Posted on 11/07/2003 7:50:36 AM PST by Monte Smith
What's his schedule? I doubt he waste time coming to Texas.
And I'm a transplanted Yankee from New Joisey.
It's a small graphic & kind of hard to tell. But you are correct.
give us back Missouri!!!
On what grounds?
That is a common assumption. Actually, the line that the surveyors Mason and Dixon drew starts near the mid-point of the Delmarva Peninsula and first goes north-south, separating Delaware from Maryland. When it reaches Pennsylvania, it makes a left-hand turn, and then form an east-west line, separating Pennsylvania and Maryland.
The line was surveyed as a result of a settlement between the Calvert family, which founded Maryland, and the Penn family, which obviously formally founded the English colony in Pennsylvania. There was a dispute over the land which now forms the state of Delaware. The charter that was signed to found the colony of Maryland gave the colony land on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay from its shore all the way to the Delaware Bay, if there had been no formal settlements on it. The Calverts claimed that this was the case. However, the Penns correctly pointed out that the land west of the Delaware Bay, but east of the fledgling Maryland colony, had already been settled once temporarly by the Dutch near present-day Lewes, Delaware. The English court which heard the dispute sided with the Penns' claim, and so the boundary line was surveyed by Mason and Dixon.
By this time however, the "Three Lower Counties on the Delaware," which would become the state of Delaware, had on the loosest of ties to Pennsylvania. Though still formally part of Pennsylvania, it had its own legislature, which met at the courthouse in New Castle, Delaware. The boundary line that was drawn that demarcated the "Three Lower Counties" from the rest of Pennsylvania is a line which forms an arc 12 miles from the courthouse in New Castle, which starts at the New Jersey side of the Delaware River, and ends where the Mason-Dixon line makes the left-hand turn.
Yes, technically part of southern New Jersey lies south of the east-west Mason-Dixon line, but only if the line were continued across the state of Delaware and the Delaware River. So that is your history lesson for the night. ;-)
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