Maryland

Around 10,000 BC the first humans, known as Paleo-Indians, arrived in what became Maryland, living in small, semi-nomadic groups and hunting large game such as bison and mammoths. After Ice Age animals died out around 8000 BC, Archaic people used the rivers and Chesapeake Bay for transportation and food; by about 1500 BC oysters had become an important food, and around 1000 BC Woodland people made pots and relied on seed plants. Around AD 800 corn, tobacco and squash and the bow and arrow came into use, and around AD 1000 permanent villages formed near water, wood and fertile soil, with tribes eventually organizing into chiefdoms led by a single leader.⁠[1]

In 1498 John Cabot, a Venetian navigator sailing under the English flag, traveled along the Eastern Shore near present-day Worcester County. In April 1524 Giovanni da Verrazzano’s expedition passed the mouth of Chesapeake Bay and explored the lower Eastern Shore. In 1562 the Spanish cartographer Diego Gutiérrez became the first to map Chesapeake Bay, calling it the “Bahia de Santa Maria,” and in 1572 Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, Spanish governor of FloridaFloridaFlorida is a U.S. state occupying mainly the Florida peninsula, with its capital at Tallahassee; its most populous city is Jacksonville. It entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as the 27th state, and had a population of 21,538,187 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, explored the bay.⁠[1]

Capt. John Smith led two voyages exploring Chesapeake Bay, beginning on June 2 and July 24, 1608. In May 1631 William Claiborne, a member of the Virginia Council, established a trading post and farming settlement on Kent Island.⁠[2]

On June 20, 1632, Charles I granted a charter to Cecilius Calvert, 2nd Lord Baltimore, and the colony was named after Charles’s queen, Henrietta Maria.⁠[2]

On November 22, 1633, settlers led by Leonard Calvert sailed from Cowes, England, aboard the Ark and the Dove, landing on St. Clement’s Island on March 25, 1634, a date now observed as Maryland Day. St. Mary’s City was established on March 27, 1634, and served as Maryland’s capital until 1694.⁠[2]

On September 13, 1642, a gubernatorial proclamation declared the Susquehannocks, Wicomisses and Nanticokes “enemies” of the province. On July 5, 1652, the Susquehannocks signed a treaty at the Severn River ceding Eastern and Western Shore lands to the English, except Kent Island and Palmer’s Island. On December 20, 1660, Uttapoingassinem was formally recognized as Tayac (emperor) of the Piscataways; in 1680 the Piscataways moved to Zekiah Swamp to escape raids by the Iroquois and Susquehannocks; and on October 13, 1692, the Emperor of Piscataway entered a “League of Amity” with the colonial government.⁠[2]

On April 21, 1649, the colony enacted An Act concerning Religion, a religious toleration law.⁠[2]

On July 27, 1689, Protestant Associators under John Coode overthrew the proprietary officers in the Maryland Revolution of 1689, and on March 12, 1692, William III and Mary II declared Maryland a royal colony. On February 28–March 1, 1694/1695, the capital moved from St. Mary’s City to Anne Arundel Town, which was renamed Annapolis in May 1695.⁠[2]

Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon surveyed the boundary line with Pennsylvania between 1763 and 1767. On October 19, 1774, a mob burned the Peggy Stewart in Annapolis harbor.⁠[3]

Marylanders William Paca, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Thomas Stone and Samuel Chase signed the engrossed copy of the Declaration of Independence. On November 8, 1776, the Ninth Provincial Convention adopted the first state constitution. On March 1, 1781, Maryland ratified the Articles of Confederation, bringing them into effect.⁠[3]

From November 26, 1783, to August 19, 1784, Annapolis served as the national capital while the Continental Congress met in the State House. On December 23, 1783, George Washington resigned his commission as commander in chief in the Old Senate Chamber of the State House, and on January 14, 1784, Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris at Annapolis, ending the Revolutionary War. St. John’s College was established at Annapolis on December 30, 1784.⁠[3]

The Annapolis Convention met at Mann’s Tavern on September 11–14, 1786, to discuss revising the Articles of Confederation; Maryland sent no representatives. On December 19, 1791, Maryland ceded 36 square miles of Montgomery County land, including Georgetown, for the federal District of Columbia. That year Benjamin Banneker published his almanac.⁠[3]

In 1802 property qualifications for voting in local and state elections were removed, extending the vote to adult white men. On March 29, 1806, Congress authorized the National Road, and that year construction began on the Basilica of the Assumption in Baltimore, America’s first Roman Catholic cathedral. The College of Medicine of Maryland, the nation’s first public medical school, was chartered on December 18, 1807. On February 7, 1817, the Gas Light Company of Baltimore lit the country’s first gas streetlamp. On March 6, 1819, Chief Justice John Marshall interpreted implied federal powers in McCulloch v. Maryland.⁠[4]

