The Kentucky Bend, also called the New Madrid Bend or Bubbleland, is a 26-square-mile piece of Kentucky encircled by Tennessee and Missouri, reachable only by driving in on Tennessee State Route 22. Its nine residents have a Tiptonville, Tennessee mailing address, and a 911 call may bounce through another state before Fulton County responders make a long detour to reach them. This episode explains how the exclave came to be.

The story begins with a 1665 British colonial boundary drawn on a blank map, continues with surveyors who estimated the final stretch to the Mississippi rather than measuring it, and hinges on the river’s oxbow loop that swings across the latitude line. We also cover the 1811 and 1812 New Madrid earthquakes that made the river run backward, the Civil War siege at Island Number 10, the Darnell and Watson feud recorded by Mark Twain, and the rise and fall of a cotton community.

• Why Tennessee administered the bend for decades before dropping its claim in 1848
• How fluvial uplift temporarily dammed the Mississippi and formed Reelfoot Lake
• Why hairpin river bends made steamboats sitting ducks for artillery
• Alluvial soil, sharecropping, and a population that peaked above 330 in 1880
• Temperature extremes from 107 degrees to minus 17 and the mechanization that emptied the land