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Buffalo and Cleveland have both been described as the "easternmost Midwestern city and westernmost city of the East." The Cuyahoga River itself has been described as a boundary between the Midwest and the Northeast.
In 1763, when the two countries stopped fighting in the Appalachian regions of the U.S. and Canada, they signed the Treaty of Paris, which officially granted Canada and the French lands in the modern-day U.S. to Britain. The treaty called for a dividing line between the countries’ territories “drawn along the middle of the river Mississippi from its source to the river Iberville,” which ceded the western side to France the eastern side to America.
With this new treaty, there was a western boundary. But during the era of the Revolution,
the Allegheny Mountains created not only a physical boundary but a mental one as well. The
mountains conveniently created the first boundary by which writers could start compartmentalizing and differentiating American regions. A short time after the Revolution,
Thomas Jefferson wrote that the Allegheny Mountains were “in fact the spine of the country
between the Atlantic on one side, and the Mississippi and St. Laurence on the other.”
Jefferson was not the first writer of the late 18th century to presume that the Alleghenies divided the country into eastern and western halves. The common theory of the time was that the Alleghenies, or “endless mountains,” cleanly delineated the east, or civilization, from the west, or wilderness.
I don't think you're getting my point here. It's a moot point if Detroit hat more people than Saint Louis in 1810, because at that time all of the "cities" were what we'd now consider tiny hamlets. Detroit has no structures at all remaining from this era (the oldest house in Detroit ins from 1826) and Saint Louis and Cincinnati only have a handful.
What matters a lot more is when the cities became big. Cincinnati surpassed 100,000 people some time in the late 1840s. Saint Louis in the early 1850s. Detroit only hit this point by the mid 1870s however. It's 19th century core was significantly smaller than the other two cities, and to a larger extent (albeit not completely, like in the Sun Belt) swallowed up by expansion of the CBD and other redevelopment in the early to mid 20th century. It also leads to the cities having very different architectural forms not only due to differing local vernaculars, but different time periods. Cincinnati has a lot of surviving Italianate architecture, for example, because it was a big deal in the U.S. from around 1845 till the 1870s. Detroit, not so much.
Oh, I got the point, I was just correcting your statement that St. Louis and Cincinatti were larger than Detroit throughout the 19th century. I showed that Detroit was bigger than St. Louis in 1810, that's all.
Michigan and Ohio don't much want the Midwest label either.
Quote:
If Michigan has a Midwest identity crisis, it’s because the state fits snugly into a number of other areas, not the least of which is Rust Belt.
“The Midwest is essentially a cultural construct, to use a fancy word,” says Andrew Cayton, distinguished professor of history at Miami University in Ohio. “It is what people think it is. Like a lot of identities, it is what you want to call it.”
Cayton ought to know. He and two other scholars edited The American Midwest, a 1,890-page encyclopedia of U.S. life across the northern latitudes between Pennsylvania and Wyoming.
Researchers discovered that Michigan and Ohio were among the last states to embrace the notion of Midwest. And both states are reported to be “uncomfortably labeled” as such.
“We decided to present as much information about this area we called the Midwest as we could,” Cayton says. “Let the fighting begin whether or not Missouri and Michigan should be in the same region.”
Frankly I just call it the north. Midwest, northeast. The north.
But then Massachusetts gets grouped with Iowa.
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