The Maryland State Archives Atlas of Historical Maps of Maryland.  It is the culmination of nearly a quarter century of collecting, research, and writing about  how Maryland struggled to define its borders .

Next month is an important anniversary in the history of our State, one that has been forgotten and obscured by time.  In February 1632 George  Calvert commenced the arduous process of securing a grant of land in the upper reaches of the Chesapeake from the King of England.  In English, not in Latin, first George and then his son Cecil, argued with representatives of Virginia and the King's ministers over the proposed boundaries.  They began with a request for what today would be the whole of the Delmarva peninsula and lands to the Westward following the 40th degree of latitude to somewhere near the source of the Potomac River and returning by way of the south bank of the river to the Chesapeake Bay.  Indeed, in that first draft, almost all the waters of the Chesapeake Bay would have been given to Maryland with Virginia confined to its beaches and rivers.  The protests were too great.  The two lower counties of Accomack and Northampton were left in Virginia, a line was drawn across the bay from the mouth of the Potomac to an ill defined place called Watkins Point, and lands on the Eastern Shore that had hitherto been cultivated, presumably by the Dutch and the Swedes, were excluded.  It was an uncertain beginning as far as boundaries go (a modern map of the original grant would include Philadelphia today), but it provided a intriguing frame work for growth and development of a State that would indeed become "America in Miniature."

Nature, boundary disputes with neighbors, and an outright gift to the nation in 1790 of sixty-seven square miles for the District of Columbia have combined to give Maryland a distinctive shape that defies easy description and presents a formidable challenge to the cartographer. "The State of Maryland is extremely irregular in its configuration," wrote the noted geographer Thomas Gamaliel Bradford in 1838, "its southern boundary being formed by the Potomac, with its winding channel and circuitous general course, and the intrusion of the State of Delaware upon the east and the great expanse of Chesapeake Bay in the center adding to the irregularity of its land area." Not until 1908, when the United States Supreme Court began to hear The State of Maryland vs. The State of West Virginia, would the western boundary be known for certain. Few people today are aware that a small piece of Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay is in Virginia, even though it lies north of Watkins Point, the southern boundary of Maryland as described in the 1632 Charter.  Fewer still realize that the whole of the waters of the Potomac from its source to its mouth is within Maryland, and ought not to be subject to either Federal, or any other state's regulation, except with regard to pollution, tidewater fishing, navigation, and interstate commerce.

In 1838 Bradford estimated that Maryland contained 12,000 square miles, of which 9,500 were land. He was very nearly correct. Today, the best estimates are that Maryland contains 12,303 miles, of which 1,726 are waters of the Chesapeake Bay. The tidal shoreline alone extends for 4,100 miles, and Maryland's rivers, including what Bradford called the "devious course" of the Potomac, add many more miles, compounding the difficulty of the cartographer's task.

To attempt the mapping of Maryland is no small undertaking, yet since 1608  map makers have tried with results that are both beautiful and enlightening. In fact, there proved to be many more maps of Maryland than either of us suspected in 1980, when Joe Coale and I conceived of compiling an atlas of historical maps of the state. We began this book as a modest enterprise. We felt that a good way to celebrate the 350th anniversaries of Maryland's Charter (June 20, 1982) and the landing of the first settlers under that Charter (March 25, 1984) would be to prepare an oversized volume of a few important historical maps of Maryland from earliest times. The more research we did, however, the clearer it became that there was no comprehensive illustrated survey of the cartography of Maryland. The last major bibliographic and narrative effort was that of Edward Bennett Mathews, published by the Maryland Geological Survey in 1897 and 1898, a volume that is now available on the Maryland State Archives web site, http://www.aomol.net.  Although still enormously valuable, in a number of respects Mathews's work was either in error or incomplete. We decided to begin with the most comprehensive survey of Maryland maps that we could manage, starting with the major repositories and including private collections to the extent that we had time and permission from owners.  What started out as a small project designed to highlight a few maps in a coffee table book, became over nearly a quarter of a century, a quest to provide a comprehensive illustrated survey of every general map of the state and a guide to the extensive detailed mapping of the counties that began with Charles Varle's map of  Frederick and Washington Counties in 1808 and culminated in the precise scientific mapping of county boundaries and geology by the Maryland Geological Survey, a process in some counties, still unfinished where disputes over borders yet remain to be resolved, such as that between Garrett and Allegany counties.

