Another consideration to West Virginia's borders at the start of the Civil War was to keep the railroads between DC and Pittsburgh and DC and Cincinnati in Union hands.
Newport News, VA is named after the English seaman Cpt. Christopher Newport who carried the Jamestown settlers to the New world. He took many trips back in fourth and it’s said when he returned to the new world (in that area of modern city of Newport News) he brought back supplies and settlers which would’ve been good news for the established settlers. Thus early known as Newport’s good news/Newport’s news
Here in the south lots of small cities have circular borders. Usually they start off as a perfect circle and then expand by annexation to have different shapes and “juts”. This is really common in rural Georgia and South Carolina, that’s probably where you’ll find most of these circular cities. (Usually cities like this are really small but incorporated municipalities nonetheless). In some cases cities like this which have grown significantly will still be identifiable as some of their circular borders will remain and the general shape of expansion can be seen.
West Virginia: It has access to a very important resource, coal. During the colonial era, many Pennsylvanians moved into the region, and yes during the American Revolution petitioned Congress to establish a new state, “Westsylvania.” Virginia residents of the area west of the Allegheny Mountains were not slave holders and had numerous differences with residents in the eastern part of the state. They considered the Ordinance of Secession to be illegal, and declared that Virginia officers who adhered to that ordinance had forfeited their offices. So they set up a rival government, and even sent 2 senators to Washington claiming to be the senators representing the Commonwealth of Virginia. West Virginia was admitted as a state DURING THE CIVIL WAR, in 1863, not afterwards as a reward as you claimed.
Because everywhere west of the Ohio and Missisippi Rivers was divided into square townships and properties in the Northwest Ordinance of 1785, and are still followed in the property lines and roads today.
I would argue most aren't (at least if you account for quantity of streets, regardless of length). Did you not see the streets of Boston in this video?
The peninsula that's shared by Delaware, Maryland & Virginia is generally referred to as the Delmarva Peninsula, and since I like to head down to Chingoteague Island about twice a year or so, I can tell you that it's got some really nice maritime scenery, not to mention the herd of wild ponies on Assateague Island (which is split between Virginia & Maryland). Another claim to fame Delaware has is that it's the first state to ratify the US Constitution, so it's the first state to be added to the union under the current constitution. Also related to West Virginia, the Maryland panhandle is really narrow near Williamsport Maryland, only about 10 miles (16 km) from Pennsylvania to West Virginia at that point. I once, as a challenge, rode my bicycle from my parents house in southern Pennsylvania through Maryland at that narrow point & into West Virginia & in about 3 hours. And as for Georgia, my mom was from there, and my Grandmother lived in Athens during her last years of her life.
There's an Odessa, Texas named after Odessa, Ukraine because the Ukrainian settlers who moved there compared the Texas grassland to the Ukrainians grassland.
If you ever want to look at something interesting, look at Native American sovereign lands and boundaries. We’re federally recognized as our own sovereign entities in most cases and thus technically have our own land and laws, yet still fall under federal government not state governments. There’s also all the issues regarding the five and take of the lands since the beginning like fee land, checker-boarding, fractioning, ect. A lot of Americans don’t understand the nuances of what these sovereign entities mean and have strong feelings towards them without knowledge about them.
I always appreciate interesting city borders. Take Detroit. It has random holes in it for different towns. Oklahoma city spans 3 counties and Kansas City spans 7. New York always baffled me because it’s one city, that contains 5 counties.
EPMTUNESツ yeah hamtramck and highland park were cities before Detroit expanded it boarders! I live right on the boarder between detroit and highland park and its always confusing trying to figure out which of the two cities I'm in
These type of things depend also the State: In Virginia, for example, cities are separate from counties and are located in gaps within counties. But many states in the Northeast like NJ do not let cities, or any municipalities cross county lines. And then you get the examples like those you mentioned where spanning multiple counties is allowed.
Try living in the DFW area when you're from Dallas, Georgia (because I am). It's a mess. There's a Carrollton, Athens, Rhome, Dallas, Waco, Abilene, and Temple within a hundred miles or so of the DFW metro and 30 miles of Dallas, GA... It's great.
Just this morning, I was headed to the airport in Portland, Oregon, and my Lyft driver asked what the weather was like back in Texas. I typed in "Dallas" and it defaulted to Dallas, Oregon. Never even heard of that one.
Sean Wilson Indeed there is. Not too far from where I lived either. And yeah, I was surprised by how many Dallases there are. I think it's somewhere around 10?
I went from never having offered a second thought about borders since the time we learned about Africa in elementary school, to binge watching this channel. You've developed a pretty impressive talent. I've gone almost 20 years since then thinking geography is a boring subject. It was just by chance that I stumbled upon a video of yours, because of auto-play while watching Vsauce. Good teachers makes anything interesting and you're one of them.
