Four Corners

Four Corners is the only place in the United States where the borders of four states (Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah) meet. The four states adjoin at right angles to one another—hence the name—and the site is a popular tourist attraction. The Four Corners location is marked by a granite and aluminum bronze monument with the seals of the four states, the flags of the states and the tribal nations of the area, and an inscription that reads, “Four states here meet in freedom under God.”

Four Corners lies at 37° N and 109° W on the rugged Colorado Plateau. The area was once home to the cliff-dwelling Ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi) people. The Navajo Nation manages the monument, whose Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah portions sit on its reservation; the Colorado portion is on the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s reservation.

The Four Corners site was first indicated, in 1875, by a surveyor named Chandler Robbins, who was working for the United States General Land Office. The border between the Colorado and New Mexico territories, lying along the 37th parallel north, had previously been demarcated, and Robbins was tasked with surveying the borders of the New Mexico and Arizona territories along the 32nd meridian west. At the intersection of the three territories, he described a natural sandstone spire. A few years later, another surveyor, Rollin J. Reeves, located Robbins’s landmark and used it to mark the border between the Utah Territory and the newly created state of Colorado. At some point the sandstone spire broke, and in 1931 the site was identified with a brass marker. In 1962 the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Indian Affairs formed the first Four Corners monument and built a concrete pad around the old brass marker; the state names and border lines were indicated with tile. The monument was rebuilt in 1992 and again in 2010, and the brass marker was replaced with a plate made of aluminum bronze in granite.