The towns that quietly ignore their official North American time zone
Kenton, Oklahoma, sits legally in the Central Time Zone, yet its clocks run on Mountain Time, reportedly because most people it deals with live in New Mexico or Colorado. Phenix City, Alabama, does the reverse and unofficially keeps Eastern Time to match Columbus, Georgia, just across the state line. Time zones bend to neighbours.
Officially, Central Time is six hours behind Coordinated Universal Time, written UTC−6, and one hour behind Eastern Time. It stretches across parts of Canada, the United States and Mexico, most of Central America and a handful of Caribbean islands. In summer, most of the zone in the United States and Canada springs forward to Central Daylight Time, five hours behind UTC.
Its edges are messy. Ten American states lie wholly inside it, but five more share it with Mountain Time and another five with Eastern Time. Texas is Central except for El Paso and two neighbouring counties; Tennessee keeps Central Time in its western and middle regions, including Nashville and Memphis, while the east runs an hour ahead; and in Michigan only four Upper Peninsula counties along the Wisconsin border keep Central Time. In Florida the dividing line is the Apalachicola River.
Farther south, roughly the eastern three-quarters of Mexico uses it, calling it the Zona Centro. Six of the seven Central American countries run on Central Standard Time all year; Panama is the odd one out, keeping Eastern Standard Time. In Canada the picture is patchy as well: western Nunavut and the area around Kenora in northwestern Ontario keep Central Time, while the rest of those jurisdictions run on Eastern Time.
The dates of daylight saving have shifted too. The United States Energy Policy Act of 2005 moved the start from the first Sunday in April to the second Sunday in March, and the end from late October to the first Sunday in November, beginning in 2007. Mexico kept its old summer schedule for a while, let ten border cities follow the American dates from 2010, and then abolished daylight saving altogether, using it for the last time in October 2022.
Source: Central Time Zone
