What's with that little bit of Kentucky?

Looking closely at a map, it seems that there is a little piece of Kentucky that is entirely separated from the rest of Kentucky by territory belonging to Missouri and Tennessee. How and why did that happen?

I don’t know, but the same thing is true of Carter Lake, IA. The Missouri River once made a tight loop to the west at the north edge of Omaha, NE and Carter Lake was in that loop. The river then cut through the base of that loop and Carter Lake is now physically a part of Omaha, NE even though legally it is still in Iowa.

We’ve been over this a couple times before:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=52229
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=40009

The “Kentucky Bend” or “New Madrid” bend:

From http://www.wkmu.org/kentuckylife/800s/kylife804.html

Minnesota is another strange one. If you look at the MN/Canadian border you’ll see a fairly large lake. Across the bay (on the “Canadian side”) you’ll see a small peninsula belonging to Minnesota. I believe this peninsula is the northern-most point of the continental US.

Of the contiguous United States. Alaska is part of the continental US.

This anomaly arose for similar reasons: the boundary was defined before the area had been adequately explored.

That’s the “Northwest Angle”, also covered in previous threads. The original US/Canadian border was negotiated working from a faulty map which placed Lake of the Woods much further south than it was, and IIRC, believed it to be the source of the Mississippi (the north end of the lake was the original border). Resultant renegotiation settled the border on the 49th parrallel, but the US was allowed to keep the angle because they had already established a settlement at angle inlet.

Is the “Northwest Angle” disconnected from the rest of the USA the way the New Madrid bend is separated from the rest of Tennessee? From what I see on MapQuest, the Northwest Angle is part of Ontario.

The Northwest Angle is disconnected by land, however, by water it is contigous - the border extends out through Lake of the Woods.

Might as well hijack this thread some more to ask this one:

If you look closely, you will see that Colorado is not quite rectangular. There is an angle to the Utah border for a few miles in the southern part of Montrose county just below route 46, creating a very slight indent in Colorado’s outline. I haven’t been able to dig up how that happened. A pure WAG would be that it represents another surveyor’s correction, of course. Anybody know?

Just piping in to backup your WAG with some distant memories (IOW, I read this a long time ago but can’t find any cites. :frowning: ). It was a surveyor’s mistake but they decided to keep the boundaries as they were originally surveyed instead of correcting them. IIRC, the discrepancy (about a mile wide where the north and south lines meet I think) wasn’t really discovered until years later with more accurate equipment. I’m guessing the Rockies aren’t the easiest landscape to survey.

There’s a wee slice of Kentucky that’s on the Indiana side of the Ohio river. Near Evansville, IN, there’s a place where the Ohio river made a new meander. Before Indiana allowed horse race gambling, there was a track called Ellis Park in a piece of ground that was once on the Kentucky side. The boundary exists according to where the river was when the boundary was drawn.

Yep, you’re right. :smack: