Shipley's Choice: A Colonial Land Patent

According to the marker, in sixteen sixty-eight a man named Adam Shipley arrived in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Thirteen years later, on March thirtieth sixteen eighty-one, he patented two hundred acres along the south side of the Severn River. The tract was called Shipley's Choice, a name still carried by the neighborhood that stands here today.

Maryland's colonial land patent system worked by grant: settlers petitioned the proprietor, Lord Baltimore, for a survey, paid a small fee, and received a deed. Shipley's grant was commemorated nearly three centuries later during the tercentenary of the Shipleys of Maryland, on May twenty-fifth nineteen sixty-eight. This marker connects a seventeenth-century planting family to the suburban community that grew up on their original land.