Upstate, Downstate, and Outstate Across the United States

Upstate, downstate, and outstate are informal place names, informal in that they do not have locational coordinates or defined dimensions. They are, however, useful designators for the peripheral areas of US American states with dominant urban population cores. Beginning with upstate, this study focuses on the earliest known printed uses of each peripheral term in connection with the 50 states. It looks at how core area newspapers and other critics have deprecated the rural aspect of these peripherals, leading rural residents in some states to argue against further use of the informal name. The study also reports on the results of promotional efforts to capitalize on upstate, downstate, or outstate in naming of enterprises.


Introduction
Frank Sinatra opened his "Songs of Sinatra" CBS radio program on 2 January 1946 by vocalizing a few lines from "Night and Day". Then he had this to say: "From Portland, M-E to Portland, O-R-E, from Key West to the Golden Gate and from downstate California to upstate New York, a very happy new year to you" (Sinatra 1946). Although he may have been reading from a prepared script, Sinatra, a Hoboken, New Jersey, native, would have grown up hearing from across the Hudson River about the differences between upstate New York and New York City. Downstate California would not have been nearly so common an expression.
George Stewart referred to place names like upstate, downstate, and outstate as "informal names". They designate places that "have no strict limits" (Stewart [1945(Stewart [ ] 2008). Yet upstate, downstate, and outstate have served for more than a century to help those living in metropolitan cores distinguish themselves from those who inhabit the hinterlands, and vice versa.
The purpose of this paper is not to examine what constitutes the core and periphery of any state, as Phillips (1983) did for New York. Instead, the focus here is on (1) the earliest known printed use of the three terms for the states; (2) how they have carried negative implications for rural upstaters, downstaters, and outstaters; and (3) how businesses and organizations have appropriated these names to brand their enterprises-thus turning a peripheral put down into an areal asset.

Methodology
Finding early print dates of upstate, downstate, and outstate (UDO) was a key aspect of this project. To compile such a list, I used the commonly available free resources of Google Scholar, Google Advanced Search, and Internet Archive. I mined also library subscription databases. Among those are Academic Search Complete, African American Newspapers, America: History & Life, American Periodicals Series Online 1741-1900, Article Search (Advanced), Chicago Tribune (1985-Present), HeinOnline Academic, Newspaper Source, Nexis Uni, Nineteenth Century US Newspapers, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Defender, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Tribune, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, and Westlaw. For all the databases, I looked at the 50 states three times, once each for upstate, downstate, and outstate.
Many of the earliest known UDO print uses come from Newspapers.com searches I conducted using a personal subscription. While this online source is impressive, it is not perfect. Most frustrating is the fact that some newspapers, even some major metropolitan dailies, are not currently part of the Newspapers.com database. Furthermore, the technology, especially when one is searching in the nineteenth century, returns many false positives, like upstairs instead of upstate, downstream instead of downstate, or out-of-state versus outstate.
Enterprise names are from the online Super Pages, Yellow Pages, and White Pages. Compiling enterprise names, I tried, mainly by checking enterprise websites, to ascertain if they were still in operation. Upstate Pizza is a good example of one I had to omit. It had been active in the restaurant scene of Pineville, North Carolina, in 2011; but, by late summer 2018, this one-shop business claiming a Syracuse, New York, heritage had ceased to exist. I also avoided assigning to any state an enterprise for which the name is really a spillover from another state. Therefore, even though there is a Pennsylvania affiliate of the Upstate Niagara Cooperative, this upstate counts only for New York not for the Keystone State.

Results and Discussion
Earliest Known Printed Uses Table 1 provides dates of the earliest known printed uses of UDO for each state, but I have no doubt that many entered conversations earlier than these print dates. "A term will exist in spoken language before it is written", said Remlinger in her study of dialect in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (Remlinger 2017, 57). Mencken, tracing the use of "upstate", as it referred to "New York State north and west of Albany", cited a printed instance from 1901 as the earliest he could find, but noted the name "is probably older" (Mencken 1977, 299). The Oxford English Dictionary pushes back the dates for its defined words as far as possible but features "the date of first printing" except for handwritten items like journals, and explains that some dictionaries go back farther than is comfortable for this source (OED 1989, 1:xxx). Ohio, Delaware, and Missouri account for the earliest known print dates for upstate, downstate, and outstate, respectively (Table 1). Upstate Ohio and downstate Delaware count among the 15 dates (out of 148) that occurred in the nineteenth century, 9 upstate and 6 downstate. The first print date for any outstate, Missouri, is one of 131 dates from the twentieth century. Outstate North Carolina and outstate West Virginia are the two twenty-first-century laggards. I am unable to provide dates for outstate Maine or outstate New Hampshire. For more than half the states, 28 of them, the date sequence of earliest printed items is first the upstate reference, next downstate, and then outstate. Massachusetts is among eight states that have an upstate item first but for which outstate then comes before downstate. Utah is the only state with a downstate-outstate-upstate sequence: April 1908 (a "down-State contemporary [minister]") (Salt Lake Tribune 1908a), November 1908 ("out-state teachers") (Salt Lake Tribune 1908b), and January 1939 ("upstate Utah Aggies") (Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner 1939).
Somewhat surprising is the fact that so many states present a full complement of UDO, even tiny Rhode Island, a state that is smaller than a host of American counties. In 1906, a Rhode Island newspaper reported on plans for a training cruise by the USS Columbia that would necessitate sending a tender "to Providence to bring the up-State division [of the Rhode Island Naval Reserve] down the bay" where they would board the ship (Newport (Rhode Island) Mercury 1906). Three decades later, a Missouri newspaper carried an editorial piece about Rhode Island politics that said, "What beat Mr. Prince was first, the terrific party split, and, second, the racial intolerance of the villagers of outstate Rhode Island" (Albany (Missouri) Ledger 1935). Last, in 1963, the US Army Corps of Engineers reported on their work in the Ocean State, noting, "A plan of tidal-flood protections for Narragansett and Mount Hope Bays calling for tidal barriers across East and West Passages in downstate Rhode Island … was completed … " (US Army. Corps of Engineers 1963, 50).
Rhode Island's three references (Table 1) illustrate one finding of this study: the authors of such items do not necessarily speak for the permanent residents in the affected areas. The author of the Corps piece worked out of the New England Division's Public Affairs Office, and might have been from a state where downstate is a common term. The 1935 item about outstate Rhode Island appeared in a state where outstate had by the 1930s long been part of the political vocabulary. Even the Newport newspaper item about upstate Rhode Island might have reflected the fact that wealthy New Yorkers often summered at Newport and would have found an upstate designation familiar as they perused their Newport newspaper.
Diffusion of UDO terminology also could have occurred as big city news stories came to the attention of small town journalists. Across the United States, local papers often repeated news items from the New York and Chicago press, items that contained UDO references to New York, Illinois, or other states. Reading items from elsewhere, local writers could ingest what to them might have been novel and appropriate descriptive locational terms, and might have gone on to repeat them in their own writings. The Associated Press and other wire services eventually dispersed UDO terminology.

Upstate
Upstate areas typically lie north of the core areas for their states, or up the map, because we are so familiar with printed maps oriented such that north appears at the top. Actually, the top of a map can point in any direction.
Sullivan D. Harris published the first reference to an upstate area, on 5 April 1862, in an agriculturally oriented journal, Field Notes. His was also the first reference to any UDO, in this case upstate Ohio. "The Cleveland and Mahoning rail-road, as our up-state readers know", wrote Harris, "is a bully little concern, of which our worthy Governor is President and Charles Rhodes Superintendent … " (Harris 1862). He did not sign the railroad item, but the Urbana Union copied it a few days later and credited him (Urbana (Ohio) Union 1862). Born in Middlebury, Vermont, in 1812, Harris migrated to Ohio in 1836, where he farmed, painted, published poetry, taught school, and wrote for farming publications. Harris did live in the northeastern corner of upstate Ohio; but he could have picked up the term in travels across upstate New York, as he was once a correspondent for Moore's Rural New-Yorker (Ravenna (Ohio) Democratic Press 1877; Harris 1911, 166).
