Georgia Seeks to Annex Part of Southeast Tennessee

I’ve been reading Eric Flynt’s 1812: The Rivers of War an alternate-history fictional retelling of events during the War of 1812 in which the antics of some land-grabbing Georgians play a role.

So I was oddly amused to hear about current real-world antics of land- (and water-) grabbing Georgians. From the Tennesseean:

A resolution in Georgia’s legislature proposes to move the Tennessee-Georgia boundary about a mile to the north of where it now lies[...] The proposal elicited instant ridicule from residents of the area on Thursday, as well as tongue-in-cheek saber rattling from Tennessee lawmakers.

One state senator offered to settle the issue with a football game. Another suggested floating an armada of University of Tennessee fans down the Tennessee River to defend the state’s territory.

But behind the amusement is a serious issue that has bedeviled the Southeast: access to water. If the border is redrawn, the new state line would fall across Nickajack Reservoir. That would allow parched Georgians to tap into the waters of the dammed Tennessee River.[...]

The resolution, which has passed early hurdles but has not received final passage, claims that the boundary was erroneously surveyed in 1818 and that Georgia has never accepted it. The resolution calls for the creation of a “Georgia-Tennessee Boundary Line Commission” that would perform joint surveys and change the line to the “definite and true” boundary line: exactly following the 35th parallel.

Of course, it should be remembered that while Tennessee’s border was supposed to be set at the 35th parallel, 19th century surveyors were notoriously inaccurate about identifying the precise location of that line of latitude. If memory serves, the Tennessee State Constitution which includes a definition of the borders of the state, avoids specifying a specific line of latitude.

Why, even the famous intersection of 35° North, 90° West (famous to me, at least, since my bedroom growing up was precisely on 90° West) is a couple of miles inside Tennessee.

In case you’re wondering (and because I want to test out a modification to how I do the “Highway Feature of the Week” on this site), here’s a Google Maps view of the Alabama-Georgia-Tennessee tripoint, which shows just how close the border is to the reservoir in question: