Prince George's County:
The first settlers came to Prince George's County
from the south, leaving the older settlements of Southern
Maryland behind to move to new lands farther up the
Patuxent and Potomac rivers. These pioneers of the 1660s,
1670s, and 1680s came up the rivers by boat and canoe and
built simple frame cottages and houses when they arrived.
For the first generation, life was not easy. Their plantations
were not the elegant country seats of legend; their
tobacco fields were little more than tiny clearings in the
forest. There were no doctors, churches, clubs, or markets;
no newspapers, schools, or theaters; and there was little
organized community life. Their landings, on the river-banks,
were their only links to the outside world. There
they met the ships from England which came to collect
their tobacco and sell them goods from home.Year by year more settlers came, and in a generation's time the banks of the Patuxent and Potomac were lined with homes, farms, and families. In establishing Prince George's County, the General Assembly followed the practice of "erecting" new counties when new areas of Maryland were settled and populous enough to support a county government. Originally, there had been but one county, Saint Mary's, when all of the colonists lived close to the original settlement. By the time Prince George's County was established, there were already ten other counties in Maryland, five on each shore of the bay.
The counties were the most important units of local government in colonial Maryland, and the county court was the central agency of county government. The county court, in those days, exercised both executive and judicial powers. It levied taxes, built roads and bridges, issued business licenses, granted relief for the poor, and found guardians for orphans, besides hearing civil and criminal cases. Each justice was an important figure in his neighborhood, for, acting alone, he could settle minor disputes, mete out punishment for lesser offenses, and transact certain county business. The sheriff was an important county official, too. His was the single most powerful -- and lucrative -- position in each county, for he acted as the agent of both the county court and the provincial government. His many and varied duties included making arrests, serving legal papers, keeping the jail, collecting taxes, disbursing government funds, conducting elections, and delivering the orders of the governor and council. The county court, the sheriff, and a number of lesser office-holders constituted the county government, the level of government closest to the people and the one which touched their daily lives. The conduct of county business was an important responsibility, and counties were not created until the area in question could support a county government and fill its many offices.
Prince George's County was erected on Saint George's Day, April 23, 1696, out of land that had previously been part of Charles and Calvert counties. The population then was probably no more than 2,000. Those settlers who lived along the Potomac River had been part of Charles County, while those along the Patuxent had been part of Calvert. The interior of the county was unsettled, and few had ventured north of the Anacostia River. Prince George's County was still Maryland's frontier, and, compared to the older counties, it was a land of small planters and farmers. A census in 1706, just ten years after the county's founding, revealed that there were 406 households in the county but only thirty-seven men who owned more than 1,000 acres of land. Because there were few large plantations, there were few African slaves. Indentured servants -- men and women from Great Britain who surrendered their freedom for a few years in return for passage to the New World -- still satisfied most of the need for additional labor. Slaves would not be brought here in large numbers until the eighteenth century.
In 1696 the white residents of the new Prince George's
County shared their county with the Piscataway Indians,
most of whom then lived in reserved lands along Piscataway
Creek. Once these Indians had lived all over Southern
Maryland, but as the region filled with white settlers, they
withdrew to the Piscataway-Accokeek area. By the time
Prince George's County was created, white settlement had
leapfrogged beyond them. They could no longer hunt
freely and were expected to observe the white man's
property rights. For fifty years they had lived peacefully
with the settlers, but by 1696 they decided to move on.
Despite the entreaties of the Marylanders, who genuinely
wanted them to stay, the Piscataways left the province in
1697. Thus, only one year after the founding of the county,
Prince George's Piscataway Indians were gone. After some
wandering, they eventually settled in Pennsylvania, where
they were absorbed by other tribes.
The Piscataways were not the only Indians the Prince Georgeans had to deal with, however. From time to time Senecas and other Indians came south into Maryland sometimes to trade, but sometimes to fight. The provincial government established companies of rangers to patrol the frontier and warn settlers of Indian movements. At the time of the founding of Prince George's County, these rangers patrolled the area beyond the Anacostia River, venturing as far north as Sugarloaf Mountain and then moving eastward to meet Baltimore County's rangers. The settlers behind this line -- the pioneers of Prince George's County -- undoubtedly were grateful for the protection, and many Prince Georgeans took part in the patrols. Still, from time to time hostile Indians slipped through, and from time to time families along the Anacostia River, Rock Creek, and the upper reaches of the Patuxent were harassed, and sometimes hurt. But there were never any massacres, and as the land beyond Prince George's County was settled, the threat of Indian raids disappeared.
