The State Line

The State Line. Last Stop in Maryland. , Here in America's first interstate highway enters Pennsylvania. The National Road started in Cumberland, connected to a series of privately funded turnpikes from Baltimore, and eventually wound its way through four states to Illinois., Looking east from here, millions of early travelers faced several 3,000 foot Appalachian ridges as they rode and walked toward the Chesapeake Bay and the port of Baltimore. Heading west, horsemen, stagecoaches and freight wagons passed over more peaks before they plunged into the Ohio River Valley, headed for the plains of the American heartland to the Mississippi River., Using old trails through what were once Iroquois, Delaware and Shawnee hunting lands, the National Road joined Colonial America with the Northwest Territory. Merchants, traders and families from all over the world journeyed along this route in their quest to claim lands, expand markets and form new lives., [Sidebar:] , The Mason-Dixon Line runs through here , In 1763, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, arrived in America to settle this now famous boundary dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania. The stones, weighing between 300 and 600 pounds, were quarried of limestone in Great Britain and shipped to America. The terrain got so hilly that Mason and Dixon erected large rock groupings around wooden posts west of Sideling Hill. Leftover markers were stored at Fort Frederick and finally installed in 1901 and 1903., [Captions:] , Pig's Ear Road, on the Mason-Dixon Line, crosses the National Road at the State Line Methodist Church to your left. The church and school were moved here in 1900 from the Jasper Augustine property in Addison, PA. In 1903, it officially became the State Line Church., A photograph from the early 1900s looks west into Pennsylvania from the state line. The 96 mile distance to Wheeling, West Virginia, is marked on the old cast iron mile post. The original crushed stone National Road surface is also clearly visible.