866-MD-WELCOME
www.mdisfun.org

www.state.md.us

 

 

 

#   Entered Union      Year Settled

7^th        April 28, 1788       1634

 

Nickname

Old Line State

 

Rank   Population

19^th            5,633,597

 

Rank   Square Miles

42^nd           12,407

 

State Bird

Baltimore Oriole

 

State Flower

Black-Eyed Susan

 

State Tree

White Oak (see also: Wye Oak)

 

State Motto

Fatti maschii, parole femine  Manly deeds, womanly words

 

One of the original 13 states to join the Union (in 1788), Maryland is in the middle of the Eastern Seaboard. It's believed that Lord Baltimore, who received a charter for the land in 1632, named the state after Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of King Charles I.

 

The Mason and Dixon line was drawn in the 1760s to settle a dispute between the Penn and Calvert families. In addition to marking the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, it is the traditional boundary between the North and the South. Maryland is known as the "Free State"; its capital is Annapolis, home of the U.S. Naval Academy.

 

The Continental Congress Ratified the Treaty of Paris

When did the Revolutionary War officially come to an end? On September 3, 1783, more than a year after the last shots were fired, a peace treaty was drawn up in Paris. Under the terms of the treaty, the United States was granted territory as far west as the Mississippi River.

 

After Treaty of Paris was signed, it was sent to the Continental Congress. The United States had six months to ratify (approve) the document and return it to England. With the journey requiring approximately two months, the treaty needed to be on its way back to England by January. The valuable document almost did not arrive in time.

 

A ratifying convention was scheduled at the Maryland State House in November, but many of the delegates did not arrive right away. By January 12, only seven of the 13 states had sent their representatives. Time was running short; where were the other delegates?

 

Operating under the weak Articles of Confederation, the Continental Congress lacked the power to enforce attendance at the convention. On January 13, the convention needed one more delegate. Finally, South Carolina Representative Richard Beresford, who was ill, traveled to Maryland. As soon as he arrived, the vote was taken, and on January 14, 1784, the treaty was ratified. The United States was officially an independent nation.

 

Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass once told a group of African American students from a school in Talbot County, Maryland, "What was possible for me is possible for you. Do not think because you are colored you cannot accomplish anything. Strive earnestly to add to your knowledge. So long as you remain in ignorance, so long will you fail to command the respect of your fellow men."

 

Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Maryland in 1817 to a slave mother and a white father he never knew, Frederick Douglass grew up to become a leader in the abolitionist movement and the first black citizen to hold high rank (as U.S. minister and consul general to Haiti) in the U.S. government.

 

Harriet Tubman: Conductor of the Underground Railroad

Harriet Tubman, born c. 1820, was a runaway slave from Maryland who became known as the "Moses of her people." Over the course of 10 years, and at great personal risk, she led hundreds of slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad, a secret network of safe houses where runaway slaves could stay on their journey north to freedom. She later became a leader in the abolitionist movement, and during the Civil War she was a spy for the federal forces in South Carolina as well as a nurse.

 

Harriet Tubman's name at birth was Araminta Ross. She was one of 11 children of Harriet and Benjamin Ross born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland. As a child, Ross was "hired out" by her master as a nursemaid for a small baby. Ross had to stay awake all night so that the baby wouldn't cry and wake the mother. If Ross fell asleep, the baby's mother whipped her. From a very young age, Ross was determined to gain her freedom. Can you imagine what other kinds of embarrassment Ross suffered as a slave?

 

As a slave, Araminta Ross was scarred for life when she refused to help in the punishment of another young slave. A young man had gone to the store without permission, and when he returned, the overseer wanted to whip him. He asked Ross to help but she refused. When the young man started to run away, the overseer picked up a heavy iron weight and threw it at him. He missed the young man and hit Ross instead. The weight nearly crushed her skull and left a deep scar. She was unconscious for days, and suffered from seizures for the rest of her life.

 

In 1844, Ross married a free black named John Tubman and took his last name. She also changed her first name, taking her mother's name, Harriet. In 1849, worried that she and the other slaves on the plantation were going to be sold, Tubman decided to run away. Her husband refused to go with her, so she set out with her two brothers, and followed the North Star in the sky to guide her north to freedom. Her brothers became frightened and turned back, but she continued on and reached Philadelphia. There she found work as a household servant and saved her money so she could return to help others escape.

 

After Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery, she returned to slave-holding states many times to help other slaves escape. She led them safely to the northern free states and to Canada. It was very dangerous to be a runaway slave. There were rewards for their capture.

 

Whenever Tubman led a group of slaves to freedom, she placed herself in great danger. There was a bounty offered for her capture because she was a fugitive slave herself, and she was breaking the law in slave states by helping other slaves escape. What do you think Tubman did when someone she was helping became frightened and wanted to turn back.

 

If anyone ever wanted to change his or her mind during the journey to freedom and return, Tubman pulled out a gun and said, "You'll be free or die a slave!" Tubman knew that if anyone turned back, it would put her and the other escaping slaves in danger of discovery, capture or even death.

 

She became so well known for leading slaves to freedom that Tubman became known as the "Moses of Her People." Many slaves dreaming of freedom sang the spiritual "Go Down Moses." Slaves hoped a savior would deliver them from slavery just as Moses had delivered the Israelites from slavery.

 

Tubman made 19 trips to Maryland and helped 300 people to freedom. During these dangerous journeys she helped rescue members of her own family, including her 70-year-old parents. At one point, rewards for Tubman's capture totaled $40,000. Yet, she was never captured and never failed to deliver her "passengers" to safety. As Tubman herself said, "On my Underground Railroad I [never] run my train off [the] track [and] I never [lost] a passenger."

