Charles Carroll of Annapolis passed to his son Charles Carroll of
Carrollton was elsewhere, on the estates of Doughoregan and
Carrollton; a large portion of the original Carroll family
holdings in Baltimore had been sold off.96

1782 was also the year in which the town commisioners looked
to expand all around the town. On the north side the obstacles to
growth were physical. The horseshoe bend in the Jones Falls stood
in the path of Calvert Street. Projects were commissioned to
provide a northward passage.

In the plans for grading Calvert Street the bluff
overhanging the falls was to be cut away, but the court house
stood in the way. Projector Leonard Harbaugh pursuaded the town
fathers that he could preserve the building by excavating the
earth from thereunder leaving the court house twenty feet up in
the air. In 1783  Harbaugh accomplished this incredible feat and
Calvert Street was extended thereunder to the very precipice of
the Falls97 (Figure 9) . And in 1786 Englehart Yeiser, with the
consent of the proprietors of the adjacent land (Alexander Lawson
to the south and Andrew Steiger to the north), cut a canal
through Steiger's Meadow, diverting the Jones' Falls from its old
horseshoe curve into a due southeast course98 (Figure 9) .

Once the Falls' course had been diverted into the "canal of
Jones' Falls" the bluff was naturally washed and artificially
pushed into the precipice, thereby allowing new development and
bringing into question ownership of the original bed of the
Falls. Did this now valuable terrain belong to Lawson's heir, or

39