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The Star-Spangled State
America in Miniature
Maryland was founded as a haven for Catholics in a Protestant England — a tolerant experiment that preceded the First Amendment by 150 years. Lord Baltimore’s 1634 charter established a proprietary colony where religious difference was legally protected under the Act Concerning Religion of 1649. That Maryland promptly developed a plantation economy built on enslaved labor while championing religious tolerance captures the contradiction that ran through the state’s entire history: broad ideals, narrow practice.
The Chesapeake Bay made Maryland. Its 11,684 miles of tidal shoreline shaped everything — the tobacco economy of the colonial era, the oyster and crab harvests of the 19th century, the shipbuilding and trade that made Baltimore one of America’s great ports. The Bay’s tributaries reached deep into the interior, and the watermen who worked its waters developed a culture as distinctive as any in America: skipjacks, crab pots, deadrise workboats, and an intimate knowledge of tides that passed from father to son.
Fort McHenry gave the nation its anthem. In September 1814, a British fleet bombarded the fort at the entrance to Baltimore Harbor for 25 hours. Francis Scott Key, watching from a British ship where he was negotiating a prisoner exchange, saw the American flag still flying at dawn and wrote the poem that became “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The original flag — 30 by 42 feet — is preserved at the Smithsonian. The fort still stands on its Locust Point peninsula.
Maryland’s Civil War position was as fraught as any state’s. It was a slave state that stayed in the Union — partly by the Lincoln administration’s willingness to arrest the state legislature before it could vote on secession. Confederate sympathies ran deep in the Eastern Shore and southern Maryland; Union sentiment dominated the north and west. The bloodiest single day of the war, Antietam, was fought on Maryland soil in September 1862. Maryland supplied soldiers to both sides.
Today Maryland is defined by its relationship to Washington, D.C. Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties are essentially extensions of the federal city, housing hundreds of thousands of government workers, contractors, and their families. The National Institutes of Health, the National Security Agency, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center all sit in Maryland. Yet the Eastern Shore remains one of the most rural and traditional landscapes on the East Coast, where skipjack races and blue crab season still set the calendar.
1632
Charter Granted
King Charles I grants Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, a charter for the Maryland colony as a haven for English Catholics.
1649
Act of Toleration
Maryland passes the Act Concerning Religion, one of the first laws in the world mandating religious tolerance.
1729
Baltimore Founded
Baltimore Town is established at the mouth of the Patapsco River, growing into one of the great port cities of colonial America.
1788
Statehood
Maryland ratifies the Constitution as the seventh state on April 28.
1814
Star-Spangled Banner
Francis Scott Key writes “The Star-Spangled Banner” after watching Fort McHenry withstand a British bombardment during the War of 1812.
1830
B&O Railroad
The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad begins steam locomotive service — the first railroad to offer regular scheduled steam service in America.
1862
Battle of Antietam
The bloodiest single day in American military history unfolds near Sharpsburg; 22,700 casualties in one day stop Lee’s first invasion of the North.
1876
Johns Hopkins Opens
Johns Hopkins University opens in Baltimore as America’s first research university, transforming American higher education.
1954
Integration Begins
The University of Maryland begins integration before Brown v. Board; Thurgood Marshall, an NAACP lawyer from Baltimore, argues the landmark case.
1992
Camden Yards Opens
Oriole Park at Camden Yards opens in Baltimore, launching a nationwide movement of retro-style ballparks that transforms baseball stadium design.