We had neither the resources nor the technology to include more than a few color plates of the more important maps in the first edition and were not able to include any of the very rare large county wall maps of the nineteenth century that reveal so much about our local history and are of such great use to the local and family historian.

In the years since the first edition, advances in computer imaging  and printing made it feasible to be inclusive of local printed maps and to print a revised edition in full color.  All we needed was money, a scarce commodity for all of us these days.  Fortunately the Archives had a benefactor, Henry A. Rosenberg, Jr. who made us an offer we could not refuse.  He would give us the money to scan all the maps, thus helping to preserve our priceless Huntingfield Collection, itself a magnificent gift to the State from Russ Morrison and Owen Henderson of the largest collection of maps of Maryland then in private hands, and an interest free loan to print the book to be paid back from the proceeds of the sale of the book.

Without tapping any general funds or further taxing the limited resources of the State Archives,  we hope we have produced a well illustrated reference book and history of Maryland from the perspective of those who carefully mapped the colony and state of Maryland from its founding to the commencement of the first of two controversial supreme court cases that would attempt to settle our claims of ownership of the waters of the Potomac.

This is not the place to review that argument (we will do so later in the semester), or to dispute in detail a majority decision  of the Supreme Court, but you will find in this book the proof the court chose to ignore: that Maryland is the sovereign owner of the whole of the Potomac River.  You can read for yourself the documented assertion that historical evidence discovered since the first decision of the Court in 1911 confirms Justice Stevens's dissent that Maryland should have the right to regulate what it owns. The Supreme Court does change its mind, if but slowly. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)  was overturned by the Brown v. Board of Education cases (1954).

The proceeds from this book, once the loan is paid back to Henry Rosenberg,  and the sale of map images such as those we have on display on the Freedom Wall and in the Senate Office Building, are dedicated to maintaining our Summer Internship program at the Archives, helping our young people to better understand the value of our priceless record heritage and to assist in making it more readily accessible for study and reflection. This is but a further way in which we are attempting to meet the fiscal crisis by enlisting private support for the public good.
 

In the end the ultimate goal of this book is to preserve maps for the enjoyment of future generations.  With the Atlas we are able to do more by making maps accessible through fine reproductions while preserving them from excessive wear and tear.

In the first mapping of Maryland, map and chart makers covered their ignorance of geographical information with decorations such as fanciful animals.  Jonathan Swift made fun of such efforts in verse:

With savage pictures fill their gaps and o’er unhabitable downs place Elephants for want of towns

Chartmakers used compass roses, rhumb lines and shading to the same effect.

Beginning with Captain John Smith, however, map makers strove for accuracy.  For six weeks in 1608 in an open barge with 14 men, Smith mapped the Chesapeake Bay.  On his return to England in 1612, four years after his voyage of exploration, he had the results engraved on copper, producing the first accurate map of the sparsely habited wilderness that would become the Old Line State.  Smith had a sense of distance and spatial relationship of the land to the water that is simply amazing.  Just a casual comparison between his map and one drawn from satellite imagery will convince you of how remarkable his skills were.

Then we knew too little about world.  Today, there is too much information and the scale is often insufficient to display everything the map and chartmaker would like to include.

When the map maker and the chart maker begin to strive for too much scale and accuracy, then charts become commonplace, at best utilitarian.  Nearly a hundred years ago Lewis Carroll pointed to what Adam Nicholson calls the “tragic absurdity of the cartographer’s art,” when taken to its logical conclusion:

In Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Carroll wrote:
 

What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?
About six inches to the mile.  Only six inches! Exclaimed [the map maker].
We very soon got to six yards to the mile.
And then came the grandest idea of all!
We actually made a map of the country on the scale of a mile to the mile!
Have you used it much! I enquired.
It has never been spread out, yet, said [the mapmaker].
The farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country and shut out the light.

