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.
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