New workers from Fort Cumberland arrived at the end of the first week in October. Almost on their heels, a party of eight Senecas arrived. The Indian escorts welcomed them gladly, since the Senecas were members of the Six Nations. The Seneca party, equipped “with Blankets and Kettles, Tomahawks Guns and Bows and Arrows,” was on its way south to fight the Cherokee. They decided to travel with the survey party for a time. During that time, all of the Indians and Hugh Crawford discussed news from distant council fires. The Lenni-Lenape and Shawnees weren’t the only angry Indian groups; the Six Nations peoples also felt a growing mistrust toward European colonists. After two days, the surveyors gave the Senecas some gunpowder and war paint, and the party resumed its journey south. Yet the Indian escorts who still remained with the survey continued discussing matters among themselves.
On October 9, 1767, at 231 miles 20 chains, the surveyors crossed a well-trodden Indian warpath. Within two miles, the chief of the Mohawks requested a meeting with Mason and Dixon. “This day the Chief of the Indians which joined us on the 16th of July informed us that the above mentioned War Path was the extent of his commission from the Chiefs of the Six Nations that he should go with us, with the Line; and that he would not proceed one step farther Westward.” For a day, Mason and Dixon pled their case to continue west: they had almost reached Pennsylvania’s western limit — five degrees of longitude from the Delaware River. But the escorts would not budge, and the surveyors had no choice but to accept their decision. William Johnson later informed Richard Peters that the Mohawk leader had “Suppressed part of what he might have informed you.” Suspicions of English deceit, grievances over broken promises, and rumors of Indian enslavement — circulated by French agitators — had pushed the Indians to a level of anger higher than Johnson had ever seen, short of war. Although it arrived after the fact, this information further validated Mason and Dixon’s acceptance of the escorts’ decision.
The black rectangle inset marks the end point of the West Line.
On his final map, Dixon even included the Indian War Path that Mason noted in his journal.
Near a ridge now called Browns Hill, Mason and Dixon established their westernmost camp and spent the week of October 11 observing the stars. While they were there, a large group of Lenni-Lenape, among them Prisqueetom, brother to the king of the Lenni-Lenape, visited the camp. Prisqueetom, who was eighty-six years old, told Mason that he and his brother “had a great mind to go and see the great King over the Water; and make a perpetual Peace with him; but was afraid he should not be sent back to his own Country.”
In this western camp, the surveyors monitored their five key stars — Vega, Deneb, Sadr, Delta Cygni, and Capella — for the last time. These stars, old friends by then, had guided them along the West Line for more than a year. And it was time for another marker:
On the top of a very lofty Ridge . . . at the distance of 233 miles 17 Chains 48 Links from the Post marked West in Mr. Bryan’s Field, we set up a Post marked W on the West Side and heaped around it Earth and Stone three yards and a half diameter at the Bottom, and five feet High.
With cutting-edge scientific instrumentation, meticulous observation, and a hardworking crew, Mason and Dixon had successfully broken the established boundaries of what a survey could accomplish. Even though the West Line ended short of Pennsylvania’s western limit, Mason and Dixon’s very, very long West Line still inscribed a parallel of latitude on Earth’s surface — the first of its kind anywhere.
Although the West Line survey was complete, a lot of work remained. As soon as the team erected the stone cairn, axmen began cutting the vista east to milepost 199, where it would connect with an already completed section of the vista. Tensions eased as the group returned to familiar territory.
Sadly, though, another death occurred. Jacob, one of the Indian escorts who had worked many years as a scout for the British, died of an unmentioned cause. The surveyors had a coffin made for him and purchased a black burial shroud. Jacob’s remains, along with “a silk handkerchief sent to his widow,” were carried to Philadelphia, where he was “decently buried.” Jacob’s pay of forty dollars, a higher amount than that paid to most of the other Indians, was sent to his widow.