The United States' upstate behemoth, New York, therefore, was not the first state for which a printed use of the name occurred. The earliest evidence I have found of an upstate New York item is in the 16 January 1875 issue of the New York Daily Herald wherein the writer dealt mainly with capital punishment in Queens County, which is part of New York City. "It is said that since the [1853] execution a man was hanged in one of the up-State counties who claimed to have done the deed" (New York Daily Herald 1875). A decade later, The New York Times began using up-State (or similar spelling) as did the majority of New York City papers very soon thereafter, often to contrast politics of New York City with politics everywhere else in the Empire State (The New York Times 1885).
One seldom sees upstate Ohio in print nowadays; but upstate New York is commonplace, appearing often in New York City papers, upstate New York papers, and elsewhere. Upstate provides New Yorkers an easy way to include, generally speaking, everything north of the primate city and its suburbs.
As a distinct area, upstate New York resonates with its residents and with outsiders. Thomas (1935) began in American Speech what became a seven-part series on pronunciation there. De Camp followed a few years later with "Pronunciation of Upstate New York Place-Names" (de Camp 1944). Then came McDavid's "Midland and Canadian Words in Upstate New York" (McDavid 1951). There is a recognizable upstate literary tradition, which O'Donnell (1957) examined in his dissertation, "The Regional Fiction of Upstate New York", and in subsequent writing (Bergmann 1985). The area stands up as a productive entity, as in reports like The Economic Status of Upstate New York at Mid-Century (Sufrin et al. 1960). Carmer went so far as to claim "Upstate is a Country" (Carmer 1966). Upstate New York surfaces in titles of nonfiction, like essayist Edmund Wilson's Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York, where he discussed the pleasant summers he spent at his family homestead north of Rome, on the western edge of the Adirondacks (Wilson 1971).
Upstate sometimes takes on a darker dimension. Buckhanon called her New York novel Upstate. In it, the incarcerated protagonist, Antonio, said, "I wonder what would have happened if I would have never been sent upstate" (Buckhanon 2005). Attica, Sing Sing, and other notable New York prisons are up the map from New York City. The slang use of upstate as a surrogate for prison has traveled at least as far as neighboring Massachusetts. In the case of Commonwealth v. Carlos Vazquez, according to a police officer, Vazquez would not reveal the name of an acquaintance, stating instead, "I'm not going to say. I'll go upstate before I give his name" (Commonwealth v. Carlos Vazquez 2009). Figure 1 summarizes, by decade, the earliest known upstate references in print for the 50 states. After Ohio in the 1860s and New York in the 1870s, came Pennsylvania in the 1880s and six more states in the 1890s, mainly also in the Northeast, perhaps because of a copy-cat influence that upstate New York was having on nearby New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, and Delaware. Missouri and Tennessee also joined the upstate roster before the turn of the century; and the term went nationwide in the decade 1900-1909, bringing 31 more states into the fold. Three states, Oklahoma in 1909(statehood in 1907), New Mexico in 1913(in 1912), and Arizona in 1915(in 1912, each generated a printed upstate reference soon after gaining statehood. Hawaii, however, jumped the statehood gun by 16 years. In 1943, the Honolulu Advertiser carried a story about US American soldiers playing baseball in Hawaii while stationed there during World War II. The writer, also a warrior and very likely from somewhere other than Hawaii, said the Infantry Appleknockers, "the Up-State boys", held off a rally by the Engineer Marauders to win 3-2 (Vandergrift 1943). Hawaii did not become a state until 1959. Print reference to upstate Alaska, also a state since 1959, did not begin until 1966 (Seibel 1966).
No state has a bigger upstate reputation than New York, but upstate South Carolina is not that far behind. South Carolina was among the first 20 states to have a print reference to an upstate area and today can claim more upstatebranded enterprises than New York. South Carolina divides nicely into three rather equal areas: low country, midlands, and upcountry or upstate. The state's upstate is up the map, north and west of Charleston and Columbia (the capital); and it lies in the highest part of the Palmetto State, along the Piedmont edge of the Appalachian Highlands. At Spartanburg, in the middle of the upcountry, is the University of South Carolina Upstate. Early on references to South Carolina's upstate included the definitive article as did the first known printed item, on 12 July 1901: Gaffney "is one of the most prosperous and progressive towns in the up-State country" (Gaffney (South Carolina) Ledger 1901). Eventually, the country portion dropped out, as in this 7 July 1911 item: "The Governor left for the Up-State at 8 o'clock, where he will make an address tomorrow" (Newberry (South Carolina) Weekly Herald 1911). Now South Carolina references are not uncommonly to just the (or The) Upstate. Hess found definite articles common in Spanish toponyms, perhaps because of the Arabic influence, but "rare in English toponyms" (Hess 1987, 18). Among the many contemporary South Carolina enterprises using the definite article are Awnings of the upstate and Pediatric Massage of the Upstate. The upstate for New York enterprises, however, is a rarity.
