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Monongalia County park celebrates 250 years of Mason-Dixon line

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A celebration of a line older than the country it resides in begins Friday in Monongalia County.

The Mason-Dixon Historical Park will be hosting a weekend long recognition of the 250th anniversary of the Mason-Dixon Line. The festival will include historical re-enactments, live music and presentations from various surveyors that will last for the entire weekend. Mason-Dixon 250 organizer Pete Zapadka explained the West Virginia roots of the line on WAJR’s Morgantown AM.

“West Virginia’s northern border is the Mason-Dixon Line,” he said. “So we need to not only celebrate this, but to educate people about what the Mason-Dixon line really is, it’s very important in the fabric of our history.”

The Mason-Dixon Line was established 250 years ago this weekend to mark the boundary line between Pennsylvania and Maryland. The line also established borders in Delaware and West Virginia as well.

Established by English astronomers Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the line settled an 82-year-old dispute between English colonies due to an overlap of granted land between the Penns of Pennsylvania and the Calverts of Maryland. Even though the line was a notable landmark during the Civil War Era, Zapadka says the history of the line goes back significantly further.

“I always tell people, ‘people that think that the Mason-Dixon line is a dividing line, North versus South, Free versus Slave, Black versus White,’ no, it’s actually a line that when it was drawn and agreed upon by all parties, it’s a line that drew a fledgling nation together,” he said.

The festivities will kick off with a welcome dinner Friday night and continue through the weekend as historians describe the area at the time the line was established with the help of re-enactments of both Native American and colonial-era encampments, which will be set up all weekend.

“We’re trying to adhere to an era of 1754 to 1784,” Zapadka said. “They’ll actually be across the line into Pennsylvania, in a place called the South Bottom and we’ll have golf carts to shuttle you out there if you don’t want to walk,” he said

The re-enactment is intended to reflect the environment Mason and Dixon were in at the time the line was established, which represents the camps of surrounding colonists and Native Americans at the time of the border’s establishment. This will also include a demonstration of the techniques used by Mason and Dixon to establish the line.

The weekend will conclude with a dedication of the Third Crossing of the Dunkard Creek Recreation Area, which will be attended by government officials and direct descendants of Jeremiah Dixon. The area will include a walkway which will give you a direct path on the Mason-Dixon line itself.

“You can walk out a flat path, stand right on the Mason-Dixon Line, and how many people have ever stood on a state line somewhere and said ‘ha ha, I’m in the such and such state,'” Mason-Dixon Historical Park Superintendent J.R. Petsko said. “Now you can come to the park and do that easily.”

The original path of the original marker included a path up a nearby hill, which was adjusted so people could conveniently walk the border.

The welcome dinner will take place Friday at the Park’s Red Barn at 6 p.m.





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