A straight border line stranded Point Roberts as a piece of America inside Canada
In 1846 diplomats made the 49th parallel the dividing line between American and British land in the Pacific Northwest, without checking where it fell. The line clipped the tip of a peninsula south of Vancouver, so its 1,191 residents must drive 40 kilometres through Canada to reach the rest of the United States by road.
The Oregon Treaty of June 15, 1846 settled years of joint occupation. American expansionists had demanded everything up to 54°40′, but the compromise ran the 49th parallel to the sea while leaving all of Vancouver Island to Britain. Only when surveyors marked the line did Britain realise the peninsula's tip would be cut off. London told its boundary commissioner, Captain James Prevost, to ask for it and even offer a small adjustment elsewhere in exchange; nobody knows how the Americans answered, but the land stayed American.
Europeans first sighted it in 1791 on Francisco de Eliza's voyage, whose maps showed it as an island. In June 1792 Spanish ships under Dionisio Alcalá Galiano confirmed it was attached to the mainland, then promptly met a vessel of George Vancouver's expedition, and the rivals agreed to chart the Strait of Georgia together. Vancouver named the point after his friend Henry Roberts, originally meant to command the expedition.
Life in the enclave depends on Canadian goodwill. During the 1858 Fraser gold rush, tax-dodging prospectors built a six-building Robert's Town that lasted under a year. A 1973 drought dried the wells and set American and Canadian residents against each other, and since 1987 the community has bought its water from Greater Vancouver. For years its phone numbers could be dialled through either a Seattle-area or a British Columbia area code.
When Canada closed its border in March 2020, Point Roberts lost 80 percent of its business and was called a ghost town, though it had no confirmed COVID cases that September. A temporary ferry to Blaine and later Bellingham ran until the border fully reopened in August 2021.
Source: Point Roberts, Washington
