USA > Pennsylvania > Cumberland County > Biographical and Portrait Cyclopedia of the Nineteenth Congressional District, Pennsylvania > Part 3
USA > Pennsylvania > Adams County > Biographical and Portrait Cyclopedia of the Nineteenth Congressional District, Pennsylvania > Part 3
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control of the disputed territory.
Boundary Line. The great controversy over the boundary line between Maryland and Pennsylvania arose from ambiguity in royal grants and the ignorance of the geo- graphy of the section under consideration by the royal secretaries. While terms of Penn's charter were distinct as to his south- ern boundary line as being the beginning of the fortieth degree, yet the geography of the secretaries must have been at fault as the King did not certainly contemplate giv- ing Penn two-thirds of Maryland, includ- ing Baltimore. On the other hand Lord Baltimore's charter was the oldest yet its language was ambiguous as to his northern boundary as it did not state whether it was the beginning or the ending of the fortieth degree and the King surely did not intend to give Baltimore the Chester county settle- ments and the site of Philadelphia. Penn naturally wanted his three charter degrees of width, and Baltimore likewise fought to save nearly all of his settlements and two- thirds of his province and but justly asked Markham "if this line, 'Penn's,' be allowed where is my province." Penn offered to buy the disputed territory of Baltimore but the latter refused to sell and appealed to the royal council which found that it could not rightfully allow either claim and re- sorted to compromise. The compromise line 39 degrees, fifteen miles south of Phil- adelphia, is by some supposed to be about where the royal secretaries supposed the one hundred and thirty-ninth parallel of lat- itude to be. This plan of settlement was agreed to, on May 10, 1732, by Thomas and Richard Penn and Charles, Lord Balti- more, the latter of whom prevented the actual marking of the provisional line by a suit in equity until a decree in royal council in 1738, made it peremptory and ended the border difficulties referred to ou! a previous page. A temporary line
was run in 1739 to the top of the Kitta- tinny mountains, and an effort in 175I to continue it was frustrated by Mary- land. Finally the proprietors, Thomas and Richard Penn and Frederick, Lord Baltimore, in 1760, agreed to execute the survey of 1732 which had been held back by proceedings in chancery until May 17, 1760, when the Lord Chancellor ordered the agreement of 1732 to be carried into specific execution. John Lukens and Archibald McLean on the part of the Penns and Thomas Garnett on the part of Lord Baltimore were chosen as surveyors, and commenced their work in November by agreeing on a center in Newcastle from whence the 12 mile radii were to proceed in determining the northern boundary of the present state of Delaware. The Baltimore surveyors wanted superficial miles while the other surveyors insisted on geometrical and astronomical mensuration. For three years the commissioners labored to trace out the twelve mile radius and the tangent line from the middle point of the west line across the peninsula, and were closely ap- proximating the true tangent, when they were notified that Charles Mason and Jere- miah Dixon, two eminent surveyors and mathematicians of London had been em- ployed by the proprietors to complete the work. Mason and Dixon arrived in No- vember, 1763, and from the tangent point of the Newcastle semi-circular line reached at 15 miles south of Philadelphia, on latitude 39 degrees, started the great west line which ran between Maryland and Pennsyl- vania and continued westward as the south- ern Pennsylvania line until 1767, when the Indians stopped them on the second cross- ing of Little Dunkard creek.
Manors of Springetsbury, Louther and Maske. The grant to William Penn in 1681 contained special powers to erect manors which were confined to 10,000 acres
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in every 100,000 acres and were to lie in one place. In a half a century these manors were construed in law not to mean such in a legal sense with its train of feudal ap- pendages, but a portion of country or pro- prietary tenths for private and individual uses or to be sold by special contract and not by stated prices.
Springetsbury manor was the first of these manors to be laid out in the Nine- teenth District. It was named after Springet Penn, the grandson and one time the supposed heir of William Penn to the province of Pennsylvania. Springetsbury manor was first surveyed in 1722 by Gover- nor Keith, and resurveyed in 1768 when the plot was returned to the land office. The manor was eight miles wide and ex- tended back 15 miles from the Susque- hanna river in York county, including the town of York and 64,250 acres out of a proposed tract of 70,000 acres. The legal history of this manor in which Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and William Wirt figured is interesting but want of space prevents it's presentation
Louther manor in Cumberland county contained 7,551 acres, was situated between the Yellow Breeches and Conedoguinet creeks extending back some distance from the Susquehanna river, and received its name in honor of a nobleman by the name of Louther, who had married a sister of William Penn. This manor was first sur- veyed in 1732 as Paxtang or Paxton manor being set aside for the Shawanee Indians who afterwards refused to return on it. As Louther manor it was surveyed in 1765 and resurveyed in 1767.
