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Mean Center of Population
The country's population balance point, drifting west and south
The mean center of population is the spot where a flat, rigid map of the United States would balance if every person weighed the same - the demographic, rather than geographic, middle of the country. The Census Bureau recalculates it after each census, and it has marched steadily westward and, in recent decades, southward, tracing the great movements of the American people across more than two centuries.
In 1790 it sat near Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, and by 2020 it had moved all the way to Wright County in southern Missouri, near the small town of Hartville. That long drift west and south is a map of American history itself - the settling of the frontier, the rise of California and the West, and the modern boom of the Sun Belt all written into the slow travel of a single point across the middle of the country.