Historically, the Mason-Dixon Line has been a sort of fulcrum, tipping favorably for one entity, less so for another. When Maryland’s and Pennsylvania’s monuments were inventoried in the early 1900s, the federal surveyor’s report bemoaned “the far too prevalent notion that a landowner has a right to dispose of a monument in accordance with his own desires.” The monuments themselves belong to the states whose border they mark, but they’re often located on private lands where some owners find them more hindrance than history. Stones are marked with a “P” on the north, or Pennsylvania side. Monuments have been buried, broken off, tipped over, plowed under, shot at, stolen, dumped, defaced by souvenir hunters, and repurposed as church steps, curb stones, platforms for mounting horses, and building blocks for farmhouses and barns. They wear the scars of time, weather, neglect, and maltreatment-accidental or intentional. Most original monuments-stone pillars embedded in the ground over two centuries ago-still exist some have been replaced, a few are missing. Gladhill was one of about two dozen Maryland and Pennsylvania surveyors who volunteered to locate and document these aging landmarks. But after leaving the neatly mowed lawn of a modernish house in Adams County, we wandered the woods at length on a treasure hunt of some urgency.
#Mason dixon line how to
Gladhill was using mapping apps, and the marker’s approximate coordinates and outdated instructions on how to find it.
Specifically, we were looking for one of the stone markers-called monuments-that 18th-century Englishmen Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon placed at one-mile intervals along the border line that now bears their names. We were exploring the nation’s most storied boundary, the Mason-Dixon Line. And it was only about the size of a toaster oven stood on end. The object he was looking for had been there at least a century, maybe two. But on a warm day last June, he lost his way in the woods, and I was with him. He even wrote a book about his surveying adventures. He was raised and still lives in Fairfield, works less than 10 miles away in Gettysburg, and as a surveyor has tramped the Pennsylvania-Maryland border extensively.
Eric Gladhill knows south-central Pennsylvania pretty well.
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