In the middle 1600s, when the British Crown was handing out land grants in North America, the Penn family of Pennsylvania and the Calvert family of Maryland shared a property border. That boundary supposedly ran east-west near the 40th parallel, but wording of the King’s land grants for those two territories was confusing and also based on faulty maps. This placed the two colonies geographically at odds. For over 80 years, no one knew exactly where that border should be. By the 1730’s, violence broke out on both sides of the Pennsylvania/Maryland line, one skirmish called “Cresap’s War”. This agitation…
