Delaware's Unique Border

A blog called Strange Maps has started looking at Delaware's rather unique border. There are two posts, so far. It's interesting to see the various oddities of my state's boundary discussed by an "outsider." I advise bringing along a pinch of salt to take when you read the Strange Maps posts, there are a few very minor mistakes.

My day-job involves mapping, geospatial data, and working with things like the border in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software. I also work closely with my friend Sandy Schenck of the Delaware Geological Survey. Sandy's first job, many years ago, was finding and maintaining the 179 stone boundary monuments that mark the Delaware border. He wrote a wonderful monograph on the boundary. That's my authoritative source on these issues.

The images I've used in this post, by the way, were created using the Delaware Data Mapping and Integration Lab -- The DataMIL -- which provides a digital base map of Delaware, replacing the old paper topographic map series with a more frequently updated, web-based, topo map.

The first Strange Maps post is Where Delaware Met Pennsylvania (1): the Twelve Mile Circle. It looks at the odd border issues caused by the decree in colonial times that a circle with a radius of 12 miles, centered on the town of New Castle, be used as a boundary.

Strange Maps describes this as "the only US boundary that’s a true arc." That's sort-of true; it's the only one that is circular. It is not, in fact, a true arc. The chain used to measure the 12 miles and so to survey that part of the boundary, had to be stretched out over and over again. The links started to stretch, just a bit, throwing off the measurements. Somewhere along the line, the surveyors got themselves a fresh chain, at least once.

The result is a boundary that is a compound of degraded arc sections. Subtle, and maybe even silly. But true.

Strange Maps also points out that the boundary was described as everything within the 12 miles up to the shoreline of what is now New Jersey. The result of that, and of a 1930s Supreme Court decision, has been that the state boundary is, in fact, the mean-low water line as it existed in 1934. There are places where the shoreline on the Jersey side has filled-in and moved out, by accretion, to where it now lies within Delaware.

We try not to point this out too explicitly; it upsets our neighbors in New Jersey. That, and the fact that Delaware regulates what happens over the river bottom, which has so far stymied a proposed Liquid Natural Gas terminal in the Camden area.

The second "Where Delaware Met Pennsylvania" post looks at the "Wedge". This is a wedge-shaped bit of land that for a time was not in Delaware, not in Pennsylvania, and not in Maryland. It was another anomaly caused by the 12-mile circle and by a disconnect between what 17th-Century cartography expected to find and what 17th-Century surveying actually did find.

It's that bit beneath that "shelf" where the three states meet. Just above Newark.

I understand that it was briefly a haven for outlaws, who would flee there because no lawmen had jurisdiction. At least, until the states got together and decided to make it part of Delaware.

This almost forgotten bit of history lives on in some of the place names north of Newark like "Top of the Wedge" or "Wedge Hills."

These are just a few of the many strange truths about the Delaware border. For example, many of us in Delaware actually live east of the Mason-Dixon line. They drew our western boundary before turning west to create the part of the line that they are most known for.

Also, the Delaware boundary is the only one in the marked, in part, with boundary monuments made of stone from a different country. Mason and Dixon used a "light buff oolitic limestone cut on the Isle of Portland, Dorsetshire, England" to mark parts of the line.

The Delaware Geological Survey maintains a database of the boundary markers, some of which can be visited.

If Ya Can't Beat 'Em?

Delaware's public discourse is increasingly moving into the world of blogs.

Kent County realtor Phil McGinnis has started a blog called Kent Delaware Land Use Issues. He's used his first post to posit some arguments against the subdivision moratorium enacted last week by the Kent County Levy Court.

I imagine that he noticed the effectiveness of blogs in the recent election, which brought new Levy Court Commissioners into office with a mandate to do something about the pace of growth in the county.

Echos of A Delaware Story

I've stayed mostly out of the Representative Atkins story, but I can't help noticing that it is starting to spread.

I think it is appropriate that the aspect of this story that has spread most is the backlash against Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) after they issued a statement supporting Ocean City Maryland police who apparently released a driver they considered too impaired to continue driving without charges.

I note that they did not let him get back behind the wheel. That's important.

On Saturday, January 13, DelawareLiberal posted the story on DailyKos. He was interested in getting the word out beyond the Delmarva Peninsula. I haven't found any blog postings that credit that DailyKos posting as a source, but I'm seeing the story elsewhere.

