39 North Dakota
So back when I was a kid in North Dakota, there was a group that often performed at various high school events, usually things like the state basketball tournament or the like. The group's performance was very simple. There would be 52 kids, each of whom would be carrying a flag pole. 51 of those flag poles had the flags of the 50 states and District Columbia (in order of ratification, if I recall correctly, although it's been a long while so I wouldn't bet on it), and the last kid would be carrying the American flag. Each kid would carry his or her flag across the gym floor and would yell the name of the state. This pattern varied for only one state; when the blue banner of North Dakota came across the floor the kid would yell "God Bless North Dakota" and the gym would inevitably go nuts.
This somewhat bizarre display is probably the closest thing to mindless jingoistic state pride that I've ever seen exhibited in my home state. For the most part North Dakotans are almost stereotypically modest and soft-spoken; Lake Wobegon may be in neighboring Minnesota but pretty much every joke Garrison Keillor ever told still scans in North Dakota, which is full of Americans whose ancestors came from Norwegians, Swedes and Germans, all of whom are good Lutherans of course, and whose descendents, given current demographic trends, will probably move to the Twin Cities.
Or maybe not. North Dakota's economy is booming. Thanks to the rising prices of oil, the deposits in the western part of the state have become economical to extract, which has helped lead to the lowest unemployment rate in the country. This, of course, is not the part of the state that I'm from, although I did live in Minot as a toddler. However, home is forever and always the small town of Thompson, outside of Grand Forks. We moved there in 1984, and it was my residence on paper until 2003, although pragmatically speaking I was gone in early 2002.
It should be noted that none of these places is very big. Only one city in the entire state has a population measuring in the six figures (Fargo, at just over 105,000) and only eight more make it into 5 figures. As the unofficial state motto goes, "Forty below keeps the riff-raff out;" nobody randomly moves to North Dakota because it sounded interesting. By the standards of small towns in North Dakota, Thompson is actually pretty big. We had 500 kids in the school (K-12). My high school football team routinely played against teams made up from the kids of two or three or even more towns. My senior year we played against team from A-E-E-M-O (I cannot recall what all those letters stood for) and we had a conference opponent from M-P-C-G (Mayville Portland Clifford Gaylesburg). You know the towns are small when you have to combine three or four of them to get together enough kids for a football team. Some times the kids on one football team would play against each other in basketball; Hatton-Finley-Sharon football was two basketball teams: Hatton and Finley-Sharon. That must have been interesting.
Anyway, Thompson is right in the heart of the Red River Valley, which is the flattest place in North America, and thanks to glaciation and Lake Agassiz it has some of the richest farmland in the world. Thompson's a bedroom community for Grand Forks, so it has very little in the way of businesses outside the school and the grain elevators. For many years our house was on the edge of town with a farm field running right up to our backyard, but while I was in college they finally built some houses on that field. Interestingly, despite the addition of 20+ new houses, the population of Thompson actually went down 20 people from the 2000 census to the 2010 census. I'd speculate that a lot of those new houses were people's kids moving into their own houses, or rural residents moving into town.
North Dakota doesn't attract much in the way of tourists. If you're so inclined, most of the pretty scenery is in the western end of the state. Chief among these is Theodore Roosevelt National Park, which contains large chunks of the North Dakota badlands. While there you can check out Medora, which has the musical and the Chateau de Mores. On the eastern side of the state The Peace Garden gives North Dakota one of its nicknames, "The Peace Garden State." And yeah, that's about all there is, unless you like wide open spaces (no trees other than shelterbelts) for their own merits. I do.
Scoreboard
Full Credit - 28: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Florida, Texas, Wisconsin, California, Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas, West Virginia, Nevada, Colorado, North Dakota
Partial Credit - 6: Delaware, Connecticut, Maryland, Alabama, Iowa, Nebraska
No Credit - 5: South Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine, Arkansas
This somewhat bizarre display is probably the closest thing to mindless jingoistic state pride that I've ever seen exhibited in my home state. For the most part North Dakotans are almost stereotypically modest and soft-spoken; Lake Wobegon may be in neighboring Minnesota but pretty much every joke Garrison Keillor ever told still scans in North Dakota, which is full of Americans whose ancestors came from Norwegians, Swedes and Germans, all of whom are good Lutherans of course, and whose descendents, given current demographic trends, will probably move to the Twin Cities.
Or maybe not. North Dakota's economy is booming. Thanks to the rising prices of oil, the deposits in the western part of the state have become economical to extract, which has helped lead to the lowest unemployment rate in the country. This, of course, is not the part of the state that I'm from, although I did live in Minot as a toddler. However, home is forever and always the small town of Thompson, outside of Grand Forks. We moved there in 1984, and it was my residence on paper until 2003, although pragmatically speaking I was gone in early 2002.
It should be noted that none of these places is very big. Only one city in the entire state has a population measuring in the six figures (Fargo, at just over 105,000) and only eight more make it into 5 figures. As the unofficial state motto goes, "Forty below keeps the riff-raff out;" nobody randomly moves to North Dakota because it sounded interesting. By the standards of small towns in North Dakota, Thompson is actually pretty big. We had 500 kids in the school (K-12). My high school football team routinely played against teams made up from the kids of two or three or even more towns. My senior year we played against team from A-E-E-M-O (I cannot recall what all those letters stood for) and we had a conference opponent from M-P-C-G (Mayville Portland Clifford Gaylesburg). You know the towns are small when you have to combine three or four of them to get together enough kids for a football team. Some times the kids on one football team would play against each other in basketball; Hatton-Finley-Sharon football was two basketball teams: Hatton and Finley-Sharon. That must have been interesting.
Anyway, Thompson is right in the heart of the Red River Valley, which is the flattest place in North America, and thanks to glaciation and Lake Agassiz it has some of the richest farmland in the world. Thompson's a bedroom community for Grand Forks, so it has very little in the way of businesses outside the school and the grain elevators. For many years our house was on the edge of town with a farm field running right up to our backyard, but while I was in college they finally built some houses on that field. Interestingly, despite the addition of 20+ new houses, the population of Thompson actually went down 20 people from the 2000 census to the 2010 census. I'd speculate that a lot of those new houses were people's kids moving into their own houses, or rural residents moving into town.
North Dakota doesn't attract much in the way of tourists. If you're so inclined, most of the pretty scenery is in the western end of the state. Chief among these is Theodore Roosevelt National Park, which contains large chunks of the North Dakota badlands. While there you can check out Medora, which has the musical and the Chateau de Mores. On the eastern side of the state The Peace Garden gives North Dakota one of its nicknames, "The Peace Garden State." And yeah, that's about all there is, unless you like wide open spaces (no trees other than shelterbelts) for their own merits. I do.
Scoreboard
Full Credit - 28: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Florida, Texas, Wisconsin, California, Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas, West Virginia, Nevada, Colorado, North Dakota
Partial Credit - 6: Delaware, Connecticut, Maryland, Alabama, Iowa, Nebraska
No Credit - 5: South Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine, Arkansas