A hand-drawn manuscript map that settled an 18th-century property line and later came to symbolize the split between North and South will go under the hammer in Asheville on Thursday. Brunk Auctions is offering the original Mason-Dixon survey chart, drawn by surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, with bidding expected to open at $500,000.
The manuscript was prepared in Philadelphia between December 1767 and February 1768, according to a release from prnewswire.com. The survey was never meant to carry the symbolic weight history later gave it — it was drawn up to resolve a nearly century-old boundary dispute between the Penn and Calvert families over where Pennsylvania ended and Maryland began, per the same release. As reported by Spectrum News, the original hand-drawn chart will be offered in a livestreamed auction Thursday, with Brunk Auctions vice president Lauren Brunk estimating it could fetch $800,000 to $1.2 million.
Brunk, speaking to Spectrum News, called the chart a rare chance to get close to an historically important object. The station notes the manuscript was given to the family of Philadelphia attorney Benjamin Chew — who represented the descendants of Pennsylvania founder William Penn — soon after it was drawn, and the Chew family held onto it until 1982.
A Record-Setting Sale, Then Another
When the Chew family finally sold the map at Christie's in 1982, Malcolm Forbes bought it for $360,000, outbidding the Library of Congress in the process, per Spectrum News. The prnewswire.com release notes that contemporary coverage called the result a world record price for an autographed map, and The Map Collector later described it as the highest price ever paid for a map at the time.
The Library of Congress had traveled to Christie's in New York that April specifically hoping to acquire the manuscript, according to the prnewswire.com account, but came up short. The chart changed hands again in March 2002, selling at Christie's for $556,000 to a private collector, per the same release. Afterward, it underwent extensive conservation at Colonial Williamsburg, including removal of its deteriorating linen backing and repairs to tears and losses, the release states.
Physical Details and a Modern Backing
Descriptions of the manuscript's exact dimensions vary between sources. Prnewswire.com describes it as nearly 76 inches long and made up of six joined sheets, while a Christie's lot description characterizes it as a single long sheet measuring roughly 75¾ inches long and between 9¼ and 10¾ inches wide, consisting of six sections of heavy laid paper that were neatly joined and originally backed with linen, according to christies.com. Spectrum News separately reports the chart is now backed by Japanese rice paper.
Thursday's sale at Brunk Auctions, based in Asheville, North Carolina, won't feature the map alone. According to the auction house's own listing at live.brunkauctions.com, it will be offered alongside other maps and manuscripts critical in justifying the Mason-Dixon survey.
From Property Line to National Symbol
The Mason-Dixon line was never originally drawn to divide northern free states from southern slaveholding states, per Spectrum News — but it took on that meaning over time. Congress later used it as part of the cartographic framework designating the divide between slave and free states and territories during debate over the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which established limits on human bondage, according to the prnewswire.com release.
Over time, the line became synonymous with the division between northern free states and southern slaveholding states, and Christie's lot notes describe it as dividing the country sentimentally, in social customs and political purposes, into North and South. A history of the survey from mdhistory.org describes the line today as the unofficial boundary between North and South.
That symbolism has even fed theories about the word “Dixie” itself. The origin of the term is disputed, per Spectrum News, with a popular theory tracing it to Dixon's name. Christie's lot description similarly notes that, by some accounts, the name of the British astronomer and surveyor was transformed into “Dixie,” and a history at inventionandtech.com says the line's association with the Civil War-era North-South border fed that belief — though the same source notes more reliable accounts trace “Dixie” and “Dixieland” to French currency used in early-18th-century New Orleans, where “dix” was printed on ten-dollar bills.
Could the Map Return to a Public Collection?
Lauren Brunk has contacted Library of Congress officials about the institution bidding on the map again, Spectrum News reports. Library officials said their budget circumstances prevented them from purchasing it at this time, according to the same report, but Brunk said the Library of Congress would welcome a patriot purchasing the map on the library's behalf.
