5 m 20 ft Zoom to Pan Old Post Road - Established 1666 - Gov. William Paca

Harford County, MD

This monument gathers up Maryland's outsized place in the nation's founding, when the little capital at Annapolis briefly held the eyes of a new country. There, in December 1783, George Washington laid down his military commission and returned power to civilian hands — one of the young republic's defining acts — and the Confederation Congress, meeting in the same statehouse, closed the books on the Revolution. In the years that followed Maryland ceded the land that became the District of Columbia, and a Maryland lawyer named Francis Scott Key would give the country the words of its national anthem.

Harford County, MD

In the rolling farmland of Harford County stands a church whose roots reach back to the Jesuit missionaries who kept the Catholic faith alive in Maryland — a colony founded as a rare haven of religious tolerance in early America. Completed in 1792 by Father Sylvester Boarman, a Jesuit tending the nearby mission of St. Joseph at Priest's Ford, Saint Ignatius rose in the first years of the new republic, when Catholics were only beginning to worship freely and openly. It is remembered as the oldest Roman Catholic church in continuous use in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, the founding see of American Catholicism. Its early pastors even ministered to the family of Charles Carroll, the Maryland statesman whose name is woven through the nation's founding.

Dundalk, MD

In the late summer of 1814, fresh from burning Washington, a British army pushed toward Baltimore, the young nation's third-largest city and a nest of the privateers that had harried British shipping. On September 12, Maryland militia under General John Stricker met the advancing column here at North Point, and in the opening skirmishing the British commander, General Robert Ross, was mortally wounded. The militia's stubborn delaying action bought precious hours for Baltimore's main defenses to prepare.

Prince George's County, MD

This Latin inscription marks the spot in the Maryland countryside where Pierre (Peter) Charles L'Enfant lay for more than eighty years. A French-born military engineer who volunteered for the Continental Army during the Revolution, L'Enfant went on to draw the sweeping grand plan for the new federal capital on the Potomac — the radiating avenues and ceremonial vistas that still shape Washington, D.C. He died in obscurity and near-poverty in 1825 and was buried on a private estate here in Prince George's County. As the inscription records, in 1909 a grateful nation finally reinterred his remains with honor at Arlington National Cemetery, leaving this cenotaph to mark his first resting place.