The story was also on the Libertarian Reason Magazine's Hit & Run blog on Saturday. Reason editor Randy Balko, a FoxNews.Com columnist, wrote MADD at Drunk Drivers, but Not Influential Ones, in which he questions MADD's motives in taking the position they took. In this he is supported by his commenters, who almost unanimously are angry at MADD.

(As I'm working on this, I see that Hube, at Rhodey, has picked up on the Reason post. And so has DelawareLiberal.)

Balko credits a DUI lawyer named Lawrence Taylor as his source. In a post on his DUI Blog on January 12 (OK to Let .14% Driver Go -- If He's Politician), Taylor wrote:

MADD has apparently developed a separate standard for politicians and police in its War on Drunk Driving.

Taylor, it is worth pointing out, spends most of his time on "Bad Drunk Driving Laws, False Evidence and a Fading Constitution." At least, that's the subtitle of his blog.

In a post on January 6, he wrote:

For many years now I've written and lectured extensively on drunk driving litigation --on the science of blood and breath alcohol analysis, the flaws in breathalyzers, the ineffectiveness of field sobriety testing. In recent years, however, my focus has increasingly shifted to the gradual erosion of constitutional rights in DUI cases.

Taylor is not the only DUI lawyer to chime in.

Atlanta attorney George C. Creal Jr. had the story on his DUI Weblog on January 11 in a posting titled "Benefit of Clergy? Ocean City Delaware Cops let drunk Republican Legislator Go!" I note that Mr. Creal has not picked up on the fact that Ocean City is in Maryland, and not Delaware.

Mr. Creal says, of the Ocean City Police Department:

It is waging a public relations campaign to explain to the public that field sobriety evaluations are relative and not pass/fail. This is testimony that you would never hear on the witness stand from a police officer and should provide excellent fodder for able DUI attorneys in the area.

What I don't understand is Mr. Creal's reference to "Benefit of Clergy."

On Sunday, January 14, Chicagoan Mark Draughn picked up the story from the Reason Hit & Run blog and wrote Not So MADD About Some People... on his WindyPundit blog. Here is another blogger, by the way, who missed the "across state lines nature" of the story. (Please, people, we don't want Ocean City. Maryland can keep it.)

It has been fascinating to watch this story unfold. It was Delaware bloggers who stayed on it and forced the traditional media to pay attention. That's good, as I think this is not an issue that should be swept aside. On the other hand, I think some folks have gone too far in using this to hammer Representative Atkins. He has issues to deal with, to be sure, but the more important aspect is the notion that some drivers get breaks that others do not.

Also, as in most stories of this sort, the real questions arise from the participants' reactions to, and efforts to manage, the story.

Meanwhile, Jud Bennett sent an e-mail to his extensive Coastal Conservative e-mail list yesterday asking for a pause in the invective:

The story seems to have taken on a life of its own with no end in sight and has turned into one of the most vicious, malicious, and cruel witch hunts in the history of the State of Delaware.

I'm not sure that this e-mail was intended to serve as a "Jud's Rant." As of this writing (10:25 a.m., 1/15/07), it has not been added in the traditional Jud's Rant spot on First State Politics. It was, however, appropriated by Dan Gaffney and posted on the WGMD blog. I don't know whether this was Jud's intention or not.

I can't fully disagree with Jud, but I think Hube puts it well in his comment this morning on the WGMD blog:

Yes, there has been ridiculous speculation and hyperbole about Atkins; however, the anger amongst the laymen results in knowing that if this was THEM, they’d have been arrested, lost their license, and would now have a record.

Finally, let me point to a MySpace posting (of all places) for one of the most thoughtful reactions
I've seen to this story.

RudeBwoy381 is a 25-year newspaper editor in Georgetown. He says:

The singular focus on Atkins' particular case, however, obscures a larger and more-dangerous problem, in Delaware and, really, all over the place.

DUI is practically a sport in Delaware. Start thinking of people you know who have a DUI on their record.. the list is probably longer than you think.

He suggests that bars be provided with Breathalyzers and that they take the lead on keeping drunks out of their cars. That might help. He goes further, though, and points to a larger problem of our perception of alcohol:

This is what truly bothers me: from the time you are young, it is beat into your head that alcohol is not really a drug. Remember MADD presentations in elementary school? They always talked about "drugs and alcohol." Drugs and alcohol?