Woah! I love watching your videos on geography but never thought I would hear you point out my hometown of Rome Georgia. Rome is known for a lot of things and yes we are named after Rome Italy. We also have the world's largest college campus. Berry College. And yes in Georgia there is an Athens. But we have several other weird named cities to like Dublin. Santa Claus Georgia. But I'd love to hear more about Rome, Georgia from the point of view of someone like yourself. (Oh... u may want to check out state flags in the US! Georgia has changed our flag several times in recent years lol Cheers... from ROME!
Want some really interesting and funny place names? Take a look at Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Joe Batt's Arm, Come-by-Chance, Hole-in-the -Wall, Jerry's Nose and everyone's favorite... Dildo. Oh, there's many more too.... Thanks for this fun little video. I enjoyed it.
about delaware: I don’t wanna say ur wrong, by i don’t wanna say ur right, but i did learn in US history that delaware used to be part of pennsylvania, and then they split i think, idk, can’t remember, but i do know that delaware was part of pennsylvania as a peninsula
Texas has boatloads of major "cities" named in it. Paris, Edinburg, London, Athens, Florence, I knew someone who was from Paris (drove through it a couple of times) and Texas had one of our prominent science fiction writers living in Florence, at least for a while. I drove through there a lot when I was commuting to and from school in Killeen and home in Austin - the capital of the great "nation" of Texas - every week.
Delaware was settled but Sweden, Maryland and Virginia by England, and what was to be New Jersey by Netherlands. That's some of the why of Delaware and the odd division of the Delmarva Peninsula.
Yeah if you wanna rant about city names try New Hampshire and Maine...in NH we have Manchester, Greenland, Lebanon, Berlin, New Boston, Portsmouth, Derry, Londonderry and several others I can't think of, while Maine has China, Poland Spring, Belfast, Vienna, and among many others, my personal favorite: New Limerick. Keep in mind that New Limerick is not named after the city in Ireland, but rather a slightly larger town in Maine named Limerick, which is named after the Irish city. We're very creative up here in northern New England.
Just think if you live in that excluded hole in Raleigh, NC. You live right in the center of Raleigh, someone asks you "do you live in Raleigh," No. But you live in the center of Raleigh, around you is the Raleigh Police Station, the Raleigh Library, the Raleigh Newsstand, but you DO NOT live in Raleigh! Try explaining that one.
In Indiana we have Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Chili, Denver, Edinburgh, Nashville, Columbus, Santa Clause, French Lick, Warsaw, and Salem. Then "South Bend" is one our northerm most cities...
Not exactly a weird border, but the town of Broken Hill in Australia is in a different time zone to the rest of the mainland state it's in. Time zones in Australia summer time are just a mess to begin with. Also someone cocked up the South Australia/Victoria border and it runs slightly west of where it was intended.
Should someone tell him about how messed up city limits are in the Chicago suburbs? or Illinois cities in general? Have you seen Aurora's city limits? or Peoria's? Springfield's? It's absolute chaos.
There are a LOT of cities in the USA called Oxford or Cambridge. Usually because they had/wanted a university (e.g. some small town in Mississippi changed its name to Oxford when the state announced it was looking for somewhere to put the university).
Actually, even though nobody calls it "Rhode Island" anymore, the US Board on Geographic Names has repeatedly refused to officially change the name of the island to Aquidneck, so its official name is still technically "Rhode Island."
Maryland actually wasn't settled by the British right away. A few Catholic settlers who live in Virginia didn't like all the Anglicans so the moved up the bay and eventually they gained the charter for the colony from England.
I grew up in Raleigh, NC, I can cosign those weird city boundaries. There are even bits of Raleigh that occupy the next county over. Sometimes when you're driving around, especially in north Raleigh, you'll see seemingly random "Raleigh City Limits" signs in the middle of what logically seems like Raleigh. Some of enclaves inside Raleigh, like Millbrook and Leesville, were their own towns originally, and Raleigh kinda grew around them. I think its still kinda up for debate whether they are neighborhoods of Raleigh or their own townships. Also Wake Tech Community College is in a small Raleigh exclave in the middle of Garner. Raleigh has a funny history geographically, the only reason the capitol was moved there was because it was close to a bar that early state legislators liked to drink at.
Interesting and funny - I am a Brit, who married an American girl back in 2002, and settled in W.Va. I have watched a number of your videos about borders. I am also a history and geography buff, and have found this series most enjoyable! However, some positive criticism: you didn't mention when speaking about Missouri, that there a 2 cities named Kansas City, the more famous of which is in Mo., but there is also a Kansas City, KS. Secondly, you may know this already, but you have a tendency to say "Like," every 5th or 6th word, and in this video, said it over 200 times!
Well, there is also some Canadian cities that have some name from Europe... like the former name of Toronto, that was called York. There is also in Ontario cities like Paris, London, and the former name of Kitchener that was named Berlin. In Quebec, there is 2 cities called Nantes and Venise. In BC, you have a city that is called New Westminster. Guess that it's not just in the US :P
New York and New Jersey actually fought a fifty year war over their border when they were still colonies. One battle was fought on the Sabbath, so both sides agreed not to use weapons, though there were armed skirmishes. Prisoners were sometimes kept in county jails. The whole thing was settled about 1760 or so by a commission in Britain.
