road_less_trvled
Stargazer's Stone: This helped end the Pennsyvania - Maryland Border War
Charles II died in 1685, and the Duke of York, a Catholic convert, succeeded him as James II. But three years later, William of Orange, the Dutch grandson of Charles I and husband of James II’s protestant daughter Mary, seized the English throne. The Calverts lost control of their Maryland holdings, and Maryland was declared a royal colony. Penn’s ownership of Pennsylvania and the Lower Three Counties was also suspended from 1691 to 1694. The Calverts did not regain their proprietorship of Maryland until 1713 when Charles Calvert, the fifth Lord Baltimore, renounced Catholicism.
Penn revisited America in 1699-1701, and reluctantly granted Pennsylvania and the Lower Three Counties separate elected legislatures. He also commissioned local surveyors Thomas Pierson and Isaac Taylor to survey and demarcate the twelve-mile radius arc boundary between New Castle and Chester counties. Pierson and Taylor completed the survey in ten days using just a chain and compass. The survey marks were tree blazes, and once these disappeared, the location of the arc boundary was mostly a matter of fuzzy recall and conjecture.
Geodetic science was in its infancy. Latitude could be estimated reasonably accurately with sextant and compass, but longitude was largely guesswork. As England’s naval power and colonial holdings continued to expand, the demand for better maps and navigation intensified. Parliament set a prize of £20,000 for a solution to the “longitude problem” in 1712. The challenge was to determine a longitude in the West Indies onboard a ship with less than half a degree of longitude error. Dava Sobel’s book Longitude (1996) details how clock-maker John Harrison eventually won the prize with his “H4” precision chronometer.
Penn died in 1718, disinheriting his alcoholic eldest son William Jr., and leaving the colonies to his second wife Hannah, who transferred the lands to her sons Thomas, John, Richard and Dennis. Thomas outlived the others and accumulated a two-thirds interest in the holdings.
In 1731, the fifth Lord Baltimore petitioned King George II for an official resolution of the boundary dispute. In the ensuing negotiations the Calverts tried to hold out for the 40th parallel, but Pennsylvania colonists had settled enough land to the west and southward of Philadelphia that this was no longer practical. In 1732 the parties agreed that the boundary line should run east from Cape Henlopen to the midpoint of the peninsula, then north to a tangency with the west side of the twelve-mile radius arc around New Castle, then around the arc to its northernmost point, then due north to an east-west line 15 miles south of Philadelphia. It was a bad deal for the Calverts. The east-west line would turn out to be about 19 miles south of the 40th parallel, and, as the map (Figure 5) appended to the agreement shows, would intersect the arc. The map placed “Cape Hinlopen” at what is now Fenwick Island, almost 20 miles to the south as well; this error was an attempt at deception, not ignorance (compare the map in Figure 4, completed more that 50 years earlier). But litigation over interpretation and details dragged on.
Stargazer's Stone: This helped end the Pennsyvania - Maryland Border War
Charles II died in 1685, and the Duke of York, a Catholic convert, succeeded him as James II. But three years later, William of Orange, the Dutch grandson of Charles I and husband of James II’s protestant daughter Mary, seized the English throne. The Calverts lost control of their Maryland holdings, and Maryland was declared a royal colony. Penn’s ownership of Pennsylvania and the Lower Three Counties was also suspended from 1691 to 1694. The Calverts did not regain their proprietorship of Maryland until 1713 when Charles Calvert, the fifth Lord Baltimore, renounced Catholicism.
Penn revisited America in 1699-1701, and reluctantly granted Pennsylvania and the Lower Three Counties separate elected legislatures. He also commissioned local surveyors Thomas Pierson and Isaac Taylor to survey and demarcate the twelve-mile radius arc boundary between New Castle and Chester counties. Pierson and Taylor completed the survey in ten days using just a chain and compass. The survey marks were tree blazes, and once these disappeared, the location of the arc boundary was mostly a matter of fuzzy recall and conjecture.
Geodetic science was in its infancy. Latitude could be estimated reasonably accurately with sextant and compass, but longitude was largely guesswork. As England’s naval power and colonial holdings continued to expand, the demand for better maps and navigation intensified. Parliament set a prize of £20,000 for a solution to the “longitude problem” in 1712. The challenge was to determine a longitude in the West Indies onboard a ship with less than half a degree of longitude error. Dava Sobel’s book Longitude (1996) details how clock-maker John Harrison eventually won the prize with his “H4” precision chronometer.
Penn died in 1718, disinheriting his alcoholic eldest son William Jr., and leaving the colonies to his second wife Hannah, who transferred the lands to her sons Thomas, John, Richard and Dennis. Thomas outlived the others and accumulated a two-thirds interest in the holdings.
In 1731, the fifth Lord Baltimore petitioned King George II for an official resolution of the boundary dispute. In the ensuing negotiations the Calverts tried to hold out for the 40th parallel, but Pennsylvania colonists had settled enough land to the west and southward of Philadelphia that this was no longer practical. In 1732 the parties agreed that the boundary line should run east from Cape Henlopen to the midpoint of the peninsula, then north to a tangency with the west side of the twelve-mile radius arc around New Castle, then around the arc to its northernmost point, then due north to an east-west line 15 miles south of Philadelphia. It was a bad deal for the Calverts. The east-west line would turn out to be about 19 miles south of the 40th parallel, and, as the map (Figure 5) appended to the agreement shows, would intersect the arc. The map placed “Cape Hinlopen” at what is now Fenwick Island, almost 20 miles to the south as well; this error was an attempt at deception, not ignorance (compare the map in Figure 4, completed more that 50 years earlier). But litigation over interpretation and details dragged on.