Altered States

Let’s just keep driving north, you think, until we reach the northernmost point of the continental United States.

You head north, all the way up to Minnesota. You pass through Minneapolis, and you start getting excited, because you know it’s only a three and a half hour drive to the Canadian border. You arrive at the border checkpoints.

But you keep going.

The Northwest Angle (just called “The Angle” by locals) is further up there, so you drive through Canada for about two hours. Or, you have a boat handy, and you take that across the Lake of the Woods. Or maybe the water’s frozen, and you take a shortcut across an ice road.

This is an example of a state whose geography has been altered over time, so that the state’s map now looks almost fanciful, like there are multiple people tugging at the borders of the state all at once.

The Northwest Angle's really seems like it should be a part of Canada, right?

We can thank poor mapmaking for this, at least in part. Immediately following the American Revolution, the Treaty of Paris (1783) sought to settle the border between the US and Canada. Unfortunately, the map that the British and Americans were using had some pretty big errors.

Namely, the Mitchell Map depicted the source of the Mississippi River as much further north than it actually is, and it guessed at the shape of the Lake of the Woods. Here’s the actual wording from the Treaty of Paris:

...from the northwest angle of Nova Scotia, viz. that angle which is formed by a line drawn due north from the source of Saint Croix River to the Highlands; ...thence through the middle of said Long Lake, and the water communication between it and the Lake of the Woods, to the said northwesternmost point thereof, and from thence on a due west course to the river Mississippi...

Since neither the source of the Mississippi nor Lake of the Woods' true shape were accurately known, this created an impossible boundary. A straight line going due west from the Lake of the Woods would never hit the Mississippi River.

Despite the geographic oddity, the terms of the Treaty of Paris were upheld. This created the situation where The Angle became part of the US, and you need to travel through Canada to reach it.

Minnesota isn’t the only state to have gone through some unexpected alterations. Living here in Virginia, Maryland is my neighbor to the north, and I’m not sure any states have a more strange natural border.

You can see this very clearly in this wonderful public domain survey map, carefully laying out the borders of Maryland back in 1794:

In Maryland’s case, it’s not so much the borders with the other states that are interesting, although each of those tells its own story. The Potomac River takes care of the entire southern border with Virginia and West Virginia, and the panhandle extends far to the west, telling of competing claims and compromises.

But the thing we’re interested in is the Eastern Shore. Thanks to the way the Atlantic Ocean and the Chesapeake Bay weave their way into the land mass, there’s a large chunk of land that is separated from he rest of the state by water.

I know from experience that Maryland’s Eastern Shore can be duplicitous. You can be very close to a destination “as the crow flies”, but still have to travel very, very far to get there.

First, there aren’t very many bridges that cross the great water chasm. It’s just expensive and difficult to build them, so you end up having to go very far south first in order to go north for an equal amount of time, just to get somewhere a little east or west of where you were.

Adding insult to injury are the hundreds of little waterways and tributaries, creating a need for lots of alternative routes and less efficient roadways.

Alaska and Hawaii are probably the most obvious choices for states with unusual borders, but those are also more familiar to most folks. What are some other examples of states or nations whose borders have undergone some interesting transformations? What borders have ended up just plain weird?