The Ebright Azimuth

The roof of Delaware is a benchmark at the roadside, 447 feet up

The highest point in Delaware is a small bronze disk in the ground at a suburban road junction, where Ebright Road meets Ramblewood Drive at the entrance to the Dartmouth Woods neighbourhood, about 6.5 miles north of downtown Wilmington and roughly 500 feet from the Pennsylvania line. The National Geodetic Survey knows the disk as EBRIGHT AZI, and the Delaware Geological Survey has put it at 447.85 feet above sea level. A blue and yellow sign stands beside it on a little landscaped curb extension.

The odd name comes from surveying. In 1933 the Coast and Geodetic Survey set a triangulation station called EBRIGHT on the farm of James and Grant Ebright, near a granite boundary monument between Delaware and Pennsylvania, and fixed an azimuth mark to the east of it beside the road. An azimuth is an angle measured in a spherical coordinate system, and that mark is the Ebright Azimuth. The surveyors kept coming back to check on it; their notes record a farm called Winterset, later a trailer court, and brush so thick it once hid the mark.

Its claim to the top was not always settled. Many Delawareans thought Centreville was the high point, but the benchmark there stands at 445.58 feet, a little over two feet lower. And the Ebright disk is not quite the summit either. Further surveys and 2007 LiDAR contours show ground just west of Ebright Road, in the mobile home park, at least two feet higher, so by the state geologists' reckoning the true high point of Delaware is about 450 feet.

The state also has a reputation it does not deserve. A Trivial Pursuit question long ago spread the idea that Delaware has the lowest high point in the country. It does not: Britton Hill in the Florida Panhandle tops out at 345 feet. Delaware would slip to third lowest only if Washington, D.C., became a state, since Fort Reno there reaches 429 feet.

Just south of the benchmark rises a steel tower that Western Union built in 1947 as a microwave relay called Brandywine, on the link between New York and Washington, its dishes aimed at stations near Mount Laurel, New Jersey, and Elkton, Maryland. It now carries land-mobile radio antennas. For anyone collecting state high points, this one involves no climb at all.