#8: Marble Hill

New York City, it goes without saying, is one of America's most interesting cities.  But this is even more true from a geographical standpoint, given that the city is composed of five boroughs - and five distinct counties - located on four different primary landforms (not including the many smaller islands that belong to one borough or another).  These are, of course, Manhattan Island, Staten Island, Long Island (home to both Brooklyn and Queens), and the New York mainland, home of the Bronx.

But there is a bit of Manhattan that does not conform to the commonly understood border distinctions.

Marble Hill neighborhood on Google Maps (click to enlarge).

Just north of the Harlem River, across from Manhattan Island, is the neighborhood of Marble Hill.  On a map, it appears simply to be part of the Bronx - but it isn't.  It's part of Manhattan.  Why is a neighborhood that's not on Manhattan Island part of Manhattan?  The answer is simple yet strange: it used to be.

The Harlem River is not, strictly speaking, a river, but a strait that separates Manhattan Island from the mainland.  It connects the Hudson River with the East River (itself not really a river) by way of Spuyten Duyvil Creek.  The problem that arose in the 1800s was that Spuyten Duyvil Creek was not terribly conducive to large maritime traffic, forcing ships to go all the way around Manhattan Island if they wanted to reach the East River.

The solution to this was the Harlem River Ship Canal, a straight, deep channel dug out to connect the Harlem and Hudson Rivers in a way that bypassed the original course of Spuyten Duyvil Creek.  Spuyten Duyvil Creek's course ran along the northern border of the Marble Hill neighborhood, then the northernmost point of Manhattan Island.  Once the canal had been dug (it was finished in 1895), Marble Hill was turned into an island.

1895 map showing the plan for the canal.  The island to the north of the canal is Marble Hill.  Source: http://myinwood.net/the-harlem-ship-canal/

In 1914, the original course of Spuyten Duyvil Creek was filled in.  Marble Hill thus became an island no longer; now it was physically attached to the Bronx.  That borough has attempted to lay claim to the neighborhood on at least one occasion - on March 11, 1939, Bronx borough president James Lyons made a pitch to the residents to join the Bronx, but was booed into submission.  Marble Hill gets its city services via the Bronx, presumably for the sake of convenience, and its zip code aligns more closely with those of the Bronx than with those of Manhattan proper.  But legally the neighborhood still belongs to Manhattan, and its residents are happy to keep it that way.  In fact, in 1984 the state legislature formally declared Marble Hill to be part of Manhattan.

Marble Hill today possesses both a stop on the 1 train (225th Street) and a Metro-North stop (Marble Hill) on the Hudson line that help keep it directly connected to Manhattan.  But it remains another one of those curious outposts whose residents value civic pride over geographical convenience.

Marble Hill.  Picture from the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marble_Hill,_Manhattan).

Sources:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bronx/marble-hill-caught-boroughs-article-1.1781901
http://myinwood.net/the-harlem-ship-canal/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/nyregion/attached-to-the-bronx-but-legally-in-manhattan.html?_r=0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spuyten_Duyvil_Creek
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_River_Ship_Canal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marble_Hill,_Manhattan

#7: Oecusse

Timor-Leste, also known as East Timor, is one of the newest sovereign states on the planet, having only gained full independence from Indonesia in 2002.  Initially a Portuguese colony, Timor-Leste declared its independence in 1975, when the entire Portuguese empire was breaking up (Guinea-Bissau became independent in 1974, while Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe all gained independence in 1975), but Indonesia proceeded to occupy the territory for the next quarter-century, only finally departing in 1999, which allowed a transition to full independence.

Looking at Timor-Leste on the map, something jumps out at you: the exclave of Oecusse.  It's a real quandary: how did one of the world's newest, smallest, and poorest nations manage to get away with holding onto a sliver of territory beyond its main national borders?  As usual, the answer lies in history, and in particular the history of colonization.

Timor-Leste in Google Maps.  The Oecusse exclave is on the north side of Indonesian Timor, separated by the national border line.

As far as anyone knows, the Portuguese were the first Europeans to visit the island of Timor in the 1500s, when the remnants of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition - post-Magellan's death in the Philippines - stopped briefly on their way back to Europe in 1522.  Traders began to visit the island the following year.  In short order, Portugal controlled a significant portion of territory in southeast Asia, from the southwest coast of India all the way to southern China.  By the mid-1600s, however, the Dutch had swept through the region, evicting the Portuguese from nearly every possession they had.  The Portuguese foothold was limited to a few small territories that they managed to hold for the next few centuries: Goa, Macau, and East Timor.

