Living across the Mason-Dixon Line
While I have crossed many international borders, most of my border crossing experience has been internally. The border which I have crossed the most is the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, an internal state border within the United States of America. There are no border checks, no paperwork is needed and barely any markings denote the border. When I was younger, my family would travel up into Pennsylvania to visit my grandmother. We lived just south of the border, and she just north of it. When I grew up and started living with my grandmother, I needed to cross the border going to work, visit friends or go shopping.
Since the crossing is not a stressful or even eventful undertaking, the things I associate with the crossing are quite mundane. I think mainly of the twenty-to-thirty-minute drive between my hometown of Westminster and my grandmother’s town of Littlestown. I also think about the border markings. There are signs along the road reading “Welcome to Maryland/Pennsylvania” and those which denote the border as the “Mason-Dixon Line” - the dividing line between what is generally seen as the “North” and the “South.”
Outside of these signs the only thing marking a border is the change in road colour. At each border point, one side is usually darker than the other depending on when each side was built or last repaired.
While the border crossing is easy, the border still has some impact on my daily life, due to differences in the sizes of Westminster and Littlestown as well as government policy. I associate the Maryland side of the border with cheaper food and lower gas prices. Hence, I frequently drive into Maryland to go shopping and fill up my car.
While this border only has a minor impact on my life, it used to be a significant border in the past. In colonial America, the Mason-Dixon line was surveyed between 1763-1767 to resolve a border dispute between Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware. The portion south of Pennsylvania later marked the boundary between Southern slave states and Northern free states.
Before emancipation, if escaping slaves could make it across the Mason-Dixon Line into the North their chances of getting their freedom significantly increased. A network of people existed in the South whose primary goal was to help get enslaved people across that border to freedom.
Discrimination and oppression however continued, and segregation was only formerly abolished with the Civil Rights Act in 1964. In the nineteenth century the “Mason-Dixon line” was used to describe the entire boundary between slave and free states. It has remained in use figuratively to refer to enduring cultural, political and social differences between the “North” and the “South” (which is often referred to as “Dixie” after the line). However, while it was a free state/ slave state dividing line, discrimination and racism always transcended the line. Northern states still had racist and discriminatory laws and even today it is not hard to find a Confederate flag flying high in rural parts of the North.
Joseph Kappes 28 years
