Politics, Typos, Errors and Whiskey For the most part the Tennessee - Kentucky border is a straight line.  That is, at least from the east heading west across to Simpson County Kentucky.  When it reaches Simpson County the straight line dips south 8 miles at an angle then returns back north creating a southern “Jog” of a triangular shape.  That is known as the Simpson County Jog and is the home of Franklin, Kentucky.  Franklin has two other claims to fame.  First, they offer interesting tours the old jail and courthouse, second, Johnny Cash and June Carter drove up from Nashville and were married in Franklin back in the ‘60’s --- in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout. Even more interesting is that the “triangular Jog” shape has an even smaller (101 acre) “bite” taken out of it on the east side.  One can look at the area using Google Maps and zoom in to see how that little “bite” affects the Jog. Continuing west from the Simpson County Jog for a while, the Kentucky boundary suddenly takes about a 30 mile dip due south, turns west, and then continues in a straight all the way to the Mississippi River.  That border, along with the New Madrid Bend in the river created a small piece of Kentucky that is not contiguous with the rest of the state.  That’s called the Kentucky Bend.  The only way to get to “The Bend” is through Tennessee.  Population in the bend is around 17. It used to be more back in the day, but the 60 year long Darnell - Watson feud reduced the population a bit. Now, one might get curious as just how the border ever got drawn this way.  Well, it all boils down to politics, typos, errors, and whiskey. The Simpson Jog harkens back to the Walker Survey of 1780 (yep, 1780) where two things happened.  First, the surveyors were  trying to use the position of the sun to guide them on a very cloudy day.  Second was that a local landowner used a jug of whiskey secreted in an oak tree as a bribe to the surveyors to ensure that all his land stayed in what is now Kentucky.  One could speculate that the whiskey might have had more effect on the surveyors’ bearings than the cloudy day, but that would be pure conjecture.  At any rate, since the survey was an official survey the “Blackjack Oak Jog” stuck and was incorporated into the border. Now this infuriated a Tennessee (it was actually Virginia at the time) farmer named Middleton whose farm was now divided into two.  It took him a while, but because of his political influence he finally got the Powers-That-Be to survey the part of his farm that was in the Simpson Jog.   As you might expect, that survey ended up creating the 101 acre “bite”.  Eventually someone who was in a position to decide, decided, and from that point on the 101 acre “bite in the Jog” was magically in Tennessee.  It is now known as the Middleton Offset.  It is not known if whiskey had any part in this decision, but whiskey was a kind of currency in those days. The anomaly of the border west of the Jog and Offset is purely due to an error.  One of the surveyors misread an older map  and ended up creating the point where the border goes straight south for about 30 miles.  Either not noticing the error, or perhaps the whiskey jug wasn’t quite empty when he started work that day, he went due west from the wrong starting point.  Since no one found out until the survey was filed, accepted, and officially stamped, the error stuck. It has also been said that even earlier surveys of the line were off and that the entire line between Kentucky and Tennessee is off by around 50 miles; it should have been about 50 miles south from where it is now, jogs, offsets, and errors notwithstanding.  Apparently the King decided where the border should be way long before the Revolution and that original survey was about 50 miles short. The only reason that any of this is mentioned is that when errors become official strange things happen.  An official error is like a government program.  Once created it takes an Act of Congress to change it, and it seldom actually gets fixed.                  And Fairhope2 has such an error lurking in its past........