Queen Anne's County: Kent Island and the Eastern Shore

Queen Anne's County was established in seventeen oh six, carved from portions of Kent and Talbot counties and named for the reigning British monarch. The county's deeper claim to historical attention is Kent Island, which sits in the northern portion of the county in the Chesapeake Bay. In sixteen thirty-one, William Claiborne established a trading post on Kent Island, making it one of the first European settlements in what would become Maryland, predating the arrival of the Calvert colonists by three years.

That timing created a bitter jurisdictional dispute between Claiborne and the Maryland proprietors that fueled violence in the sixteen thirties and forties. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge today carries Route Fifty across Kent Island, directly over the ground where Maryland's earliest colonial conflicts played out.