I'm kind of hoping that at least part of that title was provocative, at least on the Address Nerd level, because many of us don't live in, and indeed probably can't picture, a unified system for rural addresses stretching across an entire state.
But then, most of us don't live in North or South Dakota. I'll explain.
In my virtual peramulations across the globe, one thing for which Google has made me grateful (there are downsides, but more on that some other time), I was, one fine day, scanning the wide open spaces of North Dakota, when a detail caught my eye.
I found ordinally-numbered streets, suffixed with binomial directionals (96th Ave SW, for example) in truly out-of-the-way rural areas. Such is the form of my inquisitiveness that I began panning, following the decreasing numbers in the direction of what I'd hoped would be the origin point of that system. I quickly saw that these numbered streets and avenues were one section ... one full surveyed mile ... apart. Before I knew it I had panned across a significant section of the state. And still, I had not located the origin, it seemed not to be near any of the larger towns (and some of those had their own county grids superseding the statewide pattern I was seeing.
I poked about via Google now and again hoping to find some defining document but was unsuccessful (amazing how often that is true for many of these address systems). I was unsuccessful for a very long time but then, a few days ago, I stumbled on what I was looking for.
According to this article (https://www.farmshow.com/a_article.php?aid=4428) at a site called Farm Show News Magazine, back in 1988, when Enhanced 911 was coming to North Dakota, the emergency coordinator in Stark County, was wondering how to solve the problem of establishing findable addresses in a state where the geography is kind of unrelentingly flat. From the article:
Anyone who has tried to find a farm in a rural area knows how difficult it can be. One hill looks like the next. The same with shelter belts and mile lanes, especially at night.
Thinking on it, he hit on the idea of not just his county but the entire state of North Dakota is though it were one town. The flat, rectilinear geography of the Public Land Surveyed North Dakotan landscape fairly gave itself to the approach.
Simply put, an intersection of section lines as close to the geographic center of the state as practical was chosen. (As it would happen, it can be found at 47°24'52.2"N 100°32'42.6"W, a spot about 20 miles NNE of the state capital, Near a place called McCluskey) The section line extending east and west from this, from the east boundary to the west boundary was designated a baseline and whenever it sported a road that road would be Main Street; the section line extending north and south, from the top of state to the bottom, was the other baseline and when it sported a road that road would be called Center Avenue, numbered streets and avenues corresponding to section lines radiating out from there. This divides the state up into more-or-less equal quadrants and each quarter would be suffixed with the appropriate directional: NW, NE, SW, and SE. A notional intersection of an otherwise-nondescript pair of rural roads, one being 29 miles south of Main Street and 45 miles west of Center Avenue would be the corner of 29th St SW with 45th Ave SW.
This system bears the name of its inventor, of course, it is known as the Burkle Address System, and, except for its three most populous counties, is used across the entire state of North Dakota.
Not just there, either. Neighboring South Dakota though it so ideal that they use a modified version of it too (the baselines being the northern and western boundaries of the state itself, avoiding the requirement for having directionals at all.
The guidelines for South Dakota rural addressing can be found in a PDF hosted by the State of SD at https://dps.sd.gov/resource-library/South-Dakota-Rural-Addressing-Procedural-Handbook.pdf-782.
Not all states can approach rural addresses this way, of course. But the Dakotas seem uniquely qualified to go it that way, and it's interesting how it worked out.
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