Historic ‘Dixie’ Map Dividing North and South May Fetch $1.2M

Few maps have played a more powerful role in American history—and soon, one collector could own it.

A hand-drawn map tracing the Mason-Dixon Line, later associated with the boundary between free and slave states, is heading to auction. Recently remounted on Japanese rice paper, the historic document will be offered Thursday during a livestreamed sale.

“It’s rare to come so close to an object with this level of historical importance,” said Lauren Brunk, vice president of Brunk Auctions in Asheville, North Carolina. “Seeing it in person was genuinely awe-inspiring.”

Brunk expects the anonymous seller’s map to command between $800,000 and $1.2 million.

The original survey was created by astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon to resolve a boundary dispute between the colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Its meaning changed dramatically after the map was invoked in the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which set limits on slavery in the young United States. In time, the line became a powerful symbol of the sectional tensions that would erupt into the Civil War roughly 40 years later.

“For most Americans, the Mason-Dixon Line represents the division between the free states of the North and the slaveholding states of the South,” Brunk said. “That, however, was not the purpose for which it was originally surveyed.”

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The map is also linked to a long-running theory that the nickname “Dixie” originated with Dixon, although historians continue to debate the word’s true source.

Not long after the survey was completed, the linen-backed paper—measuring 76 inches (193 centimeters) long and 6.5 inches (16.5 centimeters) high—was presented to the family of attorney Benjamin Chew. Chew had represented the heirs of William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania.

The Chew family kept the map for generations. In 1982, publisher Malcolm S. Forbes purchased it for $360,000 after outbidding the Library of Congress, according to Brunk.

The sale was widely reported at the time as the highest auction price ever paid for an American map.

The historic document was sold again in 2002. A separate vertical segment depicting the Delaware-Maryland boundary is held by Princeton University.

Before the latest auction, Brunk contacted the Library of Congress to ask whether it might once again pursue the map.

“I wanted them to know it was returning to the market,” she said. “They told me that, given current budget constraints, they aren’t in a position to purchase it.”

Still, Brunk said the institution would welcome the map if a private collector were willing to buy it and donate it on the library’s behalf.