So, back to Timor itself.  The Dutch had established a firm presence on the western half of the island, with a fort at Kupang in the southwest, around 1613.  Meanwhile, the main Portuguese settlements were at Dili (now the capital of Timor-Leste) and Lifau, located in what is currently Oecusse.  The question is, how did we get to the point where the Dutch not only did not boot the Portuguese out of Timor as well, but couldn't even manage to take control of Oecusse?

Apparently, it has a lot to do with intermarriage.  The Portuguese colony managed to generate a significant mestizo population on the island, and this made the locals unwilling to see the Portuguese be completely replaced by the Dutch; too, the Portuguese missionaries had created many Catholic converts, and the Dutch Protestants were viewed more as outsiders.  In addition, the Portuguese held on just long enough to see the establishment of a peace treaty between the Netherlands and Portugal back in Europe which helped prevent the outbreak of full-on war between the two countries in the East Indies.  By the 1670s, the Dutch were actually trading more or less peacefully with the Portuguese faction at Lifau.

1943 US Army map denoting the line between Portuguese East Timor and the rest of what was then still Dutch territory.  Retrieved from http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/east_timor.html.

Ultimately, the difference between the two groups was that before too long, the Portuguese presence was made up mostly of Timorese locals who felt a connection to Portugal, while the Dutch presence was composed more of white Europeans.  Plus, it wasn't long before the Dutch had bigger regional fish to fry - namely the British, who had established significant presence in the region by the early 1700s.  By the mid-1800s, the Dutch and Portuguese had signed multiple treaties, and the 1859 Treaty of Lisbon officially ceded to Portugal the area around Oecusse where the local tribes were loyal to the Portuguese.

Basically, then, Oecusse owes its status as part of Timor-Leste to the simple fact that it was where Dominican missionaries first made converts way back in the 1550s.  These historic ties to Portugal kept it part of Portuguese territory all the way up through 1975, when it was the first part of East Timor to be invaded by the Indonesians following the declaration of independence.  Even when Timor-Leste finally became independent in 2002, they were able to hold onto their claim to this tiny outpost, which today has a population of about 60,000.  Fittingly, though, it, like the rest of Timor-Leste, is almost entirely Catholic, setting it distinctly apart from Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation in the world.

Most of the historical information in this entry comes from Hägerdal, Hans (2012), Lords of the Land, Lords of the Sea; Conflict and Adaptation in Early Colonial Timor, 1600–1800.  Other information from Wikipedia.

#6: Campobello Island

At the far eastern point of the United States mainland is a point called West Quoddy Head, Maine.  This is an oddity in itself - the easternmost point in continental America is named "West?" - although it turns out to have a prosaic explanation: to the east of the point is a strait known as Quoddy Narrows, and thus the point lies at the west head of Quoddy Narrows.

But we're not here to talk to about West Quoddy Head.  Instead, let's discuss the piece of land that lies on the other side of Quoddy Narrows: Campobello Island, Canada.

The border between Maine and New Brunswick has long been a matter of some dispute.  There was a brief "war" over it in the 1830s which led to the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, which clarified (in the same sort of excruciating geographic legalese as previous border treaties) the boundary.  This seems to have applied primarily to the northern border, however.  The border in southeast Maine, based on the mouth and initial course of the St. Croix River, does not appear to have changed or been claimed differently from how we know it today at any point prior to 1842, as seen on the map here.

Which brings us to Campobello Island.  The odd thing about Campobello isn't that it belongs to Canada; that's been well-established since Jay's Treaty of 1794.  The odd thing is that it's a part of Canada that is only reachable by road from somewhere other than Canada.  That's right: while there are vehicle ferries from Canada, the only road bridge to Campobello starts in the small town of Lubec, Maine.

Bridge crossing from Lubec to Campobello.  Image from http://makemytripadvisor.blogspot.com/2011/05/canada-travel-sensation.html.

