The Northeast Region
The Northeast is one of the four regions the US Census Bureau uses to divide the country, and the smallest of them by land area. Nine states belong to it, about 57 million people live there, and it is the most densely settled region in the United States. Two Census divisions sit inside it: New England with six states and Middle Atlantic with three.
The 9 states in the Northeast
| State | Capital | Admitted | Division |
|---|---|---|---|
| Connecticut | Hartford | 1788 | New England |
| Maine | Augusta | 1820 | New England |
| Massachusetts | Boston | 1788 | New England |
| New Hampshire | Concord | 1788 | New England |
| Rhode Island | Providence | 1790 | New England |
| Vermont | Montpelier | 1791 | New England |
| New Jersey | Trenton | 1787 | Middle Atlantic |
| New York | Albany | 1788 | Middle Atlantic |
| Pennsylvania | Harrisburg | 1787 | Middle Atlantic |
How the Census Bureau defines the Northeast
The Northeast is Region 1. Its New England division holds Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. Its Middle Atlantic division holds three states and only three: New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.
In everyday use, Mid-Atlantic stretches south to take in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC. The Census puts all four of those in the South Atlantic division of the South, so under the official system Maryland and Delaware are not Northeastern at all. Regions and divisions are stacked layers of one scheme rather than competing ones.
Population, land and economic weight
New York and Pennsylvania each pass ten million residents and together account for more than half the regional total. New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the country, Rhode Island is the smallest state by area, and Vermont is one of the least populous. Maine, the largest Northeastern state, ranks only 39th, and six of the nine rank 44th or lower.
New York City is the largest city in the United States and the center of American finance, Boston and its suburbs anchor biotechnology and higher education, and Pittsburgh anchors the far end of Pennsylvania's industrial belt. All eight Ivy League universities are inside the Census Northeast: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale.
The geography that gives the Northeast its shape
Ice made this region. The Laurentide ice sheet ground across all nine states, scraping New England down to thin, stony soil, dumping the debris that became Cape Cod and Long Island, and leaving the lakes that fill Maine and the Adirondacks. Farming was hard from the start, which pushed capital early toward shipping, milling and trade instead.
The Appalachian chain runs through the region under local names: the Green Mountains in Vermont, the White Mountains in New Hampshire, the Catskills and Adirondacks in New York, the Alleghenies in Pennsylvania. Mount Washington in New Hampshire, at 6,288 feet, is the high point of the Northeast, and a 231 mile per hour gust recorded there in 1934 stood as the world surface wind record for over sixty years.
One gap in that wall decided the region's history: the Hudson and Mohawk valleys form the single near sea level break through the Appalachians. The Erie Canal followed the gap in 1825, tying New York Harbor to Lake Erie at Buffalo, and made New York rather than Boston or Philadelphia the dominant American port.
How the Northeast was settled
Seven of the nine states were among the original thirteen colonies: Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Vermont entered as the fourteenth state in 1791, and Maine separated from Massachusetts in 1820 under the Missouri Compromise.
Plymouth in 1620 and the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 were Puritan projects that produced the town meeting. The Dutch built New Amsterdam on Manhattan in the 1620s, which is why New York began commercial rather than religious, and William Penn's charter of 1681 made Pennsylvania a Quaker refuge.
Samuel Slater's mill at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, brought British textile machinery to America in 1793. Pennsylvania's anthracite fields and Pittsburgh's steel mills supplied the national railway build out, and immigration came through the region's ports, above all New York.
What the Northeast is known for
Boston to Washington runs as one near continuous urban belt, which the geographer Jean Gottmann named Megalopolis in 1961; the Northeast Corridor rail line follows the same track. Maine lands most of the American lobster catch, Vermont produces more maple syrup than any other state, and New Hampshire holds the first presidential primary of every election cycle. Gettysburg in Pennsylvania was the largest battle of the Civil War, fought in July 1863.
Where the boundary is argued
Maryland is the standing dispute. It lies north of Virginia, its economy runs with Washington DC, and people call it Mid-Atlantic without hesitating, but the Census files it in the South. The Mason and Dixon line, surveyed between 1763 and 1767 to settle a colonial border quarrel between Pennsylvania and Maryland, later became the shorthand divide between North and South, leaving Maryland on the southern side of a line drawn for reasons unrelated to sectionalism. Delaware has the same problem in miniature: original colony, first to ratify the Constitution in 1787, and Census South.
Pennsylvania is argued from the opposite direction, because Pittsburgh sits west of the Appalachian crest, drains toward the Ohio River, and belongs economically to the Rust Belt with Ohio and Michigan. Whether New England is part of the Northeast or a region of its own is a question of level: in the Census system it is a division inside the Northeast, while in ordinary speech it stands alone.