While searching for references for my recent peneplains post, I found a great essay called "Why The Midwest Is Square". It's from the 1987 Old Farmer's Almanac:
A farmer in Wyandot County, Ohio (so help me), insists that at the end of a harvest day in the field, his drivers park tractors, harvesters, and trucks square with the world and exactly parallel to each other. Doesn't matter whether east or west or north or south, but by heaven all shall be the same or the worker is sent back to correct his mistake. Neatness is a primary virtue. A crooked dead furrow is more to be lamented than a crooked banker. Another farmer - a good friend, I must confess - feels compelled to keep the corners of his hay field exactly 90 degrees as he mows. Instead of sashaying around the turn, as I do, so I can finish before next Tuesday, he mows through the corner, stops, backs slowly and carefully around until the mower blade comes square to the standing hay, then proceeds ahead again. A neighbor spent thousands of dollars to move a creek that meandered evilly through his land, so that the could "square off" a field. Midwesterners have studded their land with right angle corners; they think the earth is square, not round.
The essay goes into detailed history about how Ohio and the other Midwestern states got to be so resolutely rectilinear. It's at its most hilarious where it describes the confusions of people who live on the border between Ohio's flat lands and its rolling hills: a collision between flatland and paisleyland.