The third and last manor laid out in the district was the manor of Maske in what is 110w Adams county. This manor received its name from the title of an old English estate belonging to some of Thomas Penn's distant relations. The order of survey was
issued in 1741 but the surveyors were driven off in that year by Scotch-Irish set- tlers on its soil, who had previously taken their lands by warrant and license. The Survey was made in 1766, after a compro- mise with the Scotch-Irish, and its bound- aries included 43,500 acres instead of 30,- coo acres as originally ordered. The manor of Maske was nearly six miles wide and 12 miles long and included the sites of Gettysburg, Mumasburg, Seven Stars and McKnightstown. Its southern boundary was one half mile north of Mason and Dixon's line, and Gettysburg was in the eastern edge of the manor, 7} miles north of the south boundary line. On the soil of this manor was fought the great battle of Gettysburg near the place where the Scotch-Irish drove away the surveyor and it is significant that while the Scotch-Irish won the right to their own labor, Gettys- burg gave the ownership of their own labor to 4,000,000 of negro slaves.
West of the manor of Maske was Car- roll's Delight and east of it, Digges' Choice, two large tracts of land surveyed and set- tled under Maryland warrants. Carroll's Delight was a short distance west and con- tained 5,000 acres of land which was pat- ented by Lord Baltimore in 1735 to Charles, Mary and Eleanor Carroll, as be- ing in Frederick county, Maryland. The Carrolls had it surveyed in 1732 and sold numerous tracts to early settlers. Digges' Choice comprised the present township of Conewago, Union and Germany in Adams county and Heidelberg in York. The ori- ginal warrant granted to John Digges, a petty nobleman, of Prince George's county, Maryland, 1727, called for a tract of 10,000 acres, of which 6,822 was surveyed in 1732 under the name of Digges' Choice and com- prised the townships heretofore mentioned. Digges not only sold land within his patent bounds but also outside to some Germans
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and soon conflicting claims between Penn- sylvania and Maryland settlers led to the commencement of the border troubles. . A part of the Germans outside of Digges' tract lines resisted his claims made on them, and one of their number, Jacob Kitzmiller, slot his son, Dudley Digges, and routed the Maryland sheriff when attempting to eject these German settlers. Kitzmiller was demanded by Maryland but held by Penn- sylvania and acquitted upon being tried, and M. A. Leeson writing of this event says: "This act and acquittal of the pea- sant shed new light on the land question and possibly was the second paving stone in the street which is leading to ownership of land by the cultivator of the land."
Pioneer Races. To escape religious persecution three races speaking two dif- ferent languages and following the stand- ards of different churches, came almost contemporaneously as the pioneers of the Nineteenth Congressional District, where to differences of blood, language and re- ligion, they added difference of choice in lo- cating homes and settlements in different sections, distinguished from each other by possessing different kinds of soil. These pioneer races in order of age were:
1. English Quakers on the Red Lands of York and Adams.
2. German Protestants in the limestone valleys of York and Adams.
3. Scotch-Irish Presbyterians on the Slate Lands of York and Adams and the limestone and slate lands of Cumberland.
One of the later and most powerful of the races of the human family is the Eng- lish; and the making of the Englishman can be traced from the cradle and the nur- sery of the human race in Central Asia, away into five great climatic zones, around whose settlement centers grew race masses. Three were in Asia, one along the Nile, and the other on the shores of the Mediterran-
ean, where civilization had its birth and the two great groups of modern nations, the Latin and the Greek, had their rise. Of the fierce northland German peoples, that swept from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, one was Teutonic, whose unconquerable tribes settled largely along the northward waterways from the heart of the great Ger- man forest to the North sea. Three of these tribes, the Angles, Jutes and Saxons, stretched westward along the North sea coast from the mouth of the Elbe river to that of the Weser. Their life was fierce and the land was wild, but both were tieeded, the one to fashion the earliest char- acter elements of the parent stock of the wondrous Englishman, and the other to render a birthland so uninviting as to drive its children forth to their destiny of an is- land home and a world-wide dominion. The Britons' appeal for aid against the Pictish invader of Scotland was answered by the grating of Anglican, Saxon and Jutish boats upon the British shore; but the in- vited defenders, when the Pict was driven back, became the self-appointed conquerors and the German nursery was exchanged for the island school grounds of the oncoming Englishman. The Angles gave their name to the country, the Saxons theirs to the language, while the Jutes were so few in numbers as to stamp their name in no prominent way and were even denied men- tion in the name of the new race, which at the time of their conquest by the Nor- mans was called Anglo-Saxon. The Anglo- Saxon had driven the Briton from the land, but when in turn they were conquered by the Dane and the Norman they remained, and in one hundred and fifty years had so largely absorbed their conquerers that they were an Anglo-Saxon and Norman-Dane people that became known as Englislı when they aided the Barons, June 16, 1512, to compel King John to sign the Magna
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NINETEENTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT.
