Maryland Colony
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40 free Maryland Colony trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Maryland Colony began in 1634 as one noble family's private province, planned as a place where English Catholics and Protestants could live side by side. Over the next 142 years it saw uneasy experiments in tolerance, armed coups, quarrels with its neighbors and a plantation economy built on servants and enslaved people. This quiz turns the fun facts of that story into questions: where the colony's name came from, the odd rent its owner paid, the ships of the first voyage, the woman who asked for a vote in the 1640s, the tea protest that ended in flames and the survey that fixed its northern edge. Every answer comes with a short explanation. It is written for students revising the thirteen colonies, for teachers and quiz hosts who need accurate questions, and for anyone curious about how Maryland started.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Maryland was named in honor of which French-born queen consort, a Catholic married to England's Protestant king?
Henrietta Maria
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.
Q 02Under the 1632 charter, what did Lord Baltimore owe the Crown each Easter as rent for the whole of Maryland?
Two Indian arrows
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.
Q 03Which songbird carries Lord Baltimore's name because the male's orange and black resembled the Calvert coat of arms?
Oriole
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.
Q 04Which cash crop so dominated colonial Maryland's economy that colonists used it in place of money?
Tobacco
Tobacco was planted from the first season, and English ships loaded it straight from riverside plantation wharves, so the colony barely needed port towns.
Q 05Which famous boundary, surveyed in the 1760s, settled colonial Maryland's long-disputed northern border?
Mason–Dixon line
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.
Q 06Maryland's first colonists crossed the Atlantic in 1633–34 aboard the Ark and which much smaller companion ship?
The Dove
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.
Q 07Which Maryland nickname is said to honor the dependable Continental Army regulars praised by George Washington?
The Old Line State
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.
Q 08The Calverts' title, Baron Baltimore, which later named Maryland's biggest city, came from an estate in which country?
Ireland
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.
Q 09Which Maryland planter was the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence and its last surviving signer?
Charles Carroll
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.
Q 10Which city, renamed by a royal governor, took over as Maryland's colonial capital in the 1690s?
Annapolis
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.
Q 11Which English king granted Maryland's founding charter in 1632, weeks after the 1st Lord Baltimore died?
Charles I
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.
Q 12Colonial Maryland's settlements clustered on rivers flowing into which bay, the largest estuary in the United States?
Chesapeake Bay
Chesapeake Bay gave the colony easy shipping but poor health: malaria and typhoid made lives there markedly shorter than in New England.
Q 13Which river did the 1632 charter make colonial Maryland's southern boundary with Virginia?
Potomac
Q 21Cresap's War of the 1730s was a violent border feud between Maryland settlers and those of which other colony?
Pennsylvania
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.
Q 22Maryland's assembly ordered planters of the main cash crop to also grow which food, so colonists would not starve?
Corn
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.
Q 23Father Andrew White, who celebrated the first Catholic Mass in the thirteen colonies, belonged to which religious order?
Jesuits
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.
Q 14Which grain did northern and central Maryland increasingly grow as the Revolution approached, fueling Baltimore's rise?
Wheat
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.
Q 15Maryland was the last state to ratify which founding document, holding out until 1781 over western lands?
Articles of Confederation
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.
Q 16Before Maryland, the 1st Lord Baltimore founded a colony called Avalon on which cold North Atlantic island?
Newfoundland
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.
Q 17Which younger brother of the 2nd Lord Baltimore led the first settlers and served as Maryland's first governor?
Leonard Calvert
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.
Q 18Which settlement on a southern Maryland peninsula served as the colony's first capital for about sixty years?
St. Mary's City
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.
Q 19Which Maryland landowner stood before the all-male assembly in 1648 and asked for a voice and two votes?
Margaret Brent
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.
Q 20Maryland's Protestant uprising of 1689 followed which upheaval in England that put William and Mary on the throne?
Glorious Revolution
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.
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.
Q 24Maryland's Toleration Act of 1649 protected Christian worship, yet set a death penalty for denying which belief?
The divinity of Jesus
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.
Q 25Where did Virginian trader William Claiborne settle in 1631, starting decades of armed conflict with Maryland?
Kent Island
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.
Q 26What name is given to the lawless years 1644–1646, when privateer Richard Ingle's men overthrew Maryland's government?
The Plundering Time
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.
Q 27Which religious group, welcomed from Virginia, defeated Lord Baltimore's forces at the 1655 Battle of the Severn?
Puritans
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.
Q 28Which brig did its own co-owner set alight in Maryland's capital in 1774 for carrying taxed tea?
Peggy Stewart
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.
Q 29Under which land policy, borrowed from Virginia, did Maryland grant 50 acres for every person a settler brought over?
Headright system
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.
Q 30The Calvert family won back control of Maryland in 1715 after converting from Catholicism to which faith?
Anglicanism
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.