The Geographic Center of North America

For most of a century, the little town of Rugby, North Dakota, has claimed a peculiar distinction. It calls itself the geographic center of all of North America.

The claim goes back to nineteen thirty-one. An employee at the United States Geological Survey office reportedly balanced a cardboard cutout of the continent on a pencil point and found that it teetered evenly somewhere in Pierce County, about fifteen miles from Rugby. The town seized on the idea. In the summer of nineteen thirty-two, the local Boy Scout troop stacked a fieldstone obelisk near the biggest crossroads in town, and Rugby even changed its seal to an outline of the continent with itself as a single dot.

The math has since been challenged. More careful calculations point to a spot near a town actually named Center, North Dakota. But Rugby got there first, and it is not letting go.