Archaeologists find earliest colonial site, a ‘sister colony’ to Jamestown
Maryland archaeologist Travis Parno was at a board game convention in Philadelphia, sitting at a table surrounded by thousands of other enthusiasts when he got a text message.
He was supposed to be on vacation, taking a break from his search for the legendary fort at St. Mary’s, the first permanent English settlement in Maryland and one of the earliest in what would become the United States.
Back at St. Mary’s, archaeological geophysicist Tim Horsley had been scanning a site a half-mile from St. Mary’s River with ground-penetrating radar that could detect the outlines of ancient buildings.
The text message interrupting Parno’s vacation was from Horsley. It said: “I think we found it.”
On Monday, Historic St. Mary’s City announced that Parno, director of research for the organization, and Horsley had found the outlines of the palisaded fort that was erected in Southern Maryland by White settlers in 1634.
Horsley’s scans had revealed the imprint of postholes that formed a large rectangle with a semicircular bastion at one corner.
The scans also showed evidence of what appeared to be dwellings inside the fort, including several that may have been Native American.
Excavation later turned up evidence of the brick cellar of a guardhouse or storehouse, the trigger guard for a musket and a quartzite arrowhead that was 4,500 years old.
“This is our moment,” Parno said. “This is the earliest colonial archaeological site in Maryland. This is it.”
William Kelso, the archaeologist who in 1994 discovered the lost fort at Jamestown, Va., said the discovery is “extremely significant because St. Mary’s is sort of a sister colony . . . [and] it’s another page to the story, to chapter one.”
Archaeologists had been seeking the St. Mary’s fort since the 1930s. The site today is in an empty meadow where the wind blows off the river and the shadows of soaring turkey buzzards drift over the landscape.
It is owned by Historic St. Mary’s City and is about the size of a football field.
Much like the famous Jamestown fort, which marked the first permanent English settlement in what would become the United States, its exact location had been lost.
The original 150 colonists, including many English Catholics fleeing Protestant persecution back home, had arrived at St. Mary’s on two ships, the Ark and the Dove, in late March 1634, Parno said.
They were preceded by the English settlers at such places as Jamestown in 1607, Plymouth in 1620 and Massachusetts Bay in 1630.
The Maryland group included a Jesuit priest, Andrew White; the colony’s first governor, Leonard Calvert; and Mathias de Sousa, an indentured servant of African and Portuguese descent who later served in the legislative assembly of freemen.
“I found a most convenient harbor, and pleasant country lying on each side of it,” Calvert wrote to his business partner, Richard Lechford, on May 30, 1634.
“On the east side of it we have seated ourselves, within one half mile of the river,” he wrote. They had erected “a pallizado of one hundred and twenty yards square” with four bastions equipped with small artillery pieces.
The palisade was probably 12to 14-feet high.
White reported: “Our towne we call St. Maries . . . . [It] abounds not alone with profit but also with pleasure.”
But like Jamestown, the settlement at St. Mary’s was later abandoned. The capital moved to Annapolis in the 1690s, and the site was left undisturbed and ripe for archaeology.
St. Mary’s has produced major archaeological finds in the past.
It was Maryland’s first capital and home to the first State House.
In 1990, experts exhumed three lead-lined coffins containing the remains of Maryland colonial governor Philip Calvert, who died in 1683, his first wife, Anne, and Calvert’s 6-monthold son.
Anne’s coffin contained sprigs of the memorial herb rosemary, bits of a silk ribbon that may have been used to bind her wrists for burial - and much of her hair. The baby had suffered from the childhood disease rickets and probably scurvy.
The search for the fort had continued through the 1980s and ‘90s with inconclusive results. The quest was put on hold for many years as St. Mary’s focused on other projects.
Parno resumed the hunt in 2017, and his find was deemed conclusive in late 2019.