Abraham Shepherd hails from Shepherdstown, West Virginia, but when he was born it was Mecklenburg, Virginia.

As near as I can put it together, there were originally two large tracts of land belonging to Shepherd families; one was over 200 acres and the other was a 750-acre plot of mostly farmland.

In 1776 there were five Shepherd brothers, whose father, Thomas, died in 1776. John Shepherd, one of those five, moved to Wheeling Creek (Ohio, not WV), then Limestone Kentucky, then Red Oak, which was in Adams County, about 50 miles east-southeast of modern-day Cincinnati.

Meanwhile, back in Mecklenburg, the town changed its charter and, in 1798, extended its corporate limits and changed its name to Shepherdstown, likely to honor Thomas Shepherd. Thus, in 1862 when the trans-Alleghany Virginia counties voted to secede from Virginia and become their own state, Shepherdstown was instantly one of the oldest towns in the state. That vote was challenged, and in 1866 the US Congress passed a resolution recognizing the transfer. Ultimately in 1870 the Supreme Court decided in West Virginia’s favor. Maryland also had something to say about who owned some of that land, which is why West Virginia has that peculiar hook in the northeast corner, but again the Supreme Court sided with West Virginia.

Last week, a Maryland legislator put forth a bill that would secede the Eastern Shore of Maryland from the rest of the state, but he somehow also included a county from Delaware and the part of Virginia that’s part of the Delmarva Peninsula and separated from the rest of the state by the Chesapeake Bay. How counties in three different states could become their own state, and whether the potentially affected counties in those states actually feel about such a move, is not known. I suspect that it’s largely a performative action on his part to protest gerrymandering, and he’s right in that many of Maryland’s districts have ridiculous shapes. But these days it’s much more complicated to just break away from another state, for political and fiscal reasons.

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