In 1632, King Charles of England gave the territory that became Maryland to a man named George Calvert, the first Baron Baltimore. Calvert was Catholic, and he wanted to establish a place where Catholics could escape the religious persecution they were suffering in England. King Charles’ queen, Henrietta Maria, was also Catholic, and the king named the the new colony for his wife. He called it Terra Mariae, or Mary Land.
In 1649, the Maryland colonial government passed an act banning religious persecution, but that didn’t prevent it. The Puritans were strongly anti-Catholic, and they brought this outlook to the American colonies. In the 1650s, religious violence proliferated in Maryland, during a period called “the Plundering Time,” and in 1688, Catholicism was outlawed. Formal religious persecution in Maryland continued off and on for almost 100 years, until after the American Revolutionary War.
Maryland was involved in military action well before that war, though, in a conflict with the neighboring colony of Pennsylvania. Land grants creating the two colonies differed on the precise location of their border. This led to a dispute over who had the right to ferry people across the Susquehanna River, which ran through the border area.
In 1730 a man named Thomas Cresap, a Marylander, was attacked on his ferry boat by two Pennsylvanians who threatened to murder him. Cresap defended himself with his oars, but he ended up stranded on a rock in the river. He was eventually rescued by a passing Native American.
This incident invigorated the border dispute, and it continued for several years, including an occasion when a crowd of some twenty men forced their way into Cresap’s house. His wife drove them out with gunfire.
Maryland and Pennsylvania both called militias into action, and the resulting conflict was called Cresap’s War. It ended in 1738, when King George II of England forced the colonies to negotiate a cease-fire. The drawing of the Mason Dixon Line in the 1760s finally defined the official border.
The Mason Dixon Line was regarded as the divider between states to the south, which embraced slavery, and those to the north, which did not. Maryland was the exception. It was a slave state, but it was north of the line, and when the American Civil War began it remained in the Union.
This ambivalence is reflected in some of Maryland’s history during that war. For example, an 1861 riot, triggered when Baltimore citizens attacked Union troops marching through the town, is regarded as the first Civil War bloodshed. Overall, some 115,000 people from Maryland served in armed forces during the war: 85,000 for the Union, 30,000 for the Confederacy.
In more peaceful news, Maryland has more than 4,000 miles of shoreline, along both the Atlantic Ocean and the meandering edges of the Chesapeake Bay. However, it has no natural lakes, only man-made ones.
Route 50 covers 144 miles in Maryland, from Ocean City to Washington, D.C. It first crosses the DelMarVa peninsula (the states of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia each occupy parts of the peninsula). It then follows Maryland’s Eastern Shore along the Chesapeake Bay and crosses the bay, passing Annapolis, Maryland’s state capitol.
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The map was generated using Google Maps.