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There isn't streaming both Curiosity Stream and Nebula, where you can watch my brand new original feature length documentary, Siri's Ghost Towns for less than $12 a year by following the link down in the description, The United States is a complicated country with a complicated geometry.

Take Colorado, for instance, which has seems like a simple rectangle.

While that appears to be true from far above on every map you've probably ever seen, taking a closer look at this rectangle reveals some disturbing geometric truths.

Colorado ain't no rectangle.

Back in 18 76 when Colorado was first admitted as a state, the legislation, which created it to find the state's borders purely by lines of latitude and longitude without any regard for natural boundaries like mountains or rivers specifically the state of Colorado was then defined as being all the land, which existed between the latitude lines 37 degrees north and 41 degrees north, and between the longitudinal lines of 102 degrees, three minutes west and 109 degrees three minutes west.

From the very beginning, Colorado was doomed to never be the shape of a true rectangle.

Earth is obviously shaped like a sphere.

So while lines of latitude are, of course, all parallel with one another, lines of longitude all moved to converge at a single point, the further you move away from the equator.

Therefore, from the get go, Colorado's northern border was going toe always be shorter than its southern border, and in fact, it's 21 miles shorter, to be exact.

Colorado, therefore entered into life as more of a trapezoid, but it goes much further than that.

When the state was created in 18 76 surveyors had to be hired to accurately map out all of Colorado's borders.

Using the technology of the time on foot, they followed the lines of latitude and longitude that set the borders across hundreds of miles through mountainous terrain the best they could while marking it all out with mile posts.

But they weren't perfect.

Take the boundary between Colorado and Utah as a prime example.

It runs from south to north for 276 miles, and when the original surveyors reached the North End with Wyoming, they noticed that they ended up one mile west of where they expected to be at.

This meant that there were at least a few kinks in the border where they had strayed off course.

Because, as it turns out, walking in a perfectly straight line across 276 miles through the mountains in the 19th century was pretty difficult.

In fact, there are little errors and kinks like this all around supposedly square shape of Colorado.

And because of all these errors, Colorado doesn't have four sides but 697 sides to be exact, making the true shape of Colorado a heck Sahakian neocon takai captagon.

The interesting thing is that once a border is defined on the ground and accepted by all interested parties, that's what becomes the official border, even if it doesn't exactly match the previously written description.

And so Colorado's border irregularities have remained right up until the present day, but it's far from the only state was such a strange border history.

Let's go visit New York and New Jersey next and specifically these islands in the Upper Bay, Liberty Island and Ellis Island, despite the New York New Jersey border running directly through the center of the Hudson in the upper bay.

These two islands on the New Jersey side belonged to New York.

Well, Liberty Island in its entirety does.

But only a small part of Ellis Island belongs to New York, while the rest of the island belongs to New Jersey, making the New York chunk on awkward State Enclave.

So why is that the case?

Like all weird US state borders, it goes back to the Colonial era.

Back then, the border between the two states was pretty undefined, and they argued about where, exactly, it waas.

Eventually, they came to a compromise in 18 34 confirmed by the U.

S Supreme Court that set the border right down the middle of the Hudson and the upper bay.

But it gave the islands to New York for some reason.

New Jersey pro tested this decision for decades.

All the while, they had toe watch New York, expanding the size of Ellis Island with land reclamation inside of their own territorial waters.

Finally, though, in 1997 they had a new idea.

The state of New Jersey sue New York, claiming that all the land the state had reclaimed around Ellis Island belonged, in fact, to New Jersey, since they dredged up the land in territorial waters that have been expressly granted to New Jersey under the 18 34 compact.

New York, of course, disagreed and claimed a common sense clause, which argued Ellis Island was granted to New York in whatever shape and size it was transformed into in the future.

The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, and the court ended up siding with New Jersey, which created the awkward situation where all the land of the original Ellis Island still belongs to New York.

But all the rest of the new land created around it after 18 34 belongs to New Jersey.

But this is far from the only strange border situation on the U.

S East coast.

There's also whatever the hell is going on here in the Mid Atlantic with Maryland, Delaware and Virginia, which is probably the worst border Gore seen anywhere inside of the U.

S.

Basically, it's once again the fault of all the colonists.

But to be fair, they didn't really know what they were doing.

Let's start off with Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware, basically, Maryland was granted a charter.

First they gave them this land.

Then Pennsylvania was granted a charter later that gave them this land.

And then King Charles.

The second gave Pennsylvania another piece of land that vaguely looked like this, which eventually became Delaware.

Now, obviously, all of this land pretty much overlap with each other in a lot of areas.

So Maryland and Pennsylvania got pretty heated about what belonged to whom and almost even came toe war in 17 30 when both colonies called up their militaries over the disagreements.

Finally, though, they decided to settle this issue by hiring a couple of surveyors, and the line that survey came up with was the Mason Dixon line.

Unfortunately, the line they drew wasn't exactly perfect, and they were pretty much geometrically doomed from the start because of Delaware.

Stupid border in the North, which is a circle.

You see, Delaware's border in the north was defined as being part of a 12 mile circle radiating out from a courthouse and Newcastle.

So when the surveyors were drawing out the line between Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware, they had to run it from the south up on a tangent line like this and then, from this point, to meet the agreed upon border between the states in the North.

This ended up leaving this wedge shaped no man's zone right here that theoretically didn't belong to any state.

But Pennsylvania and Delaware both claimed it as their own in 1921.

It was decided that the geometric shape would be more stupid if it belonged to Pennsylvania, so it was decided once and for all that had rightfully belonged to Delaware.

But that's not the only strange part about Delaware's borders.

Delaware was defined as being west of the Delaware River, so the border between itself in New Jersey run straight through the middle of the river.

Except for the part where the 12 mile circle exists here, the Delaware border instead extends all the way to the bank of the river or, to be more specific, what the bank constituted in the late 16 hundreds.

Therefore, in a twist of fate, the same argument that New Jersey used to claim most of Ellis Island from New York has been used by Delaware to claim some land in the Delaware River from them.

Specifically, these two segments of land, which have been dredged up by New Jersey since the 17th century.

But since they exist within Delaware's 12 Mile Land grant in the river that extends to the bank, they legally belong to Delaware.

The Mason Dixon line also generated a weird situation in Maryland right here in the town of Hancock, which is sandwiched in just a two mile wide zone between West Virginia and the South and Pennsylvania in the North, despite Maryland stretching 70 miles further to the west.

Now for a similar situation, let's hop on over to the best friends Michigan and Ohio.

Everybody knows that Michigan has this big upper peninsula that's disconnected from the rest of the state, but few people know that Michigan actually has to disconnected peninsulas.

The other one is a lot smaller, but it's down right here, just above Ohio and Michigan ended up gaining both of these enclaves because of Ohio.

Back in the early 19th century, when Ohio is getting admitted as a state, their northern border was defined as being a straight line that would stretch from the bottom of Lake Michigan over the lake, eerie like with all of these other situations, though, the geographic knowledge of the area at the time was very poor, and it ended up being discovered later that Lake Michigan stretch further south than what was previously believed.

This meant that Ohio's border would stretch further south than they thought, which would critically leave the city of Toledo inside of Michigan.

Well, Ohio wouldn't stand for that, so they instead insisted on a revised diagonal border from the bottom of Lake Michigan over to Lake Erie.

That would leave Toledo within Ohio.

But Michigan pressed their claims on the previously decided border, and a strip of contested land emerged between both of them, called the Toledo Strip.

Michigan and Ohio both called up their local militias.

A few shots were fired where one soldier was injured until the federal government intervened and gave the strip to Ohio.

In exchange, Michigan was granted the upper peninsula in compensation and was granted statehood further.

This line, from the north end of the Toledo Strip, cuts across this little peninsula in the south, leaving Michigan with two stranded and separated peninsulas of slightly different sizes.

Now there's a lot more I have to say about strange internal US borders and politics, But this video is already getting pretty long in the YouTube algorithm.

Doesn't really ever favor that very much, which is why I already put my extended cut of this video on Nebula.

My creator, friends and I teamed up to build our own platform where we don't have to worry about getting de monetized or buried by an algorithm that doesn't support us.

It's called Nebula, and it's a place where we house all of our content, ad free and where we can experiment with new content that probably wouldn't work out on YouTube.

The version that I put up on Nebula removes this entire ad and replaces it with an extended talk on Mawr.

Strange US Borders Further Nebula is also the exclusive home for my own brand new documentary, Siri's Ghost Towns, the first episode of which is live right now, where I'll take you on a 35 minute tour of one of America's largest and most interesting abandoned communities that involves America's most polluted lake million's of fish skeletons and hundreds of abandoned homes and buildings, all in the middle of California.

New episodes will be releasing exclusively on Nebula next year, with even more ghost towns.

And this is just one of many pieces of exclusive content that you can get on there with much more from channels like Riel Engineering, Wendover Productions, Lindsay Ellis, Tom Scott and many more.

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