the Mississippi in 1763.) Maryland was one of the six colonies without such a claim, and refused to ratify the Articles of Confederation for more than three years as a result. The issue wasn’t the House of Representatives, which didn’t yet exist; it was that the claimant colonies would sell land which properly belonged to the nation as a whole. Maryland achieved only partial satisfaction (Virginia, New York, and Connecticut agreed in principle to renounce their claims) before giving up and ratifying in March 1781.
Pennsylvania, however, was not involved. The dispute between Pennsylvania and Virginia was local, extending only as far as the Ohio River, and did not raise the same issues as the more sweeping claims extending out to the Mississippi.
Here in New England, we refer to the combined states of Vermont and New Hampshire as “Sixtynineistan”.
Okay, I made that up.
Your guess is correct. For some reason, the NJ/DE boundary is not the river channel, but the Jersey shoreline. I do not know why. But when some landfill was dumped there, the land created was part of DE. It is, IIRC, a half square mile of mud and no one actually lives there.
One that was not mentioned was the MD panhandle, a long stretch that is about 3 miles wide. I assume that resulted from the Mason-Dixon survey.
Another one not mentioned was the PA chimney onto Lake Erie. I believe that PA actually bought that land from NY in order to have an outlet on the lake. Can anyone explain the Lake of the Woods jutting up into Canada about the 49th parallel. Then there is Pt. Robert, part of WA state that cannot be reached by land without going through Canada. Clearly just 3 sq. miles of land cut off by the 49th parallel, but Vancouver Island goes well south of the 49th and is still Canadian. By the way, the southernmost place in Canada is Pt. Pelee (pronounced peely) whose tip goes just below the 42nd parallel, so is the same latitude as a bit of CA.
You may want to read up on New Jersey v Delaware (1934). tl;dr version. When James, Duke of York gave Delaware as a gift to William Penn, it included the whole river within the 12 mile circle. After that it’s half and half.
Fun facts from the frozen north… The long “straight” boundary between Saskatchewan and Manitoba is actually stepped. As I understand, to accommodate the fact that they laid out square township lines for farms in the southern end, starting with Manitoba, but as the curve of the earth reduces the distance between longitudes, they wanted to keep an entire square inside one province - then carried on the same concept to the top of the province.
Any islands in Hudson Bay and James Bay are part of Northwest Territories (and now, of Nunavut) so there is in fact a part of Nunavut further south than Edmonton.
St. Pierre and Miquelon are islands south of Newfoundland that is still part of France. They lost Quebec but kept these important ( /s ) islands, making France one of the countries in North America.
Newfoundland itself is a Johnny-come-lately to Canada, and for a long time the boundary between Labrador and Quebec was a point of contention (and fairly irrelevant). Even though the British government drew the official line decades ago, Quebec still often tries to pretend they got it wrong.
The iles-de-la-Madeleine are in the middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence but still part of Quebec, despite being closer to 4 other provinces.
I think the point about settings like Maryland around the bay is - in the early days, water was the easiest transport route. People would settle around a bay, or in a river valley where heavier loads could go by barge. Lakes and bays were particularly convenient - it may be hard to row, but it was a lot easier and less work to sail. Contrast that to slogging through untracked wilderness or even over roads generally made of mud. Even smaller hills were more of an impediment to travel than a nice quick sail. A river like the Mississippi became a boundary instead because (except for Louisiana) it was an international boundary first.
Indeed, a fun fact can be seen by looking at satellite views of southern Quebec along the major rivers. The farm fields are long narrow strips because in the 1600’s when they were first handing out farmland, the rivers were the only transport; so farms were long narrow strips each with river frontage. Roads came later. By the 1800’s in Ontario and the late 1800’s on Canada’s prairies, there wasn’t much water transport inland, so they laid out mile squares for farmland (IIRC, 1.25 miles around Toronto) and built the necessary roads.
The Maryland-Virginia boundary is the mean low tide mark of the Potomac on the Virginia side. I remember back in the eighties, when Maryland had a lottery but Virginia did not, a pier in Colonial Beach, VA cleaned up by having a Maryland lottery seller at the end of a pier. Then Virginia got a lottery and business got better than ever.
Another factor in where and how the land was given out in early Quebec is that the only productive farmland was within a few miles of the major rivers. The rest of Quebec has thin unproductive soils because the soil was removed by the glaciers in the various Ice Ages. But large rivers flood from time to time which leaves mud in the areas near the rivers and that builds up the soil. Not saying the river transport wasn’t important. Of course it was, but the pattern of land allocation may not have been quite so extreme if there had been good land elsewhere in the province.
AFAICT, that mile square land allocation system was copied almost exactly from the US PLSS (Public Land Survey System). But also it should be noted that the only part of Canada that wasn’t glaciated in the Ice Age was in the prairies. But not all the Prairie Provinces. The areas that were glaciated currently have lots of lakes (about three quarters of Manitoba, for example) which means only the lakeless prairie areas have good soil.
(Missed the edit window.) Change that “three quarters” to 90%.
You should really check some facts, mate. I know your observations are made out of love for geography (I’m sharing it), but this could be easily seen as offensive. Surely you were not expecting Croatia conquering a piece of Bosnia (or the other way around) so the countries could be more neatly square-shaped?
Both countries had different sizes and shapes in history.
Case in point, Croatia. link
Bosnia had both longer coastline, and no coastline at all. link
To grossly oversimplify things, that wedge poking at Croatia is the result of the Ottoman Empire conquests. The border is not “unnatural and artificially conceived”, at least no more than any other human-made border: the northern border with Bosnia is a river, and so is the upper part of the western border, the lower part is a mountain chain. As for the narrow strip on the southern coastline (and that awkward Croatian exclave/Bosnian coastline), that goes back to the Republic of Ragusa/Dubrovnik. link For what is worth, border checks in the area are really relaxed despite one country being in EU and the other one not, and Bosnians are the most common guest on Croatian coast in summer.
And nobody (save for small groups of extreme-right idiots) is questioning those borders as they are.
So in a nutshell, those borders are perhaps unusual, awkward even. But it’s not that some politicians put them out of their asses a few years ago.
For the USA, google “How the states got their shapes” I’ve read the book and there was a mini-series on some cable network.
The book someone referred to up thread is “How the States Got Their Shapes” by Mark Stein. It has a lot of history on the shapes of the US states and covers a lot of what has been discussed in this thread, but not everything (e.g., New Mexico’s bump).