Did you know the 12 mile arc that forms Delaware’s northern boundary line is measured from that copula? It is the only nominally circular state boundary line in the United States. So suck it Texas!!
From Wiki – the 12-mile arc was first described in a 1682 deed to William Penn from the Duke of York. The 12-mile range extended just up to the still-very-much “no-man’s-land” of that time: territory of the dangerous, aggressive, Iroguois-speaking indians. Coastal tribes were friendly but 17th Century Iroquios, not so much.
The mid-Atlantic coastal territories between the Delaware and the Hudson rivers were claimed, mostly for Iroquios indian fur trade, by Dutch 1615, Swedes 1638, Dutch again 1650 and finally by the English in 1667 [I am currently reading Russell Shorto’s “The Island in the Center of the World” about the Swedish colonization of America].
Check the link below – the New Castle arc coincides roughly with the southeastern boundary of the Iroquois at the curve of the peidmont.
Courthouse, Old New Castle
Did you know the 12 mile arc that forms Delaware’s northern boundary line is measured from that copula? It is the only nominally circular state boundary line in the United States. So suck it Texas!!
Damn right. And if someone could have found a longer string, we might have been able to stretch that boundary all the way north and west to Route 1.
A curiosity:
From Wiki – the 12-mile arc was first described in a 1682 deed to William Penn from the Duke of York. The 12-mile range extended just up to the still-very-much “no-man’s-land” of that time: territory of the dangerous, aggressive, Iroguois-speaking indians. Coastal tribes were friendly but 17th Century Iroquios, not so much.
The mid-Atlantic coastal territories between the Delaware and the Hudson rivers were claimed, mostly for Iroquios indian fur trade, by Dutch 1615, Swedes 1638, Dutch again 1650 and finally by the English in 1667 [I am currently reading Russell Shorto’s “The Island in the Center of the World” about the Swedish colonization of America].
Check the link below – the New Castle arc coincides roughly with the southeastern boundary of the Iroquois at the curve of the peidmont.
http://www.pencaderheritage.org/main/historymaps/phhistmap4.html
Pencader’s unattributed image is from a pictoral history book I distributed back when I was trying to save the La Grange farm.