The United States is fifty separate arguments about where a line should go, what a flag should look like, and who got somewhere first. These stories follow the paper trail: statutes that name an official cooking pot, a survey that missed by a third of a mile and stuck anyway, a constitution sent by telegraph, and famous landmarks whose best-known fact turns out to be wrong.
Every tile in a The Fifty States game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Firsts
nine stories
1Thirty delegates, thirty votes, and a head start
On the tile: Delaware1787
Delaware's convention met in Dover at Battell's Tavern, also known as the Golden Fleece, and on December 7, 1787 its thirty delegates voted unanimously to ratify the federal Constitution. No other state had done it yet, and Delaware's usually quarrelsome factions all lined up behind it. The state has called itself the First State ever since, and still keeps December 7 as Delaware Day. Ratifying did not make the Constitution law; that took nine states, and New Hampshire supplied the ninth the following June.
Vermont declared independence in 1777, adopting a constitution at Windsor that created a republic, and then governed itself for fourteen years. It even opened talks with Great Britain about joining Canada, which did nothing to improve its standing with a suspicious Congress. The deadlock broke in 1790, when New York finally settled its long-running claims. Vermont delegates met at Bennington in January 1791, ratified the federal Constitution, and on March 4, 1791 Vermont was accepted as the fourteenth state, the first admitted after the original thirteen.
Certified copies of Nevada's new constitution went east by mail and by sea, and neither arrived before the deadline. So Governor James Nye had the entire document telegraphed. The message ran 16,543 words and cost $4,313.27 to send. Starting on October 26, 1864, it was relayed from Carson City through Salt Lake City, Chicago and Philadelphia, reaching the War Department two days later. Lincoln proclaimed Nevada a state within the week, days before the presidential election.
William Bright introduced the bill late in Wyoming's 1869 territorial session. It passed the Council six votes to two and the House seven to four, and Governor John Campbell signed it on December 10, making the territory the first government in the world to guarantee women the right to vote. Esther Hobart Morris is usually given the credit, and she is worth knowing, but Morris herself wrote that the honor of presenting the bill belonged to Bright.
Montana sent Jeannette Rankin to the House of Representatives in November 1916, four years before the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed American women the vote. She was the first woman in the country's history to win a seat in Congress. She could run at all because Montana had already granted women the vote by referendum in 1914, as several western states had done by then. She was sworn in on April 2, 1917.
Tennessee could make the Nineteenth Amendment law by becoming the thirty-sixth state to ratify, and its House was split. Harry Burn, twenty-four years old, wore the red rose of the opposition and had already voted to table the measure. In his pocket was a letter from his mother, Febb, telling him to vote for suffrage and not keep them in doubt. He voted aye. He explained afterward that a mother's advice is always safest for her boy to follow.
Edwin Drake and a driller known as Uncle Billy Smith sank a well beside Oil Creek near Titusville, Pennsylvania, and struck oil on August 27, 1859, at a depth of only sixty-nine feet. Pennsylvania calls it the first successful commercial oil well. The market it served was lighting and lubrication, not engines, which barely existed yet. The museum on the site traces how drilling moved from hand tools to steam and gas power, and who chased the fortunes that followed.
8The first machine that charged you to stand still
On the tile: Park-O-Meter1935
Carl Magee, an Oklahoma City newspaper publisher, filed his patent in December 1932 and worked the mechanism out with engineers at Oklahoma State. On July 16, 1935, 175 meters went up across fourteen downtown blocks. A nickel bought an hour, and ignoring the meter cost twenty dollars. The Oklahoma Historical Society counts three effects: the parking problem eased, money came into the city treasury, and the assessed value of downtown commercial property climbed sharply. Other cities noticed.
Victor Gruen turned the shopping street inside out. Southdale Center opened in Edina, Minnesota on October 8, 1956, fully enclosed and climate controlled, with a garden court at its heart. Shoppers could park once and then wander, eat and run errands without crossing a street or driving from store to store. The Library of Congress dates the fully enclosed American shopping destination from that day. Gruen had been working toward it since a proposal he drew up with Elsie Krummeck in 1943.
John Eisenmann, a Cleveland architect, designed Ohio's flag for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, where it flew in public before Ohio had adopted anything. He chose a swallowtail burgee, a pennant shape picked so the design would read the same in any position, and it is still the only non-rectangular state flag. The red and white stripes stand for roads and waterways, the blue triangle for hills and valleys, and the white O around a red circle doubles as a buckeye.
For ninety-five years the story was that a thirteen-year-old at the Jesse Lee Home in Seward won the 1927 territorial flag contest with eight gold stars on blue. The design is exactly as described. Benny Benson wrote that the blue field stood for the Alaska sky and the forget-me-not, the Dipper for strength, the North Star for the future of the most northerly state in the Union. The age was wrong. In 2022 researchers established he was fourteen, and a court ordered his birth certificate corrected.
