The boundary between the colonies of Virginia and North Carolina was established in a 1663 charter at the latitude of 36 degrees north, then revised in 1665 to 36 degrees 30 minutes north.
The initial attempt to survey and mark the boundary in 1710-1711 created confusion, so the line was surveyed again in 172. That effort started at the Atlantic Ocean, and went west until reaching the edge of European settlement at the Dan River. William Byrd II wrote about the experience in The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina. His secret diary about the experience was later published as well.
In 1749, Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson's father) extended the survey 90 miles further to the west. Fry and Jefferson were Virginia's two commissioners overseeing the survey; Daniel Weldon and William Churton were their equivalents from North Carolina.
They started on Peters Creek (a tributary of the Dan River in modern Patrick County), where William Byrd had stopped his survey of the "dividing line" 20 years earlier. They stopped at Steep Rock Creek, southeast of modern-day Damascus.
