St. Mary's City

Historic St. Mary's City: Reconstructed colonial town and living history

Historic St. Mary's City is a large public access historic interpretation area with four public museums and is a re-creation of the original colonial capital of Maryland and also the original settlers village.

It has several living history museums, and the entire complex is staffed by period dressed actors who recreate history theatrically, as well as archeologists and archeology students who provide scientific and historical interpretation, public archeological site displays, reconstructed colonial buildings, including ongoing year-round outdoor historical reenactments, a working colonial farm and the fully working replica of The Dove sailing ship, which was one of the "two original settlers ships that established the first Maryland colony" (Maryland's historical equivalent of the Mayflower).

Historic St. Mary's City also provides presentations on different aspects of colonial era woodland Indian life. At special times of the year, members of the Piscataway Indian Nation also provide reenactments and other cultural demonstrations. The Piscataway people were the original inhabitants of St. Mary's City and also befriended and helped the early colonists.

The area also hosts summer stock theater productions (with historical themes) and other special events. Historic St. Mary's City is owned by the State of Maryland and runs under a registered nonprofit charter. In addition to general tourism, the organization hosts special tours for school children, handling more than 20,000 students on field trips per year.

Historic St. Mary's is under the administration of the "Historic St. Mary's City Commission", a government agency of the State of Maryland.

St. Mary's College of Maryland

The public honors college, St. Mary's College of Maryland, is a state-funded coed undergraduate liberal arts college. It is only one of two "Public Honors Colleges" in the nation and one of only a handful of small public liberal arts colleges. It was specifically tasked by the state of Maryland to be modeled after far more expensive private elite liberal arts colleges with the intention of offering such an education in the public sector.

The school is secular (nonreligious); the name commemorates the original colonial settlement by that name, half of which was located where the college now stands.

History of St. Mary's City

Beginnings

Colonial St. Mary's City was first envisioned by an English Lord, George Calvert. Calvert had been born in Yorkshire to a Catholic family, but when he was twelve, the local authorities compelled his parents to send George and his brother Christopher to a Protestant tutor. From then on George conformed to the established religion and had a successful career in service to the crown. His first attempt at establishing a colony was in 1621 in the Province of Avalon on land he purchased in Newfoundland, but after a few years, Calvert decided a warmer climate would be a better location.

After his wife's death in 1622, and a shift in his political fortunes, in 1625 Calvert resigned his position as a secretary of state and returned to the religion of his childhood, at a time of continued religious persecution of the Roman Catholics in England. In 1631, Calvert obtained a grant from King Charles I in recognition of his services to king and country. It had been a dream of George Calvert to establish a colony in North America and to also make it a haven for persecuted Catholics.

George Calvert died shortly before the Maryland charter received the royal seal; however, the King continued the grant to his eldest son and heir, Cecil. Cecil Calvert continued and expanded his father's plans. While their interest in providing a haven for fellow Catholics was genuine, it was imperative that the enterprise be profitable. Supporters in England of the Virginia colony opposed the Charter, as they had little interest in having a competing colony to the north. Rather than going to the colony himself, Baltimore stayed behind in England to deal with the political threat and sent his next younger brother Leonard in his stead. He never travelled to Maryland.

Leonard spent the rest of his life there, leading the settlers through many trials and tribulations, as well as to great successes in the farming and selling of tobacco back to Britain. Leonard, more than anyone else in his family, became the actual founder of colonial Maryland.

Led by Leonard Calvert, in November 1633, two ships, The Ark and The Dove, set sail from the Isle of Wight, loaded with settlers, Jesuit missionaries and indentured servants. After a long, rough sea voyage with a stopover to resupply in Barbados, they arrived in what is now Maryland in March 1634. They made their first permanent settlement in what is now St. Mary's County, Maryland choosing to settle on a bluff overlooking the St. Mary's River, a relatively calm, tidal tributary near the mouth of the Potomac River where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay.

Expansion

St. Mary's City experienced an economic boom due to successful tobacco farming, which was the most important export commodity. Tobacco became an extremely valuable cash crop in the colony. This also drove the expansion of African chattel slavery. Older practices of allowing chattel slaves to gain freedom by converting to Catholicism or by eventually grandfathering indentured rights to them after many years of servitude were abolished. The character of the colony began to change more and more to a slave-based economy and slavery began to embed itself into the culture.

An increasing town population contributed to the desire for constructing public buildings, some of which were a state house, a Jesuit chapel, a jail, and an inn.

During and after the English Civil War, fights between Protestants and Catholics developed in the colony. Often this tension went in long cycles, with extended periods where the tension was more repressed followed by acute periods where religious divisions would flare up, sometimes driving change in St. Mary's City and Maryland in the process.

