Category: Government
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W Towns Outside Boston
Reader “HH” brought an interesting situation outside of Boston, Massachusetts, to my attention this week. He discovered this many years ago and has been wondering about it every since. On the surface it doesn’t seem like much, just a ride along U.S. Route 20. It has a bit of historic importance in its own right,…
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Revisiting the Swap
It’s not every day that I get an opportunity for a do-over. I was in Williamsburg, Virginia during the early part of this week. It’s so tantalizingly close to The Swap that I featured a few weeks ago. I travel to Williamsburg about once a year on business and I have mixed feelings about the…
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County with (Another) State’s Name
It makes great intuitive sense for a state to include a component county with the same name. Imagine living in Oklahoma City. Not only do the residents live in a city named Oklahoma, they also live in a county and a state named Oklahoma. That’s not imaginative, in fact it’s rather boring. Ditto for Arkansas,…
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New Highpoint for the Netherlands
My brief vacation in Vermont over the weekend must have distracted me. Somehow I completely missed the news about the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles on October 10, 2010. So it took an email message from loyal reader Greg to bring its true significance to my attention. Iām not referring to the dissolution of the…
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The Misplaced County Seat
We’ve had lots of talk recently about inconveniently located state capitals and misaligned county seats. We’ve mined that thread for about all it’s worth so this is the last one for awhile, I promise. However, while I was conducting that research I came across an instance where the county seat is completely misplaced, and yet…
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Bakersfield: A Better California Capital?
We had a lot of fun and some great comments during the discussion of state capitals most inconvenient to the residents of the states’ largest cities. I mentioned that I’d found the U.S. Census Bureau’s list of Population Centers by State from the year 2000 census. Naturally I took the last two questions from the…
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Worst State Capital Location
Loyal Reader “Greg” read my recent article about whether the county seat of Benton Co., Washington should move because the center of population shifted overwhelmingly to the east. Greg said, “To go up an order of subdivision, I wonder what US state has the smallest capital city by population compared to (a) the state as…
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Will the County Seat Move?
In the United States counties are the primary administrative subdivisions of states and the county seats are towns that serve as the local center of government. There are plenty of notable variations and deviations from that model but as a general rule, states have counties with formally designated county seats. Government officials usually established county…
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Suriname’s Disputed Borders
So this is Suriname. Go ahead and take a look at its shape relative to its neighbors, Guyana and French Guiana. These are the three Guianas. They all line up in a tiny, tidy row on the northeast corner of South American along the Atlantic Ocean. Suriname was once Dutch Guiana, a colony of the…
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The Swap
An obscure page on the U.S. Census Bureau website, Substantial Changes to Counties and County Equivalent Entities: 1970-Present may not hold much interest to the general public. Even so it’s a site that I’ve bookmarked and visit once in awhile. It’s an ongoing catalog of boundary changes that involve at least 200 people or areas…