States that Never Were

by Karl Kurtz 

Some people have fanciful notions about renaming the states to suit their own desires.  Others report the interesting history of past efforts to create new American states. 

Virginia Senate Clerk Susan Schaar responded to my previous post--about a novel in which the protagonist seeks to rename the 50 states--by calling attention to an NPR story about a new book, Lost States: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States That Never Made It by Michael J. Trinklein.  States that were proposed at some point in American history and are covered in the NPR interview include Texlahoma (northern Texas and the Oklahoma Panhandle), Sylvania (Thomas Jefferson's name for an area encompassing Michigan's Upper Peninsula and parts of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota), Transylvania (Daniel Boone's name for most of what is today Kentucky), Acadia (northern Maine), and Forgotonia (six counties in the western bulge of Illinois that feel politically ignored).

An excerpt from the book on the NPR website reports on proposals for the states of Deseret (Brigham Young's idea for a super-sized state that would have covered all of Utah, most of Nevada and Arizona, and parts of California, New Mexico and Idaho), Long Island (which is bigger than Rhode Island), and Lost Dakota (the author's name for a small piece of Dakota Territory that was left out when the states of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho were carved out).

A rose from The Thicket to Susan.

Update 4/19/10: See "More on States that Never Were."

Comments

[Gerry]

Don't forget the State of Franklin !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_franklin