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…