So, we’ve seen panhandles that were created through compromise, through skullduggery, and through that age-old motivator, vendettas against Spain. But not all the states’ irregular shapes have such innocent origins – and in fact, like so much of US history, a lot of it is downright bloody.
Step up to the plate, Oklahoma and West Virginia. And then, for a palate cleanse, Idaho.
Legacy of slavery: Oklahoma and West Virginia
Perhaps the most obvious panhandle is that of Oklahoma – so much so that it’s sometimes nicknamed “the panhandle state”.
The long strip of land sitting on top of Texas might look funny, but it’s evidence of a bloodthirsty legacy: when Texas voted to join the US in 1845, it wanted to keep slavery legal. Ever since 1820’s Missouri Compromise, however, slavery had been illegal in the US above the 36°30′ parallel – Texas could not enter the Union as a slave state if its borders stretched north of that latitude.
Rather than shrug and say “welp, guess we have to give all these people their human rights after all,” Texas opted to cut off about one-fifth of its territory and sell it to the surrounding states.
“Texas used to have a panhandle for the panhandle,” noted W.F. Strong, Professor of Communication and Culture at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, back in 2016. “It stretched north of the present day border and passed through prime Colorado Rockies real estate (including Vail) into Wyoming.”
“They called that the stovepipe,” he wrote, “because that is what it looked like – a long skinny stovepipe, snaking northward.”
Still, you might ask, why should that skinny little arm go to Oklahoma rather than, say, making Kansas a little longer? Well, it turns out that Congress already had a plan in the works to divvy up the continent by latitude: they wanted “to create a tier of four prairie states that each had three degrees of height and a tier of three Rocky Mountain states that each had four degrees of height,” explained Mark Stein in his 2012 book How The States Got Their Shapes. That put the southern border of Kansas at 37°, and the strip in between it and Texas a kind of no-man’s-land.
Eventually, people realized that having no official government in place makes a lot of things a lot more difficult, and this “Public Land Strip”, as it was known, was incorporated into Oklahoma, giving the state the culinary shape is has today.
Similarly, West Virginia – the only state in the list to have two panhandles, making it look a little like a roast chicken being thrown to the ground in anger – owes its odd shape in part to the fallout from the Civil War.
Are we wrong about the roast chicken though?
See, when Virginia voted to secede from the Union in April 1861, it was mostly the rich Easterners of the state – the ones who could afford to own slaves – who had made that decision. That wasn’t necessarily because of population differences between the two regions – in fact, free residents in the West outnumbered those in the East in 1860. But here’s the catch: in Virginia, representation was apportioned according to a census that included enslaved people.
In other words: if you owned slaves, you got more votes.
No wonder, then, that the state – including the generally less pro-slavery western regions – was dragged into the Confederacy in 1861. In response, a group of counties voted to secede from the secession, becoming the pro-Union state of West Virginia.
Here’s the thing, though: none of those counties were the three that now make up West Virginia’s eastern panhandle. So why do they belong to the Western state today?
Well, in a word: punishment. “The border between West Virginia and Virginia preserves that moment in time when federal troops were present in those counties that are now West Virginia,” Stein explained, but “Congress also added three nearby counties to West Virginia – Morgan, Berkeley, and Jefferson – despite the fact that they were not among those that voted. Indeed, these Shenandoah Valley counties were loyal to Virginia.”
“But they were located in very fertile farmland,” he wrote, so “Congress annexed these counties to West Virginia in an effort to provide it with the resources needed to sustain itself as a state.”
Virginia did try to get the counties back after losing the Civil War – but by that point, having lost more than a million lives, a few billion dollars, and a whole-ass president thanks to the secessionists, the Union was disinclined to acquiesce to their request.
“Having only recently seceded from the Union, and having lost the war, Virginia was not in a very strong bargaining position,” Stein wrote. “The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Virginia’s claims.”
Spite: Idaho
Idaho’s panhandle is more of an axe handle, really: it sticks all the way up to Canada, hanging onto the northern border at all costs despite the obvious encroachment of Montana.
The Gem State also has the dubious honor of possessing possibly the only panhandle created out of pure spite. Like many midwestern and western states, Idaho was once part of the much larger Idaho Territory – an area that encompassed what is now Montana and almost all of Wyoming as well as modern Idaho.
It wasn’t long, however, before the Territory was divided – and Idaho sent one Sidney Edgerton to represent them in the negotiations. He was a wise pick, at least on paper: a former congressman and current judge, and a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln to boot.
But there was one thing the Idahoans had missed: Edgerton, it turned out, was petty as hell.
“When the Idaho Territory was created […] Edgerton [had] relocated to the territory, where he had obtained a judicial appointment,” Stein explained. “Upon arriving, Edgerton discovered that the governor had assigned him to an outlying district east of the Rockies. Edgerton felt snubbed.”
When he was sent to help create the border between Idaho and Montana, therefore, he decided to – well, kind of screw over his new home state. Rather than stick with the initial and rather sensible suggestion of the Continental Divide being the boundary, Edgerton pushed it all the way back to the Bitterroot Mountains.
See that dotted line? That’s where Idaho COULD have ended.
In fact, it took Congress pushing back on Edgerton’s proposal to give Idaho even the tiny sliver of northern land that makes up its panhandle today. “Had the border remained the Bitterroot Mountains, Idaho would have been deprived of the fertile Kootenai Valley and those valleys connected to it,” Stein pointed out. “While Montana did not lack agricultural land, Idaho needed every acre it could get.”
“Idaho’s eastern border is, ultimately, an enduring monument to the fact that an individual can change the course of events,” he wrote – but “only up to a point.”
Source Link: Why Do Some American States Have Panhandles?