Page:Some History about the Village of Berlin.pdf/19

==== UPPER POTOMAC ====

The first record of a white man's domicile in the area along the Potomac River between the mouth of Catoctin Creek and the present County border at South Mountain to the west was that of Abraham Pennington. Pennington was an Indian trader living on "Coxson's Rest," surveyed for Thomas Wilcoxson on April 1, 1728. This tract stretched along the Potomac as a thin narrow band nearly three miles long and less than a quarter of a mile deep. Through its length later ran the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and "Coxson's Rest" was later included in a resurvey known as "Hawkins' Merry-Peep-O-Day.

In 1730 Flayle Payne joined Pennington as a neighbor to the west of "Coxson's Rest." He presumably was purchasing his land from John Abington whose survey of November 2, 1730 was called "Pain's Delight. 113 On it today lies the town of Knoxville. Payne was granted a reward by the Lower House of the Maryland Assembly on July 28, 1731 for bringing runaway slaves back to their rightful owners. In 1733 he was listed as a taxable in monocacy hundred. Payne was appointed overseer of the road from "Monocacy to Antietam" in 1738 and two years later was named Constable of Lower Monocacy Hundred. He witnessed the will of William Diggs of "Mellwood Park" in lower Prince George's County in 1739,5 and in 1742 his name, as Frail Pain, appeared on the petition to divide Prince George's Parish. In 1744 he was one of the signers of the petition for a road from "Tuscarora Creek to the mouth of Kitoctin Creek and then on to Antietam Creek.

1 See above, pp. 15, 40. 2 See below, pp. 97-98. 3 C/S: AM 1:30. 4 See Appendix, p. 369. 5 Maryland Provincial Wills, 22:232. 6 See p. 56. 7 C/S: LG E:76. 94