Kentucky Bend

Kentucky Bend is a teardrop of farmland belonging to Kentucky that touches no other part of the state. It fills a tight hairpin loop of the Mississippi River, with Missouri across the water on two sides and Tennessee on the third. The oddity goes back to the survey of the Kentucky–Tennessee line, which was run west across the country and only estimated where it would meet the Mississippi. When later surveyors traced the river's meanders, the line cut straight across the loop, stranding the tip on the far side.

Only nine people lived there at the 2020 census, down from a peak of 332 in 1880. The only road in comes from Tennessee, and residents have Tiptonville, Tennessee mailing addresses. Locals know the area as Madrid Bend or Bessie Bend. It lies in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, close to the epicenters of the great earthquakes of 1811 and 1812, which shook this stretch of the Mississippi so hard that the river briefly appeared to run backward.

• Missouri
  The Show-Me State, meeting of the great rivers borders
• Tennessee
  The Volunteer State, a long ribbon across the South borders
• The Mississippi River
  The great river that drains the American heartland bounded by
• Kentucky
  The Bluegrass State, between the Appalachians and the Mississippi located in
• Carter Lake, Iowa
  An Iowa city on the Nebraska side of the Missouri River related