Captain Thomas Cresap and the Border War

Thomas Cresap arrived on this stretch of the lower Susquehanna in seventeen thirty, claiming the land for Lord Baltimore and the Maryland proprietorship. The Penn family believed the ground belonged to Pennsylvania. What followed was a genuine frontier confrontation known as the Conojohela Border War, a messy dispute between two colonial governments over where one colony ended and the other began.

Cresap dug in, refused to leave, and defended what he called his plantation, which he named Pleasant Garden, for six years. In seventeen thirty-six, Pennsylvania authorities had enough: they burned his log house or fort near the river and carried Cresap off as a prisoner to Philadelphia. He was held on charges of murder in connection with the border violence.

Ultimately released, Cresap went on to become a celebrated frontier trader and scout, living to a very old age. The messy boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania would not be definitively settled until Mason and Dixon ran their famous line decades later.