Campsite 23

The tallest ground on this site's horizon stands 6.1° above level, to the northwest.

On the March equinox direct sun reaches the pitch at 7:28 am and leaves it at 7:02 pm: 11 h 36 m of it, against 12 h 12 m of daylight on an open horizon.

The forest's northern edge is the Mason–Dixon Line. Mason and Dixon ran it here in 1766–67, but their stone markers, cut in England from oolitic limestone, went no farther west than Sideling Hill, because wagons could not haul them on. West of Sideling Hill the line was marked by mounds of earth and stones and wooden posts, and over a century many were ploughed down, washed out or lost in fallen timber. In 1900 Maryland and Pennsylvania agreed to resurvey their common boundary with the help of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. The engineers were told to reproduce Mason and Dixon's line exactly, not to correct it, and to save every original stone they could. They found that some unused English stones had been left in western Washington County and had ended up as doorsteps, horse blocks and building stone; they recovered what they could and set them in gaps in the line. Where nothing old could be found they set new posts of magnesian marble from the Beaver Dam quarry in Baltimore County (the MHT forms call it Cockeysville marble), cut with P and M and the dates 1766 and 1902. The last was set in August 1903. Along the forest, stone 152 on Ragged Mountain is an original crown stone, carved with the Penn and Calvert arms and set in the 1767 mound; the 1909 report called it the westernmost of the old monuments then on the boundary.

US 40 Scenic and MD 144 follow the old National Pike. East of Cumberland it was not the federal National Road, which began at Cumberland and opened in 1818, but a chain of state-chartered turnpikes paid for largely by Baltimore banks, with milestones counting the miles to the Baltimore courthouse. Together they made one road from Baltimore to the Ohio. Through the Cumberland Narrows, the milestone nomination says, passed 'over half of the emigrants and freight' of the early westward migration. Flintstone grew along it. The Flintstone Hotel is said to have been built about 1807 for John Davis, a large landowner, and was an inn by 1850 for road travellers and visitors to the mineral springs; tradition names Lafayette (1824), Henry Clay and Theodore Roosevelt as guests. A writer in 1882 recalled 'such endless cavalcades of coaches and wagons' and droves of sheep and cattle that 'blocked the way for miles'. Railroads later took much of that traffic. When cars came, the State Roads Commission rebuilt the pike in Allegany County between 1911 and 1915, set a concrete water trough marked 'S.R.C. 1915' by a spring below Town Hill, and replaced wooden bridges with concrete ones, among them a slab bridge over Snib Run (1916) and an open-spandrel arch over Fifteen Mile Creek (1917). Garages, gas pumps, Shipway's Restaurant and the Town Hill Hotel served drivers until later realignments and the National Freeway took the through traffic away.