Old Bohemia: The Jesuit Mission That Taught the Founders

In seventeen oh four, the Society of Jesus bought a farm and established a mission in the remote farmlands of Maryland's Eastern Shore. He called it Bohemia Manor, and for decades it operated as one of the only places in the English colonies where Catholics could worship, learn, and live without constant legal harassment.

Maryland had been founded in sixteen thirty-two partly as a refuge for Catholics, but that protection collapsed in the sixteen nineties when Protestant colonists overthrew the Catholic proprietors and imposed a new legal order that banned Catholic worship, education, and political participation. Catholics were barred from voting or holding office. Building or entering a Catholic church carried legal penalties.

The Bohemia mission was the Jesuits' workaround. Set back from the main roads, isolated enough to avoid routine enforcement, it became a center of hidden Catholic life on the Eastern Shore. In the mid-seventeen hundreds, the Jesuits ran a school here, Bohemia Academy, for Catholic boys whose families could not legally educate their sons in the faith.

Two of those boys would shape the founding generation of the United States. Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, attended Bohemia Academy before heading to Europe for further education. His cousin John Carroll, who became the first Catholic Bishop in the United States and founded Georgetown University, received his earliest formal schooling in these same rooms.

The Jesuit mission also relied on the labor of enslaved people on its plantations on the Eastern Shore. That history has become central to how the site understands itself, a place where the Catholic faith sought its own freedom while denying freedom to others.

St. Francis Xavier Church stands today on the original property. The grounds include the church, the rectory, and the cemetery where centuries of this layered history lie.