On August 24, 1814, the British won the Battle of Bladensburg and on August 24–25 entered Washington, D.C., and burned public buildings. The Battle of Baltimore began on September 12, when local militia repulsed British troops at North Point and British Maj. Gen. Robert Ross was killed; the day is commemorated annually as Defenders’ Day. On September 13–14 the British bombarded Fort McHenry for 25 hours against a garrison of some 1,000 soldiers, militiamen and sailors; the poem Francis Scott Key wrote after seeing the flag still flying later became “The Star-Spangled Banner.” British forces withdrew from Baltimore on September 15.⁠[4]

Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Talbot County in February 1818, escaped from slavery in Baltimore on September 3, 1838, published his Narrative in 1845 and dedicated the Douglass Institute in Baltimore in October 1865.⁠[4]

Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross near Madison in Dorchester County in 1822 and escaped to Philadelphia in 1849. Between 1850 and 1860 she made at least 13 trips back to the Eastern Shore, leading more than 70 people to freedom, and on June 2, 1863, she led the Combahee Ferry Raid in South Carolina, freeing more than 700 enslaved people and becoming the first woman to lead a major U.S. military operation.⁠[4]

The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was chartered on February 28, 1827, and on July 4, 1828, ground was broken for both the B&O and the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal. The B&O’s Carrollton Viaduct, completed in 1829, was the country’s first masonry railroad bridge; on May 22, 1830, the horse-drawn passenger car Pioneer made the B&O’s first run, from Mount Clare to Ellicott’s Mills, and on August 28 Peter Cooper’s steam locomotive Tom Thumb raced a horse-drawn train. The C&O Canal was built between 1828 and 1848 and reached Cumberland in October 1850.⁠[4]

Through the efforts of Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft, the Naval School was established on October 10, 1845, at Fort Severn, a 10-acre Army post in Annapolis, with a class of 50 midshipmen and seven professors; in 1850 the Naval School became the United States Naval Academy.⁠[5]

The second state constitution, drafted by a convention that met from November 4, 1850, to May 13, 1851, was adopted by voters in June 1851; on July 4, 1851, Baltimore City was separated from Baltimore County.⁠[4][6]

On April 19, 1861, a Baltimore mob attacked the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, the first bloodshed of the Civil War. The Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg) on September 17, 1862, was the bloodiest one-day battle in American history and technically a draw; on September 22 Abraham LincolnAbraham LincolnAbraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th president of the United States (1861–1865). Born to a frontier farming family in Kentucky, he had less than a year of formal schooling, taught himself law, and served in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives before winning the presidency as the Republican candidate in 1860. During the Civil War he preserved the Union, issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and pushed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery through Congress. He was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865, and died the next day.Open the full entry issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. In July 1863 about 7,000 Confederate prisoners taken at Gettysburg were held at Fort McHenry. On July 9, 1864, Confederates under Jubal Early defeated Union troops under Lew Wallace at the Battle of Monocacy. John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln in April 1865, was buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore.⁠[4]

After the soldiers’ vote was added, Governor Augustus W. Bradford declared the third state constitution adopted on October 12–13, 1864; under Article 24 of its Declaration of Rights, slavery in Maryland ended on November 1, 1864, and Baltimore’s City Council marked the day with a 500-gun salute. Maryland ratified the 13th Amendment on February 3, 1865; it rejected the 14th Amendment on March 23, 1867, and the 15th on February 26, 1870.⁠[4]

A convention that met from May 8 to August 17, 1867, drafted the fourth state constitution, which voters adopted on September 18, 1867.⁠[4]

The fourth constitution is also Maryland’s last, the one under which the state government still functions; its text includes the amendments proposed by the General Assembly and ratified by voters through November 5, 2024. The earlier constitutions were adopted by the Ninth Provincial Convention at Annapolis in November 1776 and by the voters in June 1851 and October 1864.⁠[6]

The first Preakness Stakes was run at Pimlico on May 23, 1873. The Johns Hopkins University opened in Baltimore on October 3, 1876; the Enoch Pratt Free Library opened on January 5, 1886; the Johns Hopkins Hospital was dedicated on May 7, 1889; and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine opened in October 1893, admitting women.⁠[4]

On February 7–8, 1904, a fire in Baltimore destroyed 1,500 buildings across 80 blocks (about 140 acres) of the business district. On March 17, 1904, “Jim Crow” public accommodations laws introduced by William G. Kerbin passed, mandating separate railway cars and steamboat compartments.⁠[7]