Oregon came late to flags. Portland's postmaster asked for one to send to a display at the Post Office Department, and Governor Walter Pierce signed the adopting act on February 26, 1925. State law spells out two designs for the one flag: the state shield in gold on navy, ringed by thirty-three stars, on the front, and a beaver on a log on the back. Oregon is the only state whose flag carries a different image on each side.
Maryland's flag is quartered because a coat of arms was. The gold and black belong to the Calverts, the Lords Baltimore who founded the colony. The red and white cross bottony belongs to the Crosslands, the family of George Calvert's mother. The combined arms flew at a Baltimore parade in 1880 marking the city's hundred and fiftieth anniversary, and again at Gettysburg in 1888, before the General Assembly made the design official in March 1904.
New Mexico's flag carries a modern reading of a sun design found on a late nineteenth-century water jar from Zia Pueblo. Dr. Harry Mera, a Santa Fe physician and archaeologist, entered it in a 1923 contest run by the Daughters of the American Revolution, and his wife Reba made the winning flag, red on yellow. Four is the sacred number at Zia, and the four groups of rays stand for the directions, the seasons, the parts of a day and the stages of a life.
Minnesota changed its flag and its state seal at once. A State Emblems Redesign Commission, created by the legislature in 2023, worked from designs sent in by residents and certified a flag drawn from one by Andrew Prekker and a seal by Ross Bruggink. The secretary of state described the result as showing the water, the land, the North Star and the loon. Both emblems became official on May 11, 2024, and at that day's unveiling the two designers and the commission's leaders received the National Association of Secretaries of State Medallion Award.
Edwin Perkins sold a liquid concentrate called Fruit Smack, corked in bottles that made a mess in shipping. In 1927, in Hastings, Nebraska, he worked out how to take the water out and sell the flavor as a powder. A packet cost a dime, then a nickel once the Depression arrived, and demand went up rather than down. In May 1998 Governor Ben Nelson made Kool-Aid the state soft drink, not, as the wire services first reported, the state beverage.
Most states name a bird and a flower and stop there. In 1997 Utah added cookware. House Bill 203, sponsored by Representative Craig Buttars, wrote a single line into the state code designating the dutch oven the state cooking pot of Utah. The choice points back to settlers who cooked over open fires in heavy lidded iron, and to a tradition of outdoor dutch oven cooking in the state that never really stopped.
Chapter 2 of the Massachusetts General Laws collects the commonwealth's emblems, and two consecutive sections are about baking. Section 41 declares that the Boston cream pie shall be the official dessert, a dish that is not a pie at all but a cake split, filled with custard and iced with chocolate. Section 42, directly after it, declares the chocolate chip cookie the official cookie. The same chapter also fixes an official muffin, bean, donut and groundhog.
South Dakota's plan in the 1920s was a tourist attraction: Native Americans and pioneers carved into the Needles, a cluster of granite spires in Custer State Park. Gutzon Borglum looked at the Needles and refused them. He chose a four-hundred-foot cliff in what was then Harney National Forest instead, and the subject changed with the site, to four presidents picked for the ideas they stood for. Carving ran from October 1927 to October 1941, with about four hundred workers.
Eero Saarinen won a nationwide competition in 1947 and 1948 with a shape that hides a square inside a curve. The arch in St. Louis stands 630 feet high and measures exactly 630 feet from the outside of one leg to the outside of the other. Each leg is 54 feet across at the base, with foundations sixty feet down. Construction began in 1963 and the last section was set on October 28, 1965.
Curing concrete gives off heat, and three and a quarter million cubic yards of it would have held that heat a very long time. So Hoover Dam went up as a stack of interlocking columns, each threaded with one-inch steel pipe, more than 582 miles of it in all. Chilled water from a refrigeration plant on site ran through the pipes until March 1935. Grout was then forced into the gaps that the cooling had opened between the columns, fusing them into one wall.
The Antiquities Act of 1906 let a president protect objects of historic or scientific interest on federal land. Theodore Roosevelt used it for the first time on September 24, 1906, on a great column of igneous rock standing over the Belle Fourche River in northeastern Wyoming. Treating a geological formation as an object of scientific interest was a generous reading of the new law, and it set the pattern for every national monument that followed.
Jim White was sixteen when he built a ladder of wire and scrap wood and climbed about sixty feet down into the dark near Carlsbad, New Mexico, in 1898. He explored the cave for years and promoted it for the rest of his life. He did not find it. The National Park Service says Native peoples, among them the Mescalero Apache and the Zuni Pueblo, had known of the cave for hundreds of years, and settlers who later stumbled on its mouth claimed to have gone in first. White's claim is to the first credited exploration.
The name has persuaded generations of visitors that the geyser goes off on the hour. It does not. The National Park Service puts the average gap between eruptions at about ninety minutes, ranging from fifty to 127, with water thrown 106 to 184 feet up. What makes it faithful is a pattern rather than a clock: a short eruption is followed by a short wait and a long one by a long wait, which is why rangers can post a prediction and be close.
