How the States Got Their Shapes

Have you ever looked at a map of the United States and wondered how in the world some of the borders were drawn? Why Oklahoma has a panhandle? Why Michigan has an upper peninsula that appears to belong to Wisconsin? Why the Western states are very similar in size, but California is much larger? All of the answers are in Mark Stein's informative if dry volume, How the States Got Their Shapes.

I've always loved poring over maps, especially atlases and the like. It's a bit of a wonder how I never became a cartographer (or maybe it isn't, I'm not very precise). This book is a godsend for those of who wonder why a little bit of Kentucky seems to be separated from the rest of the state, or why the southern peninsula of Maryland suddenly breaks into Virginia. It turns out that there are good reasons for all of these anomalies, usually having to do with treaties, natural boundaries, or simple human greed.

Some of the boundaries are basic, such as the 49th parallel, which is the long northern border with Canada, that was determined by a treaty with England, or the border that defined the Louisiana purchase. Some of the boundaries, such as the one that runs all the way across the country, from the northern border of Texas to the Atlantic Ocean, was determined by slavery. The reason Texas does not extend to the border of Kansas, and gives Oklahoma its panhandle, is because any state north of that latitude could not be a slave state. To keep it's slaves, Texas gave up that land (although it is true that Texas can break into five states if it wants to).

The original colonies were established by charter from the English king, and extended all the way west to the Pacific. Of course these states gave up their land to make more states--Virginia to make Kentucky, Georgia to make Alabama and Mississippi, and so on, but Connecticut actually had claims in the state of Ohio which it was reluctant to give up. Even to this day, Connecticut's "Western Reserve" has its name in a college there.

After the U.S. became independent, they sought to make the states roughly equal. One will note that from Kansas up to North Dakota, each state is roughly three degrees in heights and seven degrees in width (that is why there are two Dakota states, and not just one), and from Colorado up to Montana, each state is roughly four degrees in height. So why is California so big? Stein explains: "California violated the policy of equality among states because it could. The United States needed California more than California needed the United States." In order to keep California, and its gold, from becoming an independent nation, the U.S. let it come in as a big state.

Some quirks are due to giving states equal opportunity. The reason Pennsylvania has that bit in the northwest that borders Lake Erie is to give it equal access to the Great Lakes, the same reason that Minnesota extends to Lake Superior. Sometimes the solutions were hard come by--Michigan and Ohio actually went to war over a strip of land that contained Toledo (it was called The Toledo War). Michigan lost that, but as a consolation they received the entire region that is today known as the Upper Peninsula, which gave them shoreline on four of the five great lakes.

Some disputes lasted years, and are even still disputed today. A sliver of land between Tennessee and Georgia is still argued about. Sometimes land is just taken from a state--when West Virginia broke off from Virginia (mainly because the residents had very few slaves--the land was too rocky for plantation farming) two extra counties, that form the eastern panhandle of the state, were ripped from Virginia as well. After the Civil War was over, Virginia wanted them back, but lost in court.

This is fun reading, but often pretty stiff. Stein arranges chapters on a state by state basis, and some states aren't that interesting. It might have been better to arrange them geographically, so one doesn't have to search one's memory to remember what was said in an earlier chapter.

Also, the writing is very perfunctory. Occasionally Stein moralizes on some inequitable incidents. For instance, of the reason Utah had a bite taken it out of it by Wyoming: "Utah is the only state that Congress created with boundary adjustments that made it less equal than others. This blemish in our state borders preserves the fact that blemishes on our nation's ideals are indeed part of our history." I can think of much worse blemishes on our ideals than the fact that Utah lost land to Wyoming.