More Delaware Boundary Monuments

I took advantage of my long drive home from Annapolis last week to visit a few more boundary monuments in western Sussex County. Inspired by finally making it out to see The Middle Point last month, I planned my drive in part by taking a look at the locations of Delaware boundary monuments using the Delaware DataMIL (zoom-in a bit on the border and select "Boundary Monuments" in the layer list).

I drove through Federalsburg and entered Delaware on Route 20 at Reliance, where one finds (what's left of) Boundary Monument 12. There's just a broken stub left and, according to the recovery information maintained by the Delaware Geological Survey, it has been moved 134 meters north of its original location (a road now covers the original spot).

From there, I worked my way north a bit to find the Oak Grove Crownstone (seen at right). This is one of the larger boundary markers placed every five miles by Mason and Dixon in the 1760s; the smaller ones they placed every mile. The crownstones have the coats of arms of the Penn family on the side that is now Delaware (but was Pennsylvania at the time) and the Calvert family on the Maryland side. This one is known technically as Boundary Monument 15.

Some years back, an Eagle Scout trimmed the brush from around the Oak Grove stone and erected a small fence. A historical marker has been added as well.

I plan to try to visit as many of these as I can. There are 179 of them, but not all are very accessible. Some are buried and some are deep into private (and protected) property. I can use the DataMIL, though, to find those that are close to public rights of way. I'll try to visit, and photograph, those.

Down on the Corner...

I had an opportunity this week-end to go visit a spot I've wanted to visit for some time: Boundary Monument 0, the Middle Point. This is the southwest corner of the state of Delaware, where the boundary between Delaware and Maryland turns north.

My older daughter had plans Saturday evening for a sleep-over at a class-mate's house. Because she attends the county-wide technical high school, and has since middle-school gone once a week to Academic Challenge classes at the local community college, my daughter has very good friends in all corners of Sussex County. Her sleep-over this weekend was at a farmhouse west of Seaford, almost at the state line near Woodland Ferry.

After I dropped her off, I took advantage of the sunlight and did a bit of exploring. I wanted to see the Woodland Ferry, which has recently shut down and will be replaced with a larger boat. The ferry crosses the Nanticoke River at a small old settlement called Woodland, south of Seaford.

From there, I followed a small road along the west bank of the Nanticoke River, heading downstream towards Maryland. The road got smaller and smaller, following the edges of farm fields until it turned abruptly west, crossed a marshy creek, and entered Maryland. I had planned to use the smaller roads to cut through Galestown, cross the Nanticoke at Sharptown, and head south to pick up Route 54 at Mardela Springs, and so head back into Delaware at the Corner.

I came around a sharp bend in the road to Galestown, however, and came upon a pile of dirt, a parked crane and a clear denial of entry into town. Apparently, the Spillway at Galestown Millpond was washed out, blocking several routes through town. I had to backtrack north to Reliance and head west and then south the long way around.

A pleasant surprise of this detour was a visit to Eldorado, Maryland. It included this noble church. That part of Delmarva has great wide-open fields and a slight roll to the landscape. Very impressive on a clear winter afternoon.

Eventually, I found myself rolling east on Route 54. Up ahead I spotted a small half-circle pull-off and the pavillion that protects the monument that marks the boundary. The Monument was placed by Mason and Dixon, to mark the start of the line they surveyed north and then west. They started their line at the Middle Point of a line surveyed across the center of the Delmarva peninsula by an earlier team. Their stone, inscribed with the coats of arms of Lord Baltimore and William Penn, joined several other boundary stones placed by earlier surveyors. In modern times, a Benchmark was added and officially recorded.

This is a part of Delaware 's history, and geography, that fascinates me. Part of my job is to work with the digital version of the boundaries and data that were started by Mason and Dixon, and folks like them, hundreds of years ago. Their chain of stones marking a north-south line up the peninsula is a part of the geospatial data that we rely on today and that I help to make available to Delaware's citizens.

So it was very cool to finally get a chance to go visit the first one.

Delaware's Unique Border

A blog called Strange Maps has started looking at Delaware's rather unique border. There are two posts, so far. It's interesting to see the various oddities of my state's boundary discussed by an "outsider." I advise bringing along a pinch of salt to take when you read the Strange Maps posts, there are a few very minor mistakes.

My day-job involves mapping, geospatial data, and working with things like the border in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software. I also work closely with my friend Sandy Schenck of the Delaware Geological Survey. Sandy's first job, many years ago, was finding and maintaining the 179 stone boundary monuments that mark the Delaware border. He wrote a wonderful monograph on the boundary. That's my authoritative source on these issues.

The images I've used in this post, by the way, were created using the Delaware Data Mapping and Integration Lab -- The DataMIL -- which provides a digital base map of Delaware, replacing the old paper topographic map series with a more frequently updated, web-based, topo map.

The first Strange Maps post is Where Delaware Met Pennsylvania (1): the Twelve Mile Circle. It looks at the odd border issues caused by the decree in colonial times that a circle with a radius of 12 miles, centered on the town of New Castle, be used as a boundary.

Strange Maps describes this as "the only US boundary that’s a true arc." That's sort-of true; it's the only one that is circular. It is not, in fact, a true arc. The chain used to measure the 12 miles and so to survey that part of the boundary, had to be stretched out over and over again. The links started to stretch, just a bit, throwing off the measurements. Somewhere along the line, the surveyors got themselves a fresh chain, at least once.

The result is a boundary that is a compound of degraded arc sections. Subtle, and maybe even silly. But true.

Strange Maps also points out that the boundary was described as everything within the 12 miles up to the shoreline of what is now New Jersey. The result of that, and of a 1930s Supreme Court decision, has been that the state boundary is, in fact, the mean-low water line as it existed in 1934. There are places where the shoreline on the Jersey side has filled-in and moved out, by accretion, to where it now lies within Delaware.

We try not to point this out too explicitly; it upsets our neighbors in New Jersey. That, and the fact that Delaware regulates what happens over the river bottom, which has so far stymied a proposed Liquid Natural Gas terminal in the Camden area.

The second "Where Delaware Met Pennsylvania" post looks at the "Wedge". This is a wedge-shaped bit of land that for a time was not in Delaware, not in Pennsylvania, and not in Maryland. It was another anomaly caused by the 12-mile circle and by a disconnect between what 17th-Century cartography expected to find and what 17th-Century surveying actually did find.

It's that bit beneath that "shelf" where the three states meet. Just above Newark.

I understand that it was briefly a haven for outlaws, who would flee there because no lawmen had jurisdiction. At least, until the states got together and decided to make it part of Delaware.

This almost forgotten bit of history lives on in some of the place names north of Newark like "Top of the Wedge" or "Wedge Hills."

These are just a few of the many strange truths about the Delaware border. For example, many of us in Delaware actually live east of the Mason-Dixon line. They drew our western boundary before turning west to create the part of the line that they are most known for.

Also, the Delaware boundary is the only one in the marked, in part, with boundary monuments made of stone from a different country. Mason and Dixon used a "light buff oolitic limestone cut on the Isle of Portland, Dorsetshire, England" to mark parts of the line.

The Delaware Geological Survey maintains a database of the boundary markers, some of which can be visited.