Bethlehem Steel shipped the bridge's steel coated in red lead primer, and Irving Morrow, the consulting architect, kept noticing it from the ferry on his way to the site. He ran color studies and specified a version of that warm red, because it sat well against the Marin hills and stood out from the ocean and the sky. Morrow concluded that the effect of International Orange is "as highly pleasing as it is unusual in the realm of engineering."
America's early national parks protected scenery and wildlife. On June 29, 1906, Theodore Roosevelt signed one into being for a different reason. Mesa Verde, in southwestern Colorado, was the first national park created to preserve the works of man, the phrase the National Park Service still uses. Its 52,000 acres hold nearly 5,000 archaeological sites, among them about 600 cliff dwellings tucked into sandstone alcoves by Ancestral Pueblo builders.
More than four hundred miles of passage have been mapped under the hills of central Kentucky, which makes Mammoth Cave the longest known cave system in the world. The number is not final. Surveyors keep linking passages that were thought separate, and the total has climbed for decades. The park above it was established in 1941, and the cave is now both a World Heritage site and an international biosphere reserve.
The 1783 peace treaty ran the boundary to the northwesternmost point of Lake of the Woods and then west to the Mississippi. The negotiators were reading John Mitchell's map, which gave the lake the wrong shape and put the Mississippi's source beside it. In 1798 David Thompson showed the river rose well to the south, so the line had to drop to the forty-ninth parallel. What was left stranded above it is the Northwest Angle, farther north than any other part of the contiguous states.
Modern instruments put the Four Corners monument roughly 1,800 feet from where Congress meant it to be. Every few years that gets reported as a blunder. It is not. In 1875 a surveyor named Chandler Robbins marked the corner with a seven-foot sandstone shaft, working from coordinates fixed at Ship Rock the year before, and the four territories and Congress accepted his work. The National Geodetic Survey states the rule plainly: once a monument is established and accepted by the parties, the monument, not the arithmetic, is the boundary.
In 1835 Michigan and Ohio both claimed a strip of land around Toledo. Ohio's legislature voted $300,000 for troops and Michigan answered with $315,000, and Michigan's young territorial governor marched a thousand armed men into Toledo, where they found nobody. The only injury was a deputy sheriff named Joseph Wood, stabbed on July 15, who recovered. Congress settled it with a trade: Ohio kept the strip, and Michigan took the western Upper Peninsula and statehood, which came on January 26, 1837. Michigan thought it had been robbed until somebody counted the copper and the timber.
Most of Delaware's northern boundary is a curve. When Charles II granted Pennsylvania to William Penn in 1681, the Duke of York protected what remained of his own holdings by ordering a boundary swung twelve miles out from New Castle. The center point moved over the years, ending at the cupola of the New Castle Court House, and in 1763 Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon resurveyed the arc from that point, as part of the work that settled the colonial boundaries and gave their names to a line.
Ohio's convention agreed to petition for admission on November 29, 1802, and Congress approved the petition on February 19, 1803. Then it moved on without ratifying the state constitution, the step that completes admission, which left Ohio technically part of the Northwest Territory. Nobody noticed for a century and a half. Representative George Bender of Ohio called the lapse a legislative oversight and introduced a fix on January 13, 1953. President Eisenhower signed it that August, admitting Ohio retroactively as of March 1, 1803, as everyone had assumed all along.
In 1934 Nebraska voters approved, 286,086 to 193,152, an amendment replacing two legislative chambers with one and making its elections nonpartisan. George Norris, a Republican senator from McCook, had driven the state arguing that two houses were outdated and wasteful. The new body met in 1937 with 43 senators in place of 133 members, and passed 214 bills in 98 days. It remains the only one-house legislature in the nation.
In 2003 three researchers put a pancake from an IHOP under a confocal laser microscope, compared its profile with a cross-section of Kansas, and reported in the Annals of Improbable Research that the state won. The joke stuck, and so did the assumption underneath it. A 2014 study in the Geographical Review measured terrain the way a person actually sees it and ranked Kansas seventh. The flattest state is Florida, whose highest point is 345 feet above sea level.
8The one Great Lake with no border running through it
On the tile: Lake Michigan
Four of the Great Lakes are shared water, split between the United States and Canada, and everything about managing them has to be negotiated across a border. Lake Michigan is not. The Environmental Protection Agency ranks it second of the five by volume, behind Superior, and calls it the only one that lies entirely within the borders of the United States. Four states hold its shoreline: Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana, and none of the shore is Canadian.
When Virginia left the Union in 1861, its western counties would not go. Pro-Union Virginians formed a rival government that June and asked Congress for a state of their own. The Senate agreed in July 1862, on the condition that the new constitution provide for gradual emancipation, an amendment written by Senator Waitman Willey. Lincoln signed the admission bill on December 31, 1862, and proclaimed West Virginia a state effective June 20, 1863.