New Hampshire needs more room
on April 01, 2014
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You may be under the impression that Vermont and New Hampshire are similar, and it's true. But in certain ways they couldn't be more different. Yes, they're both small, long, and thin, cold, and mountainous (Green vs. White). But Vermont is the most leftist state in the union, while New Hampshire is slightly libertarian.
Vermont is also a little bit larger than New Hampshire. Vermont has an area of 9,620 square miles, with only 626,630 people, whereas New Hampshire, with nearly double the population at 1,323,459, possesses only 9,304 square miles, a bit over 300 square miles less. So now, in a surprise move, New Hampshire's Attorney General Marc Lebensraum has announced that this geographic area differential is unfair, and has revived a long-running border dispute between the two that was thought to have been settled back in the 1930s when SCOTUS ruled on the issue:
The border between New Hampshire and Vermont was set by King George II in 1764 as the western bank of the Connecticut River. The U.S. Supreme Court re-affirmed this boundary in 1934 as the ordinary low-water mark on the Vermont shore, and markers were set.Ever since, the two states have been required by their respective state laws to formally reaffirm the boundary every seven years. Here's a photo of the last time it happened, which was in May of 2012, and was obviously quite amicable:
