![]() ![]() So Mason and Dixon spent 58 months surveying a 233-mile (374-kilometer) stretch of land, from Philadelphia westward. Colonial landowners along the line separating the two proprietors' land feared being asked to pay taxes to both the Penns and Calverts because both families were claiming the same land. The two families quarreled and fought over land for decades. ![]() Mason and Dixon, who were Englishmen, were hired in 1763 by the King of England to settle a land dispute between the aristocratic colonial families, Quaker William Penn II and the Charles Calvert of Maryland. "I use the analogy that Mason and Dixon used the constellation of stars to guide them and today we use a constellation of satellites." ![]() "In many respects the techniques we use today are very similar to those used by Mason and Dixon," Babcock says. So if the Mason-Dixon Line really is the dividing line between the North and South, why then, does it put Maryland - the home of the crab cake - in the South? That's because the Mason-Dixon Line runs between Maryland and Pennsylvania and Delaware, which are all considered Northern states. HowStuffWorksĪsk a Southerner where the South begins and you might get answers like "where one syllable words become two or three" or "where the most honored food are grits and gravy." In other words, the South should begin in Richmond, Virginia, or Lexington, Kentucky, or even Wheeling, West Virginia.īut the Mason-Dixon Line, which has been regarded for 200 years as the transition between the North and South in the United States, turns that conventional sociological thinking upside down. The dashed line represents an unofficial extension separating free and slave states pre-Civil War. The solid red line represents the Mason-Dixon Line, which was drawn by astronomer Charles Mason, and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon in the 18th century. ![]()
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