And a lot of the colonial-era boundaries were badly surveyed, with mutterings that local settlers bribed or confused the surveyors with moonshine. Some boundaries are set by landmarks which may be ephemeral - the circle in the Delaware/Pennsylvania border, centred on a spire in the town of New Castle the Texas/Arkansas border running due south from a point 100 paces west of the southwest corner of the Fort Smith garrison building the section of the Maryland/Virginia border which was supposed to align with Watkins Point, which had however been eroded into oblivion by the time the surveyors got there. I had not really taken in that the block shapes of Colorado and Wyoming reflected a general aspiration to create states covering seven degrees of longitude and four of latitude (three for the four states immediately to the east). I learned a number of things from it, including the importance of the 1790 Nootka convention and why Hawaii has more interesting borders than one might have thought. NwhyteA popular history of the building blocks of US political geography (NB the author is not the wingnut Mark Steyn).
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