Qualla: Somerset County, Maryland

Somerset County, Maryland: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Fischer, CC BY 2.0. Stephen Horsey was arrested on October 11, 1663, by a Virginia colonel and forty mounted men. He refused to go. Horsey told Colonel Edmund Scarborough that he would remain in Maryland under Lord Baltimore and the king, and the settlers ran the militia off. Three years later, Charles Calvert appointed Horsey to the first court of a brand-new county - Somerset, Maryland - and made him its first sheriff. The man Virginia tried to drag back across the line ended up running the place that drew the line.

Image: Eric Fischer | CC BY 2.0

Somerset County, Maryland: A Quaker Refuge on the Annemessex

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA, Public domain. In 1659, Virginia passed a law requiring every Quaker in the colony either to convert to Anglicanism or to leave. The Quakers of Accomack County, on the southern tip of the Delmarva Peninsula, looked north. They petitioned Charles Calvert, the third Lord Baltimore, in 1661 to set...

Image: NASA | Public domain

Somerset County, Maryland: The Birthplace of American Presbyterianism

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Kiser (User:Malepheasant), CC BY-SA 2.5. The Quakers were not alone for long. In the 1670s, Scottish and Irish Presbyterians began arriving, some from Virginia, some directly from the British Isles. In December 1680, an Anglican settler named William Stevens, who lived in the Rehoboth settlement, wrote to the Presbytery...

Image: Tim Kiser (User:Malepheasant) | CC BY-SA 2.5

Somerset County, Maryland: The Napoleon Plot

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JodyMBrumage, CC BY-SA 4.0. In July 1815, after Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte tried to escape to the United States. He failed; the British caught him and shipped him to Saint Helena in the South Atlantic. But the conspiracies continued. According to local legend recorded by Hulbert Footner in his 1944 book R...

Image: JodyMBrumage | CC BY-SA 4.0

Somerset County, Maryland: Tobacco, Slavery, and the Long Aftermath

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit USGS Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Laboratory from Beltsville, USA, Public domain. For more than a century, Somerset County was a tobacco economy run on enslaved African labor. The crop exhausted the soil, and by the early 1800s some planters had switched to mixed farming. But the Eastern Shore stayed deeply rural and deeply tied to the institution of slavery. ...

Image: USGS Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Laboratory from Beltsville, USA | Public domain

Somerset County, Maryland: Marshes and Smith Island

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Acroterion, CC BY-SA 4.0. Almost half of Somerset County is water. Of its 610 square miles, only 320 are land; the other 291 are tidal Chesapeake. The Deal Island Wildlife Management Area covers 13,000 acres of marsh in the northwest quadrant, with nine miles of flat trails through habitat for waterfowl, ...

Image: Acroterion | CC BY-SA 4.0