If there is a lesson in this book, apart from the rich history to which it leads, it is that the most successful maps are those that are the simplest in design, those do not attempt to crowd too much detail into the delivery of their message, yet provide a broad overview  and paths easy to understand and to follow.

Our web site, http://www.mdsa.net,  will tell you that we have been known as the Free State since the 1920s. A newspaper editor, Hamilton Owens, was opposed to prohibition.  When Alabama Congressman William D. Upshaw, a firm supporter of Prohibition, denounced Maryland as a traitor to the Union for refusing to pass a State enforcement act which meant that the bars in the state would remain open, Owens gleefully wrote an editorial proclaiming Maryland the Free State.  Although he never published it, he began calling Maryland the "Free State" in other editorials and it caught on, even though very few people today know what he intended it to mean.

There is more currency to our claim to being the Old Line State. Not only is it imprinted on our version of the U.S. quarter, but also it is derived from a sound historical tradition.  It does not refer to the Mason Dixon Line, but to the fact that George Washington described his Maryland troops during the American Revolution as his reliable "Old Line."

As I thought about what I might say of interest tonight to a class that has more than a passing interest in maps and place,  I was reminded of our unsuccessful efforts at the Archives in 1983 to become a part of Donald Orth's and Roger Payne's National Geographic Names Data Base: Phase II project.  The previous year Joe Coale and I had  published our Historical Atlas of Maryland Maps and my Deputy Commissioner of Land Patents, Richard Richardson approached me with an application for a grant to do the Maryland volume of historical place and feature names.  Unfortunately we did not have the staff time available to undertake the challenge as we were about to begin building a new Archives in celebration of the State's 350 anniversary.  I dug out Richard's meticulous files on what he had proposed and wondered at the enormity of the task he outlined.  It would have been great fun to do, and a tremendous contribution to our sense of place. I decided to take a moment and find out what had become of the project.    To quote the GNIS web site:
 

The Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), developed by the USGS in cooperation with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN), contains [on line] information about almost 2 million physical and cultural geographic features in the United States. The Federally recognized name of each feature described in the data base is identified, and references are made to a feature's location by State, county, and geographic coordinates. The GNIS is our Nation's official repository of domestic geographic names information. (http://geonames.usgs.gov/ (accessed 1/29/04))

Instead of getting down to the business of writing a lecture, I had a great time testing the system for Maryland places.  I even tried an obscure subdivision in Anne Arundel County about which there is currently a mapping controversy and sure enough it was there.  I could peruse a 1994 aerial photograph and a wide range of relative mapping efforts including the USGS quad map from 1983 and the Census Tiger Map files.  I must say that the return was somewhat misleading.  It indicates that the subdivision is an island possibly in the South River which is not true, but it is placed properly on the maps and the name assigned to the subdivision in 1933 has become a permanent part of our place name authority file.

It is simply amazing what you can do today with web-based tools and the internet.  We have the 1941 Gazetteer of Maryland searchable and on line at our Archives of Maryland On Line web site (http://www.aomol.net) and hope to have all historical gazetteers there before too long. Four years ago I designed a simple system for imaging and indexing all subdivision plats and condominium plans recorded in the Maryland Courts which is now on line as plats.net (user name: plato, password: plato#).  Now anyone anywhere can find an authentic map or plan of places where a large share of Marylanders own their own homes and/or condominiums.  It would not take much more effort to include our retrieval databases in the GNIS system if someone would only give us a grant to do the programming.

Tonight, out of the 2 million names in the GNIS system, I thought I would be ambitious and talk about three that have special signficance to Maryland.

The first is the name 'Maryland' itself.   Matthew Page Andrews ( History of Maryland, 1929, p. 11), was the first to recount the origin of the name.  When George Calvert approached Charles I, the king of England, with his proposal for a colony to he north of the settled portion of Virginia, he left the name blank.
 

