July 15th “Go west, young man” In July 1865 New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley popularized an enduring American slogan when he advised in his newspaper, “Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.” Thousands of men and women were already doing just that, striking out for western frontiers in search of cheap land and wide-open opportunities. Each decade, the Census Bureau calculates the mean center of population—the place where an imaginary map of the U.S. would balance if all residents were the same weight. In other words, it’s the “middle point” of where we all live. As the nation has grown, the center of population has moved west. In 1790 it lay near Chestertown, Maryland. By 2000 it lay more than 1,000 miles away near Edgar Springs, Missouri. Census Year Approximate Location 1790 23 miles east of Baltimore, Maryland 1800 18 miles west of Baltimore, Maryland 1820 16 miles east of Moorefield, West Virginia 1840 16 miles south of Clarksburg, West Virginia 1860 20 miles south by east of Chillicothe, Ohio 1880 8 miles west by south of Cincinnati, Ohio 1900 6 miles southeast of Columbus, Indiana 1920 8 miles south-southeast of Spencer, Indiana 1940 2 miles southeast by east of Carlisle, Indiana 1960 6.5 miles northwest of Centralia, Illinois 1980 A quarter mile west of DeSoto, Missouri 2000 2.8 miles east of Edgar Springs, Missouri American History Parade 1862 The Confederate ironclad Arkansas pounds its way through a fleet of Union warships blockading Vicksburg on the Mississippi River. 1912 Jim Thorpe, one of the greatest athletes in U.S. history, shatters the world record in the decathlon at the Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden. 1913 Augustus Bacon of Georgia becomes the first senator elected by popular vote (before the Seventeenth Amendment, senators were elected by state legislators). 1916 Pacific Aero Products, later renamed The Boeing Company, is founded in Seattle by William Boeing.
Posted on: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 05:40:30 +0000