St. Mary’s City, MD – We’ve all been there, where you start out looking for one thing and end up finding another. That was the case for Dr. Julia A. King, professor of anthropology at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, whose team of archaeologists were tasked with excavating land being considered for the college’s new sports stadium near Mattapany Road in St. Mary’s City.
When they did the work a few years back, they found evidence of 18th century slave quarters on the property that would be impacted by the new construction. Artifacts were carefully preserved and the site documented for the historical record.
“To the college’s credit, they redesigned the stadium so that the slave quarters are going to be avoided,” King explained.
Her students also found something on the very fringes of the construction project they didn’t expect—remnants of a Slavonic school that stood on the site in the early 20th century.
“We didn’t do a whole lot of work there,” King said. “We were more focused on the slave quarters which was being impacted by the stadium, but you could tell something was there.”
This summer, however, King and her team of researchers have picked up the thread of St. Mary’s County’s Slavonic communities of the early 20th century, something she said has not been widely studied in the past.
“Regina Coombs Hammett [author of A History of St. Mary’s County] had written quite a bit in her book about the Slavonic communities of St. Mary’s City,” King noted. “We were able to use a lot of her work. Andrea Hammer’s SlackWater project also provided some good information.”
King explained that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a lot of rural acreage in lower St. Mary’s County was abandoned due to the constant production of tobacco, which is well-known to deplete the soil of vital nutrients if grown in the same fields over and over.
“There was a lot of stuff going on at that time trying to bring people into Southern Maryland,” King said. “The Slavonic community was able to buy 3,000 acres, which they subdivided into 100-acre lots. That was in 1911,” she added.
Once they got into research, King said doors began to open. Where the little school house stood, Lot 57-58 in the land records, indicated that the site—less than an acre—was deeded to the National Slavonic Society and designated for a school, which was probably built somewhere around 1914-15. There was a second school in St. Mary’s City at that time, but it was not Slavonic, she pointed out.
“The Slavonic School seems to be in operation by 1915,” she stated.
The fate of the school, after 17 or 18 years of use, becomes muddled. There are indications that the land was sold in 1932 and the school was hauled by the Goddard family down to Ridge.
“Joyce Goddard Stone told me a tenant farmer lived in it when she was a little girl, back in the 50s and 60s,” King said. “She remembers taking food and stuff down to them. We went down and we did find the foundation of a building in St. Inigoes. It may have been repurposed as something else.”
While this particular chapter of St. Mary’s County history may not be as dramatic or as sexy as some of the research they have conducted on Native American and colonial sites, King stressed it is still an important part.
“It’s still 100 years old,” she said. “There are Slavonic descendants who are full-time members of our community. It speaks of a period in time when the area was very poor and very rural,” she added. “The government tried to address it by bringing people in.”
There are small Slavonic graveyards sprinkled throughout Historic St. Mary’s City and along Mattapany Road.
“People still come and decorate the graves,” King said.
Contact Joseph Norris at joe.norris@thebaynet.com
