On to Snider's Cornfield

After every census since 1790, Government mathematicians have been put to work on a problem calculated to burn the numbers off their slide rules. Its terms: if the country were a rigid plane, encumbered by nothing but its human population, and if every man, woman & child had exactly the same weight, at what point, if placed on a fulcrum, would it achieve exact balance? Object: to find the geographical center of U.S. population.

The computers start with an arbitrarily selected tentative center, just as a man might move the weights to an approximation of the right position before stepping on a scale. Then they take the U.S. population in units of "square degrees," the areas enclosed by consecutive parallels and meridians. In most square degrees they assume that the population center is at the geographical center. (For square degrees that contain large towns they make special calculations.) Then they multiply the population of each square degree by the distance north or south of the tentative center. If those to the south of it "outweigh" those to the north, they move the center until they get a balance; same operation for east & west.

Sixty Years in Indiana. After the first census in 1790, the center was the upper Chesapeake Bay. It has moved west ever since, never straying more than 30 miles north or south of the 39th parallel. Between 1850 and 1860 it hopped 80.6 miles from western Virginia to Ohio and by 1890 it had jumped clear into Indiana, where it stayed for six decades. This year, when the mathematicians finished calculations on the 1950 census, it was obvious that the center had made the biggest westward hop since 1890, and, because of the industrial rush to Texas, the greatest southerly move on record. The census bureau announced that the new center reposed at latitude 38 degrees, 50 minutes and 21 seconds and longitude 88 degrees, 9 minutes and 33 seconds.

A team of astronomers from Indiana University set out to find exactly where that was on the map. Shooting the sun with sextants, like mariners determining a ship's position, they discovered that the center had moved across the Indiana line at last to a spot near Olney (pop. 8,541), the county seat of Richland County, Ill.

Squirrel Chowder. If the astronomers had been simply seeking to put the center in a particularly American rural setting, they could hardly have chosen better. The low, hickory-wooded hills around the town were once the home of Winnebago and Pottawatomi Indians. The region's first settler was Thaddeus Morehouse, who opened a tavern to sell venison and whisky (at 25-c- a gallon).

Olney today has a shoe factory and six bars--which Mayor Emanuel G. Miller regulates by keeping a "shutoff list" of drunks who cannot be served liquor. The town is also squirrel conscious, not only because squirrel chowder is a favorite dish at church suppers but because hundreds of Olney's squirrel population are rare albinos.

When a final fix by the astronomers placed the center in Farmer Carl Daymen Snider's cornfield, well-wishers came from all directions. Snider, a lean, tanned 33-year-old son of the soil, took it calmly: "I ain't overly worked up about it." said he. When he was asked if his family would pose before a camera, he said: "The woman may take the shotgun to it."

His wife, however, had other ideas. She washed the faces of her two sons, Don, 5, and John, 2, with muscular fervor and lined the family up. "I didn't know whether to believe that bunch," she said, darkly, of the astronomers. "There's so many of these salesmen coming around. You can't tell whether they're crooks."

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