Once Upon a Time in Delaware

by Katharine Pyle

At one time, Lord Baltimore sent Colonel George Talbot over from Maryland with a band of soldiers. They seized a farm near New Castle that belonged to a Mr. Ogle. On the farm Colonel Talbot built a fort with palisades, and he put a force of armed men in to defend it. He declared he was holding it for Lord Baltimore.

Soon after this, Penn heard that Lord Baltimore had sailed back to England, there to make claims on the land before the King’s Privy Council. Penn then took ship and went back to England, too, to present his side.

After the Privy Council had heard everything there was to be said, and had read all the papers on the question, they gave their decision. The decision was that Lord Baltimore had no right to any of the three Provinces on the Delaware. They were to belong to William Penn. The boundaries were to be the lines marked out by the Duke of York,—half the peninsula down to Cape Henlopen, and a line to be drawn across from Cape Henlopen to meet the Western boundary.

But somehow the quarrel did not end. Years passed and Lord Baltimore died, and William Penn died, and still the boundary dispute went on. Finally the same old question was decided in exactly the same way by the Lord Chancellor of England in 1750, in favor of William Penn’s children, and the thing was settled at last. But it was not as easy to mark out the boundary lines on real land as it is on a map. So because the marking of them was very difficult, and because Penn’s heirs and Frederick, the new Lord Baltimore, wanted the lines settled once for all, two very good surveyors came over from England in 1763, to run the boundary. The names of these two surveyors have been famous ever since. They were Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon.

It was not an easy task that these two surveyors had undertaken to do. A great part of the land was still wild and unbroken. Savages and wild beasts lurked in the forests. At night, as they sat beside their camp fires, they could hear the long cry of the catamounts off in the wood. Often an Indian warrior would glide out from the thickets, and stand watching their work, and then glide away again, silent as a shadow. The savages seemed friendly, and indeed some of them went with the white men as guides, but there was no knowing when they would turn against the white men. At one time, word was brought to Mason and Dixon that the Indians meant to attack their camp, and twenty-six of their workmen left, and made their way back to safety. All work stopped for a while. Then fresh men came out to take their places, and the chopping and surveying went on. Great trees were cut down and rocks were rolled from their beds. A path eight yards wide was made through the wilderness, and in this “vistoe” as they called it, stones were set up to mark the boundary line. Some of the stones had Penn’s coat-of-arms carved on them; some were carved upon one side with “P” for Pennsylvania, and on the other with “M” for Maryland.

Months slipped by, years passed, and still the work was not finished.

Then one day the surveyors came to a path through the forest that crossed the “vistoe” they were marking out. It was a path worn by the passing of many Indian feet. Here the savages who were acting as their guides stopped.

“It is not the will of the Six Nations[4] that you should go further,” they said.

The white men were very anxious to finish the line. They had been working on it for over four years, and it needed thirty-six more miles to complete it, but the Indians would guide them no further. “It is not the will of the Six Nations,” they repeated.