St. Mary's City: Maryland's First Capital and First Disappearance

Maryland's first colonial capital was established at St. Mary's City in sixteen thirty-four, not long after the first coffee shop opened in London and more than a century before the Declaration of Independence. It served as the seat of the colonial assembly, the courts, and the governor for sixty years. Then, in sixteen ninety-five, the capital moved to Annapolis, and St. Mary's City did not decline. It disappeared.

Not destroyed, not burned, not flooded. It simply emptied. The residents followed the government north. Buildings were abandoned and left to rot. Fields returned to forest. Within a generation, the first permanent English capital in Maryland had been entirely reclaimed by the land around it. No settlement remained. The site was plowed for farmland and grazed and treated like ordinary countryside for two and a half centuries.

Archaeologists began systematic excavations in the nineteen seventies and found the city underneath the fields. They located the footprints of the statehouse and the first Catholic church in the English colonies and the storehouse and the streets. They found the skeletal remains of residents, artifacts from the founding generation, and the physical outline of a city that had been completely invisible for three hundred years.

St. Mary's City now operates as a living history museum and active archaeological site, which means that the interpretation of what you are visiting, the interpretation of who founded it and who was excluded from it and what the colony actually was underneath its founding mythology, is still ongoing. The excavations are still going. The city that disappeared is still being found.