Mason and Dixon’s Line

The line which divides Pennsylvania from Maryland, running on the parallel of 39° 43′ 26″. The boundary between the colonial po e ions of the lords Baltimore and of the Penn family had been a subject of almost continual dispute from the first settlement of the country. At length, in 1760, the contending parties having agreed upon a compromise, appointed commi ioners to settle definitively the limits between the two territories. Surveyors were employed by both sides, but their progre appeared rather slow; the proprietors who resided in England decided to send Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, two distinguished mathematicians and astronomers, to complete the work. They arrived in Philadelphia in November, 1763, and by the autumn of 1767 had carefully surveyed and marked a line of nearly 250 miles, extending for the most part through a dense forest and pa ing over a number of mountain ridges. This line, dividing as it does the free State of Pennsylvania from Maryland, which was formerly a slave State, has been often referred to, in popular language, as the boundary between freedom and slavery in the United States.