How the Carolinas Fixed Their Blurred Lines

Aug 26, 2014 | New York Times
View Original

Border disputes between American states are as old as the republic, but in today’s highly charged political atmosphere they often take an ugly turn.Georgia and Tennessee, to cite the loudest current example, are trading insults and ultimatums over a strip of land barely a mile wide. In 1990 Georgia marched South Carolina to the Supreme Court over a handful of islands in the Savannah River (South Carolina prevailed). New Jersey did the same to New York a few years later over landfill around Ellis Island. When New Jersey won, Rudolph W. Giuliani, then the mayor of New York City, quipped, “It must have been a fix.”

So it may come as a surprise that North and South Carolina, two states better known for philandering politicians and restrictive voter ID laws than progressive politics, are quietly collaborating on an enormous undertaking to re-mark their misplaced 334-mile common boundary