On November 5, Hugh Crawford and the Indians departed. They were paid, in colonial currency, a total of 631 dollars (the equivalent of slightly more than 236 pounds) for their service. The Mohawk Leaders — Hendricks, Daniel, and Peter — received payment twice that of the other escorts. Three of the men also received a rifle in partial payment. Soceena and Hannah received payment equal to that of the lower-paid Indian men. Shortly after the Indians left, all but thirteen of the survey’s crewmen departed for their homes too.
Meanwhile, the final load of boundary stones lay waiting at the foot of Sideling Hill, at milepost 134. Earlier that season, Mason and Dixon had received an estimate for transporting them to the section of the line between mileposts 134 and 199. The exorbitant fee requested was twelve pounds — nearly equal to the weekly wages of a dozen crewmen! Astounded, Mason and Dixon refused, a decision later applauded by Pennsylvania commissioner Benjamin Chew, who complimented the surveyors, noting they had “acted very prudently in refusing to give the extravagant Price.” Mason sent a letter to Hugh Hamersley, Lord Baltimore’s agent, to report that they’d left seventy boundary stones at Fort Frederick. Ironically, considering the expense of cutting the stones and shipping them to America, Mason wrote, “In all the Mountains we have past over this year and almost at every Mile Post there is good stone if not superior to those sent from England.” In lieu of the heavy markers, Mason and Dixon followed the commissioners’ instructions and, without any further visits from the Lenni-Lenape, marked the line on the tops of the western ridges with cairns similar to the one on the westernmost ridge. The work satisfied them: “The Marks we have erected may be seen from Ridge to Ridge in most Places and it will take a great length of Time (if ever) to destroy them.”
The crew marched east in snowy weather that grew progressively worse. At Savage Mountain, they trudged through snow twelve to fourteen inches deep. On November 20, with hands so cold their fingers wouldn’t open and close, they sheltered in a Mr. Kellam’s house, where seven of the crewmen quit. Cold, tired, and forced to find new men to complete the work, Mason and Dixon splurged on a filling, hot meal. On November 28, after paying the crewmen, the surveyors sat down to a hearty dinner of venison, corn pudding, and turnips.
Later, when the surveyors reached the top of Town Hill, they received a pleasant surprise: Robert Farlow, a trusted instrument bearer who’d worked with them for three years, awaited them. In the beginning of October, Mason and Dixon had sent him east to set boundary stones on an eastern section of the line. When the surveyors arrived on Town Hill, Farlow and his men had just finished building the cairn there. Mason and Dixon were even more pleased when Farlow told them all the markers were in place from milepost 135 eastward to the Post marked West, except for those at miles 77 and 117, which they’d placed slightly off the line due to marshy ground and a gigantic boulder. As the size of the crew dwindled, Moses McClean began selling off unneeded equipment: blankets, kettles, two axes, a pair of hobbles, a saddle, a tent, and ten cows.
By December 12, a skeleton crew of fewer than ten men remained with Mason and Dixon, who dispatched an express message to the commissioners to expect their arrival in Philadelphia — mission accomplished — on the fifteenth of December.
The surveyors spent Christmas Day meeting with the commissioners, including Benjamin Chew, who was eager “to put an end to this tedious Business.” Mason and Dixon were relieved to hear the commission had “no further occasion for us to run any more Lines for the Honorable Proprietors.” Was their work for the Penns and Lord Baltimore finally done?
It seemed not, as almost in its next breath, the boundary commission issued two additional tasks. First, Dixon, a fine draftsman, was to draw a map of the line. Second, knowing that Mason and Dixon were computing the length of a
degree of latitude for the Royal Society, the commissioners asked them to compute the length of a degree of longitude in the parallel of the West Line. The surveyors undertook both tasks at the Harlans’ house.
