Kentucky Bend - The Earthquake Exclave RoadyGoat
1811You are near the strangest piece of real estate in America. Kentucky Bend is an exclave of Kentucky completely surrounded by Tennessee and the Mississippi River. You cannot drive here from the rest of Kentucky. The only road in comes through Tennessee. It exists because of an earthquake. On December 16, 1811, the first of the New Madrid earthquakes struck, estimated at magnitude 7.5 or higher. The quakes were so violent they made the Mississippi River appear to flow backwards and created Reelfoot Lake when the ground collapsed. The river's course was dramatically altered. When surveyors later marked the Kentucky-Tennessee border along the 36 degree 30 line, they found the line intersected a deep northward oxbow in the Mississippi. Kentucky's western border was defined as the river. Tennessee's border was the straight survey line. The result was a peninsula of Kentucky land surrounded on three sides by water and cut off from its own state by Tennessee. About eleven square miles of bottomland that was once cotton country. Today only a handful of people live here. Their mail comes through Tennessee. Their children go to school in Tennessee. But the land is Kentucky, because two hundred years ago the earth shook hard enough to bend a river and strand a county.
