Scientific Center of North America!

What Is the Scientific Center of North America?

This is the rock that marks the geographical center of North America!

What Makes It Wonderful?

What’s wonderful about this marker is the long, circuitous route that brought it here! See, in 1931, the town of Rugby, North Dakota declared itself the Geographical Center of North America (and trademarked the title) after a US Geological Survey employee balanced a cutout of the continent on a pinhead!

Then on August 30, 2016, Hanson’s Bar in Robinson, North Dakota bought the trademark “Geographical Center of North America” as it had lapsed! The bar’s owner, Bill Bender, had done measurements with strings across a globe and determined that his bar, not Rugby, was the center of North America. He put down a decal on the floor to prove it!

But at the same time, a professor from the University of Buffalo, Peter Rogerson, was undoing the entire thing! Plugging the coordinates of all different extremities of North America into an algorithm, he mathematically calculated that the center of North America is in… Center, North Dakota! What a coincidence! This town had been named as the center of Oliver County in 1902! Today, this mathematical center is marked by a 30,000-pound boulder and a plaque with the town’s coordinates, even if it’s 4 miles north of town. I guess everyone’s still searching for that fabled center!

How Can I #HelpTheHelpers?

Be a responsible visitor! Please respect the signs and pathways, and treat all structures and artifacts with respect. They’ve endured a lot to survive into the present. They’ll need our help to make it into the future!