AREA HISTORY:  History of Adams County, Chapter III, Adams County, PA

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History of Cumberland and Adams Counties, Pennsylvania
Chicago:  Warner, Beers & Co., 1886
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Part III, History of Adams County, Pages 12-14

HISTORY OF ADAMS COUNTY 

CHAPTER III.

THE MASON AND DIXON LINE-GERMAN, SCOTCH-IRISH AND JESUIT IMMIGRATION IN 1734-
LORD BALTIMORE AND WILLIAM PENN-BORDER TROUBLES-TEMPORARY DIVIDING LINE-MASON 
AND DIXON-THEIR SURVEY-THOMAS CRESAP-“DIGGES CHOICE”-ZACHARY BUTCHER.

As stated elsewhere the proprietary of the province was compelled to send 
settlers west of the Susquehanna, at an earlier period than was intended, in 
order to head off the encroachments that began to be made by those claiming from 
Lord Baltimore.  The Germans came into what is now Adams County, in 1734, led by 
Andrew Shriver.  The Scotch-Irish came about the same time under the lead of 
Hance Hamilton.  The Catholics (Jesuits) simultaneously (possibly before) came 
into the southern portion of the country from Maryland.  They were (that is 
their priests, when traveling over the country of south Pennsylvania and 
portions of Virginia and Maryland, over a century and a-half ago) subjected to 
many persecutions and often outrageous assaults, more than once mobbed and 
beaten, and the writer has an account of one who, pursued by a mob, mounted his 
horse and swam the river as the bullets were flying thick about him.  Two 
hundred years ago it seems nearly all men were illiberal in their religion, and 
believed in ghosts and witches.  They would persecute all of opposing sects, and 
then persecute themselves with the fantastic antics of imaginary witches.  They 
had active imaginations.  They wrangled, argued, discussed and fought savagely 
about the wildest and silliest mysticisms.  The most of them had been driven to 
the wilderness, by the cruelest persecutions, to a land of liberty-to enforce 
with an iron hand their own incomprehensible dogmas.

Fortunately, beyond all else, Lord Baltimore, a Catholic, and William Penn, a 
Quaker, became the proprietors of the adjoining provinces of Maryland and 
Pennsylvania.  In the history of many centuries of the world, here were two of 
the finest types of great and humanitarian statesmen-two men of peace, guided in 
their religious and temporal affairs by the loft conceptions of that higher 
religion of the common brotherhood of man that is so incomparably superior to 
those impassable lines of divisions of sects into mere names and church 
formulas.

Under the control of the average ruler or statesman of that day, the dispute in 
regard to the true line dividing the two provinces would have rushed swiftly to 
a bloody issue.  So indefinite were the grants to Penn and Calvert from the 
English king that each was honest in claiming ground that the other believed to 
be his own.  Then on each side of the line of contention were peoples of 
different religious denominations, and the difference was the serious and highly 
inflammable one of Catholic and Protestant, each of which could point to their 
martyrs, horrid persecutions, long, implacable and bloody wars of faith against 
faith.  Here were every element, every circumstance to lead to a terrible 
calamity to the people of the two young provinces, to the country and to 
mankind.  Sectional lines and hates first arose among the people in reference to 
the dividing line between Pennsylvania and Maryland.  Long before States were 
formed, long before our Union was dreamed of, here was the little cloud no 
larger than your hand that was the true type of sectional contention that 
eventually culminated in the bloodiest civil war in history.

The border troubles commenced in 1683 and raged with stubborn obstinacy for 
nearly a century-the Catholics of Maryland with the battle cry “Hey for Ste. 
Marie!” and the Puritan shouting as he fought, “In the name of God, fall on!”

In 1739 Thomas and Richard Penn, grandsons of William Penn, and Frederick, Lord 
Baltimore (great-grandson of Cecelius Calvert), jointly organized the first 
commission to run a temporary dividing line between the provinces.  The 
commission never completed its labors.  Consultations and negotiations between 
the proprietaries continued at intervals.  Partial surveys would be made, but 
these were unsatisfactory to each party, and then steps would be taken for an 
additional survey.

