Delaware - Day 27 - Mason-Dixon

Trap Pond State Park

Sunday, 27 January 2019

This morning I watched a squirrel gather dry leaves and take them up a tree.  I'm guessing he was insulating his home somewhere in the tree.  I saw him make 3 trips and he was very specifically gathering dry leaves, not something on the ground under them.  I don't think I've seen that before.

I took the dogs to another part of the campground for our 2^nd walk this morning and saw the Pileated Woodpecker (presumably the same one I’ve seen by my campsite) pounding away on a tree.  I found him because of the noise he was making.  And then I wondered how his head is constructed to allow him to earn his living pounding away like that without wrecking his brain.  Do you suppose people who study head trauma and concussions have checked out woodpecker anatomy?  Somehow this whole species has evolved to allow them this characteristic that our own species is destroyed by.  Odd.

Before we left the park this morning I emptied the waste tanks.  The tanks themselves are heated to keep the contents from freezing (I don't even want to think about how ghastly frozen waste tanks would be) but the hose I connect to dump them with was pretty stiff from the cold.  The overnight temp was below freezing and, by 9:30, it had only gotten to just above freezing, so the hose was unhappy.  Still, everything worked, nothing cracked or fell apart (thank goodness), and I'm cleaned out for another week.

today's route

Given the weather, I didn't want to go very far today, so we went to the marker Mason and Dixon put down in their survey.  It's still there, which seems remarkable to me after more than 250 years.

Getting there was actually more of a challenge than it should have been.  For one thing, most online sites say the marker's in or near the town of Delmar, but fortunately there are a few sites that say au contraire, it's actually miles out of town right smack on a different border line.  See Delmar is like Texarkana and takes its name from the 2 states that it straddles, but that border is the horizontal line that marks Delaware's southern border.  The border that Mason and Dixon marked is where that horizontal line meets the vertical line - a corner.

So instead of hunting futilely around Delmar, I got to State St. and turned west and went to the farthest southwestern corner of Delaware.  Actually, it wasn't even that simple because Delaware hadn't bothered to mark State St. as being Rt. 54, which is what the map and everybody else said to look for.  I was actually in Maryland, seeing the Welcome to Maryland sign and seeing the street name signs written on different kinds of markers, when I figured out I'd missed something and turned around.

Even then, the road was marked as Maryland's Route 54, when the map told me it was Delaware's Route 54.  I'm pretty sure it doesn't follow the state boundary line but is instead wholly in Delaware, which didn't bother to mark it.

And I actually came across another Welcome to Maryland sign and passed it before I got to the Mason-Dixon site.  But I knew from internet sites what it looked like and could see it up ahead so knew I hadn't passed it.  Oddly, the site has a Delaware State Historical Marker on it but not one from Maryland, and yet I'd not only passed the Welcome to Maryland sign but on the way back passed a Welcome to Delaware sign across the street.  So apparently both states think the marker is in Maryland, but it's Delaware that's claiming it.  Wonder who thought this one up.

this is what I was looking for

explains the stones

the largest stone was M-D's; the smaller stones are even older

When Mason and Dixon prepared to do this survey, they not only used regular survey equipment but also a new astronomical clock to measure the movement of the stars to determine their location on the ground. This clock was transported on a mattress on a cart that had been fitted with spring suspension to keep the clock from being jolted too badly by the rough terrain. They really tried hard.

From there, back to Delmar (The Little Town Too Big For One State - pop. 1,600 in DE and 3,000 in MD), I turned left and headed north to Laurel.

I passed a huge area of grain storage buildings and a sign saying Amick Farms, Delmar Mill.  I looked it up later and learned that they buy local corn to make chicken feed.  Thos buildings were a lot bigger than I'd have thought could be filled from that area, but I've probably been misled about how much is being producd because all the bields I've seen in Delaware have been fallow.  There must be a whole lot of corn and grain grown in this state, with all the farms I've seen.

Farther down the road I passed a site being built and labeled Future Home of Proximity Malt.  Those buildings were enormous also so I looked them up and learned it's a new malt company that's billing itself as an alternative to the current North American malt market.  I didn't know there is a "current North American malt market," let alone a need to counter it.

On this one fairly short stretch of road I passed 2 Haitian churches, like the one I saw in Connecticut.  But two of them in this one small area?

I saw an enormous magnolia, reminding me once again that Delaware is on the border of the southern US.  I've also seen some succulents here and there, looking more like Arizone than my idea of Delaware.  Just shows how wrong I've been.  They haven't just been in people's gardens either - I saw some in Killens Pond State Park, and I'm pretty sure the park service didn't plant those.