Mason Dixon International Rodeo Lawyers have become part of the fabric, or should I say leather, of the rodeo landscape. Our representatives traverse 39 countries throughout each performance season. As the seasons differ north and south of the equator, our team is trotting around the globe all year long.

Mason’s and Dixon’s line, was surveyed between 1763 and 1767 by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in the resolution of a border dispute involving Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware in Colonial America. It is still a demarcation line among four U.S. states, forming part of the borders of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia (originally part of Virginia before 1863).

The line was established to end a boundary dispute between the British colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania/Delaware. Maryland had been granted the territory north of the Potomac River up to the fortieth parallel. Pennsylvania’s grant defined the colony’s southern boundary as following a 12-mile (radius) circle (19 km) counter-clockwise from the Delaware River until it hit “the beginning of the fortieth degree of Northern latitude.” From there the boundary was to follow the fortieth parallel due west for five degrees of longitude. But the fortieth parallel does not in fact intersect the 12-mile circle, instead lying significantly farther north. Thus Pennsylvania’s southern boundary as defined in its charter was contradictory and unclear. The most serious problem was that the Maryland claim would put Philadelphia, the major city in Pennsylvania, within Maryland.

The dispute was peacefully resolved in 1767.

Mason and Dixon likely never heard the phrase, “Mason-Dixon line”. The official report on the survey, issued in 1768, did not even mention their names.[6] While the term was used occasionally in the decades following the survey, it came into popular use when the Missouri Compromise named “Mason and Dixon’s line” as part of the boundary between slave territory and free territory.

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