Charles County is a county in Southern Maryland. As of the 2020 census, the population was 166,617. The county seat is La Plata. The county was named for Charles Calvert (1637–1715), third Baron Baltimore.
Port Tobacco, officially Port Tobacco Village, is a town in Charles County, in southern Maryland, United States. The population was 13 at the 2010 census, making Port Tobacco the smallest incorporated town in Maryland.
Raphael Semmes was an officer in the Confederate Navy during the American Civil War. Until then, he had been a serving officer in the US Navy from 1826 to 1860.
The very first USS Hatteras was a 1,126-ton iron-hulled steamer purchased by the Union Navy at the beginning of the American Civil War. She was outfitted as a gunboat and assigned to the Union blockade of the ports and waterways of the Confederate States of America. During an engagement with the disguised Confederate commerce raider, CSS Alabama, she was taken by surprise and was sunk off the coast of Galveston, Texas. The wreck site is one of the few listed on the National Register of Historic Places because of its location away from destructive surf and because of the ship's side-wheel design, which marks the transition between wooden sailing ships and steam-powered ships.
Marshall Hall, Maryland is the site of the Marshall family mansion. It is now part of Piscataway Park operated by the National Park Service. Marshall Hall is located near Bryans Road in Charles County, Maryland, next to the Potomac River, more or less across from Mount Vernon, Virginia, the home of George Washington. The home was one of the finest built on the Maryland shore of the Potomac in the early 18th century. The Marshall family were minor gentry and owned as many as 80 slaves by the early 19th century.
Gustavus Richard Brown was a lifelong friend of George Washington, a physician, helped found the hospital department of the Continental Army, and a botanist. He is best known as one of the doctors summoned to attend to George Washington the night he died.
Chapel Point State Park is an undeveloped public recreation area located on the Port Tobacco River, a tributary of the Potomac, in Charles County, Maryland. The state park offers fishing and hunting. Adjacent to the park, St. Ignatius Church and cemetery, the oldest continuous Roman Catholic parish in the United States, offers a scenic river view.
St. Ignatius Church is a Roman Catholic parish church of the Archdiocese of Washington located at 2315 Brinkley Rd., Fort Washington, MD 20744, in Oxon Hill, Prince George's County, Maryland. The historic church structure was constructed between 1890 and 1891. The 1+1⁄2-story structure is wood frame, with clapboarding, and shingling in imbricated pattern. It is rectangular in form with a gabled roof, 80-foot (24 m) projecting front belfry with spire and louvered openings, round arched openings, and modified corner buttresses. The architectural style is considered Eclectic, with elements of the Shingle and Queen Anne styles. It is the second church on site and has served as a mission and parish church. The original church, built in 1849, was partially funded by Mary Surratt, one of the conspirators involved with the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Oakwood is a historic house at Harwood, Anne Arundel County, Maryland. It was built in the 1850s and is a 2+1⁄2-story, frame vernacular farmhouse with Greek Revival influenced details. It is a highly intact, mid-19th-century tobacco plantation dwelling and is associated with Sprigg Harwood, a leader in the failed initiative to have Maryland leave the Union and align with the newly formed Confederate States of America.
Holly Hill, also known as Holland's Hills or Rose Valley, is a historic house at Friendship, Anne Arundel County, Maryland, United States. It was initially named as Holland's Hills for Francis Holland, who bought the land in 1665. Richard Harrison, a Quaker planter and shipowner, bought the land and built a home on it. Harrison owned about 6,000 acres total.
Linden is a historic home located near Port Tobacco, Charles County, Maryland, United States. It is a rambling frame house, consisting of a 2+1⁄2-story main block with wings, embodying many traditional characteristics of Tidewater architecture. The house is situated on the crest of a hill overlooking the Port Tobacco Valley. The home was begun early in the 1780s and enlarged about 1800, and in the late 1830s. Linden was probably built as a summer residence about 1783, by Henry Barnes, a wealthy Port Tobacco merchant and on a property that remained in the same family for over 300 years.
St. Thomas Manor (1741) is a historic home and Catholic church complex located near Port Tobacco, Charles County, Maryland. Known as St. Ignatius Church and Cemetery, the manor house complex is the oldest continuously occupied Jesuit residence in the world. The mission settlement of Chapel Point was established in 1641 by Father Andrew White, S.J., an English Jesuit missionary. Father White administered to the Potapoco Native Americans, some of whom he converted to Catholicism. Established in 1662, this is the oldest continuously active Roman Catholic parish in the American Thirteen Colonies. With the consecration in 1794 of Bishop John Carroll, St. Thomas became the first Roman Catholic see in the United States.
Retreat is a historic home located at Port Tobacco, Charles County, Maryland, United States. It is a one-story, clapboard-sheathed, frame house with a double chimney. The principal part of the house was built about 1770. Also located on the property is a frame, pyramid-roofed meathouse, dating from the early 19th century, and moved here from another historic property in the county known as "Brentland" in 1953. The home, approached by a private gravel road, is surrounded by cultivated fields, meadows, and woodland, preserving its original agricultural and rural setting. The house is one of the earliest known examples of the side-passage, two-room dwelling in Charles County. It is associated with Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer and Daniel Jenifer.
Stagg Hall, is a historic home located at Port Tobacco, Charles County, Maryland, United States. It is a two-story frame house built about 1766 adjacent to Port Tobacco's former town square. It was built by Thomas Howe Ridgate, a prosperous Port Tobacco merchant.
The Mt. Carmel Monastery is a historic monastery located at Port Tobacco, Charles County, Maryland, United States. It is a two-part frame house, the main block of which was built about 1790 and restored in 1936–37. It consists of a two-story structure with a moderately pitched gable roof. The entire house, devoid of any extraneous ornamentation, reflects the austere lives of the Carmelite nuns who are believed to have used this house as their residence.
Port Tobacco Historic District is a national historic district in Port Tobacco, Charles County, Maryland. It is located along both sides of Chapel Point Road immediately south of Maryland Route 6. It includes five surviving 18th- and 19th-century buildings; four have been privately restored as single-family residences. The fifth was renovated for use as a children's museum. Two of these buildings, Chimney House and Stagg Hall, are immediately adjacent to one another at one corner of the town square.
Anne Olivia Floyd was a Confederate spy during the American Civil War, noted as a blockade runner.
The Landon House, also known as the Stancioff House, is a historic home located at Urbana, Frederick County, Maryland, United States. It was built about 1849 and is a large three-story frame house with a notable clerestory roof, and two-story full length galleried porch. The home's interior woodwork is of a simple Greek Revival style. The former smokehouse has been converted to a chapel. The house is said to have originally stood on the Rappahannock River near Fredericksburg, Virginia, and moved to its present location in 1846 at the direction of the Reverend R.H. Phillips. It has been used as both a school and private home. Reverend Phillips established a Female Seminary here between 1846 and 1850, then become a military institute for boys, and by the end of the 1850s it apparently had resumed its role as a Female Seminary. It was used by the 155th Pennsylvania Volunteers as a resting point for Union Troops marching toward the Battle of Antietam on September 16, 1862. The house would host a cotillion ball for Confederate soldiers before eventually becoming a field hospital during the civil war. During 2013 the building was purchased by new owners who have plans to restore it to its Civil War state.
The Civil War Trust's Civil War Discovery Trail is a heritage tourism program that links more than 600 U.S. Civil War sites in more than 30 states. The program is one of the White House Millennium Council's sixteen flagship National Millennium Trails. Sites on the trail include battlefields, museums, historic sites, forts and cemeteries.
