Brunk Auctions will offer the original hand-drawn manuscript survey of the Mason-Dixon Line on Oct. 29 in Asheville, North Carolina. The auction begins at 10 a.m. ET at 117 Tunnel Road, and bidding on the map will open at $500,000. It is being offered during the nation’s 250th anniversary year.
Surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon prepared the manuscript in Philadelphia between December 1767 and February 1768. It followed years of work to settle a boundary dispute between the Penn and Calvert families over the line between Pennsylvania and Maryland. The map is nearly 76 inches long and made of six joined sheets of laid paper. It is signed by both surveyors.
The map sold at Christie’s in New York in 1982 for $360,000 to Malcolm Forbes, then president of Forbes magazine. The Library of Congress had hoped to acquire it. The Washington Post called the price a world record for an autographed map. It sold again at Christie’s in 2002 for $556,000 to a private collector.
The map was nearly lost to history. For generations it stayed among the Chew family papers and was assumed to be an engraving. In 1963, historian Nicholas Wainwright and Benjamin Chew III noticed the cartouche differed from the printed version. A comparison with the eastern manuscript at Princeton University confirmed the strip was an original.
After the 2002 sale, the map was conserved at Colonial Williamsburg, where conservators removed its deteriorating linen backing and relined it with Japanese paper. Removing the old backing alone took more than 200 hours. The map was exhibited at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum through March 2006.
Andrew Brunk, CEO and president of Brunk Auctions, said the original manuscript is exceptionally rare because no other known original exists. He said the line the surveyors drew has become part of American culture. A related group of period maps and manuscripts documenting the survey will be offered at the same sale.
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