among our population descendants of Germans, Bohemians, French, Dutch, Swedish, Swiss, Irish, Scotch, English, Africans, and also a degenerate island population in the Chesapeake.
Beginning at St. Mary’s, we have the first settlement by English Roman Catholics in 1634. At Annapolis, in 1649, was a settlement of English Protestants, refugees from Virginia. Frederick County, laid out in 1745, covered three fourths of the land area of the province, and was composed of German, Irish, and Scotch settlers. The German element has prevailed since the days when Thomas Schley, the schoolmaster, in 1735, led the one hundred families of the Palatinate into permanent possession of this region. Frederick County is now rich in folk-lore faith and practice.
As early as 1681, we learn of the erection in Cecil County of Bohemia Manor, bought by Augustine Herman, of Bohemia, the first man in the colonies to receive papers of naturalization. Later, he sold some of his land to Dutch and French Labadists, Protestant refugees from Europe, whose names exist to this day in Cecil. Thomas H. Bayard and other prominent men have sprung from these Labadists and Bohemians. Into Cecil County came Swedes, Norwegians, and Dutch across the Delaware, living at Swedestown. Quakers of Penn's settlement were thrown into Maryland by the new boundary of Mason and Dixon’s line; while one fourth of the original Welsh tract is now in Cecil County.
Into Carroll County came Scotch-Irish settlers; and Talbot imported between six and seven hundred Irish and British to the Eastern Shore. Lower down were Welsh again.
Five shiploads of Acadians were landed in Maryland, helpless and destitute. These were French Catholics, while those of Bohemia Manor were Protestant. Quakers came to Montgomery County, driven from other provinces, but finding home and honor here.
Scattered through the two "Shores" are the negroes of Maryland. And lastly, in the islands of the Chesapeake we find a population of ignorant sailors and fishermen, descendants of a more prosperous stock; they are now sunk in poverty and superstition; and, consequently, they offer a good collecting ground to the lover of folk-lore. Thus in the State of Maryland we find original names still surviving in each county, proving an uninterrupted descent through two hundred and fifty years. And, as superstition always lives, we find abiding with us the sayings and beliefs of these earliest settlers. This unbroken line of myth and fable in Maryland may be easily connected with its European: starting points; whence other students may follow it backward to the more distant origins of our folk-lore, the Aryan myths of Asia, or the negro tales of Africa.
Mrs. Waller R. Bullock.
Baltimore, Md.
