McKissick Island

McKissick Island (also known as McKissick's Island) is a former 5,000 acre island in the Missouri River that is part of Nemaha County, Nebraska but is now east of Nebraska's normal eastern border and can only be reached by land from Nebraska by first going through Iowa and Missouri.

It is sometimes described as a Nebraska enclave within Missouri, although it is not a true enclave, since it is physically attached to Nebraska through the river.

A dispute over whether Missouri or Nebraska had jurisdiction was determined in a 1904 United States Supreme Court decision that was not formally recognized by the two states until 1999.

The island always had a small population and as of 2006 it was reported that only one house was on the island. The only road sign on it uses Nemaha County street grid of 647A Avenue and 739A Road rather than the Atchison County, Missouri grid which surrounds it.

The island derives its name from the McKissick family which bought land in the area in the 1840s before Missouri's borders with Nebraska and Iowa had been finalized with those states entry into the union. Ironically the family were among the first settlers of Fremont County, Iowa where they founded McKissick's Grove about one miles north of the McKissick Island thinking the Grove was in Missouri. When Iowa entered the union in 1846 that Grove near today's Hamburg, Iowa was determined to be in Iowa.

The McKissicks moved to California in 1861.

The island is officially called McKissick Island on the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) system. The island is northeast of the line that otherwise forms the Nemaha County/Otoe County but is considered a precinct (equivalent of a township) of Nemaha County. Maps interchangeably refer to it under both McKissick Island and McKissick's Island.

However the Supreme Court ruling calls it "McKissick's Island."

A map of the river attributed to Robert E. Lee in 1837 showed the island on the Nebraska side.

On March 1, 1867, Nebraska entered the union with officially recognized boundaries including McKissick's Island. Missouri had extended its border to the Missouri River in northwest Missouri in 1836 in the Platte Purchase and did not claim the island when those borders were drawn.

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