40 Fun Facts About Maryland Colony

Maryland was named in honor of which French-born queen consort, a Catholic married to England's Protestant king?

Henrietta Maria was the youngest daughter of Henry IV of France, and the charter's Latin name for the colony, Terra Mariae, simply means Mary's Land.

Under the 1632 charter, what did Lord Baltimore owe the Crown each Easter as rent for the whole of Maryland?

Two Indian arrows were due at Windsor Castle every Easter, along with a fifth of any gold and silver found: a token rent that kept the land legally the King's.

Which songbird carries Lord Baltimore's name because the male's orange and black resembled the Calvert coat of arms?

Oriole is the bird: the Baltimore oriole was named for the family's heraldic colors, and it is now Maryland's state bird and the mascot of its baseball team.

Which cash crop so dominated colonial Maryland's economy that colonists used it in place of money?

Tobacco was planted from the first season, and English ships loaded it straight from riverside plantation wharves, so the colony barely needed port towns.

Which famous boundary, surveyed in the 1760s, settled colonial Maryland's long-disputed northern border?

The Mason–Dixon line, surveyed from 1763 to 1767, closed an 80-year quarrel over overlapping royal grants and later became shorthand for the divide between North and South.

Maryland's first colonists crossed the Atlantic in 1633–34 aboard the Ark and which much smaller companion ship?

The Dove was a small trading vessel that a crew of seven could sail, and it stayed behind in Maryland to carry goods between the colonies.

Which Maryland nickname is said to honor the dependable Continental Army regulars praised by George Washington?

The Old Line State recalls the Maryland Line, whose troops known as the Maryland 400 charged a far larger British force at the Battle of Long Island in 1776 so the rest of the army could get away.

The Calverts' title, Baron Baltimore, which later named Maryland's biggest city, came from an estate in which country?

Ireland gave the title: Baron Baltimore referred to the family's manor in County Longford, an estate King James I granted George Calvert as a reward for loyalty.

Which Maryland planter was the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence and its last surviving signer?

Charles Carroll outlived every other signer, dying in 1832 at the age of 95, and was regarded as the richest man in the colonies when the Revolution began.

Which city, renamed by a royal governor, took over as Maryland's colonial capital in the 1690s?

Annapolis honors Princess Anne, the future Queen Anne: royal governor Francis Nicholson moved the government there in 1694 and gave the town its new name.

Which English king granted Maryland's founding charter in 1632, weeks after the 1st Lord Baltimore died?

Charles I sealed the grant in June 1632, so the colony went to the dead man's eldest son instead; seventeen years later the same king was beheaded in London.

Colonial Maryland's settlements clustered on rivers flowing into which bay, the largest estuary in the United States?

Chesapeake Bay gave the colony easy shipping but poor health: malaria and typhoid made lives there markedly shorter than in New England.

Which river did the 1632 charter make colonial Maryland's southern boundary with Virginia?

The Potomac River boundary ran along the far, southern bank, so the whole river fell inside Maryland, and Maryland and Virginia kept settling river rights in court for centuries.

Which grain did northern and central Maryland increasingly grow as the Revolution approached, fueling Baltimore's rise?

Wheat took over the north and center of the colony while the south and east kept to the old plantation crop, a split that helped inland farming towns grow.

Maryland was the last state to ratify which founding document, holding out until 1781 over western lands?

The Articles of Confederation could not take effect without every state, and Maryland refused until Virginia and others agreed to hand their western claims to Congress.

Before Maryland, the 1st Lord Baltimore founded a colony called Avalon on which cold North Atlantic island?

Newfoundland's cold and the settlers' suffering discouraged him, and in 1629 he quit Avalon to ask the King for land in a warmer part of the New World.

Which younger brother of the 2nd Lord Baltimore led the first settlers and served as Maryland's first governor?

Leonard Calvert governed from 1634 until his death in 1647, while his elder brother, the colony's owner, stayed in England and never once saw Maryland.

Which settlement on a southern Maryland peninsula served as the colony's first capital for about sixty years?

St. Mary's City was abandoned after the government left and turned into farmland, which kept its buried remains so undisturbed that it is now a major archaeological site.

Which Maryland landowner stood before the all-male assembly in 1648 and asked for a voice and two votes?

Margaret Brent was turned down, yet as executor of the late governor's estate she paid off restless soldiers, and the assembly later said the colony had been safer in her hands.

Maryland's Protestant uprising of 1689 followed which upheaval in England that put William and Mary on the throne?

The Glorious Revolution deposed the Catholic James II, and within a year 700 armed Maryland rebels had forced Lord Baltimore's officials to surrender the government.

Cresap's War of the 1730s was a violent border feud between Maryland settlers and those of which other colony?

Pennsylvania and Maryland both sent armed forces before King George II imposed a ceasefire in 1738; the trouble grew from a rival ferry run by Marylander Thomas Cresap.

Maryland's assembly ordered planters of the main cash crop to also grow which food, so colonists would not starve?

Corn was the remedy because planters gave so much land to the export leaf that the colony risked running short of food; a law made each of them raise a set amount.

Father Andrew White, who celebrated the first Catholic Mass in the thirteen colonies, belonged to which religious order?

Jesuits sailed with the first settlers, and White, later called the Apostle of Maryland, left writings that remain a key record of the colony's land and Native peoples.

Maryland's Toleration Act of 1649 protected Christian worship, yet set a death penalty for denying which belief?

The divinity of Jesus was the line: the law sheltered only Trinitarian Christians, so Jews and Unitarians who practiced openly risked their lives, and it was repealed five years later.

Where did Virginian trader William Claiborne settle in 1631, starting decades of armed conflict with Maryland?

Kent Island, the largest in the bay, was Claiborne's trading base before the charter existed; he refused to accept Lord Baltimore's rule and took the island back by force in 1644.

What name is given to the lawless years 1644–1646, when privateer Richard Ingle's men overthrew Maryland's government?

The Plundering Time saw Protestant raiders rob anyone who would not swear loyalty to Parliament, mostly Catholics, while the governor sheltered in Virginia before returning with troops.

Which religious group, welcomed from Virginia, defeated Lord Baltimore's forces at the 1655 Battle of the Severn?

Puritans from the settlement of Providence won the fight, which has been called the last battle of the English Civil War, and their side held the colony for a time.

Which brig did its own co-owner set alight in Maryland's capital in 1774 for carrying taxed tea?

Peggy Stewart burned to the waterline with her sails and colors flying, after her owner offered to torch brig and cargo himself to calm an angry crowd.

Under which land policy, borrowed from Virginia, did Maryland grant 50 acres for every person a settler brought over?

The headright system paid the same 50 acres whether the newcomer was a free settler, a bound servant or an enslaved person, which rewarded planters for importing labor.

The Calvert family won back control of Maryland in 1715 after converting from Catholicism to which faith?

Anglicanism was a political choice: the future 4th Lord Baltimore converted in 1713 although his Catholic father cut off his support, and the Crown returned the colony two years later.

The 1st Lord Baltimore held which high office under King James I before resigning and declaring himself Catholic?

Secretary of State was one of the top posts in government; he gave it up in 1625, and the King softened the fall by making him Baron Baltimore on his resignation.

Maryland sent soldiers in the 1660s to help its Susquehannock allies resist raids by which powerful Native confederacy?

The Iroquois, or Haudenosaunee, besieged the Susquehannock town in 1663 and failed; Maryland's assembly had called its ally a bulwark and security for the north of the province.

Maryland took a larger quota than any other colony of which unwilling arrivals, shipped from Britain as laborers?

Transported convicts served years of forced labor instead of a harsher sentence at home, and Maryland was a main destination for the tens of thousands that English courts sent overseas.

Maryland's charter was partly meant to pressure which rival power's settlements along the Hudson River to the north?

The Dutch Republic claimed the coast between Virginia and New England as New Netherland, so the Privy Council steered Lord Baltimore's grant north of Virginia to plant English settlers nearby.

Maryland Day marks the first colonists' landing on March 25, 1634, the date of which Christian feast honoring Mary?

The Annunciation fell on the day they stepped ashore, and March 25 was also New Year's Day in England's legal calendar, so by English reckoning the colony began as the year did.

Which large stone stronghold did Maryland build on its western frontier in 1756 during the French and Indian War?

Fort Frederick was designed mainly as a refuge for frontier settlers, and two decades later the Revolution turned it into a prisoner-of-war camp.

Where did Maryland's first colonists land in March 1634, raise a large cross and celebrate their first Mass?

St. Clement's Island was only a first stop before the settlers moved to the mainland; a 40-foot stone cross there now honors the beginnings of religious freedom in America.

On which Caribbean island did the Ark and its companion ship stop to resupply during the 1633–34 voyage to Maryland?

Barbados broke up a long, rough winter crossing: the ships left England in November 1633 and did not reach Maryland until the following March.

Maryland's charter gave Lord Baltimore the near-royal powers long held by the bishop of which northern English county?

Durham's bishops ruled a border palatinate almost as kings, and the charter copied that model, letting the proprietor create courts, pardon crimes and even wage war.

Which Native people traded their village site to Maryland's first settlers and let them shelter in their longhouses?

The Yaocomico took cloth, hatchets and hoes for the land, taught the newcomers to plant local crops and showed them where to gather clams.