Category: Borders
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The Swap
An obscure page on the U.S. Census Bureau website, Substantial Changes to Counties and County Equivalent Entities: 1970-Present may not hold much interest to the general public. Even so it’s a site that I’ve bookmarked and visit once in awhile. It’s an ongoing catalog of boundary changes that involve at least 200 people or areas…
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Gaithersburg Doughnut Hole
I’ve noted my appreciation for reader comments, suggestions and input on many occasions. The quality of what people contribute is nothing short of miraculous. Sometimes an example lodges in my brain to the exclusion of all the rest. That’s what happened with the Gaithersburg Doughnut Hole and I don’t know why. It’s not any more…
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Kenai Adventure, Part 2
Whittier is a scenic town of perhaps two hundred people on the western side of Alaska’s Prince William Sound. There are dozens of picturesque villages dotting the coastline of the Kenai Peninsula so that’s not why I stopped here on a cold, rainy morning in July. No, I wanted to experience its rich concentration of…
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World’s Largest Exclave
Are you familiar with the concept of a googlenope? It’s a phrase that returns no results when entered into Google. Imagine the difficulty of that achievement for just a moment. The phrase doesn’t exist anywhere on the Internet for all intents and purposes. How often does that ever happen anymore? Ironically a googlenope disappears upon…
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A Geo-Oddity Holiday Celebration
I faced a dilemma on the 4th of July holiday this year. I’d celebrated in style last year with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view the spectacular Washington, DC show from a rooftop balcony. How could I top that for Independence Day 2010? Well, the answer is I couldn’t. The only way I could improve upon…
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Odd Irish Border Road
New reader Ian, an Irish expat living in California, has an interest in border anomalies. He pointed out an instance in his native Ireland: the most direct road corridor between two points crosses an international border multiple times in the space of just a few miles. I am aware of a similar condition in the…
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Half-Breed Tract
My hobbies sometimes run together. That happened again as I searched an 1896 land ownership map for Wabasha County, Minnesota. There I hoped to find the footprints of a peripheral ancestor. I knew the Nineteenth Century property ownership existed, in fact I’d visited the site in person. However, I’d never seen this particular vintage map…
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Great White North(ish)
I came across another wonderful map as I reviewed the Dead Tree Media over the weekend. The City of Toronto bought a full-page advertisement hoping to entice tourists from the northeast United States to cross the border into Canada for a weekend or a few days. They presented several lighthearted graphics designed to attract the…
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100th Meridian Initiative
The meridian line 100° west of Greenwich, England, often called simply the 100th Meridian, divides roughly the eastern side of North America from the west. This happens both geographically and culturally. So it cuts directly through the Great Plains in the United States. It goes down the middle of North and South Dakota, through Nebraska,…
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Arapahoe Exclaves in Denver
I’ve kept my eye on a certain set of geo-oddities for a long time. Arapahoe County possessed multiple exclaves fully enclosed within the boundaries of Denver City/County, Colorado. Denver had to find a way to grow as people moved into the area. So they found an easy solution. They simply annexed land from their neighboring…