 

The Battle of Antietam

At dawn, the hills of Sharpsburg, Maryland, thundered with artillery and musket fire as the Northern and Southern armies struggled for possession of the Miller farm cornfield during the Civil War. For three hours, the battle lines swept back and forth across the land. More lives would be lost on September 17, 1862, than on any other day in the nation's history.

 

By mid-morning, General Robert E. Lee's Confederate troops were crouched behind the high banks of a country lane. They fired upon advancing Union troops, but the Union General, George B. McClellan, held a strategic advantage--a scout had discovered a copy of the Confederate army's battle plan.

 

An overwhelming number of Northerners broke through the Confederates' line. Union bullets rained down the lane onto Confederate soldiers, and the former Sunken Road came to be known as Bloody Lane because of the tragic death toll suffered there.

 

Covered by cannon fire from General Stonewall Jackson's artillery, the Southerners retreated toward Sharpsburg, while the Union troops fell back. New Southern troops arrived in time to repel a second Union attack led by General Ambrose Burnside.

 

By nightfall, the Confederates occupied the town of Sharpsburg, but the battle was a Union victory. More than 23,000 men were killed, wounded, or missing in action. The next day, Lee began his retreat across the Potomac River. Lee's plan to find new recruits and supplies in Maryland, a slave-holding state that remained in the Union, had failed. The next year he would launch another assault into Union territory, which came to a head at the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania.

 

Maryland Day

Do you know how Maryland and the city of Baltimore got their names? On March 25, Marylanders celebrate Maryland Day to honor the arrival of the first colonists to the land King Charles I of England chartered to Lord Baltimore in 1634. He named the land after the King's wife, Henrietta Maria, or Mary. Lord Baltimore had almost complete control over the colony as long as he paid the King a share of all the gold or silver discovered on the land. Who came to this new colony?

 

Catholics escaping religious persecution in England saw Maryland as a safe haven. The colony even passed an act ensuring religious liberty and justice to those who believed in Jesus Christ in 1649. Besides the busy port of Baltimore, another important city in Maryland is Annapolis, established as the capital in 1694 and home to the U.S. Naval Academy, founded in 1845. When do you think Maryland became a state, and what famous song was written here?

 

In 1788, Maryland entered the Union as the seventh state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. During the War of 1812, the British bombarded Baltimore's Fort McHenry "with bombs bursting in air." Watching this was a young lawyer named Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to "The Star-Spangled Banner" based on his eyewitness account.

 

Maryland has an even more fascinating history. Ask your family what they know about the state, and while you're at it, try humming a few bars of our national anthem, written by a Marylander.

 

Cracking Crabs in Maryland

Do you know what a "jimmy" is? Jimmies, callinectes sapidus, beautiful swimmers, channelers, sooks, and she-crabs -- are all names for the blue crab, a crustacean found in the Chesapeake Bay. The Chesapeake Bay is a large bay on the Atlantic coast of the United States. It has played an important role in the history and culture of the state of Maryland.

 

Chesapeake Bay fishermen, or watermen, have harvested the waters for crabs, oysters, clams, and fish for many generations. They work in skipjacks, a name for workboats or fishing boats. Commercial fishing was a huge industry in Maryland, but pollution has caused a decrease in the population of the bay's marine life. Consequently, many watermen struggle to maintain their way of life.

 

Nevertheless, Marylanders love their crab and eat them by the bushel at crab houses. These restaurants cover their tables with brown paper, unload a bushel of crabs on the table and provide knives and mallets for customers to pry the crabs open. Have you ever eaten a crab?

 

Benjamin Banneker

Do you know who Benjamin Banneker was and what he did?

 

Benjamin Banneker was a self-educated scientist at a time when most African Americans were slaves. Born a free black man in the British Colony of Maryland in 1731, he received some formal education, but he mostly borrowed books and taught himself science and mathematics. At 22, he borrowed a pocket watch, and without any training, figured out how to carve a working wooden clock that chimed each hour. Because of this clock, he became well known and people would visit him just to see his creation.

 

Banneker ran his family farm for many years, but when he was in his late 50s, a neighbor's son lent him a telescope. He became interested in astronomy, the study of the planets and stars, and again taught himself a new science. He made calculations of tides, sunrises and sunsets, and even predicted an eclipse. For several years he published an almanac of these calculations. Today, he is best known for publishing six almanacs, called "Benjamin Banneker's Almanac," between 1792 and 1797.

 

In the 1790s, Banneker also helped survey and lay out the land for Washington, D.C., which became the nation's capital. For a look at Banneker's amazing life, visit the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park & Museum in Ellicott City, Maryland.

 

The Carroll County Ghost Walk

Does your town play host to any ghosts?

 

Every year the Public Library of Carroll County, Maryland, is a ghost host! Since the early 1980s, the library has held the Carroll County Ghost Walk. At this event, visitors come to the library and learn about local ghost legends and sightings. Afterward, they head out into the streets to tour the town of Westminster and see the spooky spots for themselves.

 

Is Westminster really haunted? Some people think so. In fact, Cockey's Tavern in Westminster is said to have its own ghost -- a confederate soldier who was wounded in the Battle of Gettysburg. Stories say that he likes to help himself at the bar, rearrange pictures on the wall, and, in general, be a troublemaker.

 

Over the years many strange and unexplained sightings have taken place in many other places in Carroll County. Come to the Carroll County Ghost Walk and see for yourself!