Читать книгу Measuring America - Andro Linklater - Страница 11

THE POINT OF THE BEGINNING had been decided by a boundary commission headed by two of the United States’ finest surveyors, Andrew Ellicott, who would later help to lay out the plan for the nation’s new capital on the Potomac, and David Rittenhouse, whom Jefferson declared to be the greatest astronomer in the world. Their task was to mark out the western boundary of Pennsylvania, running it north until it cut the Ohio river and then on towards Lake Erie. That boundary had been specified in the original charter to William Penn. Until Virginia ceded her claims to the Western Territory, everything beyond that limit had theoretically been hers – all of Kentucky, most of present-day Ohio, Indiana and as far west as Wisconsin. Once the line had been drawn, it would become part of the Northwestern Territory that Thomas Hutchins was to survey.