Friday, November 14, 2008

Cincinnati as Center of the Country

According to this map on Wikipedia, based on census data, Cincinnati (or Covington actually) was the mean center of population in the U.S. in my favorite decade of Cincinnati history, the 1880s.



Reminds me of the "moving right along" series of posts on mahketewah hall 1876 blog.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

sigh i just wrote a long comment, but it got eaten somehow and i can't capture the original excitement of finding this site and that you site cited me. i will rewrite in a little bit with lots of (maybe even extra) exclamation points

E-BAD said...

Yes, I topically bit that

Anonymous said...

quick quickly quicker:

this is a great blog idea. i think the question is unanswerable-ish, but asking it really provokes a lot of thought chains for natians


also looking at map makes me remember that cinci was once seriously considered as a capital for the US, but mostly in the 40s and 50s. it was super-up-and-comer and close to "future" population center. in 1871 there was a convention in cinci to debate the "america's capital" question (because at this point DC still had not caught on and was languishing in malaria marshes), but a local cinci politico who raised a motion to consider cinci was shouted down. cinci's moment had passed by the time it was actual center.


also i went to X for HS, which is shocker too

Randy Simes said...

This is a really neat map...thanks for sharing. I'm pretty sure that many Cincinnatians still believe that we are the center of the universe.