The start of the recorded history of the northern Frederick County is closely tied to rivalry between England and France. When the first Europeans settled within the Emmitsburg space, in 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 limit English affect to the coastal strip east of the Allegheny mountains, and, thereby, stop English dominance of northern America.
To counter French encroachment, the English government began an energetic policy of selling settlement of the wilderness. Settlers were organized into groups of hundreds. The primary settlers, in the space under energetic research by the Greater Emmitsburg Space Historical Society, had been collectively known as the Tom's Creek Hundred. Their settlement encompassed land from simply north of present day Thurmont to the outdated Pennsylvania border, from the Monocacy to the Catoctin Mountains.
The Tom Indians, who occupied the Emmitsburg area, had by this time both moved westward or died from European diseases resembling small pox. Because of this, the land occupied by the Tom's Creek Hundred was almost devoid of Indians and, subsequently, ripe for settlement by the English.
Whereas the Royal authorities opened the land to all settlers for a nominal fee, it favored a number of select aristocrats by providing them large tracts of land in reward for their assist of the Crown. One of the earliest land barons in the valley was John Diggs.
Diggs, a grandson of the Royal Governor of Virginia, was a rich Catholic who performed a dominant role in the generally-bloody border dispute between the Maryland and Pennsylvania governments. With possession of the Chesapeake and the mouth of the Susquehanna, Maryland pressed its claim of what is now center Pennsylvania. This remained a dispute that raise alert was not settled till the Mason-Dixon line was laid out.
Diggs believed his proper to land, based upon his aristocratic standing, entitled him to most of northern and western Maryland. In 1732, Diggs formally claimed, though with none 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 receive title to three tracts of land in the Emmitsburg space. Diggs' land grabbing was rapidly mimicked by others, albeit in a smaller vogue.
Unfortunately for the land speculators and the settlers, the race between the French and English for the interior of the continent soon obtained out of hand. In 1754, the English weren't solely combating the French, but their Indian allies as well. While little fighting occurred in the Emmitsburg area, Indian raiding parties periodically moved by way of the realm. In consequence, many settlers withdrew to the relative safety of coastal cities.
With the tip of the Seven Years Conflict in Europe, by which France ceded sovereignty of the interior of North America to the English, settlers as soon as once more forged their eyes toward the wilderness. Some fled from extreme religious persecution, others from the oppression of civil tyranny, and still others were attracted by the hopes of liberty under the milder affect of English colonial rule. But for the best half, the settlers flocked to the American continent within the hopes of abandoning the crushing poverty of their homeland and for the chance to personal land and prosper by means of their