In the late 1800s, New England had become a place where the well-to-do from New York and other major cities came to spend time during the summers due to the milder ocean climate and open space to build large seaside estates.  Campobello, though officially in Canada, became a commonly-visited part of that trade.  In the mid-1880s, James Roosevelt, scion of a prominent American family, purchased several acres of land on the island and built a summer home there.

By the 1910s and 1920s, the resort craze had died out, and the island's main industry returned to fishing.  So why, in 1962, was a bridge built from Lubec to Campobello?  Well, you probably already know: James Roosevelt was the father of the 32nd U.S. president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and FDR summered on the island regularly from 1909 until 1921.  The bridge, indeed, is named the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Bridge.

FDR isn't the only reason the bridge was built; Lubec, Maine and Campobello have expectedly close ties, and joining the two was the most reasonable location for a road crossing to Campobello, as the nearest Canadian mainland is roughly ten miles away, while Lubec is only a few hundred yards across a narrow channel.  But the 1964 opening of the Roosevelt Campobello International Park confirmed the utility of the crossing.

The park may be the oddest thing about Campobello itself, as it sits within Canada but is administered by a commission of citizens from both countries.  This makes it the only part of the National Park Service I'm aware of that one requires a passport to visit.

Google Maps image of the crossing between Lubec, ME and Campobello, showing the location of the international park.

#5: The Caprivi Strip

Many countries in the world have odd bits sticking out here and there, but perhaps one of the strangest is Namibia's Caprivi Strip, jutting out from the country's far northeast like an arm trying to dribble Botswana like a basketball.

Africa became one big European land grab in the late 19th century, and Namibia was no exception. While Britain claimed Walvis Bay - an excellent deep-water port, one of the few on southern Africa's Atlantic coast - in 1878, Germany proclaimed a protectorate over the whole area in the mid-1880s, building on missionary settlements begun in the 1840s and a piece of land ceded to a German trading firm in 1883.

German South-West Africa must have been a foreboding place for the colonists. Even by the standards of a continent that includes the world's largest desert, Namibia is exceptionally dry. It contains parts of two of the world's most foreboding desert landscapes, the Namib and the Kalahari. The country has around 300 sunny days every year, which is not necessarily a boon for agriculture. The only two major rivers that would have run through the colony were the Orange and the Okavango - and those were just along the edges, to say nothing of the fact that the Okavango doesn't actually flow into the ocean.

Map of Namibia, with the Caprivi Strip at the top right.

With all this in mind, it's not surprising that the Germans wanted better access to water resources, and the northeast of the protectorate was the place to go looking for them. The best bet - so they thought, anyway - was the Zambezi River, which rises in northwest Zambia, flows down through Angola, back into Zambia, and then forms much of the Zambia-Zimbabwe border before passing through Mozambique and into the Indian Ocean. In the 1880s, the Zambezi also touched on the British protectorate of Bechuanaland (modern Botswana) before reaching Zimbabwe. The Germans aimed to change that.

The British had been involved with the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of modern-day Tanzania, since the 1850s. But in 1885, the Germans showed up with a number of gunships and threatened the sultan of Zanzibar to give them his inland territory or else. The British and Germans subsequently worked out an arrangement in which each would get a sphere of influence on the mainland. Still, the Germans had their dry territory on the other side of the continent. So at a conference in Berlin in 1890, they agreed to drop their claim to Zanzibar in exchange for Heligoland, a group of small islands in the North Sea then controlled by Britain, and access to the Zambezi River from the west, which came in the form of the Caprivi Strip.

The course of the Zambezi, from NW Zambia near the middle top of the image, around past the Caprivi Strip and Zimbabwe and out through Mozambique.

The Germans were hopeful that the Zambezi would provide a way to connect their west coast territories with those on the east coast - despite dropping pretensions to Zanzibar, they still controlled much of mainland Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Unfortunately for Germany, the Caprivi Strip only reaches as far as the upper course of the Zambezi, and in its lower reaches at that. The Caprivi Strip extends more than 250 miles from the main portion of Namibia to reach its objective, but only about 40 miles from the Caprivi Strip's termination point comes one major obstacle that rendered navigation of the Zambezi from the Caprivi Strip to the Indian Ocean completely impossible: Mosi-oa-Tunya, better known to most of the world as Victoria Falls.