Margaret Brent was a business-savvy and successful Catholic settler in St. Mary's City, who, contrary to the mores of the time that discouraged women from managing their own estates, although this was legal, insisted on managing her own business affairs. She had also traveled to the colony as a single, unmarried woman which was contrary to expectations of the time.

The law, in writing, had always been on Brent's side, but the common practices and beliefs of the day did not always guarantee enforcement, especially in the male-dominated frontier environment of the colonies, far away from the courts of England. As a woman, she had to defend her legal rights in order to be sure they were respected.

Brent defended her right to run her own estate in common law court before the assembly in St. Mary's City, making a spirited case, and won, making her the first woman in English North America to stand for herself in a court of law and before an assembly. She also demanded the right to vote in the assembly.

Brent also served as an attorney before the colonial court, mostly representing women of the colony. She is considered to have been very legally astute. Surviving records indicate that she pleaded at least 134 cases. Although she did not explicitly campaign for women's rights in general, she is credited for having done so implicitly.

The Plundering Time

The violence stemming from the English civil war eventually spread to the colonies and a Protestant raiding party attacked St. Mary's City, driving off many settlers and burning several structures. After the attack there were only about 100 people still living in the town. The raiders took control of the city and added further fortifications.

The raiders plundered the homes of all the Catholic residents of the city who refused to renounce their faith and anyone who professed friendship to a Catholic. This would later be called the Plundering Time by the colonists.

Leonard Calvert had spent a few years in exile from St. Mary's City but remained in the colonies. During this time he married Margaret Brent's sister which also brought Margaret Brent into the Calvert family as an in-law, advancing her in some ways to her advantage and in other ways to her detriment. Nearly two years later, Leonard Calvert managed to raise a militia and led an attack to retake St. Mary's City. They succeeded in driving off the Protestant militia and regained control of the town.

Then Calvert and his men carried out successful raids on Kent Island in the Chesapeake, which had become a stronghold of his foes, defeating the force there. At this point Calvert had the upper hand, although the threat still remained. However, within a year, Leonard Calvert became sick and died, creating a temporary power vacuum in the colony and also worryingly for the residents of St. Mary's City, leaving Calvert's militia, which had been protecting the city, unpaid.

Margaret Brent had been named by Leonard Calvert as the executor of his last will and testament, a very unusual designation for a woman of her time. She therefore handled the liquidation of Leonard Calvert's estate. However at the same time, Calvert's still-unpaid militia had become a security issue for St. Mary's City. Even if the militia simply disbanded due to the soldiers remaining unpaid, the city would then be vulnerable again to attack. And so Brent successfully petitioned the Maryland Assembly to grant her power of attorney over the holdings of Cecil Calvert, the Lord Baltimore, who was Leonard's brother living in England. She then used proceeds from liquidating some of these holdings to pay the militiamen.

1649: Maryland assembly ratifies the "Maryland Toleration Act"

The Maryland Toleration Act, crafted and passed by the reinstated Maryland assembly in St. Mary's City, was the first law codified to mandate religious tolerance among Christians of various sects (especially Catholics and Protestants). It was approved not only to carry out the wishes of George Calvert and his son and Cecil Calvert that the colony be a place of religious toleration between Catholics and Protestants. More urgently, the act, which applied to all of the Maryland Colony, sought to settle once and for all the religious divisions that had triggered the recent fighting. The assembly at the time was majority Protestant, and the aristocratic leadership, including the governorship of the colony was Catholic.

The act remained in effect for 40 years, and contributed to relative peace in the colony during that time.

Stagnation

In the 1660s tobacco, which had long been a lucrative boom crop, began to experience price declines. This was likely due to increased production and competition in other colonies. The problem was then aggravated by Maryland planters cutting their tobacco product with other leaves in order to make up for the decrease in the price of a tobacco barrel. Although helpful in the very short run, in the longer run this cutting practice hurt the reputation of Maryland tobacco in England and further devalued the yearly tobacco crops. All of this began, in stages, to have a destabilizing effect on the Maryland Colony, which then further aggravated latent religious tensions between the majority Protestant planters and the Catholic aristocratic leadership.

All of this further intensified reliance on slavery in St. Mary's City, as plantation owners sought to eliminate the cost of paid labor in producing tobacco.

In 1676, the original Maryland Statehouse, the home of the Maryland colonial assembly, was finished. The current reconstructed statehouse is not in the original location, which today lies under the churchyard of the adjacent Trinity Episcopal Church. After the original statehouse was dismantled in 1829, Trinity's horse-and-wagon stable was reportedly built out of the statehouse bricks.

Moving to St. Mary's City in 1678, William and Dinah Nuthead became the first printers in Maryland. While Dinah Nuthead was illiterate, she would often help her husband in operating the printing press. By copying the letters and the processes of her husband, Dinah was able to continue the printing business following her husband's death in 1695. After gaining a license to print from the colonial government, Dinah became the first female printer in the colony. When Dinah moved to Annapolis, Maryland in 1695, she was able to continue their printing business in the new location.