The King, before he signed the charter, put the question to his lordship, what he should call it, who replied that he desired to have it called something in honor of His Majesty's name, but that he was deprived of that happiness, thre being already land in those parts called Carolina.  "Let us, therefore," exclaimed the King, "give it a name in honor of the Queen.  What think you of Mariana?"  Upon Lord Baltimore recallng the fact that a Jesuit by that name had written against monarchy {indeed called for the execution of monarchs}," the King proposed Terra Maria [Mary Land], which was concluded on and inserted...

The third is probably the most important place name in all of Maryland History, Watkins Point, which has the distinction of having two entries in GNIS, one of which I am sure is there because I was the second person in print to say it ought to be.  There is a certain satisfaction in being an authority on obscure places that deserve a better press.

I first became aware of the importance of the Charles Town, the former County seat of Prince George's County which appears on no known contemporary map,  when I was asked to provide a few remarks on the historical importance of the place six years ago on the anniversary of the founding of the county.  Sandwiched between the then  Governor (Parris Glendening, who was the former chief executive of the County) and the then County Executive (Wayne Curry), who were not on the best of terms, I attempted to educate, enlighten, and retreat as quickly as possible.

It is always dangerous to assume the mantle of principal speaker at any event. Who remembers what Edward Everett said in his two hour oration at Gettysburg? Yet some of us still can recite the three minutes of the other fellow.

That  morning I tried to take my lead from the other fellow, and confine myself to briefly addressing the significance of the day, and the importance of the place where Prince George's County officially began over 300 years before.

Choosing a name for the county in 1695 was probably not very difficult. The heir to the throne of England was Anne, the last of the Stuarts. She had married Prince George of Denmark, and it was only a matter of time before she would be crowned queen. Governor Nicholson had already chosen to honor her by calling the new capital of the province Annapolis. It was only fitting and quite politically shrewd to name the newest county after her husband.

Choosing April 23rd as the day on which the county would begin its government is not difficult to understand either. Saint's days were always used to mark special occasions. The first Lord Baltimore was married on St. Cecilia's Day and his son dispatched the first colonists to Maryland on the same day in 1632. Choosing St. George's Day in 1696 as the day on which to commence the first session of the Prince George's County Court was politically astute as well. Saint George was a 3rd century A.D. Christian martyr known for his power to slay dragons and who, since the time of King Edward III, was also the patron saint of England.

Designating a county seat for the new county was probably not so easy and took a considerable amount of political maneuvering. Hidden in that choice, I believe, is a special story that tells us much about the early history of Maryland, and the lengths to which names were used to make a point, and, perhaps, even play a joke, albeit a small and quiet one, on the governor and the crown.

In today's world places are not named as thoughtfully or with as much meaning as they were three hundred years ago. Just a casual review of Louise Joyner Hienton's tract map in her book Prince George's Heritage reveals the first settlers calling their lands:

Balls good luck
Cuckolds delight (two of those) & Cuckolds rest
Dear Bought
Dove's Perch
Free School Farm
The Hog Pen (there were two)
Joys Fortune
Little worth (there were two of those as well)
Loving Acquaintance
Maidens delight
Riley's Folly
Whims Acre
Batchelors hope (there were two those as well)
Convenience
God Father's Gift
God's Gift
The Garden
Thomas, his Chance
Anchovies choice and
Hobson's Choice

Mount Calvert was a logical choice for a county seat. It was centrally located in relation to the homes of the approximately 2000 residents whose lands formerly lay about equally in the counties of Charles and Calvert from which Prince George's was created. But choosing a property once owned by the late Philip Calvert, Chancellor of Maryland and uncle of the then Lord Baltimore, is as much symbolic of a break with the past as it was geographically sound. Philip Calvert's dream of Maryland was a world of a growing metropolis centered at St. Mary's City. Throughout his life he resisted diluting power by creating more counties and increasing the size of the General Assembly, just as he resisted moving the capital away from St. Mary's City. For nearly thirty years, from 1668 until 1695, only one new county, Cecil County, was created and that was to honor the second Lord Baltimore, Philip's brother, Cecil Calvert, in 1674. In 1696 Mt. Calvert was a geographically sound choice, but the name referred to a man whose whole career seemed opposite to the goals of the new county. The name had to go.

