The start of the recorded history of the northern Frederick County is intently tied to rivalry between England and France. When the first Europeans settled in the Emmitsburg space, within the early eighteenth century, the English government was casting a frightened eye at French moves to claim the inside of the American continent. France's holdings there threatened to restrict English influence to the coastal strip east of the Allegheny mountains, and, thereby, stop English dominance of northern America.
To counter French encroachment, the English authorities began an energetic coverage of promoting settlement of the wilderness. Settlers were organized into teams of lots of. The primary settlers, within the area below lively analysis by the Larger Emmitsburg Area Historic Society, have been collectively often called the Tom's Creek Hundred. Their settlement encompassed land from just north of current day Thurmont to the previous Pennsylvania border, from the Monocacy to the Catoctin Mountains.
The Tom Indians, who occupied the Emmitsburg area, had by this time either moved westward or died from European diseases such as small pox. Because of this, the land occupied by the Tom's Creek Hundred was nearly devoid of Indians and, due to this fact, ripe for settlement by the English.
While the Royal authorities opened the land to all settlers for a nominal fee, it favored a number of select aristocrats by offering them large tracts of land in reward for his or her assist of the Crown. One of many earliest land barons within the valley was John Diggs.
Diggs, home security a grandson of the Royal Governor of Virginia, was a rich Catholic who performed a dominant function within the typically-bloody border dispute between the Maryland and Pennsylvania governments. With ownership of the Chesapeake and the mouth of the Susquehanna, Maryland pressed its claim of what is now center Pennsylvania. This remained a dispute that was not settled until the Mason-Dixon line was laid out.
Diggs believed his right to land, based mostly upon his aristocratic standing, entitled him to most of northern and western Maryland. In 1732, Diggs formally claimed, although without any authority, all of the vacant land on the Monocacy and its many branches, which included all of current day Emmitsburg. In July 1743, Diggs managed to obtain title to three tracts of land in the Emmitsburg space. Diggs' land grabbing was rapidly mimicked by others, albeit in a smaller fashion.
Sadly for the land speculators and the settlers, the race between the French and English for the inside of the continent quickly got out of hand. In 1754, the English were not only preventing the French, but their Indian allies as well. While little fighting occurred within the Emmitsburg area, Indian raiding parties periodically moved by means of the world. As a result, many settlers withdrew to the relative security of coastal cities.
With the end of the Seven Years Battle in Europe, during which France ceded sovereignty of the inside of North America to the English, settlers once once more cast their eyes towards the wilderness. Some fled from extreme non secular persecution, others from the oppression of civil tyranny, and still others have been attracted by the hopes of liberty underneath the milder influence of English colonial rule. But for the greatest part, the settlers flocked to the American continent within the hopes of abandoning the crushing poverty of their homeland and for the possibility to personal land and prosper by means of their