The second task took a week of mathematical computation. Using their many star observations and chain measurements, and supposing Earth was a perfect sphere, Mason and Dixon calculated the length of a degree of longitude along the West Line to be 53.5549 miles. However, in their note to Richard Peters, Mason wrote, “But the Earth is not known to be exactly a Spheroid, nor whether it is everywhere of equal Density. . . . We do not give in this as accurate.” One task was complete.
Dixon finished drawing the map at the end of January, and they delivered it to Mr. Peters for his approval on January 29. While in Philadelphia, they stopped at the State House and checked on the zenith sector and transit instruments, confirming that they were still safely stored. With the second task completed, they decided to finish computing a degree of latitude for the Royal Society.
On February 1, Mason and Dixon prepared to gather the rest of the information they needed to measure and compute a degree of latitude. Joined by their good friend Joel Baily and a few others, Mason and Dixon laboriously remeasured the distance from the Harlans’ garden all the way to the Middle Point. Even though they had already measured the distance in 1764 with a Gunter’s chain, the Royal Society wanted more precision. They wanted the distance measured with four brass-tipped wooden rods, each ten feet long, and a five-foot-long brass standard, all sent directly to Mason and Dixon for this purpose by Nevil Maskelyne. Maskelyne especially cautioned Mason and Dixon to “Keep the rods as dry as you can, for if any thing alters their length it is to be supposed to be changes of moisture and dryness. . . . Always take care to bring the ends of the rods to meet, without any shock, and don’t trust this to your Labourers.” Maskelyne didn’t trust anyone but Mason and Dixon. Every measurement was double-checked.
They recorded the temperature multiple times during the day. Their reason for doing so was that in addition to the wet and dry changes mentioned by Maskelyne, changes in temperature slightly altered the length of the wooden rods, the wood expanding in heat and shrinking in cold.
The trip to the Middle Point lasted from February 23 until June 4. Wading through swampy water became routine. Twice they crossed water that was four to five feet deep. Both times, Mason noted that it was others, not he, who went in that water.
At the Middle Point, they lodged for several days at Mr. Twiford’s house, one of Mason’s favorite places in America, before returning to the Harlans’ house, where Mason combined the earlier data collected at the Middle Point with the crew’s new measurements. He calculated that the length of a degree of latitude — the arc of the meridian from the Stargazer’s Stone to the Middle Point — at their location was equal to 68.81 miles — a 0.69-mile difference from the measurement of a degree of latitude in Europe. While the difference might seem small, it did help scientists prove that Earth was not perfectly spheroidal — an important confirmation. Mason submitted the results to the Royal Society, which received the information with great appreciation.
The Royal Society was delighted that Mason and Dixon had successfully measured a degree of latitude in North America. The vertical line at the center of the map is the degree that they measured.
It was nearly the end of June before the surveyors completed their measurements and calculations. As soon as they finished, they notified the boundary-line commissioners that they were ready to leave for England. Rather than agreeing, the commissioners instead informed the surveyors that they wanted Dixon’s map engraved and printed before the two men departed. One of the commissioners hired Mr. Dawkins, a local engraver, to do the work. Unfortunately, Dawkins quit midway through the job. Engraver James Smither completed the work, and the copper plate was delivered to Robert Kennedy’s printing office on Third Street in Philadelphia. Mason and Dixon stepped closer to their departure for home when they picked up two hundred copies of the boundary-line map on August 16. Mr. Smither presented his bill for engraving several days later. It was for twelve pounds — the exact amount Mason and Dixon had saved by not hauling boundary stones to the tops of the farthest western ridges.
Copies of Jeremiah Dixon’s map were delivered to the boundary commissioners, who signed and stamped their acceptance of the map with wax seals. The column on the left contains the Maryland commissioners’ signatures; the column on the right has those of the commissioners from Pennsylvania.
Maryland commissioners: Horatio Sharpe, John Ridout, John Leeds, John Barclay, George Stewart, Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, and John Beale Bordley. Pennsylvania commissioners: William Allen, Benjamin Chew, John Ewing, Edward Shippen Jr., and Thomas Willing.