The work of the Court kept the court clerk busy that first day in 1696 and thereafter. Possibly even too busy. The first clerk, William Cooper, died after only four months in office. His wake was no mean affair and provides us with a glimpse of what life was like when the court was in session. The farewell party cost nearly four times the price of the coffin, and included 11 pints of brandy, 10 1/2 gallons of cider, 10 gallons of boiled cider with spirits, and what was deemed 'the trouble of the house.'

Attending court must have been a festive occasion. Not only would you learn all the gossip, you could watch the court cope with what at times seemed like a rising tide of bastardy and requests for county relief, the social welfare rolls of their day.

On that very first day the Prince George's County court met in 1696, the justices did something  to the bafflement of future historians, if not their contemporaries.

As if an afterthought, as their last action of their first day, they ordered "that this place called Mount Calvert Doe for the Future goe by the name of Charles Town." Why the sudden change? Why no longer Mount Calvert? Why specifically call the county seat Charles Town?

Too often we interpret our past in terms of absolutes with little effort at understanding the shadings of opinion and the degrees of commitment that shape action in the public world. Usually historians interpret the 1690s as a time of growing constraint upon the Catholic population and interpret the disenfranchisement of the Catholics as the abandonment of the Act of Toleration which the second Lord Baltimore, Cecil Calvert, had so carefully crafted nearly fifty years before. To a point, such an interpretation is a valid one. Catholics would not return to the public arena until the American Revolution when Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, and his Catholic cousins from Prince George's County, became active members of the extralegal conventions convened to fight British rule.

In fact, Charles Carroll's kinsman, James Carroll, who settled in Prince George's County in the early years of the 18th century would make it clear in his will that, apart from planting, there were only two professions open to Catholics under the current state of the laws, medicine and the law. He encouraged his nephew to choose the former, because, as he put it, "it may afford the least temptation to change his Religion."  Indeed, I suspect lawyers at times are enough to make anyone change his religion.

But in spite of the increasing legal restrictions on the public role of Catholics and the severe restraints placed upon them with regard to the practice of their religion in any other than the most private of circumstances, the Protestant judges of Prince George's County made an overture of conciliation that first day of court in 1696 that surely did not go unnoticed in London at the town house of the third Lord Baltimore, Charles Calvert.

By the revolution of 1689, the crown of England took over the government of Maryland. Governor Nicholson, who did so much to foster the creation of Prince George's County, was a Royal Governor. But Catholic Lord Baltimore retained a base of power that could not be ignored and to which even Royal governors were forced to pay heed. Lord Baltimore still retained title to the land in Maryland not yet granted. Prince George's County represented the future of Maryland in 1696. It boundaries to the west extended to the source of the Potomac and then northward to the 40th degree of north latitude and back eastward to the bounds of Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties, or nearly 2800 square miles, of which only a fraction had been granted to anyone by Lord Baltimore.

On that spring day over 300 years ago, the justices of Prince George's County thumbed their noses at the official policy against Catholics and tipped their hats to Lord Baltimore by naming their county seat Charles Town after the third Lord Baltimore, Charles Calvert.. Prejudice and religious discrimination was by no means abolished that day, but the acknowledgement of the importance of a modicum of accommodation was in evidence, and would serve to ameliorate the rhetoric of anti-Catholic sentiment to such a degree that only eighty-seven years later in 1783, Catholic and Protestant residents of Prince George's county could join in celebrating the arrival of the news that peace was at hand and the Treaty of Paris acknowledging the acceptance of the United States as a nation among nations would be on its way to Annapolis to be ratified by Congress.

In time, the center of population of the county moved westward and the overseers of the roads did their job. Pressure mounted to move the county seat to an even better crossroads of commerce than Charles Town. In 1721, Upper Marlboro became the capital of the county. Gradually the buildings of Charles Town fell into disrepair and ultimately disappeared under the cultivated fields of Mt. Calvert, leaving only one fine house today, built in the late 18th century.  It's time as a county seat (1696-1721) was so brief as to escape the notice of contemporary map makers who occasionally show the place as Mt. Calvert. It would take a national geograhic place name effort to plant it firmly in our geographical memory.