In truth, the Zambezi as a whole is ill-suited for long navigation due to rapids and sandbars, even with Victoria Falls removed from the equation. But with the Smoke that Thunders standing almost directly in their way, the Germans had no hope of linking up with the east coast; only some local navigation north into Zambia and Angola was possible. Nevertheless, the Caprivi Strip remained part of German South-West Africa, and it stayed with the territory as it became South-West Africa (under South African administration after World War I) and finally Namibia upon its 1990 independence from South Africa.

Victoria Falls. Oh, it's pretty, but just you try getting a steamship over it.

In its own way, the Caprivi Strip stands as one of the strangest-looking monuments to the European powers' cavalier attitude towards Africa - existing geography and tribal boundaries were no match for lines drawn on a map to satisfy sometimes shortsighted territorial aspirations.

Non-linked references:

Caprivi Strip history and general information from:

http://www.namibian.org/travel/namibia/caprivi.htm

http://www.namibia-travel.net/northnamibia/caprivi.htm

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/94246/Caprivi-Strip

General Namibian history from:

http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/world/A0859860.html

Namibian rainfall data from:

http://www.uyaphi.com/namibia/weather.htm

Information on the Zambezi River from:

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/655540/Zambezi-River

http://encyclopedia.farlex.com/Zambezi+valley

Information on Anglo-German relations in East Africa from:

http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ad52

Images from:

http://go.hrw.com/atlas/norm_map/namibia.gif

http://worldradio.ch/wrs/bm~pix/zambezi~s600x600.jpg

http://www.platinumglobaldestinations.com/South_Africa_2009/assets/victoria_falls.jpg

#4: The Kaliningrad Oblast

Perhaps the most famous exclave in the world, one of the more interesting things about Kaliningrad - née Königsberg - is that it's actually a two-time exclave.

Königsberg (perhaps most famous as the inspiration for a namesake math problem involving the city's bridges) was part of the state of Prussia by the mid-1500s and remained part of it up through the unification of Germany under Otto von Bismarck in 1871. Following Germany's defeat in World War I, however, the Germans were forced to cede West Prussia to Poland, in particular the "Polish Corridor," a strip of land that gave Poland access to the Baltic Sea near the port of Danzig (which was designated a "free city" belonging neither to Germany nor Poland). The Polish Corridor cut East Prussia off from the remainder of Germany, rendering it - and its key city, Königsberg - an exclave.

The German Empire at the time of the first World War. Königsberg is located just northeast of Danzig across that small inlet of the Baltic Sea known as the Gulf of Danzig.

Because Danzig was home to a large German population, being cut off from the rest of the country by Poland was not popular in Danzig, nor in the rest of Germany; in general, public resentment over the settlement of peace following World War I (and the way in which it hammered Germany in spite of the fact that they had not started the war [but were basically the only Central Power left to hammer]) helped lead to the rise of the Nazis and thus to World War II. A month after invading Poland on September 1, 1939, Germany annexed back the territory it had lost to the Poles two decades earlier, and Königsberg was no longer an exclave.

World War II-era map of the "collapse" of Poland, showing Germany's reoccupation of Polish territory around the former East Prussian exclave.

Of course, this didn't last. The Nazis were defeated and Germany was partitioned among the victors. While most of the Allies had no intention of permanently occupying Germany, however, the Soviet Union did. German territory east of the Oder and Neisse Rivers was largely handed over to Poland at the Potsdam Conference, but one particular bit of territory went the USSR's way:

The Conference examined a proposal by the Soviet Government to the effect that pending the final determination of territorial questions at the peace settlement, the section of the western frontier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which is adjacent to the Baltic Sea should pass from a point on the eastern shore of the Bay of Danzig to the east, north of Braunsberg-Goldap, to the meeting point of the frontiers of Lithuania, the Polish Republic and East Prussia.

The Conference has agreed in principle to the proposal of the Soviet Government concerning the ultimate transfer to the Soviet Union of the City of Koenigsberg and the area adjacent to it as described above subject to expert examination of the actual frontier.

Just why the Soviets were so hot for Königsberg - which they renamed Kaliningrad in the late 1940s - is a bit vague; Stalin declared it important to Soviet interests, so presumably they just wanted another major Baltic port. This was no problem until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991; previously, one could drive through Soviet territory uninterrupted from Moscow to Kaliningrad. But with Lithuania, Latvia and Belarus becoming independent, suddenly Kaliningrad was two countries away by ground in any direction! At a distance of more than 200 miles from the nearest Russian frontier, the Kaliningrad Oblast today is one of the world's farther-flung exclaves.

