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Well, not everyone has the benefit of being exposed to the rural parts of the American upper Midwest. One of the prerogatives is that your state becomes a state and gets divided up into townships at the same time. I seem to recall that the township boundaries were drawn by some sort of commission (which the Congress rubber stamped), with the states' and counties' and townships' northern and southern boundary lines lines being adjusted away from steadily east and west in order to make each township have the same area in spite of the lines of latitude moving closer and closer together as they converge toward the north pole, so that a degree or minute of longitude gets shorter and shorter as the surveyors move north, and 640-acre (or whatever the number was) parcels get slimmer and proportionally taller. The almost rectangular county i was born in borders one county in each of two other states, and what looks on most maps like a straight E/W line actually has a short N/S jog or kink in it. (Also a county of its own state on its E andW, and i'm pretty surely somewhere from 1 to 3 counties of its own state in the next row of counties; my bet is that Jefferson insisted on this approach, if he was still of sound mind at that time.) I presume many other trans-Appalachian states are similar. [interim save, --Jerzy•t 06:58, 2 June 2018 (UTC)][reply]
