Newtowne Neck: Jesuit Land, Piscataway Homeland, Maryland State Park

Newtowne Neck is one of those places where there's still far more land than people — which is exactly why the priests who settled it in 1668 chose it.

The place

• The club-shaped peninsula juts from the north shore of the Potomac River about six miles south of Leonardtown, in St. Mary's County, Maryland, between Breton Bay and Saint Clements Bay — where English colonists arrived on the Ark and the Dove in 1634.
• Newtowne Neck State Park covers 776 acres wrapped in seven miles of sandy shoreline.
• Maryland bought it in 2009 from the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus — the Jesuits, an order of Catholic priests — who had held it for more than 300 years. The state's planners were drawn by its long shoreline and well-kept rural landscape.

It was part of a package: the Jesuits offered four historic Maryland properties — Newtowne Neck and St. Inigoes (St. Mary's County), Cedar Point (Charles County) and Old Bohemia (Cecil County, on the Eastern Shore) — totaling almost 4,500 acres and nearly 20 miles of Potomac shoreline. The Conservation Fund and the Friends of the John Smith Trail (later the Chesapeake Conservancy) helped make the deal.

• About 70 percent of Newtowne Neck lies in Maryland's Critical Area — all land within 1,000 feet of tidal waters and wetlands.
• Besides waterfront, the park has woodlands, wetlands and a couple of streams.
• The four properties matter partly because they've changed so little: the Jesuits farmed them to fund their work, farming continues, and each has only a few buildings.
• The three Potomac tracts also open public access to the river and the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, which runs up the Potomac to Washington.

A single road crosses wide fields — in corn season, the stalks crowd close like the walls of a tall green alley — to the tip of the peninsula. Roughly half the land is still forest, meadow and wetland, and the state has turned old logging and deer trails into quiet footpaths.

The first people

The colonists didn't arrive in an empty land. This stretch of river was part of the homeland of the Piscataway people, whose presence on Newtowne Neck is documented as early as 4000 B.C. Archaeology and records show they stayed on the peninsula for a short time after the Europeans came, before English expansion displaced Native communities.

A Catholic refuge

In the early 1600s, England's Protestant crown suppressed Catholicism. But George Calvert, a Catholic, won the king's favor and a grant of land in North America for a colony offering religious freedom. He died before the voyage; his son took over the charter, and in 1634 another son, Leonard, led the colonists across the Atlantic and up the Potomac. The two small ships carried more than 150 passengers, among them 17 Catholic men and three Jesuit priests.

In March, they landed on an island they named for St. Clement, patron saint of sailors, where the Catholics celebrated what is said to be Maryland's first Mass.

Maryland tolerated Catholicism under a king who officially did not, so the Jesuits acquired land through Catholic intermediaries:

About four priests and a few assistants lived at the "Newtown Manor House," riding out on horseback to say Mass and perform rites for Catholic families — while also running the land as a plantation, first with indentured servants and then with enslaved people. At about 850 acres in 1668, it was one of the smaller Jesuit plantations in Maryland (others ran about 2,000–5,000 acres), and records show large losses to erosion over time. Together, their holdings made the Jesuits one of the largest colonial landowners after the Calverts.

Surviving persecution

• After 1688, restrictions tightened and public worship was banned; Mass moved to private homes and chapels. Newtowne Neck's chapel closed in 1704, and a new one was built attached to the manor house to comply with the law.
• By 1731, with tolerance restored, the Jesuits built a new chapel and manor house. The chapel survives as St. Francis Xavier Parish, still holding Mass.
• In 1789 the manor house was replaced by a large brick house with double chimneys at each gable, standing beside the church and in need of preservation. Both are visible from the park road but sit on private church land.

Visiting today

Apart from these buildings, the Jesuits left few marks — except a recent, extensive shoreline stabilization project whose sandy beaches now serve park visitors. Wading is allowed; swimming is not. The state also added a canoe and kayak launch on the calm, sheltered waters of Breton Bay, steps from ample parking along the entrance road.

Sources

Based on "Finding History and Nature at Newtowne Neck State Park," Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, National Park Service, an abridged article; rewritten in hubnx's own words.