Charta, which secured some liberties for all the people of England, which had form- erly been called Angleland. From the granting of the Great Charter the Englishı- man rapidly developed those magnificent and powerful traits of character for which he is noted all over the world. He warred with Wales and Scotland and France from 1282 to 1450, and in the next hundred years had planted great colonies in the new world. In the meantime the strength of the English people was increasing in the growth of the House of Commons, whose power was instrumental in the destruction of tlie Feudal nobility in the War of the Roses, but was not powerful enough to restrain the Crown until the days of the Stuarts. Then the great struggle was fought out and Absolute monarchy went down in the great Revolution of 1688, when Constitutional government and a limited monarchy were established. One year later the Bill of Rights was passed, the Commons was in the ascendancy, and the making of the Englishman was com- pleted. His character was then fully formed. He was as unbending as oak, possessed of great fortitude, and had a high sense of honor, and a strong love of home and country. Intelligence, genius and deci- sion are his in bountiful measure and though sometimes wrong, yet the English have swept forward in a career of great- ness among the nations of the earth that has only been equaled by the German empire in the old world, and only can be surpassed in the new world by the United States, the mightiest of England's many planted colo- nies in the different parts of the globe. The Society of Friends or Quakers arose in religious belief which was in opposition to England about 1650, and its members were fined and imprisoned on account of their religious belief which was in opposition to all wars, oaths and a paid ministry. When
Penn founded his colony as a home for re- ligious liberty his Quaker brethren came over in large numbers from England and controled the political policy of the province of Pennsylvania from 1682 until 1752, in which year several Friends withdrew from the legislature that their places might be filled by those in favor of prosecuting an Indian war provoked by unjust treatment of the savages. The pioneer English were all Friends or Quaker except a few who were members of the Established Church of England. Day credits John and James Hendricks as being the first English set- tlers in York county, in 1729, while Fisher seems to think that they were of German lineage. The Hendricks settled near the site of Wrightsville, and three years later Ellis Lewis and other Quakers from Ches- ter county came into what is now New- berry township, and were rapidly followed by their brethren from Chester county, Philadelphia and New Castle, Delaware, who settled the county between the Cone- wago and the Yellow Breeches creeks, or the northern part of York county, com- prising the present townships of Newberry, Warrington, Washington, Fair View, Monaghan, Carroll and Franklin. The Friends also spread westward along the Conewago into Latimore, Reading, Huntingdon and other townships of Adams county. Ellis Lewis and other Quakers who came to what is now New- berry township in 1732 gave the name of "Red Lands" to the county on account of the redness of the soil and rock.
The second pioneer race was the Ger- man Protestants from the Palatinate of Germany who settled in the limestone val- leys of the Codorus and Conewago creeks of York and Adams counties. They were Lutherans, German Reformed, Moravians, German Baptists or Dunkards and Menno- nites in religious belief, and they spoke the
-
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BIOGRAPHICAL AND PORTRAIT CYCLOPEDIA.
