It may be one of the most consequential maps in U.S. history—and soon, it could belong to a private collector.
A hand-drawn chart depicting the Mason-Dixon Line, later associated with the boundary between free and slave states, is headed to auction.
Remounted on Japanese rice paper, the document will be offered Thursday during a livestreamed sale.
“It’s not that often that you can really get this close to something that is so historically important,” said Lauren Brunk, vice president of Brunk Auctions in Asheville, North Carolina. “And it was awe-inspiring, really.”
Monica Scott / Brunk Auctions via AP
Brunk estimates that the anonymous seller could receive between $800,000 and $1.2 million.
“Drawn between 1767 and 1768 by Charles Mason … and Jeremiah Dixon … the Mason-Dixon Line is the symbolic boundary between Northern and Southern states,” Brunk says on the auction house’s website.
The survey conducted by Mason and Dixon was originally commissioned to resolve a border dispute between the colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Decades later, its use in the 1820 Missouri Compromise to define the limits of slavery in the young United States gave the line a far broader meaning—one tied to the divisions that would erupt into the Civil War four decades afterward.
DON’T MISS: Poundland Future Uncertain as Discount Retailer Faces Potential Administration
“The Mason-Dixon Line that most Americans know is this dividing line between the Northern free states and the Southern slaveholding states,” Brunk said. “But the line was not drawn for that reason.”
One longstanding theory holds that the name “Dixie” originated with Dixon, although the word’s true origins remain disputed.
Not long after the survey was completed, the linen-backed strip of paper—measuring 76 inches long and 6.5 inches tall—was given to the family of attorney Benjamin Chew, who represented the descendants of Pennsylvania founder William Penn. The map stayed with the family until 1982, when the late publisher Malcolm S. Forbes purchased it for $360,000 after outbidding the Library of Congress, Brunk said.
At the time, the sale was reportedly the highest price ever paid at auction for an American map.
The map was sold again in 2002.
A vertical section depicting the Delaware-Maryland border is held by Princeton University.
Brunk contacted officials at the Library of Congress to ask whether the institution might want to pursue the map a second time.
“I wanted them to be aware that this was coming back to the market,” she said. “And they said, at this point, budgets being what they are, they were just not in a position to buy it.”
Still, Brunk said that if a patriot wished to purchase the map on the library’s behalf, “they’d be happy to have it.”