Why is Michigan's Upper Peninsula part of Michigan?

If Maryland counts, so should Louisiana (straddles the Mississippi River) and Alaska (Bisected by the Alaska River).

Oh, and the Northwest Angle in Minnesota, too. Like Point Roberts, that one would require you to cross an international boundary to reach it without crossing the separating body of water.

Alaska is bisected by the Yukon River; I’d thought it changed names in Alaska.

Maybe the contest should be amended to exclude rivers?

Missouri has a weird thing near the bottom east doesn’t it?

Of course it was a win for Ohio. If MI had ‘won’ the dispute then I wouldn’t be a native born Ohioan.

The two I was thinking of are Virginia, with that but that hangs off Maryland at the mouth of the Bay, and Washington, with Point Roberts. Minnesota would also qualify, but I’m not sure about Kentucky. My criteria excluded rivers as dividers. Should’ve specified- sorry.

But you can leave Kentucky going south into Tennessee, go a bit west, the north back into Kentucky without crossing a river. How strict do you want to be?

If you look down the Mississippi River you’ll find various bits that have been split off from their mother states when the river shifted, but you can’t get to them without crossing the river – unless you want to detour way up to Minnesota and back – so those would definitely disqualify.

Unless the Corps of Engineers intervenes, that neck will eventually cut through leaving a snippet of land protruding into Missouri that is both Kentucky and Tennessee. That would be odd.

Why not? Kentucky’s is the only true exclave amongst these examples.

Having looked at the map, I would agree that KY would be a fourth example of an exclave.

I remember when I took a vacation to Escanaba and they have the movement to make the UP a state of its own called Superior. It’s not viable as a state but it’s something they all talk about

Hardly “all”. There’s always been a few goofs that think that the UP could be its own state, but the majority realize that there is zero economic base.

Like Wyoming? <ducking and running>

:smiley:

Wyoming might be an economic powerhouse by comparison. The population of the Michigan UP seems to be roughly 300,000 (3% of Michigan’s total 10 million), whereas Wyoming has over 500,000.

Okay, so maybe they’re about the same. Maybe Wyoming should become Upper Colorado.

Since when is a “viable economic base” a prerequisite for statehood?

Actually, I’m going to change my mind. The other examples of WA, VA, and MI were drawn that way. The river happened to move in KY’s case.

If that were the criteria, the entire state of Michigan should have had its statehood revoked about 20 years ago.

That’s debatable, too. The New Madrid quakes which created the physical feature happened in 1811/12. The detailed survey of the border which revealed the bisection of the loop came later, after the Jackson Purchase in 1818.

BTW, that’s analogous to the Point Roberts situation - they agreed to the 49th parallel to mid-channel without realizing that Point Roberts extended south of it, until they surveyed. From the wiki article on Point Roberts:

Which brings us back to the reason Ohio and Michigan almost had a “war” over Toledo. At the time that the boundary of the territories was set, an assumption was made about the actual relationship between the various marking landforms used to describe the border. That assumption was wrong, forcing the people in charge of things to interpret the meaning of the border language in light of the actual geographic relationships. Ohio won that interpretation contest. Lucky them… :smiley:

That sort of thing happened with lots of boundaries. The Northwest Angle came about because they were working from a grossly mistaken conception of the origin of the Mississippi River, and its positional relationship to the Lake of the Woods.