Decline

In 1689, about forty years after the passage of the Maryland Toleration Act, sectarian tensions between Protestants and Catholics became so great that Protestant settlers revolted against the Lords Baltimore in the Protestant uprising in Maryland. The English Crown took over the Maryland colony and appointed royal governors, replacing the Calverts.

Legally mandated religious tolerance was abolished, first by Royal decree and then later by a law passed by a now majority-Protestant state assembly, in the new capital in Annapolis.

In 1692 Catholics in the Maryland Colony lost the right to vote. Catholics were also no longer allowed to worship in public and could only worship in their private homes. Laws were also passed limiting new Roman Catholic immigration to the colony.

Although a Catholic person's right to vote in Maryland would be reinstated by the state assembly some decades later, other forms of discrimination against Catholics would continue through most of the next century and would leave lasting religious tensions in Maryland felt all the way through to the election of John F. Kennedy just past the mid-20th century.

The new Protestant Maryland governor Sir Francis Nicholson relocated the capital from St. Mary's City to the more central Annapolis (then called "Anne Arundel Town") in 1695. The colonial statehouse in St. Mary's was turned into a Protestant church the same year.

In 1695 St. Peters freehold, the former home of Maryland governors in St. Mary's City, was destroyed in an explosion. Whether this was an intentional act or an accident is not known, as a large gunpowder magazine had been stored in its basement. The freehold had briefly been the home of the new Protestant Governor Francis Nicholson until he ordered the colonial capital moved to Annapolis. Prior to this the freehold had been the home of Philip Calvert, the former Catholic Governor of the Maryland colony and Cecil Calvert's half-brother until his death in 1682.

During the 18th century, Catholics became a persecuted minority group in Maryland, including St. Mary's county. Catholics were denied the right to serve in the militia, taxed double when money had to be raised for the military, and continued to be discouraged from immigrating. Wealthy Catholics often became crypto-Catholics (practicing their religion in secret and sending their children abroad to get Catholic educations), but poor Catholics could not afford this and were more vulnerable to discrimination practices. Consequently, over the generations, many converted to Protestantism in order to avoid discrimination. By the late 18th century, the Catholic population had dropped to 9%.

1700–1865: Antebellum slave plantation era

The small remaining farms in St. Mary's City were consolidated into a large antebellum-style slave plantation by the Brome-Howard family, which operated through a majority of the 19th century. The main plantation house was built over the ruins of one of the Calvert residences.

During the Civil War, Union troops occupied St. Mary's County, which like a large part of Maryland at the time, had Southern sympathies. Piers and wharfs in St. Mary's County were burned by Union forces in order to stop trade with the confederacy which was only across the Potomac River. Brome's Wharf in St. Mary's City was also burned, as it was a part of what was by then the Brome-Howard Plantation, owned by Doctor Brome, a slave-owner and a likely confederate sympathizer. There is archeological evidence that the Union Army may have occupied the plantation for some time. Records show that Brome later complained that Union troops had damaged his piano while ransacking the main plantation house.

Records show that one quarter of the 66 people living under slavery at Doctor Brome's plantation in St. Mary's City escaped during the Civil War and at least two of them then joined the Union Army. Even before slavery was legally abolished, the Union Army had a policy allowing enslaved men to gain their freedom if they became Union soldiers. Other records show that the total number of people living under slavery there during this time was 59.

Two men who had escaped slavery from the St. Mary's City area, Alexander Gough and William Gross, joined the famed 38th United States Colored Infantry Regiment of the Union Army, which won unit citations for valor in the Battle of Chaffin's Farm (also known as the "Battle of New Market Heights") in the American Civil War. Gough is known to have survived the war and lived the rest of his life in Baltimore. Two other African American men from the area, William H. Barnes and James H. Harris both from Great Mills (which is just to the north of St. Mary's City), who had been free tenant farmers before the war, also served in the same regiment. Harris and Barnes each received the Medal of Honor for their actions in the Battle of Chaffin's Farm. There is evidence suggesting that additional slaves from the Brome plantation fought in the war as well. In total, over 700 African Americans from St. Mary's County served in the Union Army during the Civil War.

St. Mary's City's resurgence

The book Rob of the Bowl tells a somewhat fictionalized story of the original St. Mary's City. The author, after the book became popular, publicly lamented that there was no monument to memorialize the original St. Mary's City and what happened there.

A few years later, in 1840, a women's nondenominational seminary high school was established on the grounds of old St. Mary's City, in response to Kennedy's call for a monument; its founders described it as a "living monument" to the beginnings of religious tolerance and established it to meet the educational needs of young women in the county and the state. The school was called St. Mary's Seminary.

