"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.