Allemannisch, Pfalzisch Schwabisch dia- lects with an admixture of South German. In due time a considerable number of Eng- lish words were incorporated and the re- sulting dialect is now known as Pennsyl- vania German, which name is also applied to the descendants of these Palatinate Ger- mans, with whom a few Swiss came and settled. These German Protestants were principally natives of the beautiful Rhine- land province of the Palatinate in Germany and the neighboring Rhenish Bavarian cities of Mannheim and Heidelberg, whose names they gave to two townships in whichi they settled in York county. Their trans- Atlantic homes were in a land of beauty, where sunny skies bent over vineclad hills, rich valleys and mountains covered with noble old ruins of Feudal times. It was also a land of song and story, being near "Bingen on Rhine," the wicked Bishop Hatto's rat haunted palace and the spot of the mythical sunken treasures of King Nibelung, after whom is named the Nibe- lungen Lied, that collection of famous epic poems which is often called the German Iliad. Byron in his tribute to this Rhine- land country of the Palatinates says,
"The river nobly foams and flows,-
The charm of this enchanted ground; And all its thousand turns disclose
Some fresher beauty varying round."
Religious and political wars and perse- cutions during the first half of the eight- eenth century marked the Palatinate and Bavarian territory with a wide swath of flame and a dark trail of blood, and sent thousands from those provinces to the new world in quest of peace and religious lib- erty. An able and interesting account of the Pennsylvania Germans has been writ- ten by H. L. Fisher, who shows himself to be well acquainted with their ancestry, character, manners, customs and dialect. He speaks at length of their industry, thrift,
patriotism and intelligence, and gives long lists of Pennsylvania Germans who have served with credit and distinction in na- tional, state and county affairs as senators, congressmen, governors, assemblymen and judges, and who have been prominent as artists, soldiers, agriculturists, educators and divines. He makes an able defense of the Pennsylvania German dialect as not being a mongrel dialect as charged by many High German scholars whose lan- guage might be compared to Pennsylvania German as the regular army to the militia. Mr. Fisher says of the Pennsylvania Ger- mans "that as a body they are among the best, trustworthy class of people in this or any other country. Their ambition is, ever has been, and may it ever continue to be good rather than great, solid rather than brilliant, honest rather than rich. As practical farmers, they are unsurpassed; as mechanics, they are skillful, reliable and respectable; as merchants and financiers, they have shown equally with others that truth, candor, honesty and fair dealing are the very handmaids of success in business. As soldiers and civilians, as clergymen and laymen, and indeed in all the various rela- tions of life, we have seen them, on the average, equal to emergencies as they chanced to arise, and fully abreast of the times with their fellow-citizens of other na- tionalities. As colonists and pioneers in the great work of civilization they were behind none of them." Scharf says, "It is almost agreed by historians and philoso- phers that the capacity of a race of people to adjust itself to new environments is the proper test of the race's vitality. * * *
Judged by this test, the Germans have a greater vitality than any other race, for they have been the emigrating race par ex- cellence, ever since the authentic history of nian began." Hegel in commenting on the German spirit as the spirit of the
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NINETEENTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT.
new world, says: "The Greeks and Romans had reached maturity within, ere they di- rected their energies outward. The Ger- mans on the contrary, began with self-dif- fusion, deluging the world and over pow- ering in their course the inwardly rotten, hollow fabrics of the civilized nations Only then did their development begin by a foreign culture, a foreign religion, polity and legislation. This receptivity of the German races made them the best immi- grants in the world. Wherever they went they conquered the people, but adopted and assimilated their institutions. They became Gauls in Gaul, Britons in Britain, and they learned how to become Americans in the United States." The Palatinate and Bavarian Germans between 1729 or 1730 and 1734 spread as the second settlement wave from the Susquehanna southwestward through the limestone valleys of York and Adams county and Kreutz Creek and Lit- tle Conewago were among the earliest set- tlements west of the Susquehanna. A por- tion of the Germans in the Conewago set- tlement were Catholics, and a few Swiss and French were among the German immi- grants.
