Mar 3, 2015 4 min read

The United States has held steady with 50 states since 1959, the longest stretch the country has traveled that it has not placed any additional stars on the flag.

It hasn’t been for lack of trying.

There probably hasn’t been a moment in the last 56 years, since Alaska and Hawaii joined the union, that someone hasn’t been fiddling with the idea of slicing a chunk out of one state and forging another. There are also residents of some states who feel like their communities are getting a raw deal from distant state capitals, and they would be better off plighting their troth with another state that would put their interests at center stage.

There’s been an effort by residents in northern California and southern Oregon to create a new state called Jefferson. For years, the notion has been bandied about that the Upper Peninsula of Michigan should go its own way – its largest city, Marquette, is a seven-hour drive from Detroit, after all – and call itself Superior. If that happened, Michigan might be able to balance the scales by acquiring Toledo, Ohio, since some residents in that city feel like they are being ignored in favor of Ohio’s “three C’s” – Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati – and they believe the city’s fortunes are more closely aligned with those of Detroit, just an hour away.

There are folks in the western part of Maryland who are disgruntled that their state will be blue in perpetuity thanks to the electoral weight of Baltimore and the Washington, D.C., suburbs and want to strike out on their own. There was a movement afoot not too long ago to create “Northern Colorado.” The list goes on.

With our budget woes and other nagging difficulties, it’s hard to imagine many people are gazing at Pennsylvania with a sense of longing. But in the Sunday edition of the Observer-Reporter, there was an Associated Press story on how some residents of upstate New York would like to break the chains that hold them to Albany and come join us.

They argue that state lawmakers, with an eye toward New York City and the clout its five boroughs carry, have deprived them of the means to boost their economy by turning down casino applications and imposing a statewide ban on natural gas fracking. The southern part of New York also sits atop the Marcellus Shale.

It all started when New York’s fracking ban was announced last year and snowballed when one state senator asked his constituents about secession in a survey. Now, members of the Upstate New York Towns Association are comparing the tax rates and the cost of doing business in the two states.

Officials in that part of New York concede the odds are long and it’s ultimately more about sending a message than anything else. The AP also pointed out that the process of secession is arduous – New York and Pennsylvania would each have to agree, as would the federal government. And the last time a portion of one state split off to form another was in 1861, shortly after the Civil War started and Virginia’s western, mountainous counties joined the Union and became West Virginia. It took a crisis for that to occur – nothing that is happening in upstate New York, or anywhere else in the country, rises to that level.

Still, we should probably be flattered that some residents of the Empire State think enough of us that they would consider becoming part of Pennsylvania. There was some evidence, though, that some of those New Yorkers are clear-eyed about what they could be getting into if they become part of the commonwealth.

“Their roads are horrible,” one told the AP. “Our roads are not that bad.”