California, more than 700 miles north to south, seems like a logical locale for a vigorous upstate-downstate scenario. Such is not the case; but in 2001, the northernmost 20 California counties launched an Upstate California marketing campaign to differentiate themselves from the San Francisco area and the nearby Napa-Sonoma wine country. The idea, said Robert Berry, the campaign's president, was "to bring the cachet of upstate New York" (Brown 2001 (Dunn 2006), are still active today.
Having lunch one day at the Zenith Athletic Club with fellow business types, George Babbitt, in the words of novelist Sinclair Lewis, was listening to Sydney Finkelstein pontificate about how the most expensive product one can afford is always the best option. Finkelstein's forebears would never agree, said Finkelstein, because "they live in one of these hick towns up-state and they simply can't get onto the way a city fellow's mind works … " (Lewis 1922, 57). Babbitt appeared several years after New York City newspapers and others began making fun of upstate New Yorkers, sometimes referring to their areas as "hayseed districts" (Adam 1908). According to a piece that a Kansas editor reprinted, the New York Post, in 1902, claimed a recently married woman "from upstate" asked her neighbor how to kill the crabs that her husband sent home for dinner; she had been trying to drown them to no avail (St. Paul (Kansas) Journal 1902). A "New Yorker" joshed an "up-state friend", telling him that the things sticking out the sides of a partially complete skyscraper in the city were "the mile posts" (Chicago Daily Herald 1908). Many years after the New York City press quit mocking their upstate neighbors, Ellis opined that the "growth of suburbia leads one to believe that the typical and most influential New Yorker of the future will be neither a 'hick' nor a 'city slicker'. Rather it will be a suburbanite" (Ellis 1959, 219). Such an ending to negativity has not been the case, however. Robin Lakoff, a native of New York City and then a linguistics professor, told The New York Times in 2001 that upstate New York was "the sticks" to her. "It's the place you had to study in eighth grade" (Brown).
Denizens of the nation's upstates eventually realized an advantage might accrue to them if they countered the negativity by naming businesses and organizations after these peripheral areas. A recent review of that practice revealed more than a thousand upstate enterprises, in 21 different states (

Downstate
We know not the name of the writer who first used downstate in a reference to Delaware in 1881 (Table 1). The item containing it was a catchall for tidbits of information: the apple crop in Kent County, the pier at Lewes, smallpox in Little Creek Landing, and an observation that it was "wonderful how the Western correspondents of some of the down-State papers pick up gall enough to sign their effusions 'Dom Pedro' (Wilmington (Delaware) Morning News 1881). The Dom Pedro reference has lost relevance over time, but the downstate aspect is clear. Downstate Delaware still resonates today in, among others, the downstate Delaware Striders and Riders, a fitness association headquartered in Dover.
Delaware was not the only state to achieve downstate print mention in the 1880s (Figure 2). Another north-south state, Vermont, joined the downstate roster in 1889, in a piece about summer fairs (Montpelier Vermont Watchman 1889). By 1900, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Illinois were onboard. Downstate New York popped up very early, as an upstate Buffalo paper reported on a crime in the White Plains area, which is a suburb of New York City (Buffalo Evening News 1891). During the decade 1900-1909, 23 more states saw their first downstate print use. Again, Hawaii got a head start on statehood, this time by a matter of days (3 August versus 21 August 1959). An editor in downstate Illinois, knowing that locals there would understand what it meant to be part of the periphery, thought it timely to say, "The veteran political writers are scratching their chins over the problem of what constitutes downstate Hawaii" (Decatur Herald 1959). To my knowledge, downstate Hawaii has never warranted a locational definition nor has the designation ever surfaced again.
