Page 43 - Maryland Historical Trust - Archaeology Colonial MD

subsoil surfaces with plastic sheeting, leaving por- tions of sites unexcavated for future investigations where feasible, and the collection of flotation, shell and soil samples were not standard prac- tice in historical archaeology before the St. John’s excavations. St. John’s is the site that opened the first window into the nature of 17th-century colonial life in Maryland. It revealed what the major elements of the archaeological record of 17th- century Chesapeake sites consisted of, and per- haps more importantly, how those varied elements could be deciphered and interpreted. While St. John’s abundantly informed us about living in early Maryland, it is the work at another site that told us about death and dying in the colony.
Mortality and Burial
One of the greatest risks colonists faced in com- ing to the Chesapeake was an early death. His- torians tell us that about one third of the immi- grants died in their first year from “the seasoning,” the name they used for the adjustment to the new disease environment of the region. Even if they survived that, few lived past 45 and children rarely had both natural parents with them as they grew up.20 Consequently death was a common feature of life in the new colony. Archaeology is the only way to learn directly about the people themselves in terms of health and disease and how the de- ceased were treated and buried. While many col- onists were interred on their own plantations in small burial plots, the largest formal cemetery in the 17th century was at St. Mary’s City in associa- tion with a Catholic church.
The first church in Maryland was built by Father Andrew White in the 1630s on a tract that is still called Chapel Land. It was a wooden struc- ture and the land around it became an accepted location for burial of the dead. Most were proba- bly Catholic although as a recognized “graveyard” it is possible some Protestants were also interred there as a matter of convenience. Legend tells that this chapel was burned by Richard Ingle following his attack on St. Mary’s City in 1645. Excavators did find one large structural post with a mold filled with charcoal that gives some sup- port to this legend. After that event, there is little information about what happened at the chapel site until the early 1660s, although it appears that burial continued. The one person we can be rela- tively certain was interred there during this time is Governor Leonard Calvert (brother to Lord
Baltimore), who died in June of 1647.
Things changed in the mid-1660s when
the land owners, the Jesuits, began construction of the first major brick structure in Maryland. It was apparently finished by 1669 when a Robert Pennywell broke out the windows of the Chapel in an anti-Catholic outburst. Further clues to the structure in the 1670s include a bequest to pur- chase “ornaments for the chapel” and payment to a person to dig a grave inside the building and replace the flooring stones. The only surviving description comes from the staunchly anti- Catholic royal governor Francis Nicholson. In 1697, he wrote that the Jesuits had “... a good brick chapel at St. Mary’s.” We can only wish he had been more verbose.
The next reference to the building is in 1704, after two priests celebrated Mass there. This pro- voked the next royal governor John Seymore to order the priests to appear before him and berate their actions and religion. He then ordered the sheriff of St. Mary’s County to lock the chapel door, take the key with him and insure that it was never again used for worship.21 This was the final act in bringing an end to Maryland’s innovative policies of Liberty of Conscience, the free exercise of religion, and separation of church from state. Catholics could no longer worship in public, hold office, serve in government, and were double taxed to support the official Church of England.
The chapel was a major symbol of the religious freedom offered by Maryland, for nowhere else in the English-speaking world at the time could a free-standing Catholic church be built, and certainly not in the capital city of any other English colony. While there is no specific date, the Jesuits probably dismantled the chapel ca. 1715 and recycled about 95% of the above ground building. The dead continued to be in- terred there afterward because a number of grave shafts are filled with demolition debris. In the 1750s, the Jesuits finally sold the site and it was converted into agricultural fields and any surviv- ing grave markers removed.
While the chapel was known from these few documentary references, no detailed descriptions, illustrations, or church records have survived. An adjacent building, called the Priest’s House, was long thought to be the chapel referred to in these documents. Only in 1938 did H. Chandlee Forman, observing brick in the plowed field, test the site and discover the presence of a larger cruciform-shaped structure. It was the building
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