Drayden, Maryland

Porto Bello is a historic home located at Drayden, St. Mary's County, Maryland. It is a 1+1⁄2-story gambrel-roofed Flemish bond brick house built after 1742. It is located on a portion of the first grant of land recorded in the province of Maryland: West St. Mary's Manor, one of the nine original Maryland Manors. Its name commemorates the Battle of Porto Bello (1739).The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.

The St. Marys River (sometimes spelled St. Mary's River) is a 22.3-mile-long (35.9 km) river in southern Maryland in the United States. It rises in southern St. Mary's County, and flows to the southeast through Great Mills, widening into a tidal estuary near St. Mary's City, approximately 2 miles (3 km) wide at its mouth on the north bank of the Potomac River, near the Chesapeake Bay to the east.

West St. Mary's Manor is a historic house on West St. Mary's Manor Road in rural St. Mary's County, Maryland. Built in the 1780s according to dendrochronology and with a four-room center-hall plan, and is located on the first recorded English land grant in what is now Maryland. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970.

Valley Lee is an unincorporated community in St. Mary's County, Maryland, United States. The St. George's Episcopal Church was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. Another landmark of Valley Lee is the 100-year-old Russells Store, a country store, barber/beautyshop, and local tavern. The ZIP Code for Valley Lee is 20692.

St. George's Episcopal Church is a historic church located at 44965 Blake Creek Road, in Valley Lee, St. Mary's County, Maryland, United States. It was built in 1799 on the same site as three other, earlier churches. It is a one-story, five-bay, rectangular, gable-front, Flemish bond brick structure. The interior has been restored to its 1884 appearance. The church is surrounded by a graveyard, enclosed by a low brick wall. It is generally believed that St. George's is the site of the oldest Anglican church in Maryland whose parish is still in existence. William and Mary Parish, as it was originally known, was one of the original 30 Anglican parishes in the Province of Maryland. The church was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

Piney Point (also known simply as "The Point"), is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in St. Mary's County, Maryland, United States. It is known for the Paul Hall Center for Maritime Training and Education, houses along the beach, a lighthouse, and a museum. The Piney Point post office also serves St. George Island, which is connected to Piney Point by a short bridge.

Maryland Dove is a re-creation of the Dove, an early 17th-century English trading ship, one of two ships (Dove and The Ark) which made up the first expedition from England to the Province of Maryland. The 1978 Dove was designed by the naval architect and naval historian William A. Baker. The Dove was a trading vessel that could be sailed by a crew of seven. The much larger Ark, was a passenger ship, and was sailed by a crew of 40 or more. The Dove was left behind as a local trading vessel to facilitate commerce between Maryland and the other colonies.

The James P. Muldoon River Center, located in Saint Mary's City, Maryland, is a 13,000 square foot eco-friendly facility of the St. Mary's College of Maryland. The facility houses a marine biology laboratory classroom, a seminar room, boat repair facilities, a safety monitor station, water sports equipment storage, small locker rooms, offices for waterfront staff and biology faculty, a multi-purpose room, instructional space for water-based activities, and a deck that overlooks the waterfront basin and Horseshoe Bend on the St. Mary’s River. It is the home venue of the St. Mary's Seahawks sailing team.

The Province of Maryland was an English and later British colony in North America from 1634 until 1776, when it made common cause with the group of Thirteen Colonies in rebellion against Great Britain and, finally in 1781—as the 13th signatory to the Articles of Confederation—it ratified its perpetual union with that group as the state of Maryland. The province's first settlement and capital was St. Mary's City, located at the southern end of St. Mary's County, a peninsula in the Chesapeake Bay that is bordered by four tidal rivers. The province began in 1632 as a proprietary colony granted to Cecil Calvert, the English 2nd Baron Baltimore, whose father, George, had long sought to found a colony in the New World to serve as a refuge for English Roman Catholics at the time of the European wars of religion. Thus, provincial Maryland served an early pioneer of religious toleration in the English colonies. However, religious strife among Anglicans, Puritans, Catholics, and Quakers was common in the early years and Puritan rebels briefly seized control of the province. Later, in 1689, the year following the Glorious Revolution in Great Britain, John Coode led a rebellion that removed Lord Baltimore, a Catholic, from power in Maryland. That power was restored to the Baltimore family in 1715 after Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore, declared in public that he was a Protestant. Despite early competition with the colony of Virginia to its south, and the Dutch colony of New Netherland to its north, the province of Maryland developed along similar lines to Virginia. Its early settlements and population centers tended to cluster around the rivers and other waterways that empty into the Chesapeake Bay, and, like Virginia, Maryland's economy quickly became centered on the cultivation of tobacco for sale in Europe. However, after tobacco prices collapsed, the need for cheap labor to accommodate the mixed farming economy that followed led to a rapid expansion of the Atlantic slave trade and the concomitant American enslavement of Africans—as well as the expansion of indentured servitude and British penal transportation. Maryland received a larger felon quota than any other province.Maryland was an active participant in the events leading up to the American Revolution, echoing events in New England by establishing committees of correspondence and hosting its own tea party similar to the one that took place in Boston. By 1776 the old order had been overthrown as Maryland's colonial representatives signed the Declaration of Independence, presaging the end of British colonial rule.

St. Mary's City (also known as Historic St. Mary's City) is a former colonial town that was founded in March 1634, as Maryland's first European settlement and capital. It is now a state-run historic area, which includes a reconstruction of the original colonial settlement and a designated living history venue and museum complex. Half the area is occupied by the campus of St. Mary's College of Maryland. The entire area contains a community of about 933 permanent residents and some 1,400 students living in campus dorms and apartments.The City is an unincorporated community under Maryland state law and is located in southern St. Mary's County, which occupies the southernmost tip of the state on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay. The community is bordered by the St. Mary's River, a short, brackish-water tidal tributary of the Potomac River, near where it empties into the Chesapeake. St. Mary's City is the historic site of the founding of the Colony of Maryland—then called the Province of Maryland—where it served as the colonial capital from 1634 until 1695. The original settlement is the fourth oldest permanent English settlement in the United States.Notably, St. Mary's City is the earliest site of religious freedom being established in the United States, as it is the first North American colonial settlement established with a specific mandate of providing haven for people of both Catholic and Protestant Christian faiths.It is also an internationally recognized archaeological research area and training center for archaeologists, and is home to the Historical Archaeology Field School. There have been over 200 archeological digs in St. Mary's City over the last 30 years. Archaeological research continues in the city.

The Piney Point Lighthouse was built in 1836 located at Piney Point on the Potomac River in Maryland just up the river from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The Coast Guard decommissioned it in 1964 and it has since become a museum. It is known as the Lighthouse of Presidents because several early US Presidents visited or stayed on the grounds.