156 MARYLAND HISTORICAL MAGAZINE to include the neighborhood of Ridgely's Delight, an eighteenth-century develop- ment of two- and three-story rowhouses. During the first two decades of the eighteenth century the peninsula of land lying between the Middle and Northwest Branches of the Patapsco River remained unoccupied. Charles Gorsuch long ago vacated his 1661 patent to Whetstone Point, and it had been repatented to absentee owner James Carroll in 1702. A 1706 legislative plan to designate the area a port of entry died aborning when neither traders nor planters took advantage. Upton Court and David's Fancy, the other two seventeenth-century patents, were both vacant and apparently escheat.5** Beginning in 1723 John Giles (yet another Quaker land speculator) sought to capitalize on this vacancy. In that year he obtained a certificate of resurvey to Upton Court (though he did not patent the land until 1731), and in 1725 he consolidated it with Whetstone Point, which he obtained from James Carroll for five pounds sterling. It took Giles just two years to take a profit when he resold four hundred of his newly-acquired acres to the Principio Company, along with the rights to all the iron ore "opened and discovered or shut and not yet discovered."59 The Principio Company was an association of British iron-masters engaged in manufacturing pig and bar iron; it had been operating an iron furnace twenty miles to the north on the Great Falls of the Gunpowder River since 1715. Whetstone Point for many years was to be one of its principal sources of ore.60 Several years later Jacob Giles, John's son and successor in title, sold what was left of Upton Court to John Moale, the elder. Moale was a miner from Devonshire who arrived during the first quarter of the eighteenth century intent on developing the area's iron deposits. Finding David's Fancy vacant, he settled and opened a mine (the transfer from Giles was an addition to this holding). In the 1720s Moale resisted efforts to have the assembly erect a town on his land. (As we have seen, the disappointed promoters looked to the north of the basin, where, in 1729, with the cooperation of Charles Carroll of Annapolis, Baltimore Town was established on sixty acres of Carroll land.)61 Vacancies on the peninsula encouraged other adventurers to seek escheat patents. In 1732 surveyor Richard Gist ventured such a claim to an alluvial deposit at the base of Lunn's Point (Federal Hill today) which overlooked the water of the basin of Baltimore Town to the north. Known as Gist's Inspection, it was located by metes and bounds nominally between the original lines of Lunn's Lott and the basin. In reality, a considerable portion was covered by water.62 In 1737 John Moale obtained a warrant of escheat entitling him as first dis- coverer to "David's Fancy along with the benefit of any contiguous vacancy." Moale appears to have shared ownership of most of the peninsula with the Principio Furnace Company and Richard Gist. The approximate locations of Gist's Inspec- tion, David's Fancy, and Whetstone Point are set forth on Map 7.63 John Moale, the elder, died in 1740, leaving two sons, John the younger and Richard. His will devised parcels in and around Baltimore Town to John the younger, and David's Fancy (which consisted of all of "Upton Court and adjoining escheat land") to the six-year-old Richard "and the heirs of his body, lawfully Parceling Out Land 157 North West Branch Map 8. East Baltimore Before the Revolution. begotten, forever." This fee tail estate was a device employed by England's landed aristocracy to keep estates in the family. It required that lands pass from generation to generation in single file descent, and prevented the living generation from selling or subdividing the land. According to the strict settlement, when Richard died the parcel would pass to his heirs and subsequently to his heirs' heirs.64 Taking Stock at mid-Eighteenth Century. At mid-eighteenth century the environs of Baltimore lay ripe for development. Fortunately they were captured in this incipient state in a 1752 drawing by John Moale the younger (an artist as well as an uptown landowner). Drawn from the hilltop in Gist's Inspection (later called Federal Hill) overlooking the Northwest Branch to the north, he depicted a town wherein Calvert is the main street leading down to a wharf at the waterfront. It shows twenty-five houses, one church, and two taverns. The town had perhaps two hundred inhabitants.65 Were it to grow and prosper during the second half of the eighteenth century, Baltimore had to overcome various obstacles. Confused and conflicted land titles were discouraging capital investment. A horseshoe bend in the Jones Falls limited expansion to the north. The competitive Fell family was intent on creating a new deep-water port outside the Town's limits to the east, thereby outstripping Bal- timore Town itself, where shallows blocked access to the shoreline. Removing Clouds on Title. East of the Jones Falls, Thomas Sligh was instrumental in clearing title to the town. He and his partner Thomas Sheredine had already bought out the rights of both mortgagor (1749) and mortgagee (1750) in the parcel which James Todd originally transferred to John Hurst in 1701. After Sheredine