If you were to take a big, flat, rigid map of the United States and rest it on something
sharp and pointy, and if every person in the United States weighed the same, the Mean Center
of Population is exactly where that map would balance. The Census comes out with this figure
every 10 years. It seems meaningless on its surface, but really that one little point
carries in it a lot of information about how our population is moving. The first Mean Center
of Population was in Kent County, Maryland. In the 1800s when the U.S. was adding on states
all the time and people were moving out West all the time, the Center sped West. A big
influx of European immigrants to the Northeast, plus movement of Southern Blacks to the North
in the early 1900s put on the breaks. Tacking on Alaska and Hawaii later in the century
started to pull it out a bit West a bit more but also it started to move South a bit,
particularly in recent years. Part of that is because of a booming Latino population
in the Southeast and in Texas, and part of that is economic factors like the growth of
the Texas oil industry. One other thing: Air Conditioning. The growth of air conditioning,
some experts say, has made the South more livable. Today the Mean Center is just near
Plato, Missouri, which in 2010 had just 109 people. So though that's the Center of Population,
it's not at all a population center.