History
Southern Maryland was originally inhabited by Piscataway Indians. Captain John Smith explored the area in 1608 and 1609. In 1634 St. Mary's City, at southern Maryland's lower tip was the site of the first Roman Catholic English settlement in North America (the site is now a living history museum). Tobacco plantations flourished in southern Maryland during slavery.
With a slave economy during the American Civil War, regional white sympathies were very pro-Confederate (as evidenced in the official state song lyrics). From the war's beginning, however, large numbers of Union occupying troops and patrolling river gunboats prevented the state's secession, although nighttime smuggling across the Potomac River with Virginia took place. John Wilkes Booth was helped by local people in his escape through the area after killing President Abraham Lincoln.
Southern Maryland was traditionally a rural and agricultural region, linked by passenger and freight steamboat routes. These steamboat routes operated on the Chesapeake Bay and major rivers until the 1930s before the building of highways and the Harry W. Nice Memorial Bridge on U.S. Highway 301. Weekend excursion boats also carried Washingtonians to small amusement parks and amusement pavilions at numerous shore locations. From 1949 (1943 in some places) to 1968, the region was popular for its slot machine gambling.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.”
—Aristide Briand (1862–1932)
““And now this is the way in which the history of your former life has reached my ears!” As he said this he held out in his hand the fatal letter.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)