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| Science & Technology |
| The County Durham men who drew the Mason-Dixon Line |
| 2017-09-02 |
| [BBC] It is 250 years since America's Mason-Dixon Line was completed. Hailed as a groundbreaking technical achievement, it came to symbolise the border between the Civil War North and South, separating free Pennsylvania from slave-owning Maryland. But who were the two British men who created it? "It was the equivalent of the moon landings today," according to Mason-Dixon Line expert David Thaler. Baker's son Charles Mason and lapsed Quaker Jeremiah Dixon were established scientists when commissioned to settle a land dispute in the pre-revolutionary America of 1763. For 80 years the Calvert family of Maryland and the Penns of Pennsylvania had been locked in a bloody dispute over the boundary between the two colonies they had been granted by the English Crown. "The stakes were very high," said Mr Thaler, trustee of the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore and an expert on the Mason-Dixon project. "There was about 4,000 sq miles of territory that was in dispute and nobody knew who to pay taxes to. Warfare regularly broke out along the border." |
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