On the 4th day of August, 1763, the Penns and Lord Baltimore employed, in 
England, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, two eminent mathematicians and 
surveyors, to take charge of the work.  They arrived in Philadelphia and 
received their instructions in December, 1763.  Early in 1764 they commenced 
their labors, and the work in the field was completed in 1767, and finally 
marked in 1768.

In the autumn of 1764 they had completed the preliminary surveys necessary to 
get their proper point, and ran the parallel latitude line west to the 
Susquehanna, thus commencing the famous line which bears their name and which is 
now the dividing line between Pennsylvania and Maryland.

The actual work of Mason & Dixon extended 244 miles from the Delaware, and 
within thirty-six miles of the whole distance to be run.  At this point, in the 
bottom of a valley marked on their map “Dunkard’s Creek,” they came to an Indian 
war-path, and here their Indian escort informed them that the Six Nations said 
they must stop.  The remainder of the line was run by other surveyors in 1782 
and marked in 1784.

A stone, marked on one side with the arms of the Penns and on the other side 
with those of Baltimore, was set every five miles.  The stones had all been 
prepared and sent from England.  The amount paid by the Penns alone under these 
proceedings, from 1760 to 1768, was £34,200, Pennsylvania currency.

The border troubles at first were solely between the peoples of the Penns and 
Baltimore.  The noted champion of Maryland was the famous Capt. Thomas Cresap, a 
squatter at Wright’s Ferry, on the west bank of the Susquehanna.  A serious 
fight of himself and son (afterward Capt. Michael Cresap, the slayer of Logan, 
the Mingo chief) with the Pennsylvanians in 1739, in which Thomas Cresap was 
captured and led, a fettered but defiant captive, in triumphal procession to 
Lancaster, where he was held a prisoner, and indicted and threatened with trial 
for murder, and this finally led to a settlement between the provinces and 
arbitration of all questions in dispute, and the release of Capt. Cresap.  The 
troubles among the people changed about this somewhat in form.  Cresap had told 
the Dutch not to pay taxes to the Penns, and Maryland felt too doubtful of her 
title to be very exact in collecting her taxes.  In time there became a fixed 
belief among the people that they occupied a neutral and independent strip of 
land, and they began to feel that they owed allegiance to no one.  They 
trespassed on “Digges Choice,” who held his grant from Baltimore, and they 
resisted Penn’s authority on the Manor of Maske.

In 1757, at a place on “Digges Choice” near what is now Jacob Ballinger’s Mills, 
in Conowago Township, in a dispute about the land titles, in which there were 
warlike demonstrations on both sides, Dudley Digges was fatally wounded by 
Martin Kitzmiller.  Fortunately for Kitzmiller the Pennsylvania authorities 
first secured possession of him as prisoner, and the Maryland authorities were 
thwarted in their efforts to secure him as their prisoner, and he was taken to 
York and tried.  He was acquitted, as it was claimed by the prisoner and 
believed by the jury, that the killing was accidental.  Such were the sectional 
prejudices a century and a half ago, that Kitzmiller’s friends would have been 
loth to have trusted his fate to a Maryland jury. 

In 1741 Zachary Butcher, deputy surveyor of Conowago, was ordered by the 
governor to do some surveying on the “Manor of Maske.”  This “manor” had been 
established by Penn in 1740.  The land title disputes are well portrayed by a 
quaint letter to the governor from the surveyor, from which the following 
extracts show the temper of the people: *  *  * “the Inhabitants are got into 
such Terms, That it is as much as a man’s Life is worth to go amongst them, for 
they gathered together in Conferences, and go in Arms every Time they Expect I 
am anywhere near there about, with full resolution to kill or cripple me, or any 
other person, who shall attempt to Lay out a Mannor there.”  

The settlers threatened personal violence to Penn’s surveyors, and would break 
the surveyor’s chain and drive him off.  These manor disputes were all settled 
by compromises in 1765, the boundaries of the different manors marked off, and 
the names of the settlers on these tracts of land designated, and the long 
continued border troubles were happily ended.