Original hand drawn chart of Mason-Dixon line up for auction

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In this Friday, April 15, 2011, photo in Newark Del., shown is a post marking the base point in the survey of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. Mason and Dixon began their survey a century before the Civil War to settle a border dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland.

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It’s perhaps the most consequential map in American history. And it could be yours.

The hand-drawn chart of the Mason-Dixon Line that eventually divided the free from the slave states is going up for auction. Remounted on backing made of Japanese rice paper, the document will go on sale Thursday in a livestreamed auction.

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Brunk estimates it could fetch anywhere from $800,000 to $1.2 million for the anonymous seller.

The survey by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon was originally meant to settle a border dispute between the then-colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania. But when it was used in the 1820 Missouri Compromise to establish the limits of human bondage in the still adolescent United States, it became synonymous with the fundamental divisions that exploded into civil war four decades later.

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Soon after it was drawn, the linen-backed strip of paper -- 76 inches (193 centimeters) long and 6.5 inches (16.5 centimeters) tall -- was given to the family of attorney Benjamin Chew, who represented the descendants of Pennsylvania founder William Penn. The map remained in the family’s hands until 1982, when late publisher Malcolm S. Forbes outbid the Library of Congress and bought it for $360,000, Brunk said.

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The map changed hands again in 2002. (A vertical section showing the Delaware-Maryland border is housed at Princeton University.)

Brunk reached out to officials at the Library of Congress to see if they wanted to bid on it again.

“I wanted them to be aware that this was coming back to the market,” she said. “And they said, at this point, budgets being what they are, they were just not in a position to buy it.”

But if some patriot out there wants to purchase it on the library’s behalf, Brunk said, “they’d be happy to have it.”

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