#Mason dixon line how to#

Chris Connallon, a geologist with the agency, is keeper of the inventory database. The Maryland Geological Survey is overseeing the project on behalf of the state, which by law is supposed to inventory the stones every 10 years but basically can’t afford to. Field work was soon halted due to the pandemic and didn’t fully resume until 2021, a loss of valuable months. The National Register imposes on applicants a two-year limit for gathering and submitting data and the Mason and Dixon Line Stone Inventory launched at a most unfortunate time: mid-March 2020. (The Delaware Boundary Markers were placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.) That’s why Gladhill and his colleagues engaged in a time-sensitive quest to find and assess Pennsylvania’s and Maryland’s monuments. Surprisingly, only monuments along the less iconic border that separates Delaware from Maryland and Pennsylvania-a line also surveyed by Mason and Dixon-are federally protected historic sites. A half century after it resolved one land dispute, it came to symbolize another when the nation split over slavery and the line meant, for many, the difference between enslavement and freedom. If things had gone Maryland’s way, latitudinally the line would be farther north and the state could now claim two major East Coast seaports: Baltimore and Philadelphia. It was surveyed from 1763 to 1768 to settle a territorial dispute between Pennsylvania’s and Maryland’s governing families, the Penns and the Calverts. Historically, the Mason-Dixon Line has been a sort of fulcrum, tipping favorably for one entity, less so for another.

When Maryland’s and Pennsylvania’s monuments were inventoried in the early 1900s, the federal surveyor’s report bemoaned “the far too prevalent notion that a landowner has a right to dispose of a monument in accordance with his own desires.” The monuments themselves belong to the states whose border they mark, but they’re often located on private lands where some owners find them more hindrance than history. Stones are marked with a “P” on the north, or Pennsylvania side. Monuments have been buried, broken off, tipped over, plowed under, shot at, stolen, dumped, defaced by souvenir hunters, and repurposed as church steps, curb stones, platforms for mounting horses, and building blocks for farmhouses and barns. They wear the scars of time, weather, neglect, and maltreatment-accidental or intentional. Most original monuments-stone pillars embedded in the ground over two centuries ago-still exist some have been replaced, a few are missing. Gladhill was one of about two dozen Maryland and Pennsylvania surveyors who volunteered to locate and document these aging landmarks. But after leaving the neatly mowed lawn of a modernish house in Adams County, we wandered the woods at length on a treasure hunt of some urgency.

#Mason dixon line how to#

Gladhill was using mapping apps, and the marker’s approximate coordinates and outdated instructions on how to find it. Specifically, we were looking for one of the stone markers-called monuments-that 18th-century Englishmen Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon placed at one-mile intervals along the border line that now bears their names. We were exploring the nation’s most storied boundary, the Mason-Dixon Line. And it was only about the size of a toaster oven stood on end. The object he was looking for had been there at least a century, maybe two. But on a warm day last June, he lost his way in the woods, and I was with him. He even wrote a book about his surveying adventures. He was raised and still lives in Fairfield, works less than 10 miles away in Gettysburg, and as a surveyor has tramped the Pennsylvania-Maryland border extensively. Eric Gladhill knows south-central Pennsylvania pretty well.