A while back I came on an interesting term: the point of beginning. While there can be many such points, the one that interested me dealt with surveyors and lines they draw on maps. When I set out to read what I could find on that topic, another related term rose up to pique my interest even further: the Mason-Dixon Line. The roots of it all go back to the time of William Penn and Charles Calvert, well-known players in our country’s very early history. Territorial line squabbles had developed in colonial days so Penn of Pennsylvania and Calvert of Maryland agreed in 1732 to hire Mason and Dixon to survey a line and establish boundaries; the line they drew started fifteen miles south of Philadelphia, the point of beginning, and extended westward.
This Mason-Dixon line proved to be significant some years later when it became part of the turmoil and difficulties that resulted in the Missouri Compromise and the later Civil War when it was used to designate the free states north of that line and the slave states south of the line. Further problems developed because of the differences in how property lines were established. On the north side survey lines and their resulting squares kept property in tidy parcels. South of the line a mess developed because property lines meandered to encompass the best of lands. If a prospective land buyer didn’t like gullies or sloughs he by-passed and/or excluded them.
The process brought me to the original survey lines and notes made by surveyors Clavenger and High when they came to the Dakotas to draw their maps by a survey commenced on September 6, 1872. It’s interesting to me. We take our land descriptions for granted, but there had to be “a point of beginning.”