On May 2, 1908, three women cast ballots in a municipal election at Still Pond, becoming Maryland’s first women voters. Women voted for the first time across Maryland on November 2, 1920. Maryland ratified the 19th Amendment on March 29, 1941, though the ratification was not certified until February 25, 1958.⁠[7]

Aberdeen Proving Ground, the Army’s first ordnance testing center, was established on October 20, 1917, and opened in December 1917.⁠[7]

On June 18, 1935, in Murray v. Pearson, the Baltimore City Court ordered the integration of the University of Maryland School of Law, with Thurgood Marshall representing Donald Gaines Murray; the Court of Appeals affirmed the order on January 15, 1936. Marshall and the NAACP won BrownBrown UniversityBrown University is a private nonprofit research university in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. Chartered by Rhode Island's colonial legislature in 1764, it is known for its undergraduate Open Curriculum, which has no common required core. Christina H. Paxson, president since July 2012, announced on August 3, 2026, that the 2026–27 academic year would be her last in office. As of October 1, 2026, the search for Brown's 20th president remained underway.Open the full entry v. Board on May 17, 1954, and on October 2, 1967, Marshall became the first African American to join the U.S. Supreme Court.⁠[7]

Riots broke out in Cambridge on June 14, 1963; Governor J. Millard Tawes declared martial law, and the Maryland National Guard remained until July 8. On July 23 U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy met Cambridge officials and civil rights groups to sign the “Treaty of Cambridge.” After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, riots took place in Baltimore on April 6–14, and the Maryland National Guard and federal troops were deployed.⁠[7]

The Chesapeake Bay Bridge, now the eastbound span, opened on July 30, 1952; until then the Eastern Shore had been a mercantile appendage of Wilmington and Philadelphia. Goddard Space Flight Center opened in Greenbelt on May 1, 1959.⁠[7][8]

On May 8, 2007, Maryland enacted the nation’s first state living wage law, which took effect on October 1, 2007. On November 6, 2012, voters approved same-sex marriage by referendum. The General Assembly abolished the death penalty on October 1, 2013. On May 25, 2019, it enacted the nation’s first state ban on plastic foam food containers.⁠[9]

In April 2015 Freddie C. Gray Jr. was arrested by Baltimore City Police, suffered a spinal cord injury in custody and died on April 19; violence, arson and looting followed his funeral on April 27, and the Maryland National Guard was called into Baltimore, leaving on May 5. On June 28, 2018, a gunman killed five employees of the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis.⁠[9]

On March 5, 2020, Governor Lawrence J. Hogan Jr. declared a State of Emergency and a Catastrophic Health Emergency because of COVID-19; the state’s first mass vaccination site opened at Six Flags America in Upper Marlboro on February 5, 2021, and the emergency ended on August 15, 2021.⁠[9]

In the apportionment based on the 2020 census, Maryland kept 8 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, unchanged from the previous apportionment, with an average of 773,160 people per seat. The state has 10 electoral votes for the 2024 and 2028 presidential elections.⁠[10][11]

At 1:30 a.m. on March 26, 2024, the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after being struck by the cargo ship Dali, killing six construction workers. Full shipping operations at the Port of Baltimore were restored on June 12, 2024, after the last bridge wreckage was removed from the Patapsco River.⁠[9]

On May 13, 2025, flash floods devastated Westernport, Lonaconing and Barton, and elementary school students and staff were rescued by boat. From April 1 to 10, 2026, Cockeysville native Reid Wiseman commanded Artemis II, NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the U.S. federal agency responsible for the civilian space program, aeronautics research and space science. Established by law in 1958 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has run programs including Mercury, the Apollo Moon landings, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station and Artemis.Open the full entry’s first crewed mission around the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.⁠[9]

As of November 2026 the governor is Wes Moore, who took office on January 18, 2023, as Maryland’s 63rd governor and its first Black governor. He served in the U.S. Army with the 82nd Airborne Division, deploying to Afghanistan in 2005, was a White House Fellow, and led New York’s Robin Hood Foundation for four years. The governor is elected to a four-year term and heads the executive branch and the Governor’s Executive Council, which includes the heads of 23 departments.⁠[12][13]

The General Assembly is bicameral, with a 47-member Senate and a 141-member House of Delegates, and convenes every year on the second Wednesday in January for a 90-day session. The judiciary is headed by the Supreme Court of Maryland, with the Appellate Court of Maryland, the Circuit Courts and the District Court below it. The state has 23 counties, and Baltimore City and about 157 other towns and cities have their own governments.⁠[13]

The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2010 state area measurements give Maryland a total area of 12,406 square miles (32,131 km²), of which 9,707 square miles (25,142 km²) are land and 2,699 square miles are water, comprising 768 square miles of inland water, 1,820 of coastal water and 111 of territorial water.⁠[14]

