Page 105 - Maryland Historical Trust - Archaeology Colonial MD

obvious technical advantages as backing for a fire- place, and Dutch tin-glazed tiles are not unusu- al, but in combination with the green and yellow floor tiles and pantile roofing tiles from Holland the combination is quite distinctive. Clearly this is demonstrating a propensity (if not a preference) among the non-conformist Puritans to trade with a friendly Protestant country.
The Puritans clearly considered Providence to be a town. They named local landmarks “Town Point,” “Town Creek,” and the “Town Path.” They also distributed small plots of property considered to be Town Lands. But to an anthropologist the settlement was probably more correctly defined as a “hamlet.” Providence was a collection of houses, but only contained a single public building — a meeting house. The placement of the actual build- ings in the settlement followed a very clear model based on the local topography. The preferred locale seems to have been at a freshwater spring head in relation to a small protected cove. Such a location would provide access to deep water that was vital
when little more than paths existed in the interior, and it would still provide some shelter from the di- rect weather conditions encountered on the coast- line. Today many of these small coves have been entirely silted in due to agricultural run-off. Inter- estingly, other 17th century towns in the region do not follow this pattern. This hamlet-type settle- ment was not a part of the landscape in the slightly later 17th century “lost towns” of Herrington and London Town.
When finally rediscovered, Herrington (18AN1214), first occupied soon after Providence, also proved to have a transportation orientation. However, it appears that inland infrastructure was more well-established during the period of Herrington’s development than it had been just a few years earlier at Providence. In 1652, Samuel Chew patented 400 acres of land for the town of “Herrington.” By the end of that decade, the set- tlement was significant enough to be the site of county-wide elections. In 1667, Herrington was formally established as a town by Lord Baltimore.
figure 13
Herrington as depicted on Augustine Hermann’s 1670 Map of the Chesapeake.
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