The school was intentionally made nondenominational, to honor, promote and memorialize religious tolerance, and also to help heal Protestant-Catholic tensions that still haunted St. Mary's County at the time.

The name was changed to St. Mary's Female Seminary, to clarify the school's already existing female student-only mission.

In 1926, the former St. Mary's women's Catholic seminary school (a boarding high school within the proper of old St. Mary's City that was founded in 1840) was expanded to add a two-year seminary female junior college, and renamed to "St. Mary’s Female Seminary-Junior College", and then during 1932–1937, stopped teaching 9th and 10th grades, so it could instead focus on just four levels: 11th ("freshman") and 12th grade ("sophomore"), forming the "Lower Division", and then "juniors" and "seniors" in the junior college known as the "Upper Division".

Through an act of the Maryland Legislature, St. Mary's gender limitation was removed, and the word "female" was consequently dropped from the school's name. However, although males may enroll, they are not offered housing. The name of the school was changed to St. Mary's Seminary Junior College.

The St. Mary's City Commission was chartered in 1966 by the State Assembly of Maryland and the Governor, Millard Tawes. The charter created the commission as "a new, independent state agency" reporting directly to the Governor of Maryland "to preserve, develop and maintain" St. Mary's City as a state "monument", and also to oversee ongoing archeological work.

Present

Historic St. Mary's City is now a significant tourist attraction in the state of Maryland, visited by approximately 20,000 students per year, in addition to approximately 25,000 other tourists per year (a rough yearly total of 45,000 people). Expansion and development of the historic area continues, including reconstruction and replica creation of additional period sites. Historic St. Mary's City is operated as an outdoor living history museum, and includes costumed actors portraying colonial-era life, museum exhibitions, and numerous reconstructed buildings.

Archaeological research in St. Mary's City

The National Park Service has described St. Mary's City as "probably the most intact 17th-century English town surviving in our nation represented entirely by archaeological resources." Numerous archaeological digs and research projects continue in St. Mary's City. In the last 30 years, there have been more than 200 archaeological digs in the city.

First excavations

After explorations by Henry Chandlee Forman in the 1940s, excavations began in 1971 with the creation of the St. Mary's City Historic Commission, a state institution tasked with discovering and preserving archaeological remains in St. Mary's City, establishing a museum on the site, and conducting related historical research. Since then, much of the original colonial St. Mary's City has been found. The Historic St. Mary's City Commission continues to excavate the area today.

The Historical Archaeology Field School

In conjunction with St. Mary's College of Maryland, the Historic St. Mary's Commission (formerly the "St. Mary's City Commission") runs the Historic Archeological Field School every summer that is attended by students from all over the United States and other countries as well. Many of its graduates now hold prominent positions in the field. The students not only study, but also work in many of the active archeological dig sites in St. Mary's City. Providing extensive hands-on experience, the school teaches all aspects of professional archeological work, including working in real archeological digs, analyzing and conserving artifacts, as well as cataloging, archiving and related historical research. The school has been in existence for more than 40 years.

Current work

St. Mary's City has numerous active archeological dig sites, focusing on precolonial, colonial and antebellum (slavery era) history.

Notable discoveries

Some important archeological discoveries in St. Mary's City include:

The site of the first printing house in the Southern colonies; a quantity of lead print type (for printing words), indicating that the site where it was found was the documented William Nuthead Printing House

A 1645 fort with a surrounding moat, claimed to be the only structural remains of the English Civil War in the American Colonies

Discovery of the St. John's house/freehold, where Maryland's citizen government was instituted

Façon de Venise glassware

A set of Kütahya ceramics, one of only two known examples found in the United States

19th-century slave quarters from St. Mary's City's later plantation period

Three 17th-century lead coffins. One of these is suspected of being the coffin of the former colonial chancellor and also judge, Philip Calvert.

The foundation of a Jesuit chapel

Discovery of the site of St. Peters Freehold, the former home of Maryland Chancellor Philip Calvert. St. Peters freehold was destroyed in a violent explosion in 1695 when 900 pounds of gunpowder stored in its cellar were set off. Whether the explosion was intentional or an accident is unknown. The discovery was made by a team of visiting British scientists, and was featured in a British Time Team documentary that aired on The Learning Channel.

Garret Van Sweringen's Inn, a 17th-century inn founded by Garret Van Sweringen an Innkeeper and a leader in St. Mary's City's development

St. Mary's Fort

In late 2019, St. Mary's Fort was unearthed to be later revealed in March 2021. The structure was built in 1634 by the first English colonists, to be their fourth colony in the New World after Jamestown (1607), Plymouth (1620), and Massachusetts Bay (1630). Moreover, a silver coin was discovered there, dated back to the reign of King Charles I.