Science & Tech
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Charles Mason, an English astronomer and surveyor, worked with Jeremiah Dixon to lay out the Mason-Dixon Line, the famous border between Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, using little but the stars from God’s heavens during the years 1763-1767. Born in April 1728, Mason was laid to rest at Christ Church Burial Ground on October 26, 1786, in a plot obtained by his friend Benjamin Franklin from church warden Tench Coxe, though the location of his grave within the burial grounds is unknown. An original 1766 Pennsylvania-Maryland boundary stone, quarried in England, stood for two centuries on the Mason-Dixon Line and honors the memory of its surveyor, Charles Mason.
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