Virginia
The original chungus. The Old Dominion. The first and greatest. And easily the most complex border history of any state.
Obviously a lot to go through here, and only limited time because the first change is only three years away, so let’s focus on that, the one most people don’t know about: Virginia really wanted Pittsburgh. They claimed it as part of their West Augusta District, the borders of which have been difficult to pin down. The best I can tell, based on the map from Wikipedia and page 412 of this article, it ran up Laurel Ridge to the Kiskiminetas, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers.
This part of the map contains the western border of Pennsylvania, and I am putting in my to-do list to find out when that western border was established. I had assumed the line required the Mason-Dixon Line to be completed, but at this point it wasn’t, and yet 5° west of the Delaware appears to be the accepted border. Definitely something I’ll be coming back to as I review these after this first run.
This also seems like a good time to address the northern frontier of what is now Minnesota. The border here runs through many lakes, and of course the problem is, they marked “Long Lake” as the border in the treaty, and no one agrees on what Long Lake is. Many maps have been drawn of this region, and a few attempts at describing it, but I wanted to do better than just write “various rivers and portages”. I wanted to show my work. Thanks to “Minnesota’s Boundary with Canada” by William E. Lass (page 52), I came up with this treatment of it. It’s not perfect — I had to make some guesses, and the area between Dog Lake and the Savanne River is mostly just winging it. But it’s so much better than every other map that just draws a line and doesn’t bother explaining, right?
Also, it’s stupidly hard to find a good shapefile of the Lake of the Woods. It’s in both countries, and it’s a major lake, yet the American lake shapefiles available don’t include the Canadian side, and the Canadian lake shapefiles that I found don’t include it at all! I eventually found one maintained for hydrological research that includes some parts of the Canadian side.
Next time: You think Big Virginia looks weird? Wait til you see Big New York.