Think about what this means. Reasonable, educated people are coming into classrooms and telling your children that alcohol is somehow separate from other drugs. So is it any surprise that kids aren't that concerned about drinking? Look at some of these MySpace surveys that ask when you took your first alcoholic drink. I didn't until I was 18, and I think I held out the longest of anyone whose survey I read, besides possibly my sister, and I'm not even sure about that.

He concludes:

With all of the damage that alcohol does to people, how can it be the least-regulated drug in the world?

RudeBwoy381, please move your writings to a platform less odious than MySpace. I'd like to read you more.

Delaware's Blogosphere Continues to Grow

I wanted to take a moment to highlight, in no particular order, a few new Delaware blogs that have come on-line recently.

Woody's Solutions was a New Year's resolution by Mark, a network administrator in Dover. It's early yet, but Mark looks to me like a dependable generalist.

The BrianMannBlog is a blog by, well, Brian Mann. Brian is step-son to Jud Bennett, who guest-posts on First State Politics. I had just left a comment there recently wishing wistfully that Jud had his own blog when someone pointed me to Brian's.

Brian played a small role in the recent Abramoff scandal, and he has started working though that experience on-line. Brian is an imaginative fellow; his retelling mixes fact and fantasy as he imagines dialog with Abramoff and others to explore issues, thoughts and feelings that grew from his experience. I look forward to the rest of the story.

Brian is also a nice fellow, who has had great advice for me in my recent bout with sciatica.

The Delaware Curmudgeon is a new blog by Shirley Vandever, whose comments I've noticed from time to time on the News Journal's StoryChat section. I think she is a fairly dedicated libertarian. That should make for some interesting commentary.

And there are a few other blogs that are not particularly new, but were new to me.

The Lone Haranguer is an homage to Daffy Duck, from Mic, of Wilmington.

Dover Citizen is from David Anderson, a politician in Dover.

Mac & Cheese is a vegetarian foodie blog, from Wilmington.

I'm probably missing some others, but wanted to recognize a few. I'm having great fun reading thoughts from all around the First State.

Mr. Burris, Re-Name That Blog!

I stopped by Dave Burris' First State Politics this evening and found a new feature: The Conservative Corner, a new, apparently to-be-regular, guest-post by pro-development activist Rich Collins.

This is Rich's first foray into the world of modern blogging and his bid to stake a claim to be the voice of Sussex County Conservatism. It joins the regular "Jud's Rant" feature in which former Lewes Councilman Jud Bennett has been tracking and commenting on Sussex County issues for some time now.

As I read through Rich's opening essay, I found myself thinking (in the voice of James Earl Jones and with ominous tympani and horn accompaniment), "And so, the battle for the soul of the Sussex County Republican Party begins in earnest."

For those of who don't follow the growth and development issues of Sussex County, Jud and Rich have been often on opposite sides of the argument.

Jud, who ran for County Council some years back and very nearly won, argues for growth control and land-use planning.

Rich fronts an organization known as the Positive Growth Alliance, which campaigns forcefully against state environmental regulations and land-use planning initiatives that it sees as threatening the free market. Or something like that.

Dave Burris is about to become the Chair of the Sussex County Republican Party (once college football is done). His blog has been a well-written, usually clear and respectable voice advocating Republican positions on Delaware and national issues. I give him a great deal of credit for opening his blog to the verbal food-fights of the Sussex Rebublicateria.

But now, as he gets ready to take on a leadership role, I wonder if Dave shouldn't re-name his blog. Something like "Sussex Republicans Gone Wild?"

Welcome, Weary MBA Student

When you have a chance, pay a visit to Dino's Journal.

Dino is a young man from Indonesia who will be arriving in Delaware this month as an MBA student at the University of Delaware.

He recently tried out PlaceBlogger and found Newarking. He was pleased to learn a bit more about the place he'll be studying.

I've added him to my blog-roll and look forward to his impressions of our small state.

An Albino Deer? Or An Echo From the Distant Past?

Driving past the old parade ground in Cape Henlopen State Park this afternoon, I saw a small heard of deer grazing by the tree line. This is not unusual; the Whitetail Deer feel safe enough to graze there most of the year.

What caught my eye, though, was an apparently all-white deer. I had to try for a photo.

This was taken at a distance and with a bit of zoom. It is not as sharp as I would like. In addition, the white deer seemed to shine in the late-day sun. I was not able to get it properly in focus.