Those are questions to which the fields that  now cover the first county seat of Prince George's County, Charles Town, formerly Mount Calvert,  pay silent tribute.  They are also questions that lay at the heart of  a costly public issue:  just where is Watkin's Point?
 

I first became intrigued with Watkins Point over twenty years ago when writing the chapter on boundaries in the first edition of our Historical Maps of Maryland.  The fascination remains.  We are publishing a twentieth Annivesary Edition next Maryland Day, March 25, with twice as many maps, all in color, the bulk of which are the magnificient 19th century county maps on which much of our place name data is based. I particularly enjoyed revisiting the Watkins Point saga in light of Virginia's challenge to Maryland's ownership and management of the waters of the Potomac River.  We own it of course, and Virginia has no rights to the water, save to navigate, fish, and build piers out from their shore, but I suspect the Supreme Court in its infinite wisdom will decide otherwise.  The political stakes of development are too high and Maryland has invariably lost almost all of its boundary disputes with its neighbors regardless of the righteousness of her cause.  Establishing where Watkins Point was meant to be is but the chief example among many including the loss of what became Delaware, and thousands of acres in Pennsylvania.  Indeed by all rights Philadelphia should be in Maryland, but do we really want another urban problem on our hands?

Where then is Watkins Point? For almost two centuries after 1668, when Edmund Scarburgh and Philip Calvert actually cut a line through the fifteen miles of trees and marsh from the Pocomoke River to Sinepuxent Bay on the Eastern Shore, no one much cared. Lord Baltimore's charter, while providing for the fortieth degree north latitude as the northern boundary of Maryland, only vaguely drew a southern boundary from

Who could have known in 1668 that the value of Watkins Point lay hidden in the water around it? Who would have guessed that Victorian America would develop such a passion for oysters? Between 1840 and 1850 the oyster harvest in Maryland nearly doubled, from 710,000 to 1.4 million bushels. By 1884 the harvest reached an all- time peak of 15 million bushels. "Drudges," tongers, and oyster police from Virginia and Maryland were locked in a controversy that has since been labeled the Oyster Wars.⁴ As early as 1820 Maryland tried to prevent over overharvesting of the beds by passing legislation curtailing dredging and favoring more labor-intensive, less efficient tonging. There is considerable question about how effectively the law was enforced, but until 1851 there were cases of dredgers being hauled before a justice of the peace in Somerset County, being fined, and even losing their boats, as the law stipulated.

By 1851 the demand for oysters was too great for even token enforcement of measures against over overharvesting, and unlimited commercial exploitation triumphed over prudent management of natural resources. On 13 March 1851, the schooner Fashion was taken in Tangier Sound, by Captain John Cullen, and condemned as a dredger by a Smith Island justice of the peace. The jury agreed that Captain Cullen had taken the Fashion in Virginia waters, not in Maryland waters, even though he was well above what Augustine Herrman and all subsequent map makers had labeled Watkins Point. Obviously, who had the right to fish and police the waters of Tangier Sound and Pocomoke Bay had become an issue that neither Maryland nor Virginia authorities could ignore.⁵

The year after the Fashion was determined to have been taken in Virginia waters (the charge of dredging was never denied), the Maryland General Assembly decided to approach Virginia and settle their southeastern boundary problems once and for all. It was not the first time that the Maryland legislature considered the matter and it was not to be the last, but as a direct result of the 1852 legislation, a careful survey of the area in dispute was undertaken. In a sense, the precision became an additional stumbling block to negotiation. So controversial were some of the findings that it took another twenty years and a panel of three nationally known arbitrators to resolve the matter.⁶ By 1877, when the award of the arbitrators was announced, both sides had examined the then extant historical record in depth and consulted every printed map they could find in Europe and America, back to Captain John Smith's, that located Watkins Point. They recorded oral testimony on the whereabouts of the boundary. that today Although is more valuable today for the local lore it contains, than for resolvingthe testimony did not go far in helping resolve any of the substantive issues before the arbitrators.⁷

