Why do the fourth and sixth tiers of counties have those strange juts on their western borders?
Iowa Geography Question
- Thread starter Acylum
- Start date
Why do the fourth and sixth tiers of counties have those strange juts on their western borders?
Short answer: survey corrections.
Long answer:
Long answer:
The Missouri River (Western Border) flows diagonally between those two tiers. In order to maintain perpendicularity, a small amount of the shift of the Western border is allocated to each of the counties to the east.
What about that one on the top tier that's equivalent to two or all its neighbors? Then to make it worse the one under it loses the bottom 1/4 to the county below it. They could have given some of that double sized one to it to make up for getting screwed.
I once worked for a company that I was responsible for creating/designing sales territories from Chicago/NOLA west. Texas and CA were a challenge for separate reasons but I specifically recall the uniqueness of TX due to county layout.
Fun fact IMO; as a kid I used that oversized territory in the fourth tier (Webster) to identify where my county was when a TV station would bring up a weather alert map.
Latitude lines are parallel, and even though longitude lines appear to be parallel, they are not. Longitude lines get closer together the farther north you go in the northern hemisphere, and so those adjustments had to be made as those longitude lines got closer together.
That county is Kossuth County. I believe it is larger because it had something to do with the number of counties in the state of Iowa, and the politics wanted an odd number? Maybe some historian can clarify this.
I may be alone on this, but I think our forefathers were foresighted enough to realize that there would be a significant lull between the end basketball season and the start of football and we could potentially run out of topics to fill that void, so they designed the layout to inspire those questions
For a short time, a couple years maybe, Kossuth County was split into 2 counties. The decision was made to do away with the north county. Sorry, I forgot what the north county was called. There was not many people that lived up north, and a few influential people didn’t want the area to be 2 counties, so it is Kossuth County.
Because they made the counties up by total IQ level. It takes 2x as many Kossuth people to equal us in bago county.
I think it was because most of the northern half was wetland and lakes, so there wasn't and farming going on, and no reason to have it be is own County.
Bancroft County, Iowa - Wikipedia https://share.google/FHeHFsonmsVnmle5u
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It was because all the legacy COBOL code had a 2 digit field for the county number and couldn’t handle 100 counties. It was known as the y1846 problem.
