Port Tobacco: The Town That Silt Swallowed

The name sounds like a shipping manifest entry, and that is essentially what it was. Port Tobacco, Maryland was once one of the most important port towns in the entire colony, second only to Annapolis in trade volume at its peak in the mid-seventeen hundreds.

The original inhabitants here were the Potobac people, one of the ancestral groups of today's Piscataway Nation. They built a village on this river bend and called it Potopaco. European colonists arrived in the sixteen thirties, set up a cluster of houses and warehouses they called Chandler's Town, and eventually anglicized the indigenous name into Port Tobacco. The Maryland General Assembly officially renamed it Charles Town in seventeen twenty-seven, but nobody ever called it that. Port Tobacco it stayed.

The town thrived for a century on a simple formula: fertile soil plus navigable water plus tobacco. Planters floated hogshead barrels downriver to ships waiting in the Potomac. Merchants built counting houses. Lawyers opened offices. A courthouse was erected. For a brief window in the colonial era, this was a place of consequence.

Then the river betrayed it. Erosion from cleared tobacco fields sent sediment cascading into Port Tobacco Creek year after year. By the late seventeen hundreds, the channel was silting shut. Ships that once docked here had to anchor further and further away, and eventually could not reach the port at all. When the railroad arrived in the mid-eighteen hundreds, it bypassed Port Tobacco entirely, threading instead through a village to the east. The county seat moved to La Plata in eighteen ninety-five. The population collapsed. Buildings fell or were torn down for lumber.

What the silt preserved, paradoxically, is exactly what makes Port Tobacco valuable today. Because the town died so completely, it was never paved over or redeveloped. Archaeologists launched the Port Tobacco Archaeological Project in two thousand seven and have been excavating the layers ever since, finding artifacts from the late sixteen hundreds through the early nineteen hundreds, including traces of enslaved Africans who built and maintained the tobacco economy that briefly made this place flourish. The archaeology is revealing a town that history almost entirely forgot.