While "being sent upstate" carries a negative meaning, "playing downstate" at season's end resonates among Illinois high school athletes and their followers in a positive way, because the state tournaments in most sports are south and west of Illinois's northeastern core, at places like Peoria and Charleston. Coaches, players, and fans in Chicagoland talk about going downstate as if it were the ultimate outcome of a successful season, which it most likely will be (Sublett 2016, 300). At Northridge Preparatory School in the northern Chicago suburb of Niles, for example, Forest Moses qualified for state in the high jump. "Although he wasn't able to make it to the finals … his ability just to get down state has people at his school amazed", said a Chicago Tribune reporter (Vorva 2013). Downstaters have not escaped negativity at their expense. There was the future governor of Connecticut belittling a "down-state veterinary surgeon" for grossly underestimating the actual number of known germs (Hartford Courant 1901). Later that year a northern Missouri paper reprinted a notice from "A certain down-state paper" that had explained an omission as follows: "Owing to lack of space a number of births and deaths had to be postponed until the next issue" (Macon Republican 1901). In 1909, a Mrs. Dexter, "from somewhere 'down-state' was enjoying her first ride in a crowded street car in Chicago". When a police officer explained to her that the health department official onboard was sampling air quality, she declared the next thing would be a scheme to "can the air and sell it" (Yorkville Enquirer 1909). Pupil John "came from downstate to the city schools" of Indianapolis. His mother objected to classes in physical education and music as a waste of time. "He inherits whittleing [sic] from his father", she wrote the school, "and his brains from me. I'm paying to educate him, so educate his brains" (Newport (Rhode Island) Mercury 1921).

Outstate
American Speech noted that university students from Nebraska, Iowa, Colorado, and Wyoming were reporting "out-state" use among their acquaintances, with reference to "out in the state away from the main city, and out in the state away from the speaker's home" and cited its frequent appearance in the Denver Post (C. B. A. 1931, 310-11). Outstate still stands tallest in the heartland of the USA, places like Missouri, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Michigan. It has appeared, however, at least once in print with reference to all but two of the 50 states (Table 1).
Graphs of the first known uses for upstate ( Figure 1) and downstate ( Figure 2) resemble classic bell curves: a few early states, a few laggards, and many toward the middle of the pack. The outstate distribution (Figure 3), on the other hand, skews strongly to the earliest years, with nine instances in each of the first two decades of the twentieth century and 10 in the third decade, which includes both the median year, 1927, and the modal years, 1927 and 1928. The list then tails off toward the present, with North Carolina and West Virginia finally appearing in 2015. Hawaii's first outstate reference came 11 years after statehood in an advertisement for an opportunity to own a vehicle rustproofing franchise. "Only eight areas available in Honolulu market. A few selected areas [are] still available outstate" (Honolulu Advertiser 1970).
Missouri recorded the initial print usage of outstate, in a 1900 post-election editorial that said in part, "out state Republicans" should be sore about some aspects of St. Louis politics but not about others (Marshall (Missouri) Republican 1900). Outstate is a good word choice for Missouri political conversations because there has long been a divide between the rural-dominated interior and the twin cores of St. Louis and Kansas City, one centrally located on the eastern boundary and the other on the western. The author of a syndicated piece out of Los Angeles put it this way: "Outside the big cities, the political climate shifts. This is what locals call 'outstate' Missouri: a landscape of cattle pastures, soy fields, wineries and one-block towns" (Simon 2004).
Michigan was the second state with a print reference to outstate. The Detroit Free Press said, as a gubernatorial possibility, Thomas J. Cavanaugh, from rural Paw Paw, was not doing much to promote his candidacy, though "his out-state admirers" were saying he would be formidable "should the lightning strike him" (Detroit Free Press 1902). Detroit and its Wayne County lie in the extreme southeastern corner of Michigan, so upstate could easily be the preferred peripheral. It is not. A quick search in Newspapers.com for "upstate Michigan" and "outstate Michigan" showed that the Free Press between 1837 and 2019 published nearly four times as many outstate references to Michigan as it did for upstate (33,430 versus 8,889).
