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 1720's 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

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