Tag: New York
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European Capitals of New York
New York is certainly an international locale, a player on the world stage attracting people from every corner of the world. It has been that way for a long time, a point of debarkation for more than two centuries. Perhaps I should expect to see the names of so many European capitals diffused within the…
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Confederate Yankees
The Confederate’s Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. That was essentially the end of the Civil War although others continued to fight briefly afterwards. The former Confederate states all regained representation in the United States Congress within the next few years. Eventually they all formally terminated their succession…
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Same Name Travel
As I prepare for my upcoming trip to Utah, I noticed that I will be collecting one of the counties named for a state, specifically Utah County, Utah. That’s the home county for Provo. I realize that I’ve called the counties named for states unimaginative and boring. Let my clarify that before I get a…
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The Jeffersons and Beyond
I stumbled across a geo-oddity as I worked on one of my other hobbies (genealogy): one family line had a connection with Watertown, in Jefferson County, Wisconsin; and a member of that same family had a connection to Watertown, in Jefferson County, New York. I’d never come across a situation where two states had towns…
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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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New York Steals Roads from its Neighbors!
I learned some interesting facts from our prior exercise, specifically that there are several extremely short U.S. Interstate highway segments that just barely clip the corners of various states. In the course of that journey I also uncovered a startling revelation. New York is stealing roads from its neighbors. I’d write it off as an…
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Mysterious Plum Island
Plum Island sits off the northeast coast of Long Island, New York. Throughout the last two centuries it has vacillated between civilian and government use. Colonists began settling here in the late seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries, and named it for the abundant native plum trees. British raiders bedeviled the island during the Revolutionary…
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The Erie Triangle
If one ponders a map of the United State’s and focuses on one of its four Commonwealths, specifically Pennsylvania, one will notice something a bit odd with its borders. The northern, southern and western borders all form straight lines of exact longitude or latitude. However there’s an exception, a little notch at the far northwestern…
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Maps on Google Analytics
I enabled Google Analytics recently on my web pages. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this tool, it involves the addition of a few lines of javascript to each page which in turn reports basic information back to the great Google mothership. It allows me to gain a better understanding of web traffic…