1-1-13: Zekiah Fort

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30074 ZekiahFort 0101.mp3

This segment originally aired on September 20, 2011.

The colony of Maryland was not even five decades old in 1680. The frontier of colonial civilization was somewhere near Upper Marlboro, and Native Americans outnumbered English settlers. One tribe which had cooperated with the English, the Piscataway, were being targeted by raids from other tribes from the north.  

To protect the Piscataway, Gov. Charles Calvert, the third Lord Baltimore, moved them to an area now known as Zekiah Swamp in Charles County. A fortified settlement was built. 

Archaeologists have been trying to find the location of that settlement since at least the 1930s.  In the summer of 2011, a team from St. Mary’s College of Maryland, in partnership with the College of Southern Maryland and The Smallwood Foundation, found the evidence they’d been searching for. In September, 2011, Sheilah spoke with the leader of the archeological dig, Julia King, a professor of anthropology at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.