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Anti-Maryland
Aug. 10th, 2015 10:57 amThe southern boundary of the state of Maryland is set as the Potomac River, as stipulated in the 1632 colonial charter.
The northern boundary is the Mason-Dixon line, set along the line of latitude 15 miles south of Philadelphia as a result of a negotiation in 1732 between the Calverts and Penns.
What they didn't know at the time, however, was just how close those two boundaries approach. The northernmost point on the Potomac is less than two miles south of the Mason-Dixon line—so the result is that at the town of Hancock, the state of Maryland is less than two miles wide, with Pennsylvania to the north and West Virginia to the south.
Which means that if the Penns had been slightly tougher negotiators—if they had held out for, say, 18 miles south of Philadelphia instead of 15 miles—there would be a little zone of about a mile wide that was south of the southern border of Maryland but north of the northern border of Maryland. I can see two possible consequences for this circumstance—either there would be a one-mile-wide eldritch zone of "Anti-Maryland" between the two borders, where unexplained phenomena and violations of physical law were commonplace; or everything outside those borders would be Maryland, south of the Mason-Dixon line and north of the Potomac. Possibly both.
Either way, I feel like that would be a far more interesting universe to live in.
The northern boundary is the Mason-Dixon line, set along the line of latitude 15 miles south of Philadelphia as a result of a negotiation in 1732 between the Calverts and Penns.
What they didn't know at the time, however, was just how close those two boundaries approach. The northernmost point on the Potomac is less than two miles south of the Mason-Dixon line—so the result is that at the town of Hancock, the state of Maryland is less than two miles wide, with Pennsylvania to the north and West Virginia to the south.
Which means that if the Penns had been slightly tougher negotiators—if they had held out for, say, 18 miles south of Philadelphia instead of 15 miles—there would be a little zone of about a mile wide that was south of the southern border of Maryland but north of the northern border of Maryland. I can see two possible consequences for this circumstance—either there would be a one-mile-wide eldritch zone of "Anti-Maryland" between the two borders, where unexplained phenomena and violations of physical law were commonplace; or everything outside those borders would be Maryland, south of the Mason-Dixon line and north of the Potomac. Possibly both.
Either way, I feel like that would be a far more interesting universe to live in.