And yet, despite all the proceedings and argument, no one was able to dispute effectively what Lieutenant Michler found in 1858 when he surveyed the line that had been established by Calvert and Scarburgh nearly two hundred years earlier. Assigned to Maryland from the United States U.S. Topographical Engineers, Lieutenant Michler had no difficulty finding the 1668 line east of the Pocomoke River. It was well marked. Unfortunately for Maryland, however, the boundary had been run, not according to a true east line, but according to what was indicated as east on the compass in 1668. Because a compass points to magnetic north and because magnetic north in 1668 was to the west of true north, the Calvert-Scarburgh line slanted to the north instead of being a true "right," or east, line. Maryland lost ground to Virginia without knowing it. If Calvert and Scarburgh had taken the latitude at the end of their line as they did at the beginning, they would have found it to be over a mile above the thirty-eighth degree north latitude.

More controversial than where the actual Calvert-Scarburgh line lay on the ground, however, was Lieutenant Michler's definition of Watkins Point. Michler argued that the commissioners in 1668 had chosen a point, not on Cedar Straits, but four miles to the north, as the "Western most Angle" of Watkins Point from which to begin their line. To Lieutenant Michler, the point chosen in 1668 fell at approximately thirty-seven degrees, fifty-five minutes north latitude, and, if extended west to Smith Island, divided the island between Virginia and Maryland.⁸

Subsequent evidence produced by the dissenting arbitrator in 1877 and supplemented by research at the Maryland State Archives strongly suggests that in the late seventeenth century both Marylanders and Virginians accepted the "Western most Angle" of Watkins Point to be where Lieutenant Michler said it was, on land that by Michler's time had been eroded and was under water at about the Jane's Island Light Ship.

Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifier, a Virginian, labeled this location Watkins Point in his manuscript map of about 1693, and a 1672 Maryland deed specifically calls that spit of land with its orchard and duckpond Watkins Point on a tract of land named "too late to repent."⁹

Perhaps it was "too late to repent" where the commissioners in 1668 had meant Watkins Point to be, but not until Lieutenant Michler meticulously surveyed and hypothetically extended the 1668 line was there any real cause for concern. If Michler was correct, about twenty-three square miles containing five thousand acres of firm land and fifteen thousand acres of marsh belonged in Virginia. Even more ominous, Maryland would be excluded from any jurisdiction over oyster beds in Tangier and Pocomoke sSounds.

In 1860, Maryland published the results of Lieutenant Michler's survey in a summary map by John de la Camp. Unlike Michler's survey, this map asserted Maryland's weak contention that the boundary line across the Bay to Smith's Point in Virginia missed Smith Island completely and ignored a considerable body of local evidence to the contrary.¹⁰

In the end, the arbitration of 1877 decided on a broken line that gave some of Smith Island to Virginia, gave all of the land and marsh north of Cedar Straits and west of the Pocomoke to Maryland, and sharallowed Tangier Sound below James Island and Pocomoke Bay to be shared by the two states. It was a reasonable decision rendered by a majority of the arbitrators that, without their knowing so, was corroborated by Jenifer's 1693? Hand hand-drawn map, but it left future generations of scholars and lawyers to ponder what Captain John Smith had really meant by "Watkins Point" and Lord Baltimore's southern boundary.¹¹

Today, sadly without attribution, GNIS confirms Captain Michler's and my documented assertions, and tells us on line that there are two Watkins Points.  One is correctly identified as being under water, but the truth is, both are as they were understood and known in the 17th Century. Sometimes, like Atlantis, we need to remember a place because it is no longer recognizeable as it once was, especially when like, Watkin's Point, it was intended to be the beginning and ending 'point' of the whole State of Maryland.

I hope that with my three examples out of two million, you will begin to agree with me that the journey through the history of mapping can be a fascinating one.  Along the way, perhaps, we will begin to understand the importance of place,  and the need to remember names accurately in the historical context of their derivation.  Certainly it is one way we can maintain our sense of humor, as well as  our connectivity with the lives and accomplishments of all who have gone before us.  Map makers were not always so scrupulous as we shall see, but that is part of the delight  and the mystery in examining and understanding the map makers art.