Google map of Kaliningrad today, two countries away from the nation to which it belongs.

Long a heavily German area, Kaliningrad today is populated almost entirely by "emigrated" Russians (the Germans were deported after World War II) and possesses a sizable military presence. Likely this is because, as the westernmost oblast in the Russian Federation, it's considered a good vantage point from which to keep tabs on NATO.

Non-linked references:
Map of Germany and Europe 1914 from http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/map01eu.htm
"Polish Collapse" map from http://history.sandiego.edu/cdr2/WW2Pics/51867big.jpg

#3: The Northwest Angle

Minnesota's northern border with Canada begins where the Pigeon River empties into Lake Superior, at almost exactly 48ºN latitude. It meanders through a series of lakes and rivers until reaching the Rainy River at International Falls; from there it traces the Rainy back up to Lake of the Woods. On the far western side of Lake of the Woods, Minnesota's land finally hits the 49th parallel, and the border levels off and runs due west from there, to the North Dakota border (and on to the Pacific). That all sounds like you'd expect it to - except that's not the whole story.

The Northwest Angle of Minnesota, the only part of the lower 48 states north of 49ºN latitude.

As you can see from the Google satellite map above, the border doesn't trace the Minnesota coast. Nor does it go to 49ºN within the lake and then cut across. Instead, it continues north and slightly west, wrapping around the piece of land known as the Northwest Angle before slicing back down on the same straight line that divides Manitoba and Ontario; when it reaches 49ºN latitude again, only then does it head due west.

The Angle is enough of an anomaly that many maps of Minnesota made in the years before its 1858 statehood didn't show it. Even after 1858, the maps weren't always current. This is embarrassing from a cartographic standpoint because the Angle had been officially U.S. territory since 1818, when an Anglo-American treaty cleared up a lingering problem created by errors in geography assumed by the 1783 Treaty of Paris - the one that ended the Revolutionary War.

This 1864 map by Johnson and Ward shows Minnesota's border never rising above the 49th parallel, even though Minnesota had been a state for six years by this point and had its northern boundary set for 46 years.

The Treaty of Paris, in setting peace between Britain and the newly-formed United States of America, had to set boundaries. The problem was that in 1783, no one was entirely sure where those boundaries were going to end up. The west coast of North America had been lightly explored; most of the interior was largely unknown. So when it came around to writing Article 2 of the treaty, defining the border between American and British territory, the diplomats for the two sides basically just guessed. (More accurately, they used the Mitchell Map, a mid-18th century document which itself either guessed or was just severely mistaken about the geography of the northwest.)

...thence through Lake Superior northward of the Isles Royal and Phelipeaux to the Long Lake; thence through the middle of said Long Lake and the water communication between it and the Lake of the Woods, to the said Lake of the Woods; thence through the said lake to the most northwesternmost point thereof, and from thence on a due west course to the river Mississippi; thence by a line to be drawn along the middle of the said river Mississippi until it shall intersect the northernmost part of the thirty-first degree of north latitude...

It goes on like that, in both directions. The problem should be obvious to any student of geography; the treaty provided for a line from the northwest point of Lake of the Woods west to the Mississippi, but the Mississippi doesn't go anywhere near that far north, terminating at Lake Itasca well over a degree of latitude south of Lake of the Woods. (It doesn't go that far west either; Lake Itasca is slightly east of Lake of the Woods' northwesternmost point.)

For a while this wasn't a huge deal; aside from fur trappers, who was spending much time in that part of America anyway? But with American and British relations on a knife edge after the War of 1812, firmer boundaries were needed. The Anglo-American Convention of 1818 provided them by writing over the error; the U.S. was still given the "northwesternmost point" of Lake of the Woods part of the 1783 treaty, but the 1818 convention sent the line due south to the 49th parallel as soon as the water ran out. Even in 1818, though, full surveys weren't available, and it doesn't seem anyone realized that a tiny piece of land would belong to the United States despite being on the other side of the lake.

This 1867 map by G.W. Colton was one of the first to include the Angle within U.S. borders.

