When the Commissioners of St. Mary’s County proclaimed International Underground Railroad Month on Sept. 1, it was easy to read as a symbolic gesture — one of four proclamations that day, alongside recognitions for recovery, suicide prevention, and disabled veterans. But the county’s connection to the Underground Railroad isn’t symbolic. St. Mary’s County is home to four sites officially listed on the National Park Service’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, a federal program that documents and verifies places tied to the escape, aid, and resistance networks that helped enslaved people reach freedom.
The most recently added of the four sits on a campus most residents drive past without a second thought. Mackall Plantation, now part of St. Mary’s College of Maryland, was the site of a mass self-emancipation during the War of 1812: 19 enslaved men, women, and children freed themselves by joining Vice Admiral Alexander Cockburn’s British fleet, which was actively recruiting freedom seekers along the Chesapeake at the time. Several of the men went on to serve in the newly formed Corps of Colonial Marines; after the war, all 19 settled in Trinidad and Nova Scotia rather than return to bondage. The site’s history came into sharper focus in 2016, when archaeological work ahead of a proposed campus stadium uncovered artifacts identified as the remains of enslaved people’s quarters. The college unveiled a memorial to those families in 2020 and added the site to the national Network to Freedom listing in 2022; it now holds an annual “Sacred Journey” ceremony, including a procession along the roads the enslaved once walked.
Historic Sotterley Plantation, a National Historic Landmark on the Patuxent River, is listed as a starting point for freedom seekers across three centuries of the plantation’s operation. An original 1830s slave cabin still stands on the property, and Sotterley’s Descendants Program has spent years identifying and collecting oral histories from descendants of the people who were enslaved there, alongside descendants of the families who enslaved them — an approach aimed at telling the fuller, harder history of the site rather than just its architecture.
A third site, the Old Jail Museum in Leonardtown, carries a different kind of history. Built in 1876 and used as a jail until 1945, the building is now a museum — and inside one of its original cells is an exhibit on Benjamin Hance, a young Black man who was killed by a white mob in Leonardtown before he ever stood trial for the crime he’d been accused of. He is the only documented lynching victim in St. Mary’s County’s history. A memorial marker now stands outside the building alongside the exhibit inside.
The fourth site, Point Lookout State Park and Civil War Museum at the county’s southern tip, ties the county’s Underground Railroad history to the Civil War more broadly, combining that history with the park’s present-day recreational use.
Taken together, the four sites mean St. Mary’s County holds more officially recognized Network to Freedom sites than either of its neighboring counties — Calvert and Charles counties each have one. September’s proclamation is a reminder that this history isn’t confined to a museum exhibit or a single afternoon in the county’s past; it’s built into a plantation, a jail, a state park, and a college campus that thousands of residents interact with every week.
