quote:

Originally posted by occrider Not according to the mason dixon line. We're all southerners down here!

And none of you wouldn be whistlin' Dixie if it weren't for the Penns and the Calverts.

http://www.wesclark.com/jw/mas_dix.html


In 1632, King Charles I of England gave the first Lord Baltimore, George Calvert, the colony of Maryland. Fifty years later, in 1682, King Charles II gave William Penn the territory to the north, which later became Pennsylvania. A year later, Charles II gave Penn land on the Delmarva Peninsula (the peninsula that includes the eastern portion of modern Maryland and all of Delaware).

The description of the boundaries in the grants to Calvert and Penn did not match and there was a great deal of confusion as to where the boundary (supposedly along 40° north) lay. The Calvert and Penn families took the matter to the British court and England's chief justice declared in 1750 that the boundary between southern Pennsylvania and northern Maryland should lie 15 miles south of Philadelphia. A decade later, the two families agreed on the compromise and set out to have the new boundary surveyed.

Remember also that Annapolis, Md. was once our Nations Capitol and that Washington, D.C. was given to the Federal Gov't by the Colony of Maryland.

Also, Delaware was a part of the Union but was still a slave state.


Yeah I'm a dork, I took a Maryland History class as an elective in high school. I'm happy to have remembered some of what I learned because I paid very little attention.