History Of Maryland Land Surveying

When King Charles I granted the Charter of Maryland to the Calverts in 1632, he also granted Cecil Calvert ownership of all land within certain boundaries and full authority to assign these lands. Between 1634 and 1680, the Calverts encouraged settlement by granting acreage (usually 50 acres) to each settler. Until 1680, any individual desiring land would have to apply to Lord Baltimore or to Lord Baltimore's Land Office.

During this process, an order would be issued to the county surveyor to lay out the specified number of acres, creating a Certificate of Survey to describe the plot of land granted. This survey was done using the metes and bounds method, giving the actual dimensions of the property accompanied by a scale drawing. Boundary trees, rocks, and bodies of water were used to mark the edges of the plot. Like many land surveys of this era, the surveys completed in Maryland were rather crude when compared to today's surveying methods. It has now been supplanted by more scientific methods, such as the public land survey system. The next step in the process was to obtain a patent, a document granting ownership rights to land that was not previously owned privately.

Due to incorrect maps and confusing legal descriptions, the original royal charters of Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Maryland overlapped. Maryland's original charter granted land north of the Potomac River to the 40th parallel. Pennsylvania was granted land south to the 40th parallel, although the intended capital city of Philadelphia actually fell south of this line. The Mason-Dixon line was intended to create a compromise, settling a dispute that had been ongoing since the 1730s.  The Mason-Dixon Line was surveyed between 1763 and 1767 to resolve this border dispute, forming part of the borders of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and present-day West Virginia, roughly separating the Northern and Southern halves of the United States. This line would later become important during slavery debates to delineate the boundary between free states and slave states.

The surveyors set the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland at exactly 39° 43' 19.92216? N. The crownstone boundary monuments, set every five miles along the line, feature the coat of arms of Maryland's founding family (the Calverts) on one side, and that of the the Penns of Pennsylvania on the other. The boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland was resurveyed in 1849, and again in 1900, though without substantial changes to Mason and Dixon's work. The exact lines surveyed by Mason and Dixon actually left a small piece of land between Delaware and Pennsylvania in dispute until 1921.

Maryland, although one of the original colonies, was actually one of the last of these colonies to be surveyed on a large scale by land surveyors. In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, most of the colonies offered extensive lands to veterans. Maryland, however, did not have extensive land granted by the Crown, and therefore refused to offer any lands. The other former colonies had to be surveyed in order to grant specific plots of land to veterans. By 1802, the Public Lands Survey System had been used to survey lands from the Appalachians to the Mississippi, but parts of Maryland were still largely unsurveyed until later in the century.

Charles Lee Iner, RLS
December, 2009