Mason-Dixon Line Still Runs Straight And True -- Modern Surveyors Follow Stones First Laid In 1764

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - With technology unimaginable to Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, Todd Babcock can show that the surveyors of the Mason-Dixon Line were remarkably on the mark with America's most-famous boundary.

Mason and Dixon drifted only a few hundred feet this way or that through the Appalachian wilderness of 230 years ago.

Babcock and others spend weekends walking the line that divides four states, and once divided the nation. They are not looking for fault, but to honor the English surveyors' work and to record and preserve the line's markers.

"A survey of this magnitude had never been undertaken before," Babcock said. "It took them over four years to complete, living in the wild the entire time."

The Mason-Dixon Line, at 39 degrees 43 minutes and 17.6 seconds north latitude, is the east-west boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, and between Pennsylvania and part of West Virginia.

Babcock, a surveyor from Fleetwood, Pa., and about 40 other members of the Mason-Dixon Line Preservation Partnership, have scoured the 233-mile east-west line for five years in search of every stone marker and cairn the old surveyors set.

The volunteers began recording in May the precise coordinates of the markers, using military satellites and global position receivers.

The line was America's great divide between the North and the South in the years leading up to the Civil War. Runaway Southern slaves in the 1800s made the Mason-Dixon Line their goal for freedom.

Britain ordered the survey in 1760 to settle a dispute between the Calverts of Maryland and the Penns of Pennsylvania, said Bruce Levine, a University of Cincinnati history professor.

"Tremendous ambiguity of boundaries of various English colonies stemmed from the fact people who gave grants didn't really know much about the land they were giving away," Levine said.

Mason and Dixon began their survey in June 1764 in eastern Maryland, marking every mile and ridge top as they headed north and then west.

They were stopped by hostile Indians just northwest of Morgantown in 1767. Other surveyers completed the line in 1784.

Mason and Dixon placed 219 3 1/2- to 5-foot, 700-pound limestone markers from the southwest corner of Delaware to Sideling Hill, about six miles west of Hancock, Md.

Most of those markers bear a "P" on the north side and an "M" on the south side to represent Pennsylvania and Maryland, while every fifth stone bears the Penns' and Calverts' coats of arms on each side.

Slowed by rugged terrain at Sideling Hill, the surveyors abandoned 30 monuments there and used large stone and earthen mounds to mark the rest of the line.

While most of the western mounds have eroded, new 10-inch-by-10-inch markers were placed at most of the sites during a resurvey in the early 1900s. Other places received monuments from the cache found at Sideling Hill.

Modern surveyors confirm that Mason and Dixon strayed only slightly from the agreed east-west boundary of 39 degrees, 43 minutes and 17.6 seconds north latitude.