Anne Arundel County: Where America's Oldest State Capital Took Root
Maryland
Anne Arundel County is one of those places where American history is so densely layered that almost every acre has a claim on your attention. It was established by the Maryland General Assembly in sixteen fifty, named for Lady Anne Arundell, wife of the second Lord Baltimore. That is a long time to accumulate consequence.
The earliest European settlement in what would become the county was founded in sixteen forty-nine, when Governor Stone lured a community of nonconformist Puritans from Virginia with promises of land and religious freedom. They called their settlement Providence, on the north shore of the Severn River. Six years later, in sixteen fifty-five, those same Puritans fought the colonial government's Catholic proprietors in what is sometimes called the Battle of the Severn, a clash between English colonists that has been called the first colonial naval battle in North America.
The capital of Maryland moved here from Saint Mary's City in sixteen ninety-four, and the town was renamed Annapolis the same year in honor of Princess Anne, who would later become Queen of England. What that meant in practice was that one of the most elegant concentrations of colonial Georgian architecture in America began to rise on the banks of the Severn. The Maryland State House, completed in seventeen seventy-nine, is the oldest state capitol building still in continuous legislative use in the United States. The Continental Congress met there from seventeen eighty-three and ratified the Treaty of Paris in seventeen eighty-four, formally ending the Revolutionary War.
Annapolis was also a major port of entry for enslaved Africans in the colonial period, a fact that the elegant brick streetscapes do not announce but that the historical record makes unavoidable. The county's tobacco economy rested entirely on that labor.
Route Three Oh One runs through the western edge of the county, a reminder that even the bypass roads here move through country where American democracy was being invented and argued over.
