“Fine, if you won’t let us be a state, we’ll do our own thing.”
~Citizens of Franklin
Americans (ourselves absolutely included) are garbage at geography. Our hypothesis for this is that we’ve had to learn the name and (relative) location of 50 states, and that’s just a lot of names and places to process. America’s pretty big, you know. People from other countries should learn to give us a break.
But this is not an article about geography (thank God), but rather, about how we very nearly had 51 states that we would have been forced to memorize in grade school.
This is the story of Franklin, the almost-14th state of the United States of America, who paid government officials in deer pelts.
America Fun Fact of the Day 