Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Case Study: St. Mary's Chapel,
c
.1660, Historic St. Mary's
City, Maryland, USA
Archaeology and Research
By Dr. Henry Miller, Director of Research, Historic St. Mary's, Maryland, USA
During the 1660s in the North American colony of Maryland, English settlers
erected a unique religious building in the new capital of St. Mary's City. Its
story is intimately connected to English expansion, religious persecution and
the growing influence of an idea - liberty of conscience. Maryland was the
proprietary colony of the English Catholic Baron of Baltimore, Cecil Calvert.
Under his direction, the new colony was established in 1634 along the Potomac
River near its confluence with the Chesapeake Bay. One of the most notable
features of the colony was its policy of religious freedom for all Christians. (1)
Among the settlers were English Catholics and a small number of Jesuit
priests. They built a wooden church in 1635 but it was burned a decade later
after an attack on St. Mary's City related to the English Civil Wars. After the
Restoration, significant growth of Maryland resumed and the first major
brick building in the colony was erected. It was a church in the capital of
St. Mary's City and was to serve as the center of Catholic worship. Indeed, when
the Jesuits built it in the mid-1660s, this structure was the first major Catholic
church erected in English America. As a freestanding church unconnected to a
residence, it could not have been legally constructed in England or the English
colonies at the time. Although stoutly built to long endure, the 'Chapel' at
St. Mary's only served for Catholic worship for about 37 years. Due to a rebel-
lion in 1689 that was stimulated by England's Glorious Revolution, Lord
Baltimore lost control of the colony and it came under royal control. Initially,
religious tolerance continued, although the Church of England was estab-
lished as the official religion in 1692. Freedom to worship ended for Catholics
in 1704, when the Royal Governor ordered the chapel at St. Mary's to be
locked and never again be used. A decade or so later, the Jesuits demolished
the structure and carted away nearly all of its above ground elements for reuse.
Its remaining ruins and a surrounding cemetery were completely obliterated
by farmers converting the land to agriculture in the 1750s. (2)
Long forgotten, the Chapel site was rediscovered in 1938 by architectural his-
torian H. Chandlee Forman. He found a massive brick foundation in the shape
of a Latin cross. (3) He reburied the foundation and its exact location was again
lost. Fifty years later, Maryland's state museum - Historic St. Mary's City - began
an archaeological project to fully uncover the foundations and recover as many
fragments of the former structure as possible. Brick, mullion and jamb bricks,
plaster and mortar, wrought nails and imported paving stone were recovered.
Perhaps the greatest discovery was three 17th-century lead coffins buried
inside the chapel, the first found by archaeologists in the New World. Project
