Saturday, September 9
10am – 4pm
Historic Rittenhouse Town
6034 Wissahickon Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19144

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In order to finance some of his scientific projects, David Rittenhouse made topographic surveys for roads, rivers, and various properties as City Surveyor of Philadelphia in 1774. The most significant and widely known of his field work dealt with laying out boundaries and jurisdictional lines involving Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. He helped run the 90-mile westward extension of the Mason-Dixon line and set the southwest corner of Pennsylvania. From this location, a party of four commis­sioners including David Rittenhouse, Andrew Ellicott, and General Andrew Porter, together with 30 men, ran north in 1785 to set the Pennsylvania-Virginia boundary. Along the way, they set a post on the north bank of the Ohio River was adopted later that year by Thomas Hutchins as the Initial Point for the survey of the Seven Ranges and the starting point for subdividing the public lands of the United States under the Land Ordinance of 1785.

Participants in Saturday’s program will learn the practice of surveying as it was done in 1774. We will be sighting lines with a compass and alidade, measuring lines with chains, drafting basic maps on the plane table, then computing simple geometry using sectors and Gunter’s rule. At the end of this exercise, everyone has the opportunity to create their own map of a piece of this historic site.

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