Awesome video! I watch your videos from beginning to end haha. If you have some time, check out the case of Rio Rico, Texas. A pace that was thought to be part of Mexico due to a company that changed the course of a river but then the residents ended up getting US citizenship after a long dispute. There's a whole court case which is pretty interesting to read.
You sort of got the way cities here ended up with enclaves backwards in some cases. Look at Ann Arbor, lots of enclaves. Those enclaves are basically islands of the underlying townships surrounded by the city. Those enclaves didn’t ask to be excluded per se, the city grew around them. For example there was a plot of land with a building on State St. The couple leasing it wanted to open a smoked meat market. The problem was they needed to connect to the city seeer system but the building was in one of those enclaves. The solution? The plot became part of the city, leaving the township jurisdiction (Pittsfield in that case). Plot by plot the city grows, sometimes skipping over plots that simply never have reason to become part of the city, hence the enclaves. Taxes are generally far lower in townships than cities so that’s an incentive to just remain part of the township. Taxes play a large roll in this in fact (especially in a place like Ann Arbor... the University of Michigan takes up a lot of land area and is tax exempt, so the city likes to absorb in taxpaying plots of land when it can.)
Basically every state does local governments differently. New Jersey has all land in counties all made up of more than one municipalities with no municipality in more than one county. Maryland has large populated areas with no municipalities. It also has the municipalities of "Chevy Chase Section Five", and "Chevy Chase Section Three" both with a population of less than 800. Texas allows cities to expand unilaterally into contiguous unincorporated territory at 10% per year with no regard for county borders, but it is impossible for a city to annex another city. Hawaii basically has no cities. In Virginia, cities are not in any counties. Every state is different. New York has three levels of local government that are not strict sub sets.
It does get complicated. I’ve lived in a Michigan my entire life and I don’t know everything about the township system here. Basically all of our counties are squared off (some are chopped off at the edges of the state or by other counties but everything is at right-angles where possible) and all of the land is in one of our 82 counties. Each county is then divided into square townships. Cities can be in multiple townships’ boundaries and even cross county lines in some cases (not many, but there are a few). Each township is also subdivided into squares and certain squares have to be set aside for educational development, etc. When you buy property here the deed actually spells out the coordinates of your property based on the township grid it’s in. It’s a pretty smart system. They could do that here as Michigan became a state in 1837, most of it was wilderness so there wasn’t much development to worry about mischaracterizing. Everything was surveyed and the grids laid well before the development happened. Places like Virginia had been colonies so they had to work around plenty of development, so cities outside of counties. That’s impossible here in Michigan. Our legal system puts criminals in county jails for instance... if the city wasn’t in a county there’d be no jail for them. It’s interesting how geographical systems have implications like that.
Also, the independent cities in Virginia are pretty arbitrary. I live near the independent city of Fredericksburg, which has a population closing on 30k and a metro of 250k. Then there's the independent city of Norton, which you'll miss if you blink while driving through. I'd never heard of it until I looked at a list of independent cities, and I'd actually driven through part of it without knowing. There's a string of cities along the Shenandoah valley that are several times larger than Norton, and the Shenandoah urban corridor is growing so fast that some are on pace to crest 50k people within 20 years, but only about half are independent cities, and the rest by all indications never will be. Then there's the mess that is Northern Virginia, there are 100+ incorporated cities there that are bigger than most independent cities, but aren't one. Some are, though, like Manassas Park, which is a school surrounded by a really big subdivision, population 15k and not growing. Tyson's Corner, which has more downtown high-rise office space than most major US cities, is unincorporated. It's all derived from the relative populations of the state's towns and cities in the late 1700s, and some political favors to frontier settlers who wanted post offices. Some of those biggest cities back then still only have a few thousand people, some of the backwater county seats that were never given independence because they were never expected to be anything more than a courthouse and the judge's house are among the biggest in the state, but not independent, and some of those frontier settlements ended up being coal boomtowns that died 50-80 years ago, but retained independence. Local government structures that probably made some sense in 1795 have barely changed since, and just don't make sense anymore. The current reality is often so far divorced from the historical reasons for the boundaries, that it's often impossible to tell what those reasons were anymore, if there was any reason or logic to it at all.
*sees Toycat hover his mouse over New England* Me: "He's not going to do it". *Sees Toycat hover his mouse over R.I.* Me: "WHAAAAT". Toycat: "... is actually Rhode Island" Me: "I CAN'T BELIEVE IT! SOMEONE ACTUALLY TALKED ABOUT RHODE ISLAND FOR ONCE!" also of course it's the name, *definitely* haven't had to answer this a million times. Once argued with a friends mother online because she wanted to know where I was from (making sure no pedos online that's cool) and she didn't believe Rhode Island was a state. Still stings. EDIT: Also it's Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, not Rhode Island and THE Providence Plantations
I’m from nyc and it honestly feels like it could function as a city state. It’s about the same size as Andorra (the 5 boroughs) but with 9 million people
