The Midwest Region
The Midwest is one of the four regions the United States Census Bureau uses to divide the country, and it holds twelve states between the Ohio River and the Rocky Mountain front. The Bureau called this same block of states the North Central region until 1984, when it switched to the name people were already using. Two of the nine census divisions sit inside it: East North Central around the Great Lakes, and West North Central across the Plains. The four regions and the nine divisions are separate systems, and the Midwest exists only in the first one.
The twelve Midwest states
Membership follows the census definition exactly, and it has not changed since the Dakotas were admitted in 1889.
| State | Capital | Statehood | Census division |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ohio | Columbus | 1803 | East North Central |
| Indiana | Indianapolis | 1816 | East North Central |
| Illinois | Springfield | 1818 | East North Central |
| Michigan | Lansing | 1837 | East North Central |
| Wisconsin | Madison | 1848 | East North Central |
| Minnesota | Saint Paul | 1858 | West North Central |
| Iowa | Des Moines | 1846 | West North Central |
| Missouri | Jefferson City | 1821 | West North Central |
| North Dakota | Bismarck | 1889 | West North Central |
| South Dakota | Pierre | 1889 | West North Central |
| Nebraska | Lincoln | 1867 | West North Central |
| Kansas | Topeka | 1861 | West North Central |
Population, land and economic weight
The 2020 Census counted 68,985,454 people in the Midwest, 20.8 percent of the country and second to the South. The twelve states cover 750,524 square miles of land, 21.2 percent of the national total. That near match between share of people and share of ground is unique among the four regions. The Northeast holds 17.4 percent of the population on 4.6 percent of the land, and the West holds 23.7 percent on 49.6 percent.
Illinois is the most populous Midwestern state at 12,812,508 and runs the fifth largest state economy in the country. North Dakota is the smallest at 779,094. The region carries 115 electoral votes. Reapportionment after the 2020 Census took a House seat from Illinois, Michigan and Ohio, the heaviest loss absorbed by any region.
The geography that holds it together
Four of the five Great Lakes wash Midwestern shores, and Lake Michigan is the only one lying entirely inside the United States. Together the lakes hold roughly a fifth of the world's surface fresh water. To the south and west, the Mississippi rises at Lake Itasca in Minnesota, takes in the Missouri just above St. Louis and the Ohio at Cairo, Illinois, which makes the region the drainage funnel for the middle of the continent. The Missouri is the longest river in the United States.
A low divide runs through Chicago separating water bound for the Gulf of Mexico from water bound for the St. Lawrence. Ice sheets flattened almost everything north of the Ohio River and left behind the till and windblown loess that became the deepest farm soils in North America. The Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin and northeastern Iowa was missed by the glaciers and is visibly steeper than the country around it.
How the Midwest was settled
The Land Ordinance of 1785 imposed a survey grid of six mile square townships cut into 36 sections, which is why section roads in Ohio, Indiana and Iowa still meet at right angles one mile apart. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 organized the land north of the Ohio River, barred slavery there, and wrote the rules by which a territory became a state. The Erie Canal, opened in 1825, gave New England and New York families a water route to Lake Erie and stamped their township habits on the northern tier.
The seven Plains states came in through a different door. They were carved from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and filled after the Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acre claims, with German and Scandinavian immigration reshaping Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Dakotas in the same decades.
What the Midwest is known for
Iowa leads the country in corn and in hogs. Kansas leads in winter wheat and North Dakota in spring wheat, durum and canola. Wisconsin makes more cheese than any other state. Detroit built the American automobile industry, Chicago's grain exchanges set prices for crops grown a thousand miles away, and the shuttered mills of Gary, Cleveland and Youngstown gave the Rust Belt its name. Seven presidents were born in Ohio, more than in any state except Virginia.
Where the boundaries are argued
Missouri is the standing dispute. The census files it in the Midwest, but it entered the Union in 1821 as a slave state under the Missouri Compromise, its southern half lies in the Ozarks, and much of it sounds and eats Southern. Oklahoma runs the other way: the census counts it in the South even though it borders Kansas and sits on the same Plains geology. Kentucky is census South while the Cincinnati metropolitan area crosses the river into it. And the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas are routinely called Great Plains or simply the West, a label that tracks their rainfall better than their census file does.