My wife began to understand life with a demographer early in our marriage, on the day I proposed a family vacation that would start at the current geographical center of U.S. population and trace (in reverse order, from west to east) its movement by visiting the center's exact location at each decennial census going back to 1790.
I'll skip the details, but a compromise was reached that scaled back the journey to a brief detour on another trip to see the marker that commemorates the 1980 population center. So while I haven't planned my summer leave around it--yet!--I still find the concept fascinating. Astronomical discoveries have done major damage to any conceit that the earth and its inhabitants are at the center of the universe. Maybe I'm attracted to the idea that we can use science to find new ways to be in the middle of something important--seeking transcendence, as it were, on a foundation of empiricism!
In my years of service to the PCUSA, I've wondered about the center of Presbyterian population. Where is that imaginary point at which the distance to all other Presbyterians is minimized, where, in effect, someone would in a single moment be a close as humanly possible to the entire membership of the PCUSA?
Well, through the magic of computer mapping, linked databases, and helpful colleagues, I have an answer. It's called the median center of population, and it works by drawing two lines on a map--one north-south, one east-west--each of which divides the population under study in exact halves. The point where these two lines intersect is the center of population. (There are multiple ways to conceive and to calculate a population center; the one I've chosen is both easy to conceptualize and--even more important--easy to cipher.)
In 1990, the median center of the entire U.S. population was located not too far away from where I write these words, in Lawrence County in southern Indiana, about 10 miles south of Bloomington. The median center has been gradually moving west and south; in 1880, for example, it was a couple of hundred miles to the northeast in Miami County, Ohio.
The center of Presbyterian population in 1996 turns out to be nearby, too, in southwestern Ohio, just east of Cincinnati. My calculations place it in the northeast corner of Clermont County, in Wayne Township, close to the intersection of Hunt and Bishop Roads.
So moving the national offices to Louisville wasn't all that "off-center" after all. Maybe Cincinnati would have been a more defensible choice. Let me suggest a way to partially make it up to Queen City Presbyterians. I've long thought that the church needed a retreat and conference center that was both convenient to Louisville and easy to reach from around the country. What better site than southwestern Ohio, an easy drive from the PCUSA's national offices, and convenient to the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport, one of the largest in the nation. And what better place for Presbyterians to meet: a place that physically brings us closer together, symbolizing the unity of the church.
If you live in or find yourself passing through that part of Ohio, you might want to jog north off U.S. 50, and stop, look, and reflect.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to phone my wife about our 1998 vacation plans. I have this great idea . . . .
Email the author: Jack Marcum
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