The state’s main regions include the coastal plain along Chesapeake Bay and the rich farming country of the Piedmont plateau, and it is often divided into the Eastern Shore, Southern Maryland, Central Maryland and Western Maryland. The highest point is Hoye Crest on Backbone Mountain in Garrett County, at 3,360 feet, on the Maryland–West Virginia border; the lowest is a natural depression in the bottom of Chesapeake Bay known as Bloody Point Hole, 174 feet below sea level, about a mile west-southwest of the southern tip of Kent Island.⁠[15][8][16]

Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in North America. Its main basin is 195 miles long and is widest, at 30 miles, near Cape Charles, Virginia, with an average depth of 25 feet; 1,726 square miles of the Bay lie in Maryland and 1,511 in Virginia. Its watershed covers about 64,000 square miles in six states and the District of Columbia, and more than 18.2 million people lived in it in 2017; the SusquehannaSusquehanna International GroupSusquehanna International Group (SIG) is a quantitative trading and market-making firm based in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, founded in 1987 by Jeff Yass and a group of college friends. Trading is its core business; it also works in institutional sales, private equity and prediction-market making, and was an early investor in ByteDance.Open the full entry, the Potomac and Virginia’s James River supply 80% of the Bay’s fresh water. The Bay and its tidal tributaries have 11,684 miles of shoreline.⁠[17][18]

The U.S. Census Bureau estimated Maryland’s population at 6,265,347 on July 1, 2025, up 1.4% from the April 1, 2020, estimates base of 6,181,640. Population density in 2020 was 636.1 people per square mile. In the 2020 census Baltimore city had 585,708 residents.⁠[19][20]

American Community Survey data for 2020–2024 show that 16.6% of residents were foreign-born, 43.4% of people aged 25 and over held a bachelor’s degree or higher, and median household income was $103,678 in 2024 dollars. Population is most concentrated around Washington, D.C., and Baltimore; Prince George’s and Montgomery are the most populous counties, and Central Maryland forms one contiguous metropolitan area from Baltimore to Washington.⁠[19][8]

Preliminary data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis put Maryland’s 2024 nominal GDP at $542.766 billion ($542,766 million); real GDP grew 2.2% from the previous year, ranking 35th among the states and the District of Columbia.⁠[21]

The economy is based primarily on government services and manufacturing, and service businesses employ the largest share of the workforce. Major manufactures include primary metals, electronic and electrical equipment, transportation equipment, chemicals and food products, and the state has high-technology industries in biotechnology, aerospace and information technology. Maryland is known for its crabs; tobacco, the early main crop, and agriculture generally are now a small part of the economy.⁠[15][8]

Maryland is also known as the “Old Line State.”⁠[22]

The reverse of the Great Seal of Maryland bears a shield with the Calvert and Crossland arms quartered, topped by an earl’s coronet and a full-faced helmet and supported by a farmer on one side and a fisherman on the other, symbolizing Lord Baltimore’s two estates, Maryland and Avalon in Newfoundland. Its motto is the Italian “Fatti maschii parole femine,” generally translated as “strong deeds, gentle words” (the translation cited to Chapter 496, Acts of 2017); the Latin border legend is the last verse of Psalm 5 in the Latin Vulgate, and the date 1632 refers to the year King Charles I granted the Maryland charter to Cecilius Calvert.⁠[23]

The state flag combines the arms of two families: the gold and black of the Calverts, the Lords Baltimore who founded Maryland, in the first and fourth quarters, and the red and white of the Crosslands, the family of George Calvert’s mother, with a cross bottony, in the second and third. It was first flown on October 11, 1880, at a Baltimore parade marking the city’s 150th anniversary, and at Gettysburg on October 25, 1888, at the dedication of monuments to Maryland regiments; it was officially adopted under Chapter 48, Acts of 1904, effective March 9, 1904. Chapter 862, Acts of 1945, requires any ornament atop a flagstaff carrying the Maryland flag to be a gold cross bottony.⁠[24]

The state bird is the Baltimore oriole, the state flower the black-eyed Susan and the state tree the white oak; the state crustacean is the Maryland blue crab, the state dog the Chesapeake Bay retriever and the state dessert the Smith Island cake. The state sport is jousting and the state team sport lacrosse. On October 1, 2008, Maryland designated walking as its State Exercise, becoming the first state to name one.⁠[25]

Maryland.Gov: Official website: https://www.maryland.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[26]

Maryland State Archives: Official website: https://msa.maryland.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[13]

Maryland Geological Survey: Official website: https://mgs.md.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]

Visit Maryland: Official website: https://www.visitmaryland.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[25]