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 The recognition of geographic regions goes back to the colonial period of American history. By the 18th century, the names New England, the Middle Colonies, and the South had come to refer to major sections of the Atlantic seaboard. Each of these regions encompassed several adjacent colonies or areas of settlement. The regional designations reflected particularities of location, climate, topography, economic systems, ethnic composition of the settlers, and systems of local government. One early use of these areas in a statistical compilation dates from before the American Revolution, when the British Government grouped the North American colonies into major colonial regions to summarize foreign trade information. These regions were New England, Middle Colonies, Upper South, and Lower South.

These colonial groupings were the forerunners of the State combinations that appear in the census publications. In fact, the area called New England in colonial times has maintained its geographic identity to the present day. Much the same is true of the Middle Colonies; except for Delaware, which is now in the Census Bureau’s South Atlantic Division, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania remain the component States of the Middle Atlantic Division. (Maryland and Virginia constituted the Upper South; North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, the Lower South.) On a smaller scale, there were other regional designations that appeared in the geographic structure of later censuses; names such as tidewater, coastal plain, piedmont, and the back country were known and in general use even before the American Revolution. These groupings were of interest from the standpoint of statistical presentations because they referred to relatively homogeneous subareas within several colonies (or States). Such geographic subdivisions appeared in several U.S. publications, often as county groupings that represented areas having similar physical and socioeconomic characteristics.

Although 13 States were in place by the time of the first U.S. census in 1790, they were treated as judicial districts in census publications and Statistical Groupings6-3