Tuesday, 8 January 2019
Pets
On our early morning walk both dogs got extremely excited, and thank goodness they didn't start barking because we were near other campsites. They pulled me so thorougly that I was really afraid I'd end up being dragged along the (paved) road, but I managed to get them stopped.
In the middle of all this, I got a glimpse of what they were reacting to: a large white patch at about my eye level moving quickly across the road up ahead. The white tail of a deer. I'm so very glad I got the dogs stopped because I still think Dexter would be able to track a deer down and do great damage. He's genetically inclined to hunt and track and gives every indication he'd do it well if I let him.
To continue the Pet Day theme, I took everybody up to Newark to the Banfield there. They'd told me on the phone they couldn't give me heartworm medicine without knowing that the dogs had had a heartworm test within the last year. I was pretty sure they hadn't, so we had an appointment.
The dogs got their tests, we threw in a kennel cough vaccination update, I got their heartworm medicine, and Lily got her claws clipped. She was peeved about it. It looks like I'll need to get that done every month, because her claws'd grown out quite a bit in the 6 weeks since the last clipping. And once again I was delighted I wasn't the one trying to do the clipping, even though they charged me a dollar more than the Connecticut Banfield did. Still worth it.
Hundreds
One of Delaware's claims to uniqueness is its "hundreds."
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| Delaware's hundreds |
Back in the 1600s, many of the colonies had "hundreds," an old English term denoting an area of land large enough to provide 100 men to serve as the king's soldiers. In the American colonies, those men were called militiamen.
The term fell out of use over time: as examples, the New England equivalents became "towns;" the PA and NJ equivalents were "townships." Today, Delaware may be the only place in the world where the term is still used.
Hundreds are no longer considered anything other than a tool used by historians to look at local history, but that change is relatively recent. Even into the 20th century, Delaware divided its voting districts based on the hundreds. But in 1964 the US Supreme Court issued its "one man, one vote" decision, and Delaware had to begin using population, rather than geography, for chosing political representation.
All this came up when I stumbled on some signs explaining this system for tourists. I'd heard about it in my pre-trip research and the signs helped clarify what seemed mystifying to me. Hundreds? Huh?
Mason-Dixon Line
Another of Delaware's uniquenesses is its border - especially the northern circular part. I found another tourist sign that talked about it. There's a detailed discussion about all this in Wikipedia wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason–Dixon_line but I thought I'd give my CliffsNotes version here.
Back when land was still being granted by England, the boundary between PA and the Delaware grant was defined as an arc extending 12 miles from New Castle. The town of New Castle isn't shown on the map on this sign, for some reason, but it's located just north of that northernmost notch you can see in DE's eastern side across from New Jersey on the Delaware River.
The boundary between Maryland and DE was in some ways more simple and in others more complicated. The owners of both Maryland and Delaware agreed to have DE's southern border run in a straight east-west line from Cape Henlopen to the Chesapeake. The trouble is that the map they used was labeled incorrectly and Fenwick Island is the point they actually used. This mistake added quite a bit of land to DE and peeved the owner of MD who tried to take back his agreement. His take-back didn't work.
Then there was agreement to extend the north-south line from the point where Delaware's arc with PA met MD's border with PA - a tri-state location - south to meet that contested line from Fenwick Island. For that, the 3 government entities agreed to hire Mr. Mason and Mr. Dixon. In 1764 the 2 men and their crew hacked a path through the mostly uninhabited forests using the most sophisticated instruments of the time to survey the line. That line is still the one recognized. Interestingly, numerous more modern surveys have failed to find much fault with their work.
Mason and Dixon were then hired to survey the disputed boundary between MD and PA - the line that is today thought of as THE Mason-Dixon line (the border between slave and free states). And that line also continues as today's boundary between the 2 states.
There's no real reason Mason's and Dixon's names should be so inextricably attached to those surveys because their final report didn't even have their names on it. But they are and will always be. Among the cultural references to them in the Wikipedia article was one to a 1950s Bugs Bunny cartoon - I guess it was spoon-fed to our whole generation.
So that's our class lesson for today.
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