Are there albino deer? There seem to be. From my quick research, I'm guessing that this was either an albino or a piebald deer.

I was also fascinated to find references to a legend of a Great White Deer from the Lenape people who first lived in this area.

I've Gotta Get Me One of These!

Today I had the opportunity to take a geocaching trip to Cape Henlopen State Park with my brother Matt, his wife and daughters, and my parents. Matt and family were given a geocaching starter-kit by Matt's sister-in-law and her partner for Christmas.

This isn't quite the first time I've tried this. For the last several years we have organized a GPS-based or geocaching-style activity as part of the Delaware GIS Conference. I helped field-test a set of way-points tied to Cape Henlopen's World War II history interpretation.

I am surprised that I have not yet gotten myself a GPS unit. GPS has become a tool in geospatial data development, which is my field. On the other hand, I'm in data coordination and not in field data collection.

I'm thinking about getting a GPS now, though. I'm not sure that geocaching is my sport, though it is fun. What I'd like to do is use a GPS to collect point locations of the various neat things I find in my wandering around Delaware.

The Park was active today. The weather was warm and there was bright sunshine. Lots of folks were out enjoying the dunes and pine woods of the Park.

It Is An Ill Blog Post That Yields No New Words

I was going to swear-off pointing to "I Hate Delaware" blog postings, but one of the several that have resulted from Christmas traffic back-ups on I-95 in northern Delaware offers a word I had not heard: Shunpiking.

I found that word in a set of links on avoiding the Delaware Turnpike at the end of a post entitled "Ban Delaware" on Backwards City.

Shunpiking refers, of course, to finding ways around toll routes. The drive-around for the Delaware Turnpike has been the subject of some on-line conversation lately.

The fuss, by the way, tends to arise from traffic back-up associated with the toll plazas on I-95. Complainers advocate doing away with those tolls, or with Delaware altogether.

We can't get rid of the tolls, though. Our state runs on cash from out-of-staters. It's worked well so far; why change now?

In Which We Head Down a Familiar Road (But Get Lost Anyway)

I maintain Google alerts for a few topics, one of which is "Delaware." I'm curious to know what's being written about us out there along the back roads of the information superhighway system.

The results have focused mostly around two aspects of Delaware: the resort area and our roads. Neither subject area is surprising. Our beaches are our pride and our roads are sometimes our shame (as they are for many states).

This morning, Google alerted me to what may be a definitive "roads" site, a blog called On the Road that focuses entirely on the minutiae of American highways. It's the blog of a "roadphile" collective known as All About Roads, co founded by a former Delawarean named Alex Nitzman who had been collecting an posting photographs of Delaware Road signs.

Mr. Nitzman returned to northern Delaware recently and has written a comprehensive critique of recent road improvements and signage changes.

He has things to say about new road work and alignments, such as the new Route 141 Spur, which he argues is not a spur.

So much for the new “Delaware 141 Spur” being an actual spur. Instead the “Spur” is a relocated Delaware 141 mainline. Why is it so difficult to get the nomenclature right in the state of Delaware?

And he has many thoughts about the highway signs that have been replaced along upstate highways.

Not only are new signs installed everywhere, but the signs installed display exactly the same thing that the editions in which they replaced did! I believe DelDOT was quoted as stating that each sign costs between $25,000 to $50,000 each in 1997, and that cost most certainly has gone up since that time. So with that kind of expenditure, was it necessary to replace 80% of the guide signs along Interstate 95 north from Delaware 141 to U.S. 202 given the fiscal crisis?

I was interested to note that he also calls attention to the use of "Must Exit" on some signs in Delaware instead of the "Exit Only" that appears to be a highway signage standard; at least based on the the surprised looks I read about here and in other Delaware highway rants.

TINGB wrote about that wording in her report on driving home to DC through northern Delaware this fall:

Julie: Here's the exit.
Me: Why does it say "Must Exit" instead of "Exit Only?"
Julie: Because this is Delaware, and Delaware is stupid.

I did a little desultory Googling this morning on this "Must" vs "Only" thing. I was unable to find any definitive "standard" language that sets one as the right verbiage to use. I did find a marvelously incomprehensible discussion of research on highways and exits at the Federal Highway Administration's Highway Research Center. It may be in there, but please don't make me read any more of that. If there are any highway engineers in the audience, please leave a polite note correcting me.

