Photography By David Hawxhurst
Maryland’s history started in Southern Maryland at St. Mary’s City, the state’s first capital and the site of just the fourth permanent settlement in British North America. But historical sites in Southern Maryland’s three counties — Calvert, St. Mary’s, and Charles — date all the way back to the Miocene epoch, when three-toed horses and giant sharks ruled the land and sea. The area continued to play a major role in U.S. history throughout the colonial period, the Revolutionary and Civil wars, right up to modern times. A trip along the area’s back roads and three main thoroughfares — Routes 2, 4, and 5 — makes an excellent road trip for any lover of antiquity. Over the course of two days last fall, I set out to explore Southern Maryland’s historic charms. Unfortunately, geography follows no time line in Southern Maryland. Sites are chronologically jumbled up, and some sites link their historic relevance to multiple eras.
You certainly don’t have to pack as much as I did into a couple of days; instead use this article as a guide, and pick and choose your destinations — by county, era, or individual characters. Beginning at the northern edge of Calvert County, our tour meanders southerly and westerly, taking Maryland history as it comes.
Calvert County
A 24 Million-Year-Old Tale
I was wrong to think Lower Marlboro would be a slightly downsized version of Upper Marlboro, the seat of Prince George’s County. Lower Marlboro today is just a few quiet blocks of restored and not-so-restored colonial homes on a bluff beside the Patuxent River. The town made history during the War of 1812 when invading British troops made off with $125,000 worth of tobacco (worth about $2.5 million today), but it hasn’t cracked the headlines since steamboat service was suspended in 1838.
Things pick up considerably south along Route 2, where St. Leonard’s Creek joins the Patuxent River. Every September for one weekend, the Battle of St. Leonard Creek rages again. On June 26, 1814, Commodore Joshua Barney’s Chesapeake flotilla, assisted by infantrymen on the shore, smashed through the British blockade in the largest conflict ever fought on Maryland’s waters. Skirmishes and cannon drills — plus more peaceable games, crafts, and refreshments — entertainingly re-create the fierce battle that slowed the British but ultimately did not prevent them from invading the U.S. capital.
Throughout the year, history comes to life at the Jefferson Patterson Park & Museum, a center of serious historical and cultural research on a 560-acre plot, mostly donated by the wife of Jefferson Patterson, an author and a diplomat.
In the numerous archaeological digs around the grounds, you can get up close and personal to the work being done by the scientists from the vast Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory, a major scientific facility on the premises.
Here, I stroll down to the Patuxent on Riverside Trail, past the sites where both the Indians and the colonists set up camp. The visitors’ center has a variety of permanent and changing exhibits, including “12,000 Years in the Chesapeake,” a display of local happenings from the earliest tribes through the European-Indian contact period and beyond. In the Children’s Discovery Room, kids can handle Indian tomahawks and puzzle out the nuances of several colonial-era games.
In the Show Barn Museum Shop, I challenge the manager to show me something that I couldn’t buy in any other museum gift shop in the world. She leads me to the multifarious work of Jim Roaix, a Native American “primitive technologist” who has produced soapstone carvings, tools, baskets, and other crafts associated with indigenous tribes for more than fifty years. I’m duly impressed.
“What the heck is this doing here?” is my initial reaction to the incongruously modern Louis L. Goldstein Gallery, the transplanted Annapolis office of the long-term (1959-98) state comptroller, with everything from the papers on his desk when he died to wall panels lined with celebrity photos, plaques, proclamations, and keys to many cities. Turns out that Goldstein was a local lad, born and buried in Prince Frederick (where his dad owned the Prince Frederick Department Store), but I suspect that his presence at Jefferson Patterson is a masterpiece of political machinations worthy of Goldstein himself.
At the county’s southern tip, the Calvert Marine Museum, alongside the Back Creek section of Solomons’ harbor, targets three areas: paleontology, estuarine biology, and maritime history. At the paleontology exhibits, I check out the fossils from the Miocene epoch — 23.8 million to 5.3 million years ago — and learn that Maryland actually has a state fossil: the corkscrew-shaped snail ecphora gardnerae gardnerae. Who knew?
An “estuariaum” of Patuxent-Chesapeake creatures, which seldom wind up on seafood restaurant menus, and a tank of “Skates and Rays of the Chesapeake” are just a couple of the highlights of the estuarine biology section. Down the hall, the maritime history of the Patuxent area, starting back in the seventeenth century, sails forth, with plenty of workboats and underwater weapons from World War II, when the lower Patuxent’s deep waters became a prime testing area (and Solomons became a relatively wild and crazy Navy town). The Discovery Room makes me wish I were a kid again — so I could go home with an authentic shark’s tooth souvenir (one to a customer).
Various local wooden craft are moored in the museum’s boat basin, among them the Wm. B. Tennison, a converted bugeye (two-masted oyster dredger). I promise to return next spring for a one-hour Patuxent joy ride (May through October). Looming over the harbor is the Drum Point Lighthouse, an 1883 screwpile light — the interior is a cozy two-story hexagonal apartment — transplanted to the museum from the confluence of the Patuxent and Chesapeake in 1975. While I am touring the lighthouse, the tight quarters evoke variations on the theme of “Eeeeyuch! I could never live in a place this small” from a passel of visiting teenage girls.
Charles County
Traces of Southern Sympathy
At 4 a.m. the morning after he assassinated Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth sought treatment at the Dr. Samuel A. Mudd House outside Waldorf for the leg he broke leaping from the Ford’s Theatre balcony. On a docent-guided-tour of the house, some twenty-five miles southeast of the scene of the crime, I am first shown the parlor and couch on which Dr. Mudd examined Booth. Steadied by the very banister once clutched by Booth, I am led upstairs to the bedroom (now the “Booth Room") where Dr. Mudd cut off the assassin’s boot to treat the leg and the small bedroom where Mudd’s wife and children were later held for four days while Yankee soldiers ransacked the premises. The trail on which Booth and his henchman David Herold continued their flight the next morning is still visible out the back window.
Although he claimed he didn’t recognize Booth or have a clue about what he had done, Dr. Mudd was subsequently convicted for conspiracy and harboring the assassin. President Andrew Johnson subsequently pardoned him — not because he thought Mudd innocent but for heroic service during a yellow fever outbreak in a Dry Tortugas prison. The Dr. Samuel A. Mudd Society, the private institution established by his descendants, which restored the 1754 farmhouse and collected many original items, stalwartly maintains that the doctor got a raw deal. And after my visit, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The focal point of Port Tobacco, Maryland’s smallest incorporated town (population: fifteen), is the reproduction of the late nineteenth-century Port Tobacco Courthouse. Costumed docents relate the town’s story: charted by Capt. John Smith in the early 1600s, originally called “Potopaco” and renamed Port Tobacco in 1650 in tribute to the cash crop that back then put the thriving port — literally — on the maps of the world. It was supplanted as county seat by La Plata after its new railroad pretty much put Port Tobacco out of business. The nearby Port Tobacco One-Room Schoolhouse operated from 1876 until 1953, most of the time for black elementary school pupils.
Past the Rose Hill estate occupied by George Washington’s physician, and, later, the notorious Confederate spy Olivia Floyd, is the Thomas Stone National Historic Site. An eight-minute orientation video proclaims Stone, a lawyer and gentleman tobacco farmer, the “least-known of Maryland’s [Declaration of Independence] signers” — apparently because he was young, soft-spoken, and so moderate that, for a while anyway, he advocated reconciliation with England. His modest estate, Haberdeventure, consists of a large central section connected by two hyphens to two smaller buildings. Three sections are open to the public — the west wing, where the kitchens have become museums of colonial history and architecture; the west hyphen, a gallery; and a couple downstairs rooms in the central building decorated with period pieces but not the original wood paneling — that’s on display in the Baltimore Museum of Art.
My last stop is St. Ignatius Church and St. Thomas Manor House, sitting astride a 120-foot bluff overlooking a leafy conjunction of the Potomac and Port Tobacco rivers. It’s a quiet Wednesday evening when I arrive, and no one else is around — a good time to stroll the grounds and contemplate the church’s long history. St. Ignatius was founded in 1641 by the Rev. Andrew White, a Jesuit priest who came over on the Ark. Today, it is the oldest Roman Catholic Church with an “active parish with a continual pastorate” in the United States. The present church, a handsome red-brick structure with a lofty belfry, is in terrific shape for a 208-year-old. It has a tunnel running down to the river that was built to (choose one): smuggle in Jesuit priests; hide priests from the British; smuggle in contraband; or transport slaves on the Under-ground Railroad.
Sitting on a bench in the garden overlooking an Our Town-esque hillside graveyard and gazing down at the river, I wonder how those early settlers felt when they got here. I strongly suspect they were very pleased. They had come to the right place.
Louis Buckler
Curator, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd House
Louis Buckler got involved with Dr. Mudd’s house eighteen years ago when he took the tour with his son. “Louise Mudd Arehart [Dr. Mudd’s granddaughter] was in the kitchen, and we got talking about historical items and houses and such as that, and she said, ‘I think you are the right person I need up here.’” A year later, Buckler joined the staff, and he’s been here ever since.
A former docent at Sotterley and no part of the extended Mudd family — “I am a descendant of the Bucklers from 1607 on down the line” — he believes today’s history-impaired schoolchildren need to visit the house. “They will learn the history of John Wilkes Booth, and they will learn of the tragedy of Dr. Mudd and his family,” says Buckler. “This house is a true historic site, and we have tried to bring rooms back to what we think they would have looked like in 1865.”
Buckler believes people need to put the story of Dr. Mudd — and questions about his guilt or innocence — into perspective. “I try to put myself back into 1865 when, we all know, that Southern Maryland was Southern-sympathetic. If the Maryland government hadn’t been put on, shall we say, house arrest, it probably would have been part of the South. Dr. Mudd did have a strong Southern-sympathetic attitude, but I believe that he was just a doctor doing his duty. He couldn’t very well turn [Booth] away from his door. So that’s where I’ll leave that.”
St. Mary’s County
“Maryland Begins Here”
Across the Patuxent, a bit north of the Governor Johnson Memorial Bridge, lies Sotterley Plantation, a former tobacco plantation, colonial-era port, and steamboat landing. Sotterley’s manor house was built in 1717, which means it’s older than Mount Vernon or Monticello but, with peeling wallpaper and chipped paint, in less pristine condition. On the guided tour of the manor house (offered May through October), a costumeless docent points out a hand-carved (by an indentured servant) Chinese Chippendale staircase and a removable wall panel, which reveals details of the building’s post-in-ground construction. Afterwards, I stroll the grounds to view the gardens and what the docent calls the “fanciest necessary in the colony” — literally, a brick outhouse some hundred yards from the manor house.
From Sotterley, I take Route 235 back east toward Point Lookout but make a quick stop at Point Lookout Confederate Cemetery, a mass grave for 3,384 POWs. It’s now marked by an 85-foot granite obelisk bearing the name, company, and regiment of the deceased — the only federal monument honoring the Confederacy.
The desolate windswept spot where the Potomac meets the Chesapeake comes into view as I drive the now-developed roads through Point Lookout State Park. This formerly popular resort area became a vast prison camp after the Battle of Gettysburg with as many as 20,000 POWs; the park once again welcomes picnickers and the like, but history lives on in the barracks, officers’ quarters, and prisoners’ pen of the Civil War remnant, Fort Lincoln, and a small Civil War museum in the park visitor center. And the same nineteenth-century view can be had from the beach near the allegedly haunted (reportedly by the spirits of Civil War prisoners) Point Lookout Lighthouse, which hasn’t illuminated the shores since 1966. (It’s open only two days a year on the first weekend of November — curiously, right after Halloween.)
I head north on Route 5 back to Historic St. Mary’s City, Maryland’s capital from 1635, when the 140 passengers from the Ark and the Dove led by Gov. Leonard Calvert established Maryland’s colony here, until 1695 when the capital was transplanted to Annapolis. While no seventeenth-century structures remain, there’s much to suggest what went on here (through reconstructed “ghost frames” of buildings that once existed and plenty of strolling costumed interpreters to explain it).
Built in 1934 to celebrate Maryland’s 300th birthday, the reconstructed State House represents a place where the Catholic-dominated general assembly passed the Maryland Tolerance Act of 1649, guaranteeing freedom of religion to all settlers (as long as you believed in the Holy Trinity). On the waterfront lies the Maryland Dove, a somewhat downsized reconstruction of the square-rigged pinnace (cargo vessel) that made the original journey.
A bit outside town lies the Godiah Spray Tobacco Plantation, a re-created 1660s working plantation. Arriving a bit early for the guided tour, I have a one-on-one sit-down with “Godiah,” who, clad in seventeenth-century farmer’s garb but speaking in twenty-first-century inflections, informs me that the Indians considered tobacco a powerful hallucinogen, that over the centuries European countries alternately banned and got rich on the stuff, and that tobacco was grown in Maryland because Brits didn’t want to deplete their precious English soil. When other visitors arrive, Godiah arises, saying, “And now I must assume a cheesy English accent,” and proceeds to teach the “new colonists” the facts of early Maryland life. “In Maryland, you must raise corn and pigs and cattle to survive,” he explains. “But you will cultivate tobacco for profit.”
A half-mile out in the Potomac, off of Colton’s Point, is St. Clement’s Island, where the Ark and Dove first landed in America on March 25, 1634; it’s now a state park. They didn’t stay long, only a couple of weeks while leaders negotiated with local tribes for permission to colonize what would become St. Mary’s City. Except for a forty-foot memorial cross erected in 1934 — the 300th anniversary of the landing — and interpretive signs along marked paths, the uninhabited forty-acre island looks exactly as it did when the Ark and Dove weighed anchor.
Water taxi service to St. Clement’s Island is available from Memorial Day through October (weather permitting), but the St. Clements Island-Potomac River Museum (Motto: “Maryland Begins Here") on the mainland is open year-round. Displays in the England Room reveal that, before being beheaded, King Charles I named the colony “Terræ- Mariæ” (Latin for “Maryland”) in honor of his French Catholic wife Queen Henrietta-Marie. The main gallery contains statues of early notables like Kittamaquund, the Piscataway tayac (ruler of all chiefs)who grudgingly permitted the colonists to stay, and Mathias de Sousa, Maryland’s first free person of African decent. The Potomac River Room contains fossils galore, models of Potomac River working craft, and, mounted above the entrance to the Crab Claw gift shop, an eight-footlong “punt gun,” which allegedly downed 108 ducks with one shot.
On the rolling stretch of Route 236 between Routes 234 and 5, I am pleasantly surprised to espy the living-history signs of Amish homesteads: buggies, windmills, and telephone booths (the Amish won’t have telephones inside the house). I later learn that Amish families, in flight from the incipient Amishland theme park in Lancaster County, Pa., began moving here in 1948 and now constitute a community of some 200 families.
If you want to make commercial contact with the Amish, look for signs posted at the entrances to farms offering quilts, bedding, plants, and hand carved furniture; or hook up with them on Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday at the Farmers Market & Auction in Charlotte Hall or on Saturday at the California Farmers Market (May–October).
