Often during our brand workshops for a community someone will say, “this is the best place to live, work and play” or “we’re the center of everything”. Some would even like that line to be the city tagline. I find it a really confusing line because every place can be called the center of something – it just depends on your perspective and the relevance of the things that surround the place.
‘The Los Angeles Times’ reports that the Center for Land Use Interpretation has an exhibit at its Culver City CA headquarters titled, “Centers of the USA”. The display focuses on all the places in the United States, nine in all, that claim to occupy the center of the country. I guess these are the places that truly are “the center of everything” – in the American context …. or are they?
The exhibit shows that there’s the geographical center (near Belle Fourche, SD) the population center (Plato, MO.) and the “geodetic” center (a few miles outside Osborne, KS.), pinpointed using a method that corrects for the curvature of the earth. Now there’s even a Google center: the point you reach if you call up a map of the U.S. on the search engine and zoom straight in as far as you can go. Depending on your browser, that’ll take you to one of two other towns in Kansas. And then of course there are other places that simply claim the honor.
I can just imagine fight this must be creating amongst T-shirt vendors. Although, “Osborne Kansas The Geodetic Center of America” does have a ring to it!
Image Credit: Center for Land Use Interpretation
Oh so that's what it is. Hmmm...thanks for sharing such an interesting fact.
Posted by: freelance writer jobs | February 01, 2012 at 05:53 AM