Minnesota has a centrally positioned eastside core, the Twin Cities, so upstate and downstate do not capture the layout of the Minnesota rural periphery as well as outstate. In fact, when the Minnesota legislature codified the metro area in 1967 by naming seven core counties to constitute the Metropolitan Council, it became even more logical for writers to label the other 80 counties as outstate, which they regularly do. The first known outstate Minnesota print item did not appear until 1 November 1914, after 14 states had preceded it. That initial item concerned the Minneapolis post office clearing out hundreds of thousands of "pieces of political mail" with some going to "sub stations for city delivery" and the rest going "to afternoon trains for out-state delivery" (Minneapolis Star Tribune 1914). Minnesota records today the only outstate-branded enterprise in the country, Outstate Data, an agricultural equipment business in Elbow Lake, near the North Dakota line (Table 2).
Outstate areas never generated much in the way of so-called "hicksville humor". They did, however, generate serious efforts by some outstaters themselves to eliminate outstate as an expression.
In Nebraska, a debate started when Doug Bernard, the manager of the McCook Elks Club, picked up an award for having created the best restaurant promotional advertising literature in "Outstate Nebraska". Bernard complained to the McCook Daily Gazette about the outstate labeling. Editor Allen Strunk agreed and wrote an editorial that said, "'Outstate Nebraska' sounds like a section of the state that was sawed off and is out there floating around. It could easily be interpreted as denoting a second rate part of the state". Maybe "Greater Nebraska" was a better choice (Beatrice (Nebraska) Daily Sun 1978). Then the Outstate Nebraska Bureau chief at the Lincoln Journal Star, Dick Ulmer, got into the discussion. "Strunk isn't alone", Ulmer wrote, "in objecting to a term that makes a good 95 percent of Nebraska sound as if it's located somewhere in the trackless wilds of Wyoming". He mentioned how state Senator Sam Cullan would correct any witness that used outstate while appearing before his legislative committee. If Greater Nebraska took hold, what should they then call the Omaha-Lincoln core? Maybe Lesser Nebraska would gain favor (Ulmer 1978). The Nebraska legislature eventually passed a resolution to impose a fine of $50 on any state official caught using the words outstate, greater, or lesser in reference to their state (McGinnis 1990).
Minnesota talked about dumping the outstate nomenclature in the 1980s, but the editorial staff at the outstate St. Cloud Times thought the controversy was unnecessary: "Pardon us if we're slow to comprehend an insult … ." They noted that outstate had "come into common use, especially in governmental circles" but that "no disparagement seems intended". Anyone thinking such an appellation "derogatory and exclusionary" only needed to see how well "Upstate New York" and "Downstate Illinois" were serving. Some in Minnesota were then suggesting "Greater Minnesota" as a replacement, but the Times editors were thinking "Lesser Minnesota" was not the right way to think of the Twin Cities and suburbs. In the "spirit of fraternal fun", the Times went on to suggest "Higher" (outstate) and "Lower", "Natural" and "Unnatural", "Congenial" and "Congested", or "Bigger" (outstate) and "Smaller" as possible descriptors (St. Cloud Times 1987). Citizenry and press still prefer outstate, as a sports columnist argued recently: "You have to get outstate (don't give me that 'Greater Minnesota' nonsense, OK?) to find true devotees for the football Gophers" (Reusse 2016).

Conclusion
Despite efforts by core residents to put down their peripheral neighbors with negative humor and efforts by the peripherals in some states to do away with the terminology, upstate, downstate, and outstate have served well since at least 1862, 1881, and 1900, respectively. These place names convey place baseness in more than a thousand enterprises bearing their imprint. They are the perfect designation for areas not part of a state's core when a commentator wants something less constricting and more inclusive than, say, southern Indiana, northern Florida, or central and western Massachusetts. Exact boundaries of what constitute an upstate, downstate, or outstate segment are unnecessary, and probably unknowable. Of course, as the metropolitan cores of states grow in population and territory, the peripheral areas must shrink in size. My feeling, however, is that the words upstate, downstate, and outstate will continue to serve a useful purpose in helping us deal with each state's peripheral other.
Sinatra closed his first broadcast of 1946 by asking listeners to start the year with "a big cup of happiness", "memories of the guys who gave us victory", and the biggest "box of tolerance" they could get. Tolerance seems like a good way to push away from the longstanding conflict between rural and urban USA, between the periphery and the core.