William Penn, a well-born Englishman and a Quaker, was granted a royal charter to found and govern a large, rich American colony that he named Pennsylvania. The son of a famous admiral was becoming a royal nuisance to King Charles II, who didn't care to keep jailing members of the new Religious Society of Friends.
Peaceable in his dealings and treaties with American Indians, Penn was land-hungry when it came to settling the borders between Quaker Pennsylvania and Catholic Maryland. He journeyed to Maryland in December 1682 for a face-to-face conference with Charles Calvert, the third Lord Baltimore. While in the state, he visited a Quaker friend, William Richardson, at his home in what is now Anne Arundel County, a couple of miles from Route 468.
The boundary between the states, a source of contention, was not finally established until the Mason-Dixon Line was drawn nearly a century later.
[Jamie Stiehm with Paul McCardell, Sun library researcher, and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission]