The reconstructed 17th century tavern at St. Mary’s City
Wednesday
St. Mary’s College of Maryland is currently celebrating its 175th anniversary. One of the many things I love about the college where I teach is that it owes its existence to a novel.
A Maryland history lesson is necessary here. British Catholics landed in southern Maryland in 1634 and established St. Mary’s City as their capital. Their major contribution to American history was protection of religious freedom, which they established as a precautionary move, knowing that they would soon be outnumbered by Protestants. St. Mary’s City sits on the St. Mary’s River, which runs into the Potomac, and the capital was moved to Annapolis in 1694 so as to have direct access to the Chesapeake. The “city”—there were never more than a few hundred inhabitants–reverted to farm land and that seemed to be that.
In 1838, however, Maryland legislator John Pendleton Kennedy set his novel Rob of the Bowl: A Legend of St. Inigoe’s in 1681 St. Mary’s City. Reading the novel today, one is reminded of James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Washington Irving. Tensions have risen between the Catholics and the Anglicans and we watch a Protestant uprising. Among those involved are the crippled Rob of the Bowl and the pirate Richard Cocklescraft, who are hiding smuggled goods within a chapel after convincing everyone that it is haunted. Cocklescraft attempts to kidnap Blanche, the daughter of a Catholic nobleman, but Rob, suddenly discovering that he is the long-lost father of Lord Baltimore’s secretary, foils Cocklescraft and rescues Blanche. He dies in his son’s arms.
The novel had limited success but it brought attention to Maryland’s colonial history and to St. Mary’s City, which people had forgotten about. To commemorate the 200th anniversary of the first landing, the Maryland legislature established a women’s seminary n 1840. It was designated as a “monument school to the people” and had, as its founding principle, a commitment to diversity, tolerance, and accessibility.
St. Mary’s became a two-year college in 1927, a four-year liberal arts college in 1967, and Maryland’s “honors college” in 1992. Despite its name, it has always been a state-run school, never a Catholic one, and it has had boys since the early 1950s. It’s still holds true to its founding ideals.
The novel begins with a passage from Oliver Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village,” and Kennedy describes the ruins that he found when he visited St. Mary’s City in the 1830s. The effect of his description was to persuade legislators to restore something of what had been:
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 moldering 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 visitor, immediately beside the wreck of this early monument of the founders of Maryland. Over these ruins a storm-shaken and magnificent mulberry, aboriginal, and contemporary 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.
The “unsightly church” is the one I attend every Sunday—yes, it is built with bricks salvaged from the original state house—and one still finds beside it an obelisk monument commemorating the founders of Maryland.
But much else has changed, and the “city” looks more as it would have looked in the 17th century. A replica state house has been built, as has a replica tavern and various other structures. “Historic St. Mary’s City” is now a living museum—a poor man’s Williamsburg some have called it—and there is a 17th century working farm, a reconstructed Catholic chapel, a reconstructed sailing vessel (the smaller of the two original ships), and actors playing historical roles. Kennedy rekindled historical pride and Maryland responded with first a school and then a thriving archaeological site.
To be sure, visitors expecting a city are invariably disappointed. Our joke is that, while there is indeed a city at St. Mary’s City, it’s all under ground.
To provide you with a feel-good moment, here is the moment in the novel when Blanche is rescued:
“God bless thee, gentle damsel!” he exclaimed as he eagerly seized Blanche by both hands and almost lifted her into his arms whilst the maiden, with scarce less alacrity, – her eyes laughing through the big drops that rolled down her cheeks, – threw her head upon his breast, and sobbed with convulsive joy – “God bless thee, dear Mistress Blanche! we will make your father a happy man again. And you, old sweetheart, Bridget, they would have stolen you away! By my troth, that Trojan war and rape of Helen the poets tell of, was but a scurvy adventure compared with this! – Lieutenant,” he added, almost in the same breath, “leave six files with our oarsmen to guard the boats and see that they draw off from the shore into a fathom water, there to await our signal when we return. The rest of the men will push forward on the track of the runaways. Follow, comrades; we have no time to lose.”
Okay, so the prose isn’t great. But it led to something good.