The problem is the way Lake of the Woods is shaped; while the northwest corner appears at first glance to be within Buffalo Bay (visible in the satellite map above as the protrusion of water within Canadian territory just southwest of the Angle), a little piece of water that wraps around the Angle defines the actual northwest corner, rendering the Angle part of Minnesota by the 1818 treaty. (Oddly, the U.S. and Canada signed a 1925 treaty that was intended to more fully define the borders between the nations, but it makes no mention of the land in the Northwest Angle. Presumably Canada just wasn't interested in fighting over it.)

Some Angle residents talked secession in the late 90s when a dispute over differences in American and Canadian laws regarding fishing on the lake came to a head. A Minnesota congressman even introduced a resolution that would have allowed the Angle to become part of Manitoba should its residents vote for it, but the Red Lake Indians, whose reservation includes most of the Angle's land, were against it (and offended that they hadn't been consulted before the resolution was put forward). As of today, the Angle is still American, in spite of the fact that the fishing laws don't seem to have changed.

Like most remote exclaves, the Angle is sparsely populated; figures vary a bit, but the general consensus is that only about 150 people live in the Angle full-time. As the northernmost piece of the 48 states, it's hard to get to, an isolated piece of an already fairly isolated area (the entire Lake of the Woods county, most of which is south of the lake, has a population of just around 4,000). But its unique geographic circumstances make it a compelling outlier for anyone interested in the whys and wherefores of maps and borders.

Non-linked references:
Historical maps of Minnesota from http://alabamamaps.ua.edu/historicalmaps/us_states/minnesota/index.html

#2: Kilcohook Coordination Area

I grew up in New Jersey and have spent my entire life being fascinated by maps, so one of the strangest bits of geopolitical marking I've ever seen was also one of the first I noticed. That's because it appears on the New Jersey map - a strange little nub northwest of Salem that sticks out into the Delaware River estuary. This nub, marked on my 2009 road atlas as the "Kilcohook Coordination Area" but known to Google Maps as "Killcohook National Refuge," just happens to belong to the state of Delaware.

Google Maps view of "Killcohook National Refuge," with the dashed line demarcating its separation from New Jersey on the river's east bank and alliance with Delaware to the west.

So how to explain this oddity? In 1732, Lord Baltimore met with representatives of William Penn's family to set the border between Pennsylvania and colonies below it. What is now Delaware's northern boundary was determined by a 12-mile radius extending outward from the New Castle courthouse.

Such a radius also technically gave Delaware claims to land on the New Jersey side of the river. These claims were never seriously pursued, but Delaware did maintain a claim over the entire river; while usually water boundaries fall down the middle of the body of water in question, the original 1682 land grant to William Penn included the entirety of the river up to the New Jersey shoreline. (The grant was cited in a recent Supreme Court decision that allowed Delaware to block industrial development on the New Jersey side.)

Of course, none of this would have anything to do with Kilcohook were it not for the Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps was involved in dredging the lower Delaware River in the first part of the 20th century, and the massive amounts of silt and mud that resulted had to be put somewhere. They ended up on the New Jersey side of the river - but because Delaware laid claim to the entire river up to the low tide line on the New Jersey side, they also laid claim to any land generated by the Corps on the river's side of the old low tide line. Kilcohook was the result.

This 1777 map of the area shows no Delaware territory on the New Jersey side. A map of Delaware from the early 19th century also shows no territory across the river.

In 1934, the government declared the area a National Wildlife Refuge; however, the status was revoked in 1998 because the land was too much of a dump for the Corps and not enough of a refuge for wildlife, explaining why current maps call that bit of land a "coordination area."

You can actually visit Kilcohook; while the area is technically supposed to be off-limits, it seems not to be guarded and hikers and bikers can easily enter (though car traffic cannot). Of course, it's not exactly Point Roberts; a reporter for a local ABC station visited Kilcohook and described it as looking "like one big construction site, without the wood, cement and bricks." New Jersey sure doesn't need any more construction sites. Enjoy, Delaware!

Non-linked references:
Information about the courthouse radius from http://www.nps.gov/history/nhl/designations/samples/de/NCCO.pdf, pages 8 and 9
1777 New Jersey map from http://mapmaker.rutgers.edu/MAPS.html
Mention of the Corps of Engineers and the dredging of the river at http://www.wdel.com/blog/?postid=1277
Killcohook NWR info and "construction site" quote from http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/local&id=4874172