Ships on the Chesapeake

Maryland Historical Society

Weathered tobacco barns in abandoned fields near new housing developments dramatically symbolize the accelerating changes that have transformed Southern Maryland during the last five decades.

Until about 1960, the peninsula traditionally described as Southern Maryland evoked images of flat, rural, tobacco-growing countryside between the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay. The region included parts of Prince George's and Anne Arundel Counties on a general line from Annapolis to Bladensburg, plus all of Charles, Calvert, and St. Mary's.

Early Settlements
This is Maryland's mother country, where the first European settlers established "plantations" in the seventeenth century. The county names themselves bespeak the state's origin as an English colony, fourth oldest in North America, under the leadership of a Catholic minority. St. Mary's, established in 1637, only four years after the immigrants arrived, was named in honor of the Virgin Mary. Anne Arundel (1650) was the wife of Cecil Calvert, Second Lord Baltimore and founder of the colony. Calvert County, originally called Patuxent (1654), received its name from the family progenitor, Cecil's visionary father George Calvert, who received a proprietary charter from Charles I for loyal service as the king's councilor. Charles (1658) was named for Charles Calvert, George's grandson and Cecil's heir. The Calvert name and Catholic religion diminished in 1692, when the family's proprietary province became a royal colony, and the Church of England became the established, tax-supported church. In 1695, Prince George's County was "erected" from Calvert and Charles and named for Prince George of Denmark, husband of Queen Anne, a devout Anglican.

Although the counties bore grand names, the land within their boundaries resisted cultivation. In the early decades, seven of every ten white male settlers died before the age of 50; about half the children born died before the age of 20. Entire Indian villages succumbed to smallpox. The early development of African slavery grew into a social cancer from which the state has never completely recovered.

Africans had arrived in Maryland within five years after the colony's founding. By 1750, nearly 60 percent of the 280,000 African slaves in North America were concentrated in Maryland and Virginia, the two colonies that made up the "Tobacco Coast." They came from many tribes assembled at coastal locations that ranged from the Senegal and Gambia Rivers in the north to the Niger River more than 2,000 miles to the southeast. Slave ships arrived with 25 percent or more of the original captives dead from bloody flux, malnutrition, and despair.

Despite the hardships, this unique American amalgamation of European, African and Native-American people gradually developed immunities to common diseases and started new settlements along the major waterways: the Patuxent and Potomac Rivers and the Chesapeake Bay. Virgin forests disappeared as farmers girdled trees, chopped them down to open corn and tobacco fields and left the stumps in the ground to rot.

Lower Potomac Society
The first farms tended to be small, owned by freeholders who worked alongside a few European indentured servants and perhaps an African slave or two. But within several generations, ownership patterns changed. Small farms continued to dominate the landscape, but tenancy increased, and more land was concentrated in fewer hands. The large population of African slaves contributed to new wealth that supported a gradually rising standard of living for most of the non-slave society. The Sotterly plantation above the Patuxent in St. Mary's County speaks to the landed gentry that developed in Southern Maryland, supported by tenants, slaves and family traditions. Other eighteenth-century mansion houses dot the landscape as reminders of the society that started a new country in 1789.

George Washington, general of the Revolution and first president of the Republic, was a prominent figure in the plantation society along the lower Potomac, including the Maryland shore and Charles County in particular. He had friends in Port Tobacco and Upper Marlboro; the dances, theaters, and horse races of Annapolis often drew him to the Maryland capital. Annapolis in 1786 provided the site of a convention to discuss interstate problems and the financial woes of Congress; delegates resolved to hold another meeting in Philadelphia the following year; that federal convention, attended by delegates from the 13 states, including Washington, led to the Constitution adopted two years later.

Nineteenth Century
In the nineteenth century, over succeeding generations, a mellow Lower-Potomac culture developed in Southern Maryland. The political and economic center of the state shifted northward and westward. Maryland became more ethnically diverse. Isolated and peaceful, set in its ways, this portion of Maryland continued tobacco cultivation, fished the Chesapeake, and nurtured a southern way of life not much different from that pursued in coastal Georgia or Gulf-coast Mississippi. Many people claimed ancestry among the first families to arrive in Maryland; a deeply ingrained color line kept blacks and whites separate.

Southern Maryland waterman

Maryland Historical Society

Twentieth Century
With uneven railroad service and poor roads, Southern Maryland traditionally was water locked by the Potomac River, the Patuxent River, and Chesapeake Bay. Farmers, watermen and residents of the small towns prided themselves on a free, deeply rooted life that respected old conventions and ignored more Puritan brethren in the North. Moonshiners and bootleggers found the creeks of the lower Potomac wonderful sanctuaries during Prohibition. Before they became illegal in the 1960s, slot machines flourished in the region.

The twentieth century slowly added a modern overlay to this slow?moving haven of tradition. The federal government, particularly the navy, has been active along the Potomac since establishment of the Washington Navy Yard on the Anacostia River in 1800; in 1890 it created an ordnance center at Indian Head and continued to expand in Southern Maryland through two world wars. The Patuxent Naval Air Warfare Center, established during World War II, led to the development of Lexington Park and started the increasing flow of newcomers who upset the old patterns.

Vacationers

Maryland Historical Society

New roads and bridges also ended the old, comfortable isolation. The Harry W. Nice Memorial Bridge crossed the lower Potomac during the New Deal, another went over the Patuxent at Benedict in 1950, and in 1977 another spanned the wide, lower Patuxent. With the extension of dual highways throughout the region during the 1980s (overlaying Gov. Albert C. Ritchie's public works of the 1920s), Southern Maryland became conveniently accessible to commuters who worked in the Baltimore-Annapolis-Washington triangle.

This suburban expansion has altered the landscape and changed Southern Maryland forever. Anne Arundel County south of Annapolis and Prince George's County south of Andrews Air Force Base retain only traces of the old tobacco culture. Even the three lower counties?Charles, Calvert and St. Mary's?now demonstrate the effects of tourism, improved transportation, and residential growth. Traditionalists lament the passing of old-fashioned gentility and respect for history; modernists rejoice in the convenience of shopping malls and the loosening of cultural barriers.

Population numbers illustrate the story. Calvert County grew more than 48 percent between 1980 and 1990, the second fastest growth rate in the state. Two hundred years ago, 88,751 people lived in the five tobacco counties. In 1890 the counties had 101,044 inhabitants, a growth rate of about 14 per cent. In 1990 the region had 1,385,007 people, an increase of almost 1,300 percent over the past century, most of it in the last fifty years. This growth continues to accelerate, creating tension between developers and preservationists.

One can still find Amish farmers, oystermen, tobacco fields, and seventeenth-century houses in Southern Maryland as well as residents who trace their American ancestry to the Ark and the Dove, the tiny ships that brought Calvert's settlers to St. Mary's County in 1634. A few descendants of the original inhabitants, the Piscataways, also remain on the land. But as the tobacco barns succumb to landscaped lawns and golf courses, a new suburban entity emerges from these ghost-filled fields: richer, gaudier, and faster. By many measures, this new Southern Maryland is also smarter and more progressive than its predecessor. It's also less knowledgeable of the past and insensitive to the slow natural and social rhythms that once beat a unique music here.