Evanston, Wisconsin?

Today's states carved

from the Northwest Territory 

See arrow marking the original northern 

border for Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.

Sounds funny, doesn't it — Evanston, Wisconsin? But that's how it almost was.

Illinois was carved out of the Northwest Territory whose Ordinance was drawn up in 1787, after the British and French let go of their interests and after several original U.S. states surrendered their claims to the land. It took another 20 years for Native Americans to give up all their land rights here and another 70 years before the whole Territory was divided into states — Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and a portion of Minnesota.

Not one of these states follows the boundaries set out in the Territory’s earliest maps, like the 1814 version shown at left. These maps show the Great Lakes and the Ohio, Wabash and Mississippi Rivers serving as natural east, west and south boundaries separating states, but the northern boundary for Illinois, Indiana and Ohio had no such natural border. It was arbitrarily placed just south of Lake Michigan, running in a straight east-west line across the three states. map at right. 

Through the years that dotted line on a map caused much vexation among the people who lived there and it was repeatedly drawn and redrawn.

Ohio began the border changes before becoming a state in 1803. It reached north to take in the port of Toledo on Lake Erie. Michigan lawmakers objected and fought for more than 30 years to take back the Toledo strip. That conflict was not resolved until 1837 when Michigan became a state and was allowed to reach across the Straits of Mackinac to adopt what is now Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Even without boundary changes, Michigan and Ohio would have had hundreds of miles of land along the Great Lakes, but Indiana and Illinois would have been left high and dry. Thus, when Indiana sought statehood in 1816, it took a page from Ohio’s book and extended its border northward, going even farther than Ohio to take in land along Lake Michigan.

Illinois did the same, only more so. Its lawmakers redrew the boundary more than 50 miles beyond the tip of the lake to gain a Lake Michigan port and significant shoreline. Also, by counting residents in that northern strip, Illinois met the population requirements for statehood. Nathaniel Pope, territorial delegate from Illinois, persuaded the U.S. Congress to agree to Illinois new boundary. In 1818 Illinois became the 21^st state, its northern boundary at 42°30” (42 degrees and 30 minutes north latitude), taking in an extra 8,000 square miles plus a crucial link to the Great Lakes.

The original federal ordinance had specified that the Territory be carved into only five states and, for the first time in U.S. history, required that these states prohibit slavery. However, when Wisconsin became the Territory’s fifth state in 1848, the northwest tip of the Northwest Territory was left unclaimed. Minnesota absorbed it on becoming a state in 1858. That the Territory became six states was a boon to northern abolitionists, happy to count one more anti-slave state in their ongoing numbers battle with the slave-holding South.

And that’s how Evanston became part of the north shore of the free state of Illinois. Evanston, Wisconsin? Don’t even go there. 

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