The island I live on was first settled by the British in the late 1500s. It's in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay and was contested land between the colony of Virginia to the south and the colony of Maryland which it now definitely belongs to.
When I teach my fourth graders Maryland history, it is hard for them to understand that for the first 200 years, Marylanders were British subjects. They lived and died British before the American Revolution. They likely never imagined a new country and quite possibly would have been horrified by the idea.
Contested borders are interesting to me. William Penn was granted a colony north of Maryland and there was some dispute over the boundary. So, Mason & Dixon were dispatched to do a survey and their finished Mason-Dixon Line not only settled the dispute between those two states, but created the line between the North and the South, the free states and the slave states before the Civil War. I grew up a few miles from that line and routinely drove back and forth across it barely noticing the small, aged stone markers that still exist in some spots.
Maryland, being a border state, was tricky during the Civil War. We were a slave state, but did not fight for the Confeferacy with the South. We were a Union State, and seeing as how we "won," we really don't consider ourselves a Southern state. We feel more in line with the Northeast, a part of the Boston to Washington megalopolis with all the attending population and traffic, high-cost living yet higher salaries, and the general excitement of being in the middle of where it all happens.
Sorry. History lesson is finished. There will be a quiz in the morning.