This standards-confusion is not unusual, by the way. In government I find many things that are assumed to be "standard" by everyone, even though there's been no official "finding," because almost everyone is following the assumed standard. And, conversely, when there is a standard officially declared, most folks in government will ignore it.

Here are two items that need additional research:

1. What in the name of all that is oily is the derivation of the phrase "exit gore area" that I kept finding in my highway standards spelunking? The definition is "The area located immediately between the left edge of a ramp pavement and the right edge of the mainline roadway pavement at a merge or diverge area." But why "gore?" It can't be why I think it might be, can it?
2. Why do I always type "standrads" instead of "standards?" Is it Freudian?
   

Me? I'm Tickled. Tickled Pink.

I am happier than I probably should be about this, but I am quite pleased that Mike's Musings is recognized in the January issue of Delaware Today magazine in a brief list of "10 Delacentric blogs you've got to see."

Mahaffie waxes poetic on many subjects with a high degree of grace and humor. His subjects run the gamut from art to politics to family life, but we especially enjoy his musings on Sussex County culture.

That's very nice. I do try for grace and I value humor.

The list includes a few of my favorites: Down With Absolutes, Delaware Watch, Kilroy, Hube and the boys at Rhodey, and Pulp Culture.

It left out some of my favorites too: TommyWonk, Sneaking Suspicions, First State Politics, and Delawareliberal (where they were somewhat miffed).

Darn that Pete Schwartzkopf, He's Such a ...

Radio Station WGMD now has a Team Blog, Talk of Delmarva, which appears to replace their WGMD Forums. A team blog means you get a variety of voices.

I was interested to see two different posts in the last few days that take very different angles on the 14th District Representative Pete Schwartzkopf.

Yesterday, Dan Gaffney wrote a post, Stuck in Sussex by Heroin Needles, which accuses Rep. Schwartzkopf of lying about the legislation authorizing a needle-exchange program for Wilmington.

Whether you approve of a needle-exchange program or not, the quotes that Dan pulls from a recent News Journal article on the program seem awfully selective to me. And even so, they don't suggest to me that Rep. Schwartzkopf was lying.

But I'm not really interested in arguing the point.

What does interest me is today's post, What Would You Give Your Neighbor For Christmas?, This one, by a Maria Evans (she is said to be "fiesty"), is about Pete's donating one of his kidneys to a neighbor.

So who is this "Pete Schwartzkopf?" A lying political manipulator who wants everyone hooked on heroin? Or an incredibly generous man, willing to sacrifice for his friends?

I've met him. I think I know which.

Does Delaware Need a Better PR Firm?

There's another Washingtonian who is annoyed by traffic on I-95 in Delaware. Well, another who has blogged about it. I'm sure there are more who haven't.

The unnamed author of a blog named "Time I'll Never Get Back" has written two posts about the holiday and Delaware's section of I-95.

In the first, a Travel Advisory last Monday, she noted that "Delaware is acting like the bratty child we always knew it was." She was annoyed by the lane closures related to bridge construction.

She first warned fellow-travelers to avoid Delaware during the holidays, then posted an update, based on reporting in the Washington Post, that the lane closures may be out of the way by the heavy travel part of the holiday. She still objected to having to pay the toll, though.

After a pleasant family interlude somewhere north of Delaware, Miss Time returned to DC yesterday and avoided the nasty back-ups of I-95 in Delaware by taking some other road than I-95. She complains about her brother not having told her this secret to painless travel before her drive north, but was pleased to have worked out out for her return trip.

Do people not realize that there are other roads than I-95 in Delaware? Are there no maps? Or is hating Delaware just too popular a pass-time?

UPDATE: Of course, back-roading it is not always the best idea.

Before. And After.

The restaurant 33 West, at 33 West Loockerman Street, in Dover, has a picture hanging up of what the building it lives in looked like way back when.

I don't know exactly when, but before my time, the building held a drugstore, the Sun Ray Drug Company. There was a Singer store next door. Loockerman Street lacked trees. It looks freshly paved and has those new-fangled parking meters.

Many years later, the Singer store is gone. Street trees planted since those two young women posed on the corner above have prospered and now tower above the buildings. Concrete sidewalks have been replaced with brick. There are no more parking meters, but parking time is limited. The drugstore has been replaced by a popular Dover eatery.

I recommend the Turkey Burger.