Short Stuff: Mason-Dixon Line

The dividing line between the North and South is purely political. But the story of its creation is pretty interesting.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's
Chuck and there's Jerry. You can hear air conditioning in
the background, and this is short stuff. I got this
idea just a couple of days ago. Emily and I
were watching Jeopardy, as we don't do every night, but
we try to make it that appointment viewing. We have
a good time watching that show together. Yeah, it's great.

(00:24):
Do you remember the time we were on Jeopardy? I
know how about that? Uh, it's funny because my daughter
will walk through the room occasionally be like you were
on that shows. Um. So it was a question a
couple of nights ago or I guess an answer. A
clue is what they call them. And it said something
about these two gentlemen, and I can't remember exactly how

(00:46):
it was worded, um, but something about like surveying, and
I was like Lewis and Clark, and it was Mason
and Dixon. And being from the South, you always hear
about the Mason Dixon line are not always, but it's
a enough term to where I was like, wait a minute.
I was like, Mason and Dixon were people, and I

(01:06):
never really thought about it. Of course, they were, but
I knew nothing about this at all. So this popped up.
The House of Works had a pretty actually really good
article on it. So, um, here we go and away
we go. Because I thought Mason and Dixon were probably
politicians of some sort, I had no idea they were
the surveyors. You've got to be a pretty amazing surveyor
for somebody to name your survey after you, especially when

(01:29):
it's the one that's as important as the Mason Dixon line,
because as we'll see, it's the line that divided the
north and the south. But even before that, decades before that,
it was a really important line that settled the decades
long boundary dispute between William Penn and the Pennsylvania Colony
and um Lord Baltimore Charles Calvert of the Maryland Colony

(01:51):
to the south. And those two were really going at it.
And the reason they were going at it was because
Penn was given the land down to the parallel fortieth
degree latitude north latitude, and Calvert, Lord Calvert was given
the land from I think like the Potomac up to parallel.
The problem is the earliest maps that map Parallel got

(02:15):
it kind of wrong, and Philadelphia by these early maps,
was in Maryland, about five miles within the Maryland border,
and William Penn said, that just can't stand. We need Philadelphia.
It's really important. Yeah, like everyone wanted Philadelphia. One day,
those great people will throw batteries at Santa Claus. I

(02:35):
forgot about. We need to claim this wonderful city. Don't
make this show it's always sunny in Philadelphia. It's gonna
be pretty great and last a thousand years. Also, at
Stake was about four thousand square miles, so it was
a lot of land. And this was a dispute for decades,

(02:56):
and the people of these two areas started to kind
to worry that things were getting so heated that they
would be like double text on their property, because both
places would claim that they're in their part of the world.
And so finally in seventeen sixty three, the King of
England said, all right, I'm gonna get in here. We're
gonna commission this survey. I got a couple of crack

(03:20):
uh surveyors. Once an astronomer named Charles Mason. One is
a surveyor named Jeremiah Dixon. There from England. They've got
all this fancy, fancy modern equipment that they're gonna bring along.
They're gonna need a ton of booze and a lot
of people, and it's gonna take years, but we're gonna
finally settle this. Yeah. They spent fifty eight months from

(03:41):
what I can tell, basically straight through living in tents
surveying a two hundred and thirty three mile or three
seventy four kilometer stretch, and they settled that boundary dispute.
And did they ever because even still today, surveyors, modern
surveyors who used geosynchron satellites to do their surveying, are

(04:02):
in awe of how accurate Mason and Dixon's survey line
and their their boundary line work was. That it was
just almost precisely dead on because they've gone back, modern
surveyors have gone back and recalculated it, and they're like,
it's basically exactly right. Yeah, And I think some of
the techniques they use informed surveying that we still see today.

(04:24):
So it's it's a pretty cool story. Um, so let's
take a break. We'll talk a little bit about that
booze and uh, how they accomplished this feat a little
more right after this, it's they got drunk a lot, apparently,

(05:01):
I guess, so I don't want to harp on it,
but it is pretty funny. One of the footnotes in
this article that you sent, Uh, where did that come from?
It was good. I will tell you later on okay. Um,
the supply list from seventeen sixty four, and it's just
one of the years had twenty twenty gallons of whiskey,
forty gallons of brandy, and eighty gallons of wine. Uh.

(05:23):
In the end, they were paid about thirty five hundred
pounds uh sixteen pounds and nine shillings, which would be
about three hundred grand today or about sixty dollars per year.
But they did a lot of hard work drawing this line.
It was very meticulous. They had some Native Americans helping

(05:44):
them as guide, some Iroquois people. Uh. They had about
a hundred and twenty people in their party, and they,
like I said, they had sort of the state of
the art equipment at the time, which, um, you know,
I think informed later equipment, but it is pretty pretty
cract stuff at the time. Yeah. There's one in particular
called a zenith sector and it had a plumb line

(06:06):
that ran vertically straight, vertically to the ground, and then
it had a telescope that you could, you know, put
to different degrees at different angles, and then you had
to get on the ground and look up through the
telescope to find the star you were looking for. And
then you could measure the angle of the star um
with the zenith of the sky, the highest point of
the sky, and calculate an angle here on Earth. And

