Prince George's County:
The story of Prince George's County begins in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the discovery
and exploration of the Chesapeake Bay. Although the
Spanish in the Caribbean knew of the bay, the English
were the first to explore and chart it. What they found
pleased them. Wrote Captain John Smith, the
bay's first
explorer "Within is a country that may have the prerogative over the most places known, for
large and pleasant
navigable rivers, heaven and earth never agreed better to
frame a place for man's habitation.... Here are mountaines,
tails, plaines, valleyes, rivers, and brookes, all running more pleasantly into
a faire bay, compassed but for
the mouth, with fruitful and delightsome land."The bay region at the beginning of the seventeenth century truly was a fruitful and delightsome land. The air was clear, the climate hospitable. The waters and woods were full of fish and game, and the soil was fertile. The bay and its many tributaries provided a network of hundreds of miles of safe, navigable waterways -- a great water highway system that allowed easy and convenient access to thousands of acres of land. The English called the vast Chesapeake region Virginia, in honor of Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen. They made their first permanent settlement, Jamestown, on the James River in 1607. In 1632 King Charles I granted the northern parts of Virginia, north of the Potomac River, to Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore. This new grant was named Maryland, and the first Maryland colonists arrived from England aboard two ships, the Ark and the Dove, in March 1634. More colonists followed, and within thirty years they would push far enough up the Potomac and Patuxent rivers to begin settling the southernmost portions of the land we now call Prince George's County.
