Page 76 - Maryland Historical Trust - Archaeology Colonial MD

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Foundation and cellar, Mattapany (18ST390). Note the tile floor of the cellar.
17th-century Maryland, was designed to create political corporations more easily controlled by the Calvert leadership. But Charles Calvert was a realist who understood that town building had always been a challenge for both Maryland and Virginia. He also recognized that the spread of settlement across the colony was showing no signs of abating. Thus, he turned his attention to the one settlement form that seemed to have no problem getting established in the Chesapeake — the plantation — to insert and extend his family’s presence in the greater colony. Calvert established plantations and associated ports under his control (or the control of his cronies) near the mouths of the colony’s major rivers, including, initially, the Patuxent and Wicomico rivers on the west- ern shore. Getting control of major rivers was a textbook practice for colonizers. Rivers were not only economically important, their environments posed physical and political dangers as well. Some of the Calvert family’s most ardent political enemies, including Thomas Gerard and Josias
Fendall, had already established their plantations near the mouth of the Wicomico. It was there that they had plotted (and continued to plot) the Calverts’ political undoing.38
Four plantation sites associated with the Calverts played important roles in the colony’s political development and all four have been the focus of archaeological investigation. Two of the plantations include Mattapany, the proprietor’s principal residence at the mouth of the Patuxent, and Notley Hall, the deputy governor’s mansion at the mouth of the Wicomico (both sites known for decades). Overlooked documentary clues suggest that Mattapany and Notley Hall were not typical plantations. Both served as regular meeting places for the Maryland Council and the Provincial Court, with a previously unknown Ad- miralty Court held at Notley Hall in 1672. Both plantations were also required ports of entry for ships trading in their respective rivers, and they were both sites of colonial defense. By the early 1670s, the colony’s principal magazine had been
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PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF NAVAL AIR STATION PATUXENT RIVER, NAVAL DISTRICT WASHINGTON.