Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.
With unique identities and cultural histories, America’s panhandles are generally more rural than the rest of the state they belong to. In this edition of the Rural Index, I’m taking a break from reporting on our surveillance police state to explore what sets our nation’s panhandles apart from the surrounding areas.
Panhandles are geographic features that resemble the handles of pans. Anyway, I’ve made a map, as is my wont.
The panhandle’s government name is a salient, which is similar to a peninsula but surrounded by land on at least two sides. They have “grippy” protrusions, in other words. I’ve created a list of nine states with panhandles: Alaska, Florida, Idaho, Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and West Virginia. However, there is no generally agreed-upon list of states that have panhandles.
But if panhandles are supposed to be grippy, then why am I including Minnesota’s little nodule? Because I like it. And if I’m including Minnesota in my list of panhandle states, then why am I not including Alabama? Because Alabama’s two little protrusions remind me of a uvula, not a panhandle. This is not a science.
Geographer Joseph Kerski told National Geographic that panhandles often have “a strong sense of place … maybe a sense of frontier.”
I agree that panhandles often have a sense of frontier, or increased rurality compared to the rest of the region. (There are notable exceptions, however, like West Virginia. But we’ll come back to that.) Take the popular refrain about Florida, for example, that the further north you travel, the further south you go. The panhandle of northern Florida is considered a part of the deep south compared to the major cities that make up the majority of the peninsula.
But some of these assumptions about rurality are rooted more in classism than in geography. So I got to thinking about how I might quantify them. Are these places actually more rural, or are they considered culturally inferior compared to the surrounding areas? Can we quantify that sense of rurality?
For the sake of this analysis, I used two frequently-cited definitions of rural to understand panhandle geography. At first glance, the data confirmed my initial assumption that panhandles are, in fact, generally more rural.
According to the Census definition of rural, which measures rurality at the block level based on population and housing density, about 35% of the residents of our nation’s panhandles live outside of Census-defined Urban Areas, the inverse of which I am using as a proxy for rural. Compare that number to the 19% of the American population that lives outside these Census-defined Urban Areas. That’s a 16 percentage point difference.
According to the county-level classification system that we most often use at the Daily Yonder, 24% of America’s panhandle residents live in a nonmetropolitan, or rural, county, compared to about 14% of the American population at large. The county-level classification system is based on the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) list of Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA). For our purposes, counties that are not in a MSA are rural.
The 26 counties that make up the Texas Panhandle have significantly more residents living in rural areas compared to the rest of the state. In the Census definition of rural, about 30% of residents in the Texas Panhandle live outside of an Urban Area, compared to 16% of the rest of the state. In the county-level system, 38% of the panhandle population is nonmetropolitan, compared to only 10% of Texas at large.
The largest population center in the Texas Panhandle is the city of Amarillo, home to a little more than 200,000 residents. The dominant industry in the Texas Panhandle is ranching and meat processing.
Just north of the Texas Panhandle are the three counties that make up the Oklahoma Panhandle, the nation’s most satisfying panhandle shape. That’s not debatable.
In the mid 18th century, land surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon drew the Mason-Dixon line, which later became the dividing line between free states in the North and slave-holding states in the South. The Mason-Dixon line cut through what was then north Texas. But Texas gave up the 34-mile-wide strip that is now the Oklahoma Panhandle because it wanted to keep slavery legal, and the land was attached to the Oklahoma Territory in 1890.
Approximately 56% of Oklahoma Panhandle residents live outside of Census-defined Urban Areas, compared to about 35% of the rest of the state. The entire Oklahoma Panhandle is nonmetropolitan according to the county-level system, compared to about 33% of the state at large.
Although Alaska does follow the general panhandle trend, the difference in rurality between panhandle communities and the rest of the state is marginal. Approximately 39% of Alaska’s panhandle residents live in a Census-defined rural area, compared to 34% of the population at large. According to the county-level (or county-equivalent) definition of rural, all of Alaska’s panhandle is rural, compared to 32% of the state in general.
This is largely due to Alaska’s unique geography. Alaska is largely remote by land area. The largest city, Anchorage, where 40% of Alaska’s population lives, is not in the panhandle. The population density of Anchorage is skewing the data, making the balance of Alaska appear more urban, when the reality is that some of the most remote parts of the state are in northern Alaska, away from the panhandle.
There is a similar phenomenon in Idaho. More than a quarter of Idaho’s population lives in one single county – Ada County, where Boise is the county seat. Large portions of southern Idaho are very rural and remote, but because Boise is in the southern part of the state, the data make it look like the panhandle is decidedly more rural. And while a greater share of the Idaho panhandle population is rural according to both definitions of rural, a large part of this panhandle is economically and geographically connected to the nearby metro of Spokane, Washington.
West Virginia is the only exception to this rural panhandle trend. In every state except West Virginia, the panhandles are more rural than the rest of the state. West Virginia has two panhandles – an eastern and a northern one. Parts of the northern panhandle are geographically and economically connected to Pittsburgh and the surrounding suburbs, while the state’s eastern panhandle is connected to the DC metro area. The interior of West Virginia is the most rural part of the state.
According to the Census definition of rural, 54% of West Virginia panhandle residents live outside of Urban Areas, compared to about 55% of the state in general. In the county-level classification system, about 17% of West Virginia’s panhandle population lives in a nonmetropolitan, or rural, area, compared to 32% in the rest of the state.
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