drawingthe line Inside the search to find and preserve the Mason-Dixon line Story & photos by Marty LeGrand
E
ric Gladhill knows south-central Pennsylvania pretty well. He was raised and still lives in Fairfield, works less than 10 miles away in Gettysburg, and as a surveyor has tramped the Pennsylvania-Maryland border extensively. He even wrote a book about his surveying adventures. But on a warm day last June, he lost his way in the woods, and I with him. The directions he had were 30 years old. The object he was looking for had been there at least a century, maybe two. And it was only about the size of a toaster oven stood on end. We were exploring the nation’s most storied boundary, the Mason-Dixon Line. Specifically, we were looking for one of the stone markers—called monuments— that 18th-century Englishmen Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon placed at one-mile intervals along the border line that now bears their names. Gladhill was using mapping apps, and the marker’s approximate coordinates
46
ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com
March 2022
The “M” on the stones faces south, denoting Maryland, while a “P” for Pennsylvania looks north.
and outdated instructions on how to find it. But after leaving the neatly mowed lawn of a modernish house in Adams County, we wandered the woods at length on a treasure hunt of some urgency. Gladhill was one of about two dozen Maryland and Pennsylvania surveyors who volunteered to locate and document these aging landmarks. Most original monuments—stone pillars embedded in the ground over two centuries ago—still exist; some have been replaced, a few are missing. They wear the scars of time, weather, neglect, and maltreatment— accidental or intentional. Monuments have been buried, broken off, tipped over, plowed under, shot at, stolen, dumped, defaced by souvenir hunters, and repurposed as church steps, curb stones, platforms for mounting horses, and building blocks for farmhouses and barns. The monuments themselves belong to the states whose border they mark, but they’re often located on private lands where some owners find them more
