4th of July, By the Numbers

The folks at Stateline put up this neat infographic about the Fourth of July.

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Stateline is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news service of the Pew Charitable Trusts that provides daily reporting and analysis on trends in state policy.

So what are some of the figures for Maryland?

• In 1770, there were roughly 200,000 Marylanders (see pg 16 of this Census PDF). Today there are 5.8 million.
• Maryland isn't a big cattle producing state (at least compared to Texas), so the best figure I could find combined our beef production with Delaware's for a total of 3.8 million pounds of beef production in May 2013. This was just 0.6 percent of what TX produced that same month!
• Maryland ranked much higher on broiler chicken production. In 2011 we produced 311.1 million broiler chickens worth $724.9 million for 7th place.
• However, Maryland only had 4,000 acres of potatoes as of 2006. Idaho is hard to beat on this front.
• AAA Mid-Atlantic estimates 798,400 Marylanders will travel over the holiday, down slightly from last year.
• And speaking of the calendar, five months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence the Continental Congress moved to Baltimore, meeting in the Henry Fite House on the site now occupied by 1st Mariner Arena (the house was destroyed in the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904).