Pennsylvania Dept Affairs, Of Internal Report on the Resurvey of the Maryland-Pennsylvania Boundary Part of the Mason and Dixon Line

Annotation

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. The History of the Boundary Dispute between the Baltimores and Penns resulting in the Original Mason and Dixon Line, by Edward Bennett Mathews, is an exhaustive account of the interesting history of events which preceded the marking of the original line. The controversy is, perhaps, the most extensive and interesting of any arising from territorial disputes in America. The fact that the ad joining provinces were owned by two families, to whom the inhabit ants looked for the titles to their lands and toward whom their loyalty often led them to extreme acts, makes the controversy sharper and the feelings more personal than they would otherwise have been. The contestants on each side were possessed of sufficient arguments to make them exceedingly tenacious of their rights and the long contin nance of the controversy led them by frequent repetition of the same arguments to believe not only in the correctness of the claims orig inally put forth but also in the slightly increased claims which were made from time to time in the heat of argument. As the history shows, the most of the statements which have come down to the pres ent are from partisan sources and must be interpreted with caution where the incidents are narrated by only a single contestant. The history of the original line is brought down to the present day by brief accounts of the extension of the east-west line to the western limit of Pennsylvania and the subsequent resurveys of portions of the original work under Graham, Sinclair, and Hodgkins.