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One Good Reason to Visit South Dakota (Besides Mount Rushmore)
If you're planning the requisite road trip across the U.S. (my family took ours in a minivan 17 years ago), add one more stop on your tour of Americana: the geographical center of the country. Eight miles
Currently, the marker is inaccessible, as it's located on private property in the middle of a barbed-wired pasture. Town leaders raised enough money to move the official center into town, and plan to place a 21-by-40 foot compass rose monument there. Belle Fourche is already considered the center of the nation city, so moving the geographical center shouldn't be cheating ... too much.
Filed under: History, North America, United States
Reader Comments (Page 7 of 7)
sd12013 Aug 20th 2007 4:12AM
It will of course depend on whether you count all 50 states or just the contiguous 48. Belle Fourche is the center if you consider all 50. As for the contiguous 48: Missouri? No. Oklahoma? Are you freaking serious? New Jersey? Erm... North Dakota? Nope! Lillian gets the prize with Lebanon, KS (roughly) as both the geometric and geodetic center.
Jason Aug 20th 2007 8:51AM
I always thought I was the center of the US. not to mention the world...
Henrietta Aug 20th 2007 11:26PM
And Texas has more of the 'World's LARGEST Car/Boat/RV (and just about everything else, take your pick) Sales Lots than any other state. I know this because it said so on the signs.
Teresa Schanzenbach Sep 4th 2007 11:34PM
Having helped spearhead this project, there is a great deal of misinfomration about the geographic center of the nation. Rand McNally still does not have it right. So allow me to clarify a few things.
#1 Lebanon Kansas is still the center of the lower 48 or contiguous states.
#2 The center of North America is near Rugby ND with the monument placed in Rugby by their museum..an eclectic but pretty cool place to visit.
#3 Belle Fourche was designated the Geo center of the 50 states in 1959 when Alaska and Hawaii joined the Union. It moved twice that year within Butte County because they came in at differnet times of the year. Right now the actual center is pinpointed nearly 20 miles north of Belle Fourche. 13 miles north on HWY 85 and the 7.8 miles further north on Old Hwy 85 (now a gravel road). It is marked by a white flagpole about 6 ft tall and an American flag. The geodetic markers are embedded in concrete. Why did we move it? Well quite frankly people don't like to or are scared to travel that far with very little in between. (If you are from SD you are used to the vast space and enjoy the solitude.) They wanted something larger and more convenient... so we built it. We still do and will always send the purists to the actual pinpointed site. NOAA gave us the stainless steel piece that is placed in the center of our new monument in town and are in agreement that it is great that we have something of more substance. Come to Belle Fourche and we will be more than happy to explain it all to you or check out our website www.bellefourche.org for more info. We will be updating it again soon with new pictures of the new monument.