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—— ON THIS DAY ——
NOVEMBER 15, 1763
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
263 years ago
Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who arrived in Philadelphia on November 15, 1763, to survey the disputed boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland.
On November 15, 1763, two Englishmen landed at Philadelphia with crates of books, astronomical tables, and the best precision instruments available in Europe. Charles Mason was an astronomer who had worked at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Jeremiah Dixon was a surveyor from County Durham. The two had worked together before, sent by the Royal Society to observe the transit of Venus from the Cape of Good Hope. They had now been hired by the Penn and Calvert families to settle a boundary dispute that had been running for about eighty years.
The quarrel was over the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland, which the original colonial charters described in terms that could not be reconciled with the actual geography. Local surveyors had failed. Litigation had dragged on for fifteen years before a court ruling in 1750 set out what the line should be, including the peculiar requirement that the east to west boundary run fifteen miles south of the southernmost point of Philadelphia, and a twelve mile arc drawn around New Castle in Delaware.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The Mason and Dixon line, the surveyed boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that later came to stand for the division between the free states and the slave states.
The work took nearly five years and was the most ambitious geodetic survey yet attempted in North America. Mason and Dixon spent the first winter calculating the exact latitude of Philadelphia from star observations, then measured south to find their starting parallel. They ran the tangent line between Maryland and Delaware first, mathematically the hardest part. From 1765 they pushed the west line through the forest, with a crew of axemen clearing a vista eight or nine feet wide ahead of them, cooks, chain carriers, and teams hauling instruments, sometimes more than a hundred people in all.
They set carved limestone markers along the way, shipped from England, with the Penn coat of arms on one face and the Calvert arms on the other, and crownstones at every fifth mile. Their accuracy, checked by a resurvey more than a century later, was remarkable: over hundreds of miles their line deviated from true latitude by only a tiny fraction of its length. They were forced to stop in October 1767 at Brown's Hill, about thirty-six miles short of the western limit, when their Native guides from the Six Nations refused to go further into territory controlled by hostile groups.
Neither man ever heard the phrase Mason and Dixon line. It acquired its later meaning during the congressional fights over slavery in the nineteenth century, when the boundary they had cut for two feuding proprietary families became the shorthand for the division between the free North and the slaveholding South, and then for a cultural border that persists in American speech long after the political one was abolished. Many of the original stones are still in place. Mason died in Philadelphia in 1786 and lies in an unmarked grave that was finally given a memorial in 2013.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
It was the most precise large survey yet carried out in North America. Working with star observations and hand-carried instruments through forest and mountain, the two produced a line accurate to within a few metres over hundreds of kilometres, confirmed by resurveys more than a century later.
It settled an eighty-year property dispute by measurement rather than litigation. Two proprietary families had fought over the boundary since the seventeenth century, with courts unable to resolve what surveyors could not locate, until astronomy was applied to the problem.
It became the symbolic border between free and slave America. A line drawn for reasons of colonial property law acquired an entirely different meaning in the nineteenth-century struggle over slavery, and survives in American speech as a cultural divide.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
Two Englishmen arrived in Philadelphia on November 15, 1763, to settle an argument between two families about where their land ended. They spent five years cutting a line through the forest with astonishing accuracy, and nobody told them that a century later Americans would use their names to describe the division of a nation.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“November 15, 1763, arrived at Philadelphia.”
— Charles Mason, opening entry of the survey journal
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about Mason and Dixon, the boundary dispute they were hired to settle, how the survey was carried out, and how the line acquired its later meaning?
