A few months back, I got an email from Atlas Obscura. They’re an aggregator of weird and wonderful sights around the globe (obscure things on an atlas I suppose one might say). In this email they revealed that the Center of the Nation monument in Belle Fourche, SD, was NOT the actual center of the nation. It wasn’t exactly an expose but it was sufficient to blow my naïve little mind.
The actual center of the nation is about 20 miles north of Belle Fourche, in the middle of some farmland prairie field.
I of course went to both.
FAKE:
REAL:
To be fair to Belle Fourche, they readily acknowledge they are merely *a monument* to the actual center of the nation, and their official sign makes this “you’re in the wrong place” perfectly clear.
So they aren’t lying per se. At least not from a certain point of view. But once we start delving into the notion of a monument not needing to be at the actual thing being memorialized, well, it seems to me we run the risk of things losing some of their meaning.
I suppose though that’s the difference between “monuments” and “survey markers” and various other “signage.”
And I guess “Center of the Nation Monument” plays better than “Center of the Nation Tribute.”
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And ya know what else? Ken Jennings, he of the greatest Jeopardy! champions fame, says the Four Corners monument is in the wrong place:
Mind Blown Version 2.0.