Shaped by History

Why do our states look the way they do? Mark Stein dug into America’s past to find answers.

By Jenny Price ’96

During seventh grade geography class, Mark Stein ’73 spent a lot of time studying a map of his home state of Maryland. One question always nagged him: why do we have Delaware?

To Stein, it looked more like Maryland’s missing piece than a separate state. He continued to ponder the mystery of state borders well past junior high school. During his years on the UW-Madison campus — where he earned degrees in English and psychology — the sight of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula connected to Wisconsin’s northern border made him wonder, “How’d Michigan get that?”

Stein went on to make his living as a playwright, with works produced Off Broadway and at theaters around the country, and as a screenwriter, with films including Housesitter, which starred Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn. But a break in his movie career finally gave him the chance — and the push — to pursue the answers to those persistent questions about the shapes of states.

“I actually did pretty well in Hollywood, but not well enough to just retire,” Stein says, “so at some point it came together for me, ‘Why don’t I just pursue this thing that I’ve been so interested in — if nothing else, as a labor of love?’ And the more I looked … the more I discovered that, ‘Oh my god, you can even say something about Hawaii?’ ”

Stein’s book, fittingly titled How the States Got Their Shapes, explores why all fifty states and the District of Columbia look the way they do, often revealing some surprising answers (see facing page). “The further I got in, the more I was amazed to discover there was this splendid logic, and it was integral to what was happening in American history,” Stein says.

He had a secret weapon in his hunt for information: his wife, Arlene Balkansky ’74, who works for the Library of Congress. “She’d point me to areas, and then she was terrific if I found something that was in a book [there],” he says. “She had borrowing privileges, and I wouldn’t have to go in; she could bring books home, which was a great time-saver.”

Still, it was an arduous search. Stein devoted about four years to researching and writing the book, while continuing to work in theater. He started with basic histories of each state and followed up on any clues he found, leading to everything from surveyors’ notebooks to the personal diaries of John Quincy Adams. “A lot of times, it was detective work like that — just to find a name or a specific reference, and then chase that down,” he says.

Would establishing state boundaries be handled differently today? Stein doesn’t think so. Although the issues might be different, one aspect hasn’t changed. “Power is power,” he says, “and it will manifest itself whenever resources are at stake.”

Wisconsin would not be shaped like a mitten if history had gone a different way. Mark Stein’s book uncovers the reasons why it looks the way it does today. In a foursome including Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, Wisconsin was the last to have a population that was large enough to merit statehood — a fact that had a significant impact on its borders. But, Stein quickly points out, the Badger State fared far better than some others. “I don’t think it’s as egregious as what they did to Utah,” he says. The federal government, he notes, distrusted the Mormons who founded that territory, so “every time a resource was found in the western part of the Utah Territory, Congress would slice another degree of longitude off the boundary” and give it to the future state of Nevada.

Equality was a driving force in the development of state borders after the unequally shaped thirteen colonies became states — and one of the reasons so many of the states out West look like rectangles. But being equal applied not only to divvying up land, but also to ensuring access to resources. When the Great Lakes became avenues of commerce with the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, states in the region could be considered equal only if Minnesota was given access to the lakes, something Wisconsin already had. So instead of Wisconsin’s western border continuing to follow the Mississippi River, it follows the St. Croix River and then continues straight north to Lake Superior, connecting Minnesota to the lake’s western shore.

The Upper Peninsula might be Wisconsin’s most puzzling loss of land, given that it’s not connected to the rest of the state of Michigan. “The UP,” as it’s usually called, was a gift to the state from Congress, something Stein calls a “consolation prize” for land Michigan lost to Ohio and Indiana. “Hardly any settlers were living there to complain,” he notes in his book. In addition, Wisconsin had no case to make when the move ended the Toledo War, a conflict that started when Michigan sent its militia to seize the disputed land back from Ohio. “Geographically, there’s no logic,” Stein says. “The logic is all political.”

The Packers and the Bears playing in the same state? That could have happened if Wisconsin had not lost sixty miles — including what became Chicago and Rockford — to Illinois when it earned statehood in 1818. Congress voted to allow the annexation after Illinois’s founders argued that it was important for their state to be connected to New York (via the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal) to keep the commerce from becoming dependent on the slave-holding Southern states via the Mississippi River. The concerns were present before transcontinental railroads were built. “Illinois had the muscle and the hot button issue of the day — the fear that the country might one day break apart,” Stein says.