Manor of Maske, Gettysburg and Seven Stars, Adams County

We're once again having heat wave temperatures here in my part of the commonwealth, not helped by smoke from Canadian wildfires. As I said last time, keep your pets inside, check on your elderly neighbors, and maybe put out some bowls of water for the local wildlife if you don't live near a stream or something.

Next week's blog post will be a day early or (more likely) a day late. That's because next Wednesday is my husband Kevin's birthday, and barring any unforeseen difficulties, we will be doing... well, something. We haven't decided exactly what just yet. Last year we did a tour of Sullivan County and collected all of their markers, but this year's activity will likely be on a smaller scale for multiple reasons. Knowing Kevin, however, it'll almost certainly include collecting a marker or two while we're out and about. 

Speaking of 'a marker or two', this week's quest is technically a double-marker post. I'm cheating, however, because I only found one of them when we were in Adams County for my own birthday a few years ago. That's because we didn't have time to venture beyond Gettysburg, what with all the stuff we wanted to explore there, so I have yet to visit the charmingly-named community of Seven Stars. Once I do, I'll come back and add the second marker. The wording on them is basically the same, however, so it works well enough. The only real difference is that the Gettysburg marker indicates the eastern boundary of the property in question, and the Seven Stars marker is for the western boundary.

This marker stands on York Street (US 30) just outside of
the borough of Gettysburg.

My first question was probably the same one as yours - namely, what is (or rather was) the Manor of Maske and why does it sound like the setting of a mystery novel or possibly a masquerade ball? Well, I'm a little disappointed to say that it was neither of those. 

The Manor of Mask was part of the Providence of Pennsylvania, which our good William Penn accepted from King Charles II in lieu of a bunch of money which the king had owed to the Penn family. Admiral Sir William Penn, our William's father, had used a lot of his own personal wealth after Charles II was restored to the throne, so that the crown could afford to do things like naval expeditions. That's a whole long story in and of itself and not terribly relevant to this blog post, so I'm going to stop myself before I fall down a different rabbit whole, which I am prone to doing. 

From the actual charter of Pennsylvania:

“Wee give and grant licence vnto the said William Penn, and his heires, likewise to all and every such person and persons to whom the said William Penn, or his heires, shall at any time hereafter, grant any estate of inheritance as aforesaid, to erect any parcels of Land within the pvince aforesaid, into mannors, by and with the licence to be first had and obteyned for that purpose…”

So a manor, in the context of this blog post, was an estate. Pennsbury was the first estate of the family in our beloved commonwealth, but the Manor of Maske was even larger. It was, as the markers state, finally surveyed in 1766, though it was actually first established in 1741. It was supposed to be named the Manor of Marske, which was the name of an estate in Yorkshire, England belonging to William's sister and brother-in-law. Exactly why or when the R was dropped from the name is unclear. William himself had long since died by this time; he passed in 1718, back in England, and is buried next to his first wife Gulielma. The survey was instead conducted on the orders of his two surviving sons, Thomas and Richard, and his grandson John. (I'm not sure if this was the grandson John who was the architect of The Solitude or the one who was the last colonial governor of Pennsylvania, but it seems more likely to have been the latter.)

The Manor of Maske was an extensive piece of property, roughly 72 miles square. To put it in perspective, Philadelphia is about 143 miles square, so this estate was slightly less than half the size of that city. It encompassed a large swath of what is now Adams County (though at the time it was still part of York County), including what later became the borough of Gettysburg and most of what we now honor as the Gettysburg Battlefield. The southern border of the manor is now a section of the Mason-Dixon Line. Oddly, though the PHMC markers identify the approximate eastern and western borders, there isn't anything delineating the northern border; there are, however, small markers from the Adams County Historical Society which indicate the northeastern and northwestern corners. There are also a few other markers throughout the region, such as this one on the Adams County Courthouse wall, which indicate that the land was once part of the manor.

With such a large parcel of land at their disposal, and so many settlers already upon it thanks to William's policy of religious freedom, the Penns probably expected to make bank on rent. This didn't exactly happen. They were faced with a host of problems, including badly recorded borders making it difficult to identify the exact locations of various lots, difficulties in communicating with tenants thanks to both language barriers and transportation issues, and inconsistent terms of sale for many of the lots. It was all deeply confusing, and led to a whole bunch of disputes. Also not helping was the ongoing boundary dispute with Maryland, which didn't get resolved until the Mason-Dixon Line was established. For ten years, the whole thing was a bit of a tangled mess.

So how did it all get resolved? Well, to be perfectly honest, it didn't. Instead, in 1776, the colonies declared their independence from Great Britain. That put an end to royal governance in any of the thirteen, and this included the Penn Proprietorship of Pennsylvania (say that three times fast). Then, in 1779, the Pennsylvania government created and passed a piece of legislature called the Divesting Act, which confiscated almost all of the remaining lands that the Penn family hadn't already sold. The only things they still held were the manors, and within the next couple of decades those were sold. The Manor of Maske was no more, and most people very likely forgot about it altogether. The only Penn manor which remains in existence today is Pennsbury Manor, in Morrisville, Bucks County, with a reconstruction of the original home serving as a museum. (It has its own marker. I'll get there eventually.)

Of the Manor of Maske, nothing remains... except these markers that tell us where it once was.

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Sources and Further Reading:

Tristan, David. "Midstate Markers - What is the Manor of Maske?" ABC 27 News, June 28, 2022.

Glatfelter, Charles H., and Arthur Wenner. The Manor of Maske: Its History and Individual Properties. Adams County Historical Society, Gettysburg, PA, 1997.

Kain, William H. "The Penn Manorial System and the Manors of Springetsbury and Maske." Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, Penn State University Press, 1943. Accessed via JSTOR.

Manor of Maske (eastern boundary) and Manor of Maske (western boundary) at the Historical Marker Database

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Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.