Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Mason-Dixon Line

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

The dividing line between the North and South is purely political. But the story of its creation is pretty interesting.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends when you're staying at an Airbnb you might be like me wondering could my place be an Airbnb and if it could what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home now The extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it But you might have an Airbnb to find out what your place could be earning at air bnb.ca slash host Hey and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck and there's Jerry You can hear air conditioning in the background and this is short stuff. I Got this idea just a couple of days ago Emily and I are watching Jeopardy as we Don't do every night, but we we try to make it that appointment viewing. We have a good time watching that show together

Yeah, it's great. Do you remember the time we were on Jeopardy? I know how about that? It's funny because my daughter will walk through the room occasionally be like you were on that show So it was a question a couple of nights ago or I guess an answer a Clue is what they call them and it said something about these two gentlemen And I can't remember exactly how it was worded but something about like surveying and I was like Lewis and Clark and it was Mason and Dixon and Being from the south you always hear about the Mason Dixon line or not always but it's a common enough term to where I was like wait a minute. I was like

Mason and Dixon were people and I never really thought about it. Of course they were but I knew nothing about this at all so This popped up the house of works had a pretty actually really good article on it. So Here we go and away we go because I thought Mason and Dixon were probably politicians of some sort I had no idea there were the surveyors you got to be a pretty amazing surveyor for somebody to name your survey after you Especially when it's the one that's as important as the Mason Dixon line because as we'll see It's the line that divided the north and the south but even before that decades before that it was a really important line that settled the decades-long boundary dispute between William Penn and the Pennsylvania Colony and

Lord Baltimore Charles Calvert of the Maryland Colony to the south and those two were really going at it and the reason they were going at it was because Penn was given the land down to the 40th parallel the 40th degree latitude north latitude and Calvert Lord Calvert was given the land from I think like the Potomac up to the 40th parallel the problem is the earliest maps that map the 40th parallel got it kind of wrong and Philadelphia by these early maps was in Maryland about five miles within the Maryland border and William Penn said that just can't stand We need Philadelphia. It's really important

Yeah, like everyone wanted Philadelphia one day those great people will throw batteries at Santa Claus We need to claim this wonderful city. They'll make this show. It's always sunny in Philadelphia It's gonna be pretty great and last a thousand years Also at stake was about 4,000 square miles so it was a lot of land and this was a dispute for decades and The people of these two areas started to kind of worry that things were getting so heated that they would be like double-taxed on their property because both places would claim that they're in their part of the world and

So finally in 1763 the King of England said, alright, I'm gonna get in here. We're gonna commission this survey I got a couple of crack Surveyors once an astronomer named Charles Mason. One is a surveyor named Jeremiah Dixon. They're from England They've got all this fancy fancy modern equipment that they're gonna bring along They're gonna need a ton of booze and a lot of people and it's gonna take years, but we're gonna finally settle this Yeah, they spent 58 months from what I can tell basically straight through living in tents surveying a 233 mile or 374 kilometer stretch and They settled that boundary dispute and did they ever because even still today

Surveyors modern surveyors who use geosynchronous satellites to do their surveying are in awe of how accurate Mason and Dixon's survey line and their their boundary line work was that it was just almost precisely dead on because they've gone back modern surveyors have gone back and recalculated it and they're like That's basically exactly right. Yeah, and I think some of the techniques they use informed Surveying that we still see today. So it's it's a pretty cool story So let's take a break. We'll talk a little bit about that booze and How they accomplished this feat a little more right after this? Hey friends when you're staying at an Airbnb

You might be like me wondering could my place be an Airbnb and if it could what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over Childhood home now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it But you might have an Airbnb to find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb dot ca Slash host hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new I hard podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road Okay, see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself? What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

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So they got drunk a lot apparently I guess so I don't want to harp on it But it is pretty funny one of the footnotes in this article that you sent Where did that come from? It was good. I will tell you later on Okay the supply list from 1764 and this is just one of the years and then 20 20 gallons of whiskey 40 gallons of brandy and 80 gallons of wine In the end they were paid about 3500 pounds

35 16 pounds and nine shillings which would be about 300 grand today or about $60,000 per year But they did a lot of hard work drawing this line. It was very meticulous. They had some Native Americans helping them as guides some Iroquois people they had about a hundred and twenty people in their party and They like I said, they had sort of the state-of-the-art equipment at the time which You know, I think informed later equipment, but it was pretty pretty crack stuff at the time