In discussing the founding of Prince George's County it would be misleading not to mention that the original boundaries of the county were not the same as they are today. Actually, the "land beyond Prince George's County" referred to above was actually part of Prince George's County until 1748. The act of the assembly which created Prince George's County assigned all of Maryland west of the Patuxent River and north of Mattawoman and Swanson's creeks (the northern boundaries of Charles County) to Prince George's. Thus, Montgomery, Frederick, Washington, Allegany, and Garrett counties; part of Carroll County; and all of the District of Columbia were once part of Prince George's County. Most of this vast area was uninhabited in 1696; that is why it was attached to Prince George's. There was little settlement beyond the present limits of Prince George's until the 1730s, when Germans from Pennsylvania began settling in the Monocacy valley. When that area became populous enough to support a county government of its own, the assembly erected Frederick County. The assembly decreed that the boundary between Prince George's and Frederick counties would be an imaginary line drawn from the mouth of Rock Creek (on the Potomac River) to Seth Hyatt's plantation on the Patuxent. That line is still Prince George's northern boundary, now dividing Prince George's County from Montgomery County, erected out of the southern part of Frederick in 1776.
There is, in truth, much more to the story of the establishment of Prince George's County than the simple fact of an act of the General Assembly. Prince George's County was born out of revolution, one of the products of a fundamental change in the government and religious order of the province. The revolution was a Protestant rebellion against Charles Calvert, third Lord Baltimore, and his government -- a successful, armed (though bloodless) coup d'etat that was recognized and legitimized, after the fact, by the crown in England.
The principal grievance of the Protestants against Lord Baltimore was both a political and religious one. While the lord proprietor persecuted no Christian, he appointed only Catholics or relatives to provincial offices. Almost all of the lucrative collectorships, judgeships, and other civil positions were filled by Calverts, their kin, or Catholics. Many of the favored circle held more than one office. While Lord Baltimore was quite happy to appoint Protestants to county judgeships and other county offices, they could aspire no higher, save for election to the provincial assembly. Protestants comprised a majority of the population, yet their faith, it seemed, disqualified them from the highest offices in Maryland.
Events in England in the 1680s only heightened the tension in Maryland. King Charles II died in 1685 and was succeeded by his brother, James II. A convert to Catholicism, an autocrat, and a believer in the divine right of kings, James prorogued Parliament, suspended laws that offended him, insulted the Church of England, and filled the highest offices of state with fellow Catholics. Unpopular with almost every element of society, he was driven from England by force of arms in 1688. Parliament proclaimed the succession of his Protestant daughter, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange, but James, in France, vowed to regain the throne.
News of the Glorious Revolution, as it was called reached Maryland early in 1689. Protestant leaders, as well as the Catholics in provincial government, waited in vain for a message from Lord Baltimore acknowledging the succession of William and Mary. No such message ever came. In July, militant Protestants, known as the Associators, formed an army, marched on Saint Mary's City, and seized the statehouse. Members of the governor's council, representing Lord Baltimore, tried to rally armed resistance, but they could not muster enough popular support. They surrendered on August 1 and handed the government over to the Associators, who immediately recognized William and Mary as sovereigns of Maryland.
Maryland's first royal governor, Lionel Copley, arrived in the province in April 1692. Immediately the work of reforming Maryland began. Among the acts of assembly that year was the establishment of the Church of England as the state church of Maryland. Before the revolution, there was little organized Anglican activity in Maryland, for few Anglican clergymen had come to the province. As a result of the revolution, however, the Church of England became the province's official tax-supported church. The province was divided into thirty parishes, and the inhabitants of each, regardless of religion, were taxed to maintain a church and minister. There was little resistance to the establishment of the Church of England in Maryland, despite the fact that most Marylanders were not Anglicans. Of the other non-Catholic sects represented in the province, only the Quakers were well organized enough to object. Their protests fell on deaf ears, and establishment went forward.
Another change in the first years of royal government was the redrawing of the political map of Maryland. In 1694 the capital was moved from Saint Mary's City to Annapolis, on the Severn River. The geographical logic of the move was obvious -- Saint Mary's was no longer centrally located, while Annapolis was -- but there was more to the move than the simple question of geography. Saint Mary's was the city of the Calverts, in a county with a large Catholic population. A revolution had been accomplished, and Maryland was now a royal, Protestant province. What better way to reinforce that fact than by building a new capital, far away from the old?
The new royal government also reorganized the counties in Maryland. The boundaries of the three old Southern Maryland counties -- Saint Mary's, Calvert, and Charles -- were redrawn, and a new one, Prince George's, was erected in 1696. Whether there were political reasons behind all of this is unclear, but one thing can be said of the new Prince George's County it was a strong protestant area. While there were a number of old distinguished Catholic families here -- giving the local gentry a disproportionately Catholic flavor -- the Catholic element in the total population was actually very small, perhaps as low as 5 percent if an accounting in 1708 was accurate. Surviving records do not reveal whether these religious considerations were important in the decision to create Prince George's County or not; perhaps it was simply time to carve out a new county on the frontier. But whatever the case, Prince George's County took its place in Maryland's scheme of government and its residents assumed the responsibilities of self-government.
Before concluding the story of Maryland's revolution in government it would be worthwhile to recount the stories of three of the individuals involved in that affair who became leading citizens of Prince George's County at its founding in 1696.
Foremost among the defenders of Lord Baltimore was Henry Darnall I, a merchant and planter who owned land in several counties, but who died and was buried here in Prince George's. Darnall was a Catholic, a cousin of Lord Baltimore's wife. He came to Maryland in the 1670s, was elected to the General Assembly, and was appointed to a number of local and provincial offices. When Lord Baltimore left Maryland in 1684, Darnall was a member of the governor's council and became a member of the board of deputy governors charged with running the provincial government in Baltimore's absence. He supported the unpopular James II, as revealed in a letter he wrote in March 1689 praying for his "happy restoration without bloodshed" (Archives of Maryland). When the Protestant Associators seized the statehouse, it was Darnall who tried unsuccessfully to raise an army to oust them. He signed the articles of surrender for the government and left Maryland in September to join Lord Baltimore in England. He eventually returned as a representative of the Calverts and was appointed to several important posts which administered their lands. He died on June 16, 1711, and was buried at his plantation, Darnall's Delight (also known as The Woodyard), in southern Prince George's County.
Two of the leaders of the Protestant Associators also lived in the new county. Colonel John Addison was a Protestant, an Anglican who came to Maryland in the early 1670s. He came from a mercantile family and worked several years as a merchant and Indian trader in Saint Mary's City before moving far up the Potomac, near the Anacostia River, where he acquired several large tracts of land. He was appointed a justice of Charles County but seems to have held no provincial posts before the revolution. He took a leading role in the rebellion, serving as a member of the Associator's Convention (the assembly elected under their regime) and the Grand Committee of Twenty (their executive committee). With the overthrow of the Calverts, appointments to provincial posts followed: first as justice of the provincial court, then as a member of the governor's council. When Prince George's County was created he was named commander of the county militia with the rank of colonel. Ironically, a few years after the revolution, Addison's stepdaughter, Barbara Dent, married Henry Darnall's stepson, Colonel Thomas Brooke. Addison died sometime during the winter of 1705-1706.
Ninian Beall was another leader of the Protestant rebellion. A native of Scotland, he was a coronet in the army resisting Cromwell when he was captured at the Battle of Dunbar in 1650. He became a political prisoner and was sent first to Barbados, then to Maryland, where he worked as an indentured servant. After obtaining his freedom he amassed vast land holdings and was appointed to a number of local governmental and militia offices, including the office of sheriff of Calvert County. Beall was one of the leaders of the rebel army, and, like Addison, he became a member of the Associators' Convention and the Grand Committee of Twenty. In 1696 he was elected one of Prince George's County's first delegates to the General Assembly. As a militia officer, he led patrols on the frontier whenever there were Indian alarms, and continued to do so well into his seventies. He was a staunch Presbyterian and the owner of much of the land that is now Georgetown in the District of Columbia. In 1717 he died at his home plantation, Bacon Hall, near Upper Marlboro.
On Saint George's Day, April 23, 1696, the newly appointed justices of the Prince George's County court met at a place called Mount Calvert, on the Patuxent River, to take their oaths of office and bring Prince George's County formally into existence. Although everyone called the place Mount Calvert, its official name was Charles Town, and indeed, it was a little town, with a few stores, a church, and an inn or two. As it was the only town within the bounds of the new county, it became the county seat. A courthouse was erected and so was a cage, a pillory, a whipping post, and stocks. For twenty-five years Charles Town served as our county seat, until the General Assembly decided that Upper Marlboro, a newer, bigger, and more convenient town four miles away, should have the honor. On March 28, 1721, the court convened in Charles Town, recessed, and then reconvened a few hours later in Marlboro. Charles Town faded away, and now, more than 250 years later, its name is almost forgotten. One large brick home marks the site. The casual visitor who ventures off Route 382 to explore Mount Calvert Road could hardly be expected to know that at its end, down by the river, there was once a place named Charles Town, and that this was where Prince George's County had its beginning.
One final ironic note must be appended to the story of Maryland's revolution in government. In 1715 old Charles Calvert, third Lord Baltimore, died. His son, Benedict Leonard Calvert, became the fourth Lord Baltimore. Although born a Catholic, he had become an Anglican. With his succession to the title, the crown restored the Calverts' powers of government and once again Maryland became a proprietary province.
