Its like Bleak House, but with a war.

"Yet skies grow thick with aviating swine, 'ere men pass a chance to draw a line."

So when we left off last year, William Penn had placed his capital city squarely within Maryland.  Penn attempted to negotiate with the Calvert family throughout the early 1680s, and when these failed, the dispute was taken to a committee of Parliament.  It defined the boundaries of the southern three counties, what would become Delaware, but didn't do anything about the east-west boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Theses fascinating disputes were put on hold by a fairly boring coup sometimes referred to as the Glorious Revolution.  Charles II dies, James II (a Catholic) comes to power, then gets kicked out, then reinvades through Ireland, then dies in exile.  The whole thing ends up with William and Mary as joint rulers and chief-papist-disenfranchise-rs.  This ends poorly for the Calverts, who have their colony repossessed and turned into a crown property.  They wouldn't get it back until 1713, when the fifth Lord Baltimore renounced Catholicism and hired David Simon as a PR consultant.

William Penn died in 1713, and the proprietorship bypassed his eldest son and went to his three sons by his second wife.  They proceeded to make a mockery of Penns carefully crafted treaties with the indians and incite borderline civil war with the scotch-Irish settlers on the western edge of the colony.  They also oversaw an expansion of Penn-sponsored European settlement to the south and west of Philadelphia, rendering the Calvert claim to the 40th parallel difficult to enforce.

The Calverts feared losing even more territory to the teeming celtic masses, and in 1750 finally got a ruling from Chancery court establishing an East-West line 39 miles south of the 40th parallel, and intersecting a transpenninsular line which Parliament had already established.  Several attempts to draw this line took place over the next decade, but the skill and equipment of colonial surveyors was found to be inadequate to the job.

In 1761 the Penns and Calverts finally agreed to hire an English survey team, and the Royal Society named Charles Mason & Jeremiah Dixon to the task.

So now you know that.

Interregnum: He's not a surveyor. He's a very naughty boy.

"I am told of certain Stars, ...which are invisible so long as they keep moving, being only seen when they pause."

My girlfriend is kind of awesome.  I'm sure lots of people say this, but I have proof.  If you can name anyone else who would willingly  spend the day after Christmas walking around a graveyard in 30 degree weather, I will  give you a cookie.  Which she baked.  Which makes her even more awesome.

It is a supreme irony, I was told by a very cold ticket-taker at the entrance to Christchurch Cemetery, that Charles Mason was a surveyor, but that no one has any idea where his grave is.  That's how I learn that whichever stone is Mason's, it's too weathered to read.  That's how he learns that Mason was an astronomer, not a surveyor.  That's how my girlfriend learned she should have stayed home.  To his credit the ticket-taker is as gracious as the weather allows.  He asks if we have read the novel.  We have.  He asks if we know the song.  We do.  he gives us our change.  We wander around and look at the stones.

Christchurch is the burial site of four signers of the Declaration of Independence, including Benjamin Rush, the father of american psychiatry, and Benjamin Franklin, who was Benjamin Franklin.  There are commodores and religious leaders and Biddles.  One of their family is buried in Macau.  Another pitches for the Phillies.

Charles Mason was born in a town called Stroud in Gloucestershire in 1728.  He died in Philadelphia in 1786.  He was born the son of a baker and died a fellow of the Royal Society, and had a crater on the moon named after him.  That's not a bad life by any stretch of the imagination.


We'll return to the history of the line next time.

Origin Points I: "In the beginning all the world was America"

I'm going to start with my own background knowledge and thoughts about the Line, and then progress through my research as it goes.  forgive me if this sounds like a history lecture, much like a small child, once its set down it will move quickly.

The colonies of the Atlantic seaboard can be thought of in terms of waterways and harbors.  They were outlets from which flowed the resources of the interior out across the ocean back to the mother countries.  they were conceived along rivers and bays, defined by rivers flowing west to east, by mountains in the west and the ocean itself.

In 1632 King Charles I granted all of the land between the Potomac and the 40th parallel to Charles Calvert, Lord Baltimore.  This was convenient for Charles, as it got an inconveniently catholic noble out of England, and provided a buffer between the English settlements in  Virginia and the Swedish / Dutch settlements around the Delaware capes.  Calvert founds the colony of Maryland, Charles gets beheaded by Parliament, the Swedes fight the Dutch, everyone is happy.

Until 1664, when, following the restoration, the Duke of York attacks and captures the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam.  While today we think of New Amsterdam as only only modern day New York, the Dutch actually claimed coastal Connecticut exempting Hartford, Northern New Jersey (Pavonia) and the formerly Swedish territories of the Delaware Valley and Bay.  The British victory gave them the third property of the same color (Chesapeake, Delaware & Massachusetts Bays) which meant they had locked down the Atlantic coast between New Spain and New France, and could start building hotels.

Bad Monopoly references aside, in 1681 Charles II decided to grant a large swath of the recently acquired territory to William Penn, an often incarcerated religious dissident who, much like Charles himself, was mostly benefiting from something his Dad had done.  His dad, in this case, was Admiral Sir Richard Penn, who had commanded the naval attack on New Amsterdam, and had paid for many of the ships himself.  William, a Quaker activist, was troublesome enough that something had to be done about him, but big enough that he couldn't be locked up for too long.  So instead he was given a piece of territory larger than France and told to go far far away.

Specifically, Penn was granted all the land between the 40th parallel (the northern border of Maryland) and the 43rd (the southern border of New York.  He was also granted all the lands of the former Dutch and Swedish colonies south of the 40th parallel, excluding a "12 mile circle" centered on the city of New Castle.  The future line was born inside those quotation marks, as the grant didn't specify if it was a 12 mile radius circle, or a 12 mile diameter, or a 12 mile circumference.

Long story short, when Penn, needing Atlantic access for his new colony, lays out Philadelphia, he does so at the confluence of the Schuylkill & Delaware rivers, south of the 40th parallel.  In Maryland.

On our next episode, Quakers argue with Catholics, Revolutions are glorious, and there are poems about pigs flying.

From the River End to the Termination Stone

When the Union play PCNJ, they won't let us use the bathrooms in the concourse. That is why this blog exists. You can't get to the bathrooms, and so they set up portajohns out by the river. So I'm standing in line, the score is 0-0, and I wind up talking with the person in front of me in line. And for some reason I say "the west will kill us both." The guy in front of me, whose name is Connor and who is a really cool guy, recognizes the quote. We wind up singing Sailing to Philadelphia in line, and Roger Torres scores and the Union win, and all is right with the world. The next day I get out my copy of Mason & Dixon, and I read it again, and an idea gets into my head, of maybe someday traveling the route myself.

This is a long way of saying that this is the start of a bit of a project. My girlfriend and I will be driving the line this spring, going from the Stargazer's Stone to the Termination Stone, and all sorts of places in between. This blog is going to be the documentation of the preparation for the trip, and then the trip itself. I'm starting out with Pynchon, Wikipedia, Google Maps and a Mark Knopfler / Jackson Browne duet. There will doubtless be diversions into history, beer, soccer, television, and anything else tangentially related to the line.

History and Literature can take us strange places. No reason they shouldn't take us there together.