Walking across the athletic fields at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, nothing looks out of the ordinary. To the casual observer, the scene is unremarkable, other than the picturesque beauty of the landscape of southern Maryland, with its gentle hills and forests.
In the summer of 2016, the college commissioned an archaeological team to examine the site of a proposed athletic stadium complex. Soon, the team began finding pottery sherds, pieces of glass, clay tobacco pipes and other indicators that there had been houses on the site at some point.
The land around St. Mary’s College is steeped in history. Where the public honors college now stands was once the original capital of colonial Maryland, St. Mary’s City, before it was relocated to what became present-day Annapolis in 1695. As a result, the campus and its surroundings are unusually rich in archaeological remains, so much so that half of the former St. Mary’s City, which is now designated as an unincorporated community, is a living museum. The other half belongs to St. Mary’s College, which serves nearly 2,000 undergraduate students in a bucolic setting by the Chesapeake Bay.
Once the team had physical evidence of the existence of dwellings beneath the athletic fields, they began to comb through written records to gain a better understanding of what these might have been. An Orphan’s Court evaluation in 1829 gives evidence that there were two log quarters on the site that fell in and out of use over the decades leading up to the Civil War.
Slavery was interwoven with the landscape of southern Maryland, where more than half of the population was African- American on the eve of the Civil War. From the middle of the 18th century up until the Civil War, the land where St. Mary’s College sits was a plantation, cultivated with slave labor. The quarters, then, were most likely inhabited by enslaved people.
“At least one or two families would have lived in each dwelling, depending on the size,” says Dr. Julia A. King, a professor of archaeology at St. Mary’s.
King, who led the excavations in the athletic fields, is a well-known archaeologist who has studied the Chesapeake region for decades. One of the earliest sites inhabited by European settlers in North America, southern Maryland is a nexus for many of the cultural influences that shaped present-day America. It was home to thriving Native American populations, was riven by religious strife between Catholics and Protestants up until the 19th century, and its lands were cultivated with the labor of people brought to the Americas as slaves. Through a combination of written records and archaeological remains, researchers and archaeologists like King can put together a comprehensive picture of the past.
