Site History

Smith’s St. Leonard became the domestic center of Richard Smith Jr.’s tobacco plantation in Calvert County, Maryland around 1711. The core of Smith’s plantation had previously been based at the King’s Reach site (18CV83). Smith was a wealthy Protestant who owned a great deal of land and held offices in the Maryland colony. He was also a strong ally of the proprietors of the Maryland colony, the Catholic Calvert family. In 1689, Smith fell on hard times thanks to economic and political turmoil in Maryland. Protestants overthrew the Calverts that year, and temporarily arrested Smith to keep him from aiding the proprietary family.

By the first decade of the 18th century the political strife and economic depression that had dominated the end of the 17th century in Maryland had abated, allowing planters like Smith the stability they needed to accumulate wealth. In 1711 he constructed a new brick cruciform dwelling at Smith’s St. Leonard. When Richard died in 1715, the plantation passed to his descendants. A plat made in 1773 to help settle a land dispute shows the location of the buildings associated with the Smith’s St. Leonard plantation center; the main dwelling, an exterior kitchen, a slave quarter, a corn house, a store, a wheat house and a barn are all indicated on the map. By the 1770s, the site was no longer occupied and had fallen into ruin, but the plat made at that time has helped guide archaeological researchers to the structures of the plantation complex.

Archaeology

The Smith’s St. Leonard Site was first identified in 1981 during an archaeological survey of the property that would later become Jefferson Patterson Park & Museum (JPPM). Archival research being conducted on the JPPM property subsequently located the 1773 plat that shed so much light on the site’s history. In 1999, a JPPM shoreline stabilization project located a trash pit at the site. The discovery of this feature and the strong historical evidence that the location matched that of Richard Smith Jr.’s plantation prompted JPPM to focus its annual Public Archaeology Program on the site in 2002.

So far, 117 shovel test pits and over 60 test units have been excavated at the site. The most intensive study has taken place around the main dwelling, kitchen, and slave quarter. In the area of the main dwelling, a portion of the brick foundation was identified at the top of a bank of the Patuxent River, but the partial nature of the footprint exposed, and the large quantity of brick eroding out of the riverbank indicate that most of the house has eroded into the river. Excavations in the kitchen area found that it was an earthfast building with a central brick chimney, but more excavation is needed to define its dimensions. Several postholes have been identified in the area of the slave quarter, indicating that it, too was an earthfast structure, but the exact orientation of the building has not been identified. The layout of the quarter is confused by the discovery of extra postholes that may have resulted from rebuilding episodes, the presence of multiple structures, or a combination of earthfast structures and fences. Excavations are ongoing as Smith’s St. Leonard continues to be the focus of the JPPM Public Archaeology Program.

References

https://jefpat.maryland.gov/NEHWeb/18CV91-%20Smiths%20St.%20Leonard%20Finding%20Aid.aspx

The Smith’s St. Leonard archaeological collection is owned by the Maryland Historical Trust and curated at the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory.