University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.

The Deserted Village.

It is now more than one hundred and forty-four
years since the ancient capital of Maryland was
shorn of its honours, by the removal of the public
offices, and, along with them, the public functionaries,
to Annapolis. The date of this removal, I think, is
recorded as of the year of grace sixteen hundred

and ninety-four. The port of St. Mary's, up to that
epoch, from the first settlement of the province, comprehending
rather more than three score years, had
been the seat of the Lord Proprietary's government.
This little city had grown up in hard-favoured times,
which had their due effect in leaving upon it the visible
tokens of a stunted vegetation: it waxed gnarled
and crooked, as it perked itself upward through the
thorny troubles of its existence, and might be likened
to the black jack, which yet retains a foothold in this
region,—a scrubby, tough and hardy mignon of the
forest, whose elder day of crabbed luxuriance affords
a sour comment upon the nurture of its youth.

Geographers are aware that the city of St. Mary's
stood on the left bank of the river which now bears
the same name (though of old it was called St.
George's,) and which flows into the Potomac at the
southern extremity of the state of Maryland, on the
western side of the Chesapeake Bay, at a short distance
westward from Point Lookout: but the very spot where
the old city stood is known only to a few,—for the
traces of the early residence of the Proprietary government
have nearly faded away from the knowledge
of this generation. An astute antiquarian eye,
however, may define the site of the town by the few
scattered bricks which the ploughshare has mingled
with the ordinary tillage of the fields. It may be
determined, still more visibly, by the mouldering and
shapeless ruin of the ancient State House, whose
venerable remains,—I relate it with a blush—have

been pillaged, to furnish building materials for an
unsightly church, which now obtrusively presents its
mottled, mortar-stained and shabby front to the view
of the visiter, immediately beside the wreck of this
early monument of the founders of Maryland. Over
these ruins a storm-shaken and magnificent mulberry,
aboriginal, and cotemporary with the settlement of
the province, yet rears its shattered and topless trunk,
and daily distils upon the sacred relics at its foot, the
dews of heaven,—an august and brave old mourner
to the departed companions of its prime. There is
yet another memorial in the family tomb of the Proprietary,
whose long-respected and holy repose, beneath
the scant shade of the mulberry, has, within
twenty years past, been desecrated by a worse than
Vandal outrage, and whose lineaments may now with
difficulty be followed amidst the rubbish produced by
this violation.

These faded memorials tell their story like honest
chroniclers. And a brave story it is of hardy adventure,
and manly love of freedom! The scattered
bricks, all moulded in the mother-land, remind us of
the launching of the bark, the struggle with the unfamiliar
wave, the array of the wonder-stricken savage,
and the rude fellowship of the first meeting. They
recall the hearths whose early fires gleamed upon
the visage of the bold cavalier, while the deep, unconquerable
faith of religion, and the impassioned instincts
of the Anglo-Saxon devotion to liberty, were
breathed by household groups, in customary household

terms. They speak of sudden alarms, and quick
arming for battle;—of stout resolve, and still stouter
achievement. They tell of the victory won, and
quiet gradually confirmed,—and of the increasing
rapture as, day by day, the settler's hopes were converted
into realities, when he saw the wilderness put
forth the blossoms of security and comfort.

The river penetrates from the Potomac some twelve
miles inland, where it terminates in little forked bays
which wash the base of the woody hills. St. George's
Island stretches half across its mouth, forming a
screen by which the course of the Potomac is partly
concealed from view. From this island, looking
northward, up St. Mary's river, the eye rests upon a
glittering sheet of water about a league in breadth,
bounded on either shore by low meadow-grounds
and cultivated fields girt with borders of forest;
whilst in the distance, some two leagues upward,
interlocking promontories, with highlands in their
rear, and cedar-crowned cliffs and abrupt acclivities
which shut in the channel, give to the river the features
of a lake. St. Inigoe's creek, flowing into the
river upon the right hand, along the base of these
cliffs, forms by its southern shore a flat, narrow and
grass-clad point, upon which the ancient Jesuit House
of the patron saint whose name distinguishes the
creek, throws up, in sharp relief, its chateau-like profile,
together with its windmill, its old trees, barns and
cottages,—the whole suggesting a resemblance to a
strip of pasteboard scenery on a prolonged and slender
base line of green.

When the voyager from the island has trimmed his
sail and reached the promontories which formed his
first perspective, the river, now reduced to a gun-shot
in width, again opens to his view a succession of little
bays, intercepted by more frequent headlands and
branching off into sinuous creeks that lose themselves
in the hills. Here and there, amongst these
creeks, a slender beach of white sand separates
from its parent flood a pool, which reposes like a
mirror in the deep forest; and all around, high hills
sweep down upon these placid lakes, and disclose
half-embowered cottages, whose hoary roofs and
antique forms turn the musings of the spectator to
the palmy days of the Lord Proprietary.

A more enchanting landscape than St. Mary's
river,—a lovelier assemblage of grassy bank and
hoary grove, upland slope, cliff, cot and strand, of
tangled brake and narrow bay, broad, seaward road-stead
and air-suspended cape, may not be found beneath
the yearly travel of the sun!

The ancient city was situated nearly two miles
beyond the confluence of St. Inigoe's creek, upon a
spacious level plain which maintained an elevation
of some fifty feet above the river. The low-browed,
double-roofed and cumbrous habitations of the towns-people
were scattered at random over this plain, forming
snug and pleasant groups for a painter's eye, and
deriving an air of competence and comfort from the
gardens and bowers in which they were sheltered.
The State House stood at the upper extremity of the
town, upon a cedar-clad headland which, by an abrupt

descent, terminated in a long, flat, sandy point, that
reached almost half across the river. In regard to
this building, tradition—which I find to be somewhat
inclined to brag of its glory—affirms it to have been
constructed in the shape of a cross, looking towards
the river, with walls thick enough to resist cannon,
and perilous steep roofs, from the top of the chief of
which shot up a spire, whereon was impaled a dolphin
with a crooked, bifurcated tail. A wooden quay
and warehouse on the point showed this to be the
seat of trade, and a crescent-shaped bay or indentation
between this and a similar headland at the lower
extremity of the town, constituted the anchorage or
harbour for the scant shipping of the port.

The State House looked rearward over the town
common,—a large space of open ground, at the farther
end of which, upon the border of a marshy inlet,
covered with bulrushes and cat-tails, stood a squat,
sturdy and tight little gaol, supported,—to use the
military phrase,—on one flank by a pillory and stocks,
and on the other by an implement of government
which has gone out of fashion in our day, but which
found favour with our ancestors as an approved antidote
to the prevalent distemper of an unnecessary or
too clamorous loquacity in their dames—a ducking
stool, that hung suspended over a pool of sufficient
depth for the most obstinate case that might occur.

Without wearying my reader with too much description,
I shall content myself with referring to but
two or three additional particulars as necessary to
my future purpose: a Catholic chapel devoted to St.

Ignatius, the patron of the province, in humble and
unostentatious guise, occupied, with its appurtenances,
a few acres in the centre of the plain, a short distance
from that confine of the city which lay nearest to St.
Inigoe's; and in the opposite quarter, not far from the
State House, a building of much more pretension,
though by no means so neat, had been erected for
the service of the Church of England, which was
then fast growing into the ascendant. On one of the
streets leading to the beach was the market house,
surrounded by its ordinaries and ale-houses: and
lastly, in the year 1681, to which this description
refers, a little hostelry of famous report, known by
the sign of “The Crow and Archer,” and kept by
Master Garret Weasel, stood on the water's edge,
at the foot of the bank below the State House, on a
piece of level ground looking out upon the harbour,
where the traveller may still find a luxuriant wilderness
of pear trees, the scions of a notable ancestor
which, tradition says, the aforesaid Garret planted
with his own hand.

The country around St. Mary's bore, at the period
I have designated, the same broad traces of settlement
and cultivation which belong to it at the present
day. For many miles the scene was one of varied
field and forest, studded over with dwellings and
farm yards. The settlements had extended across
the neck of land to the Chesapeake, and along both
shores of St. Mary's river to the Potomac. This
open country was diversified by woodland, and enlivened
every where by the expanse of navigable

water which reflected sun and sky, grove and field
and lowly cottage in a thousand beautiful lights.
Indeed, all the maritime border of the province, comprehending
Calvert, St. Mary's and Charles, as well
as the counties on the opposite shore of the Chesapeake,
might be said, at this date, to be in a condition
of secure and prosperous habitation. The great
ocean forest had receded some hundred miles westward
from St. Mary's. The region of country comprising
the present county of Anne Arundel, as well
as Cecil and the Isle of Kent, was a frontier already
settled with numerous tenants of the Lord Proprietary.
All westward from this was the birthright of
the stern Sasquesahannoch, the fierce Shenandoah,
and their kindred men of the woods.

They are gone! Like shadows have these men of
might sunk on the earth. They, their game, their
wigwams, their monuments, their primeval forests,—
yea, even their graves, have flitted away in this spectral
flight. Saxon and Norman, bluff Briton and
heavy Suabian inherit the land. And in its turn,
well-a-day! our pragmatical little city hath departed.
Not all its infant glory, nor its manhood's bustle, its
walls, gardens and bowers,—its warm housekeeping,
its gossiping burghers, its politics and its factions,—
not even its prolific dames and gamesome urchins
could keep it in the upper air until this our day.
Alas, for the vaulting pride of the village, the vain
glory of the city, and the metropolitan boast! St.
Mary's hath sunk to the level of Tyre and Sidon,

Balbec and Palmyra! She hath become trackless,
tokenless.

I have wandered over the blank field where she
sank down to rest. It was a book whose characters
I could scarce decipher. I asked for relics of the
departed. The winter evening tale told by father to
son, and the written legend, more durable than monument
of marble, have survived to answer my question,
when brick and tile, hearth and tomb have all
vanished from the quest of the traveller.

What I have gathered from these researches will
occupy my reader through the following pages.