The third and last great pioneer race was the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who came from the province of Ulster, in the north of Ireland and settled in the York Barrens, on the waters of Marsh creek and throughout the Cumberland Valley. The wonderful Scotch-Irish race, in its career among the nations of the earth, has been compared to the Gulf Stream in its course through the waters of the ocean. To trace the making of the Scotch-Irishman we must go back to the centuries before the Christian era, during one of which a branch of the Gallic or Celtic race from the wild interior of Asia settled in Asia Minor, which it named Galatia. This restless Gallic people soon left Asia, and passed
through Italy, Spain and Southern France, to which latter it gave the name of Gaul, and settled in Great Britain, where it be- came the Celtic race of the British Isles. The branches that settled in Ireland and Scotland soon came to be known as Scots. In 430 the famous St. Patrick, a Scotch- man of patrician birth, made Ireland the field of his wonderful religious labors, and one hundred and twenty years later St. Co- lumba, an Irishman of Scot blood, and of the royal lineage of the house of Ulster, founded in the Scottish island of Iona, on the ruins of an old Druid institution, the college of Icolmkill, which shed its rays of light all over Europe during the darkness of the Middle Ages. Three centuries after the founding of this great college came the occupation of the seed bed of the Scotch= Irish race, which lies in the watergirt re- gion embracing the southern part of the lowlands of Scotland, then known as Stathclyde; and the river-encircled plain of northern England, which at that time bore the name of Northumbria. Into this pe- culiar region came the Dalriadaian Scot from the north of Ireland in large numbers to absorb its few Celtic inhabitants who were descendants of the ancient Britons of King Arthur's days. The boldest of the Vikings and Sea Kings sailed up the rivers of this land and left many of their bravest followers to become a part of a new form- ing race by infusing into it the best blood of the Norseman, the Dane and the Saxon. This people was known as the Lowland Scot, and from 1047 to 1605 passed slowly through a fixing period in which they as- sumed a new character under the preach- ing of John Knox, and made their name famous throughout Europe as the fighting grandsons of the "old raiders of the North." In 1605 the Lowland Scot was ready for transplanting by the Divine Husbandman, and in April 16, 1605, the English court
.
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BIOGRAPHICAL AND PORTRAIT CYCLOPEDIA.
signed the charter to colonize Ulster or the North of Ireland with the Bible-reading Lowland Scot and the choicest blood of England in Northumbria. The Lowland Scot stock in Ulster was modified through immigration by the choicest elements of the Puritan, the Huguenot and the Hol- lander, and thus became the Ulsterman, noted for thrift, prudence and prosperity. He made a war-worn desert a fertile land, and then finding himself persecuted by the English government, he changed from the contented colonist to the exasperated Scotch-Irish emigrant. By persecution the Ulsterman was made ready for his mis- sion in the new world, where settling on the western frontier of the Thirteen Colonies, he became the Scotch-Irishman of history, so named from the dominating strain of his blood and the land from which he had come. The Scotch-Irishman protected the settlements from the Indians, was prominent in the Revolution and mainly instrumental in winning the Northwest Territory. The characteristics of this race are: independence, education and Script- ural faith; and being "first to start and last to quit," can claim that his past is his pledge to the future. A clear and elo- quent description of the Scotch-Irish by R. C. Bair, says, "injected as they were by force among the sects and races, their short career of distinct provincialism was full of momentous possibilities. The Scotch-Irish are no longer an individual people; they are a lost and scattered clan. The world has absorbed them; they are part of the leaven of its mighty develop- ment." Craig analyzes finely the character of James I, of England, tells truthfully and eloquently the history of the Scotch-Irish, and thinks that Barrens of York county, where a number of them settled, were not rendered treeless by the Indians burning the timber for hunting purposes. Between
1734 and 1736 the Scotch-Irish settled in the Barrens or southeastern part of York county ; on Marsh creek around the site of Gettysburg in Adams county and in a long line of settlements through the Cumber- land valley from the Susquehanna to the Conococheague.
A century later than the early settlements of the Scotch-Irish, came a fourth race- the Welsh-emigrant by choice and not pioneer by religious persecution. The Welsh came from about 1836 to 1850 and settled in Peach Bottom township, York county, where they founded the village of West Bangor and number over 700 of a population. They came from the slate region of the North of Wales, are an in- telligent, industrious and remarkably relig- ious people and have become very pros- perous in operating the Peach Bottom slate quarries and mines.
In speaking of the place each of these pioneer races occupied and the influence it exercised in building up the state and the nation we find a brilliant summary made by Bair who says: "If you were to ask what in it (the past) were the mightiest forces employed in laying the foundations of our republic, of vitalizing its genius, of sur- mounting its imposing structure with the glory of American ideas, I would answer there were four. These were the four: The Puritan, which was pure; the Hugue- not, and Waldensee, which was sturdy; the Quaker, which was passive, devout; the Scotch-Irish, which was belligerent and God-fearing. * * while the German lived in fertile valleys, growing rich, the Scotch- Irishman dwelt upon the poorest hills, pro- ducing brains. While the Quaker loved freedom he hated strife. * * These four are the bed rock of American society. They all came with their Bibles and here is the genius of our strength. The one be- lieved in prudence and preaching; anotl:et
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