M&D: In the Zone (or maybe not)

[Monte Davis]

Remember, _Mason & Dixon_ fans, the "Twelve-Mile circle" around New Castle,
DE that put the entire PA-MD-DE conjunction into question?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Delaware-wedge.svg

 

Actually, it was a big improvement. In the excellent _The Barbarous Years_,
just out, colonial historian Bernard Bailyn describes Lord Baltimore's
settlers divvying up the Chesapeake wilderness c. 1640:

 

"The manorial lord Thomas Gerard, one of his tenants testified, bought and
sold land 'without survey by instruments, bounding by guess from heads of
creeks to heads of creeks or other parts. sometimes by paths, sometimes
mentioning courses & distances and sometimes not.'"

 

".Giles Basha claimed a parcel called 'Peare's Plantation,' bounded by
Oyster Creek, Chesapeake Bay, and a line drawn from 'Basha's Branch of
Oyster Creek to the north of the dwelling house to the bay.'"

 

Giles Brent claimed plots ".the boundaries of which he attempted to describe
by such marker's as 'St. Mary's Forest.' Seemingly permanent physical
features were favored - 'the northern point of St. Inigo's Creek,' 'St.
George's Island.' But how firm a designation was 'a swamp in St. George's
River called Key Swamp' or 'a line from the head of Weston's Creek to
David's well'.? The boundary lines in one sector of Gerard's manor were such
a tangle that the district was called Bedlam's Neck. Everything, even the
all-important property claims, was transitory, shifting, and insecure."   

 

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