Shipley's Choice
Glen Burnie, Anne Arundel County, Maryland
Marker Inscription
SHIPLEY'S CHOICE Adam Shipley, who came to Anne Arundel County in 1668 on March 30 1681, patented 200 acres on the south side of the seven river. Dedicated during the tercentenary commemoration of the Shipleys of Maryland May 25, 1968. Maryland Historical… transcription continues on the marker
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The Story
This Maryland Historical marker commemorates 'Shipley's Choice,' a colonial land tract tied to Adam Shipley, who arrived in Anne Arundel County in 1668 and patented 200 acres along the South River in 1681. It was dedicated in 1968 during a tercentenary celebration of the Shipley family in Maryland. The name preserves the practice by which English settlers claimed and named their patented ground in the young Chesapeake colony.
Why it matters
Land patents like Shipley's Choice were the building blocks of colonial Maryland, showing how English immigrants planted enduring family roots along the tidewater rivers of the Chesapeake.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the late seventeenth century, the Maryland colony was still young, and the land along the tidewater rivers of the Chesapeake was being taken up tract by tract by English settlers. Anne Arundel County, on the western shore, was prime ground: fertile, watered by rivers that doubled as highways, and open to newcomers willing to claim and work it.
The system that shaped this landscape was the land patent. A settler would have a parcel surveyed, give it a name, and receive a patent — a formal grant recording his claim to a specific number of acres. Those named tracts became the building blocks of the colony, and many of their names still cling to the land centuries later.
That is the world this marker commemorates: the Chesapeake frontier of the 1660s through the 1680s, when a person could arrive from England and, within a lifetime, hold title to a named piece of the New World along a tidewater river.
People & events
The marker centers on Adam Shipley, who came to Anne Arundel County in 1668. Some years later, in 1681, he patented two hundred acres on the south side of the river — the tract that took the name 'Shipley's Choice.' The word 'choice' in such names often reflected exactly what it sounds like: land a settler had selected and claimed as his own.
That name and that patent became the seed of a family's long presence in Maryland. The Shipleys put down roots along the tidewater and remained part of the region's story for generations, which is why, nearly three centuries later, their descendants gathered to remember where it began.
The plaque records that this Maryland Historical marker was dedicated in May of 1968, during a tercentenary commemoration of the Shipleys of Maryland — a three-hundred-year milestone marking the family's arrival in the county. The dedication turned a colonial land record into a living family remembrance.
Its place in the American story
Land patents like Shipley's Choice are the quiet foundation on which colonial America was built. Before there were towns and counties as we know them, there were named tracts — surveyed, granted, and passed down — and the map of the early Chesapeake was essentially a patchwork of them.
The story here is also an immigration story, which is fitting for a tract remembered under that theme. A man crossed the Atlantic, chose a piece of ground along a Maryland river, and founded a family line that would outlast the colony itself. Multiply that by thousands of settlers and you have the peopling of the tidewater South.
That the name survives at all — carried forward and celebrated three hundred years later — shows how these early claims became more than legal documents. They became the enduring roots of American families and the place-names that still dot the Chesapeake landscape.
If you visit
You're in the Glen Burnie area of Anne Arundel County, in country that was once open tidewater land and is now woven into the fabric of modern Maryland. The marker rewards a traveler who enjoys reading the deep layers beneath a familiar place.
Stand with the plaque and let it reframe what's around you. The subdivisions and roads of today sit atop a seventeenth-century patent — two hundred acres one man chose along a river more than three centuries ago. Part of the pleasure here is that double vision, the old tract still faintly legible under the present-day map.
If you're touring the colonial Chesapeake, a marker like this fits naturally alongside the region's older churches, waterfronts, and county landmarks. It's a small stop, but it opens a wide window onto how English immigrants first claimed and named this corner of Maryland.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
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Themes & tags
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