(06:29):
that's the kind of stuff that they were doing again
over fifty eight months. And one of the reasons why
the survey was so advanced for its time is that
it was the first geodetic survey carried out at least
in North America. And geodetic surveys are the ones that
are so precise. They calculate the lumps and bumps and
um irregular spheroid shape of the Earth into its calculations

(06:53):
to make it that precise. That's why it was so precise.
But again, these guys weren't using satellites and computers. They
were using telescopes and plumb lines that they had to
get on the ground to look up to find stars with,
and their noodles to calculate their findings. I wonder if
the the King of England's like, we really just needed
you to walk left and drop some bird seed. Uh,

(07:15):
So what happened along the way? They they didn't drop
bird seed. This is kind of even more impressive. Is
that reference to something dropping bird seed? Well, I mean
the old stories of dropping bird seed to find your
way back? But yeah, you never heard that? No I haven't.
Is it like the joke is because like the birds
would come eat the seed. I think it was probably

(07:36):
from some fairy tale. Originally, I don't know. I totally
ruined this. I really think we're going to edit this
part out because I think I'm just going to leave
it as is. It was so beautiful and hilarious, I
think we should leave it. Um. So, what they did
drop was limestone posts that they brought over from England

(07:57):
every mile along the way, and I think it was
like two hundred and thirty something miles UH in total,
as well as an eighty three mile uh north south
border between what was Pennsylvania or what is now Delaware
what was then Pennsylvania in eastern Maryland. But they dropped
these limestone posts along the way, and then every five
miles dropped a crown stone, which is a very very heavy,

(08:22):
like a five to seven hundred pounds stone that they
carved a C on one side for calvert and a
P on the other side for pen um. Sometimes they
even had coat of arms and stuff like that until
they got to the Appalachian Mountains and then they were like,
we can't do these crown stones anymore. We can't carry
these up over the mountain. And also it's hilarious they
shipped these over from England, like, we're not sure if

(08:43):
there's stone in America, so we're just gonna cover all
those came from England because I know the posted I
think the stones did as well. Okay, yeah, I'm pretty sure,
which is hilarious but also really unnecessary. Sure, well, I
didn't know what was over here. So, like I said,
the Mason Dixon Line has been recalculated, much to the

(09:06):
thrill of modern surveyors. And I think one of the
first surveys of the Mason Dixon Line was carried out
by the Mason Dixon Line Preservation Partnership, which is adorable
because there's surveyors from Pennsylvania and surveyors from Maryland involved
in that partnership, and they went around to do an
inventory of all of those um milestones and crown stones

(09:27):
as well. Yeah, and they found a lot of them,
which is really cool. I think they found all but ten. Uh,
and they reckon just maybe flooding apparently. Uh. In the
Civil War they would use them for target practice and
stuff like that, or just the Civil War in general
destroyed them. But all but ten is not too bad, No,

(09:47):
it's not so. The Mason Dixon Line was established the
boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland and also Delaware and then
what would become West Virginia, and that in and of
itself was pretty great considering how acurate they were. The
reason why it divides the North and the South had
nothing to do with Mason and Dixon had to do
with the fact that um Maryland was a slave state.

(10:10):
It was the northernmost slave state, and in eighteen twenty
the Missouri Compromise was passed that basically said the slave
states are considered in the South, and all the South
states are slave states, the North states are free states.
And that's that. And because Maryland was a slave state,
it was considered the South, and since it south of
the missing Mason Dixon line, the Mason Dixon Line was

(10:30):
used to distinguish the North and the South between eighteen
twenty on, and that's kind of it. I'm sure Maryland
today is like, oh, kind of not really though, Yeah,
I think most of the South says the same thing too.
I mean one of the biggest shocks I've ever gotten
in my life, but a really dull life, was finding
out that Maryland was technically in the South. I had

(10:52):
no idea. Yeah, I mean, if you're from Georgia. I
even remember growing up thinking Virginia was pushing it right. Um,
But then I met Virginians and many I think maybe
because they're fairly far north geographically on the East Coast,
uh are sometimes very adamantly Southern. Yeah, they really love

(11:12):
horses too. That's pretty southern. And then one other little tidbit,
so from eighteen twenty to eighteen fifty, when the Fugitive
Slave Act was passed, Um, if you were enslaved in
Maryland and you can make it just across the border
to Pennsylvania, you were free, amazing, and you would eventually

(11:32):
become a Philadelphia Eagles fan. And boo Santa Claus. I
don't know if they threw batteries at Santa Claus. They
threw batteries at somebody. I feel like it was Santa Claus. Yeah,
that that shows up in our Black Friday episode if
you want to go listen to that one dedicated fans
there in Philly. That's all I'll say. Right, And by

(11:53):
the way, Chuck, that um the post that we were
talking about, it's called the Survey of Mason and Dixon,
Granddaddy of all titled disputes, and it's hosted on the
Maryland Bar Association's website that m has be a dot org.
So look it up. Fantastic and you'll be like, this
is great. I love it, Okay, And I guess that's it, right, Chuck.
I think that means you know what it means. Short

(12:16):
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