Mason and Dixon spent the next three weeks settling their accounts, wrapping up loose ends, and attending one final meeting with the commissioners. On September 8, almost five years after they had arrived in America, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon said good-bye to Philadelphia and journeyed to New York. On September 11, 1768, at 11:30 in the morning, they boarded the Halifax Packet and set sail for Falmouth, England. The same day, Mason concluded his journal, writing, “Thus ends my restless progress in America.”
For most of the colonists, Mason and Dixon’s line resolved the territorial disputes that had pitted landowners against each other. But a few colonists, especially those whose lands straddled the line, battled on, filing land disputes that had to be decided in court. Sometimes the result was that a colonist from one province lost his property to a claimant from the other province. These out-of-luck colonists had no choice but to move.
In August 1768, shortly before they left Pennsylvania, Mason and Dixon gave Benjamin Chew their invoice for 1,502 days’ worth of work. The total bill was for 3,256 pounds, one shilling.
MASON AND DIXON’S survey was done. Eight years later, the Declaration of Independence essentially made the Calvert and Penn boundary dispute moot. Under an agreement called the Articles of Confederation, the thirteen American colonies, among them Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware, bound themselves (as sovereign states) into the United States of America in a combined fight against England. Proprietorships granted by England no longer applied. In 1776, concerned about one of the new nation’s boundaries — the one between Virginia (West Virginia did not become a state until 1863) and Pennsylvania — Thomas Jefferson wrote to fellow Virginian and politician Edmund Pendleton, stating, “I wish they would compromise by an extension of Mason & Dixon’s line. They do not agree to the temporary line proposed by our [Virginia] assembly.”
After the Revolutionary War, Mason and Dixon’s line remained the boundary separating the three states, although minor disputes continued over a small wedge of land where the three states converged. During the years 1782 to 1785, several surveyors completed the West Line by extending it to five degrees longitude, bringing the total length of the line to about 260 miles. People of the time were well aware of Mason and Dixon’s line; it became part of everyday language. In 1784, a letter excerpted in the July 7 issue of the newspaper Freeman’s Journal described the approach of a severe storm: “The storm then took across the ridge and made as clear a line as ever Mason and Dixon did.”
During the early decades of the nineteenth century, perceptions of the origin of the Mason-Dixon Line had already blurred. In fact, in the 1830s, a number of newspapers printed short articles that reminded readers of the line’s roots in a dispute between two feuding colonies. They did so because Mason and Dixon’s line had begun to act as a boundary not just between states but between two new identities, and these new perceptions altered the lives of millions of Americans.
As tensions increased between northern and southern states, particularly issues concerning taxation of goods, people increasingly regarded Mason and Dixon’s line as the division between the North and the South — not only geographically but also politically. For the most part, industry and manufacturing drove the North economi
cally. Political decisions supported growth in those areas. In contrast, agriculture, particularly the cotton crop, drove the southern economy. Shipping cotton to overseas markets was big business. Political decisions favored increased crop production, which required increased labor — labor most often supplied by slaves. Slavery, at first on economic grounds, later on moral grounds, became a hotly debated issue as the United States expanded into new territories in the West. Tensions between the North and South escalated. In the June 24, 1833, issue of the Connecticut Courant, a man recalled a conversation he had had with the late John Randolph, a congressman and senator from Roanoke, Virginia. Randolph had been sending books to England for binding. When asked why he didn’t use binderies in New York or Philadelphia, he had replied, “What Sir, patronize our Yankee task-masters who have imposed such a duty upon foreign books! Never, Sir, never! I will neither wear what they make, nor eat what they raise . . . and until I can have my books properly bound south of ‘Mason and Dixon’s line,’ I shall employ John Bull” (meaning England). On October 9, 1841, Terre Haute’s Wabash Courier editorialized, “This famous line is so often mentioned in and out of Congress that to American ears its name is familiar as household words.”
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