How Once Upon A Time
Mason And Dixon
Ran A Boundary
OF ALL the States belonging to the United States of America, there are no two that are of the same size or shape. Some are big and some are little. One is almost square. One is shaped like a boot.
Delaware, has two boundaries, one on the west and one on the south, that are perfectly straight. On the east the boundary follows the line of the Delaware River and bay. The northern line of the State is an arc, or part of a circle. If you put a pin through the little dot on the map that is marked “New Castle,” and tie a thread to it and measure, you will find how perfect this arc of the circle is, and you will also find that New Castle is the centre of the circle.
Why should Delaware have this queer curved northern boundary? It is because, many years ago, as this book has told once before, in 1681, King Charles the Second of England gave what is now Pennsylvania to William Penn. In that grant, Penn was given “that extensive forest lying twelve miles northward of New Castle, on the northern side of the Delaware,” the southern boundary of which was a circle drawn twelve miles distant from New Castle northward and westward.
Penn, at first, was contented with this grant from King Charles. But when he looked over his land grant carefully, he saw that it would be much better for Pennsylvania to have at least a strip of land that would run along one side of the Delaware River and down to the Delaware Bay. This land had been already given by the King, to his brother, the Duke of York.