Grassfire War

I was born in Rugby, North Dakota – which since the 1920s has called itself “the Geographic Center of North America”.

It’s kind of a chamber of commerce flim-flam – how to you calculate the geographic center of an irregular shape, like a continent?

But what matters is that Rugby trademarked the phrase waaaay back when.  As in “decades before I was born there”.

And that designation – fanciful or real or somewhere in between – has been Rugby’s sole claim to fame (that and being my birthplace, natch) for as long as anyone can remember.

And that may be in jeopardy:

“We thought, we could make an equal case just as much as Rugby can,” he said. So the friends “sort of offhandedly” declared their bar to be the geographical center.

A few weeks later, after another late night at the bar, Mr. Bender checked to see if Rugby still owned the trademark. Turns out, it had lapsed in 2009. So Mr. Bender paid $375 to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, filled out some forms and snatched it up.

Now Hanson’s—a one-room bar decorated with Johnny Cash posters and a deer head on the wall, and which was previously best known for a contest that concludes with participants blowing pumpkins to smithereens with explosives—claims it is the real geographical center of North America. It has its own logo, its own T-shirt, and soon will have its own fair, Center Fest, trumpeting its new status. Mr. Bender has begun work on a monument.

I can imagine someone from the city’s chamber of commerce staring at the poor sap from City Hall who’d dropped the ball (that he or she had likely not known about) and saying “You had one job…”

3 thoughts on “Grassfire War

  1. I’ll probably be passing (near) Robinson on my bike going to Mandan next summer. I love these little town joints and will try to stop by Hanson’s and have a beverage. When I do I will definitely circle town on HUGHES ST. (Railroad Ave.).

  2. ” how to you calculate the geographic center of an irregular shape, like a continent?”

    You could make a model and find a good approximation of the balance point. Alaska and Hawaii screwed it for Rugby.

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