Landscapes of authority and nostalgia: Modernization of a southern Maryland plantation. St. Mary's City, Maryland, 1840-1930

Historic St. Mary's City is a designated Historic Landmark and Archaeological District, and the site of the first capital of Maryland. St. Mary's City was largely abandoned in the late 1600s when the state capital moved to Annapolis. Given continued isolation from the markets of Baltimore and Washington D.C., staple crop agriculture and slavery retained their hold on St. Mary's City the town became a plantation community of landowners, yeomen farmers, and slaves. By 1840 John Mackall Brome consolidated land holdings in the area of the first capital. He owned a substantial slave force of fifty and grew tobacco. After the Civil War the Brome family continued to farm, but lost land and wealth through a series of failed business deals, and a weakening tobacco market. By the Great Depression the family plantation had become the summer house for John Brome's grandchildren, and tenants farmed what land remained in the family's possession.This dissertation entails an historic ethnography of the modernization of this plantation. Treating this site as an artifact, this dissertation will examine history and culture through the material traces--landscapes and objects--of people of different times. This dissertation explores the changing uses and meanings of this plantation as it shifted from being a place of agricultural production to a site of consumption of rural heritage in the 20th century. As the plantation economy slowly stagnated throughout the late 19th century, many people left failing plantations for economic opportunity in Baltimore and Washington D.C. These expatriates retained an interest in modernizing southern Maryland, suggesting commemoration of the colonial past and heritage tourism as viable development schemes. Throughout southern Maryland, monuments were erected in the name of the 17th century colonists, automobile tourism was encouraged through the building of macadamized roads, and a pageant depicting the early settlement of Maryland was held in St. Mary's City. This landscape of nostalgia made visible the presence of proclaimed descendants of the early settlers, publically joining the history of some of Maryland's families with that of the state, and effectively bringing St. Mary's City into the modern economy of tourism.