Yeah, there's one in particular called a zenith sector and it had a plumb line that ran Vertically straight vertically to the ground and then it had a telescope that way you could you know put to different degrees at different angles And then you had to get on the ground and look up through the telescope to find the star You were looking for and then you could measure the angle of the star With the zenith of the sky the highest point of the sky and calculate an angle here on earth And that's the kind of stuff that they were doing again over 58 months and one of the reasons why the survey was so advanced for its time is that it was the first geodetic survey carried out at least in North America and Geodetic surveys are the ones that are so precise. They calculate the lumps and bumps and

Irregular spheroid shape of the earth into its calculations to make it that precise That's why it was so precise But again, these guys weren't using satellites and computers. They were using telescopes and plumb lines That they had to get on the ground to look up to find stars with and their noodles to calculate their findings I wonder if the the king of England's like we really just needed you to walk left and drop some birdseed So what happened along the way they didn't drop birdseed this is kind of even more impressive. Is that a reference to something? dropping birdseed Well, I mean the old stories of dropping birdseed to find your way back. Oh, I'd but it was yeah

You never heard that. No, I haven't is it like the joke is because like the birds would come eat the seed? I think it was probably from some fairytale originally I don't know the Hansel and Gretel maybe I totally ruin this I really think we're gonna edit this part out because I think I'm just gonna leave it as is It was so beautiful and hilarious. Oh, I think we should leave it Um, so what they did drop was? Limestone posts that they brought over from England every mile along the way and I think it was like 230 something miles In total as well as an 83 mile

north-south border between What was Pennsylvania or what is now Delaware? What was then Pennsylvania in eastern, Maryland? But they dropped these limestone posts along the way and then every five miles dropped a crown stone Which is a very very heavy like a five to seven hundred pound stone that they carved a Sea on one side for Calvert and a P on the other side for Penn Sometimes they even had coat of arms and stuff like that Until they got to the Appalachian Mountains and then they were like we can't do these crown stones anymore We can't carry these up over the mountain and also it's hilarious. They ship these over from England like we're not sure if there's stone in America

So we're just gonna cover up Those came from England because I know the the Posts did I think the stones did as well. Okay. Yeah, I'm pretty sure which is hilarious, but also really unnecessary Sure, why I didn't know what was over here So like I said, the Mason-Dixon line has been recalculated much to the thrill of modern surveyors and in 1991 I think one of the first surveys of the Mason-Dixon line was carried out by the Mason-Dixon line preservation partnership Which is adorable because there's surveyors from Pennsylvania and surveyors from Maryland

involved in that partnership and they went around to do an inventory of all of those milestones and crown stones as well Yeah, and they found a lot of them, which is really cool. I think they found all but ten And they reckon just maybe flooding apparently in the Civil War They would use them for target practice and stuff like that or just the Civil War in general destroyed them But all but ten is not too bad. No, it's not so the Mason-Dixon line was established the boundary between Pennsylvania, Maryland, and also Delaware and then what would become West Virginia and that in and of itself was pretty great considering how

Accurate they were. The reason why it divides the north and the south had nothing to do with Mason and Dixon It had to do with the fact that Maryland was a slave state It was the northernmost slave state and in 1820 the Missouri Compromise was passed that basically said The slave states are considered in the south and all the south states are slave states. The north states are free states and that's that and Because Maryland was a slave state It was considered the south and since it's south of the Mason-Dixon line the Mason-Dixon line was used to Distinguish the north and the south between 1820 on

And that's kind of it. I'm sure Maryland today is like oh Kind of not really though. Yeah, I think most of the south says the same thing too I mean one of the biggest shocks I've ever gotten in my life But a really dull life was finding out that Maryland was technically in the south. I had no idea Yeah, I mean if you're from Georgia, I even remember growing up thinking Virginia was pushing it But then I met Virginians and many I think maybe because they're fairly far north geographically on the east coast Or sometimes very adamantly southern. Yeah, they really love horses too. Sure That's that's pretty southern and then one other little tidbit. So from 1820 to 1850 when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed

If you were enslaved in Maryland and you can make it just across the border to Pennsylvania. You were free Amazing and you would eventually become a Philadelphia Eaglesman and Boo Santa Claus. I don't know if they threw batteries at Santa Claus. They threw batteries at somebody I feel like it was Santa Claus. Yeah, that that shows up in our Black Friday episode if you want to go listen to that one. Okay, ooh Dedicated fans there in Philly. That's all I'll say right and by the way Chuck that The post that we were talking about it's called the survey of Mason and Dixon

Granddaddy of all title disputes and it's hosted on the Maryland bar Our association's website that and why we MSBA org so look it up fantastic, and you'll be like, this is great Okay, and I guess that's it right Chuck. I Think that means you know what it means short stuff is out Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart radio for more podcasts my heart radio visit the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows?