The phrase the middle of nowhere designates a completely isolated, featureless or insignificant place.
However, interestingly, many of the earliest uses that I have found of this phrase are figurative, and refer to annihilation—in particular in to knock [something or someone] into the middle of nowhere. These early uses are as follows, in chronological order:
1-: From the Evansville Weekly Journal (Evansville, Indiana, USA) of Thursday 29th June 1848 [Vol. 14, No. 19, page 2, column 1]—the verbs Dodged (with capital initial) and is are in italics in the original text:
The Magician of Kinderhook with a single blow with his wand has knocked that old black cockade federalist Cass, and his chance for the Presidency into the middle of nowhere; while the Wisconsin Governor has Dodged Butler. We think we hear our neighbor exclaim “what an artful set of dodgers them Barn burners are.” Truly, neighbor, “your sufferings is intolerable.
2-: From The Sheboygan Mercury (Sheboygan, Wisconsin, USA) of Saturday 14th September 1850 [Vol. 4, No. 30, page 2, column 3]:
Macon Convention.—The convention of TRAITORS at Macon, Georgia, held on the 22d ult., proved to be eminently more disastrous than the one which met at Nashville. It was to have been a mass convention, and all the South, especially Georgia, which by the way was the first state in this great confederacy to threaten resistance to and secession from the Union, was to be present and knock Uncle Sam into the very middle of nowhere. Only fifteen hundred, however, took the trouble to see the show, less than gather together at a county fair in the North.
3-: From A Peabody a Nobody, by ‘A Democrat’, published in the Weekly Missouri Statesman (Columbia, Missouri, USA) of Friday 6th October 1854 [Vol. 12, No. 40, page 2, column 4]:
What sort of a body can Peabody be after playing such a variety of characters? Nothing but a nobody!—a weak-minded nonentity—standing in the middle of nowhere—a syringe, squirting out only what the last person who has him in charge puts in him.
4-: From the Prairie Farmer. Devoted to Western Agriculture, Horticulture, Mechanics, and Education (Chicago, Illinois, USA) of May 1855 [Vol. 15, No. 5, page 166, column 1]:
Got over to the Missouri.—An Agricultural Society has been organized at Council Bluffs, a place two or three weeks ago out in the middle of Nowhere. […] Mr. H. A. Terry is our agent at the Bluffs, and has already sent us a fair list of subscribers. It is only two or three years ago that we read an account of a journey out there by somebody, who represented it as about equal to that from Cairo to Jerusalem. In fact, the prairie grass was a stranger to sole leather for several hundred miles across Iowa, and the Massassaugas were all waiting the kick of a white man. Now, Pottawattamie has got an Agricultural Society. Hurrah!
5-: From On the Destruction of the World, published in Dow’s Patent Sermons (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson and Brothers, [1857]), by ‘Dow, Jr.’ (Eldridge Gerry Paige – 1813-1859) [4th Series, page 180]:
My friends—the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the first recorded eclipse of the moon, the suicide of Cato, the shutting of the temple of Janus by Augustus, and the captivity of Governor Dorr, all show us plainly that sometime in 1800 the earth is to shake us all off into the middle of nowhere “as a lion shaketh the dew from his mane.”
6-: From the Louisville Daily Courier (Louisville, Kentucky, USA) of Thursday 14th May 1857 [Vol. 24, No. 115, page 2, column 2]:
The Comet is Coming.—The appearance of the great comet that is expected to knock all creation into the middle of nowhere about the 16th of June, has been indefinitely postponed on account of the great gift sale at 96 Third street, where every purchaser of 25 cents’ worth of liniment receives a free gift as soon as the purchase is made, worth from 10 cents to $50. The liniment is the most popular now in use, and the gifts are new and desirable, and consist of gold and silver watches, breastpins, &c. &c.—Recollect the place, 96 Third street, near the post office.
7-: From the Knoxville Register (Knoxville, Tennessee, USA) of Thursday 17th December 1857 [Vol. 61, No. 50, page 2, column 1]:
A DISASTER!
As our pressmen were putting our paper to press yesterday (Thursday,) by an unlucky slip a whole form was pied, thus knocking our second page, editorials, communications, selections, news items and all “into the middle of”—nowhere. None but those acquainted with the operations of a printing office can fully appreciate the disaster, which is about the most provoking, that in the ordinary run of accidents, can befall the printer.
We offer this as an apology for the barren state of our columns, as well as for the delay of our paper.
word histories 
“unlucky slip a whole form was pied, thus knocking our second page”
whole form was “pied” – seems to be a printer’s term which I haven’t seen before. Blotched?
Pied meaning foot possibly an oblique way of saying someone dropped the set page onto the floor presumably The printer’s devil. 🙂
I noticed the earlier references revolved around antebellum separatist (confederacy) issues and much earlier than as a non-american I had assumed.
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Thanks for your comment.
I’ve looked up this word “pied” in the Oxford English Dictionary, and I’ve found the following:
In printing, the verb “pie” means “to make (type) into pie”, and is from the noun “pie”, which designates “a mass of type in confusion or mingled indiscriminately, such as results from the accidental breaking up of a form of type”.
This noun “pie” is in turn “probably a transferred use of “pie” (designating a baked dish of fruit, meat, fish or vegetables), with reference to its miscellaneous contents”.
Likewise, the French noun “pâté” (designating a mass of confused type) is a transferred use of “pâté”.
—Cf. also my blog post: the curious origin of ‘pie’ (baked dish).
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