Port Tobacco times, and Charles County advertiser. (Port Tobacco, Md.) 1845-1898, 1857-03-05
the townspe

10 Gne pioneer log nut, ana
building to the substantial brick edihce
the peculiar style Of the times, many Of
!. which were afterwards taken down and
! transported to Annapolis.
st. Mary's, at this time, $1,000 present
ed the appearance of one of those inland
English villages which cluster around the
castellated mansion of the manor lord, OF
lay beneath the spire Of it's Cathedral church,
with nothing to indicate it las the metropolis
of a province save it's fort, shipping and
harbor.
The lapse of years which witnessed the
duration of the city Of st. Mary as the capt.
tai of the Province of Maryland, unlike the
same period of time in the present day, was
unfavorable to the growth of the colonial
cities of the American continent, however
commanding their geographical or CONNER
cial position might have been.
The face of the christian world was desc
lated by long and fierce wars of powers, in
terests and opinions-piracy under power
full marine organization swept commerce
from the seas; smuggling, which had be-
come a fourth estate in the American colo
MES, defrauded the revenue, evaded and
sometimes deied the laws of the land agri-
culture did little more than feed the tillers
of the soil; what political economists call
balance of trade was against the colony
Tobacco, the sole staple of expectation,
though sold in London at exhorbitant prices,
was returned to the Province in articles of
luxury, and consumption which added no.
thing to the permanent wealth of it's inhabi-
tants. The repeated parliamentary restric-
tons upon colonial trade were an emphatic
announcement by the people Of England that
the Colonies existed only for the consump-
ton of her manufactures and the production
of the raw materials of trade by which the
merchants of England laid the foundations
of that manufacturing and commercial inte-
rest, which, in the course of the three score
and ten years allotted to the life of man, be-
came the dominant power in the realm
thus the Colony Of Maryland having within
her limits the noblest Of bays, receiving the
waters of the deepest Of rivers, draining a
vast extent of country teeming with agri-
cultural and mineral wealth, remained I'M
til the close of the American Revolution in
the same condition of undeveloped power as
the Italian republics of the tenth century,
or the South American States of the present
day.
The ascendancy of political and secta-
rian influence transferred the proprietary
capital Of Maryland from the banks of the
Saint Mary's to the banks of the Severn
the colonial aristocracy, whose manor houses
dotted the face Of the country, disappeared
with the metropolitan gration-the town
land reverted back to the manor from which
it was taken or reserved-builders quarried
from the deserted brick edifces-the walls
of the fort sank to the level of the earth, and
it's corroded guns, which once defended the
town and harbor, may now be occasionally
seen as land boundaries; with the exception
of the State House, which was granted by
the Legislature in 1893 to William and
Mary parish for church, the city Of Saint
Marys in few years disappeared from the
map Of the country. But even that monu-
ment Of Maryland's early history was taken
down some years ago to furnish materials
for the construction Of the present church
edifce, so that the only cotemporaneous sur
vlvor Of old colony times is an enormous
mulberry elm which stood within the enclo-
sure Of the fort, and there it stands looking
down upon the graves of the generations Of
men who died beneath it's shade-each ty-
pical of their peculiar race, creed, govern
mont and law; and if left to the natural pro-
cess of decay will still stand when all men
now living shall have passed away and their
existence be forgotten.
A very cursory glance at the panorama of
the valley of the Saint Mary's must neces-
sarily determine the fact that safety, facili-
ty of defence, and the beauty of its geogra-
Iphical and commercial position, induced
Leonard Calvert, the pioneer governor, to
select that location as the site of city which
under all the ordinary circumstances that
direct the course Of trade and foster the ex-
pansion of commerce, would have become
the chief city of a rich and populous pro-
vince, if not the commercial emporium of
the Atlantic coast, connected as it is by the
tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay and Po-
tomac river, with vast extent of inland
country measured by parallels of latitude and
by the same waters with the outside world
beyond the Atlantic.
The general topography of the plain of ST.
Marys bears marked resemblance, on a
miniature scale to the site Of Constantinople
as it is described by Polybius under the
name of Byzanturm before the Christian era.
The Saint Marys river, after leaving the
foot Of the spine which divides the sources
Of the tributaries Of the Chesapeake bay from
those of the Potomac, and sweeping around