Finding New Yarmouth By Bob Ford

In late April this year, a truck belonging to the Maryland Department of Transportation lumbered into Rock Hall and turned south on Maryland 445 and traveled onto the narrow spit of land known as Eastern Neck.

The truck carried State Highway Administration workers along with an order, an auger, and a new sign that would soon become part of the Maryland Roadside Historical Marker program. The marker, a commemoration of the “lost town” of New Yarmouth, and the truck itself, had taken a long time to arrive. The town was first nominated as a site worthy of acknowledgement by the Historical Society of Kent County in 2020.

New Yarmouth was Kent’s county seat between 1678 and 1696, complete with a courthouse, jail, church, wharfs, a shipyard on Gray’s Inn Creek, and a population of somewhat indeterminate size. It was recognized as the county’s official port-of-entry by the crown of England, with incoming and outgoing goods scrutinized by tax collectors assigned by the provincial assembly.

New Yarmouth was chiefly a tobacco port, and business was good until it wasn’t, the latter owing to a significant overabundance of the crop, and a steep decline in its market price. A Virginia governor of the same era wrote that “it is commonly said there is tobacco enough now in London to last all England for five years.”

The local population gradually moved north and east as grain crops became more lucrative by comparison, and the death knell for New Yarmouth may have been the Maryland Vestry Act of 1692, which chose a central location for the Church of England headquarters in Kent. A new church, St. Paul’s, was constructed near the head of the West Fork of Langford Creek. The people followed. The county’s official functions also drifted in that direction, to Quaker Neck for a few years, with court held in a private residence, before the county seat finally settled in Chestertown by the dawn of the 18th century, where it appears likely to remain. The first dedicated courthouse in Chestertown was built in 1707.

The Maryland General Assembly still provided tobacco inspection at the New Yarmouth wharfs into the early-to-mid-1700’s, but that is the last recorded mention of a town that disappeared into the past, a small patch of civilization that rooted only shallowly and didn’t fully blossom. Within decades, even the remnants were gone, turned back to field and the occasional house situated along Gray’s Inn Creek and down the neck along Chester River proper.

Still, New Yarmouth is a piece of local history worthy of a state marker, and at the least the equal of the marker near Fairlee celebrating Bass Propagation Lake, another of Kent’s 24 official State Roadside Historical Markers.

One slight problem is that, nearly 350 years ago, deeds, record-keeping, mapping, and reliable contemporary accounts are not what they are today. To put it plainly, there was reasonably well-sourced speculation based on some scattered studies since the mid-19th century, but no unanimous consent on exactly where the bloody town had been.

This brings us back to that truck and its contents as it left Rock Hall and began the journey down the neck with Gray’s Inn Creek off to the left and Chesapeake Bay to the right.

It passed several lanes that led to the Gray’s Inn shoreline, and the bulk of Skinners Neck on the creek’s eastern shoreline beyond. Few of the town’s past researchers thought New Yarmouth had been that far north, but it was certainly possible.

The truck motored on, approaching the 4600 block of Eastern Neck Road, which is where, after considerable parsing of the available documentation, the Historical Society of Kent County suggested in its 2020 nomination that the marker should be placed. The area is now mostly the Harry C. Green Wildlife Preserve, a gift left by the former property owner to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. The address suggested by HSKC was an estimation, to be sure, but a pretty good one, and one not arrived at lightly.

The truck did not slow, however, passing opposite Brown’s Cove, Lucy Cove and Joiner’s Cove, all of which could have been likely spots for shipyards, wharfs, and a burgeoning 17th-century town.

On it traveled, to a left bend followed by a right bend, and then, almost a mile later, to the lane entrance for Napley Green Farm. An historic estate itself – almost exactly where Gray’s Inn Creek spills fully into the Chester River between Little Gum Point and Gray’s Inn Point on the opposite shore – the Napley Green property was where some who previously looked for New Yarmouth had confidently placed it.

That included Robert J. Johnson, whose historical work “Gravesend” was commissioned by the American Revolution Bicentennial Committee of Rock Hall in 1975, and included Johnson’s excited declaration that he had determined the lost town’s true location. Johnson wrote, “It was certain now, with all the overwhelming evidence, that the New Yarmouth site had finally been lifted from the past.”

The truck had other ideas. The journey south continued down a long straight section, then another twist and turn, left then right, and another straightaway until the truck came to a halt where the road begins a sharp bend leading to the end of the peninsula and to Eastern Neck Island. The SHA workers got out. It was slightly less than three miles past where the careful figuring of the Historical Society decided the brakes should be applied, and very nearly at the mouth of Church Creek, a smaller creek that bisects the tip of Eastern Neck.

Critics would say the State Highway Administration missed the historic mark by an entire creek, at the very least. The men with the order just took the auger out of the truck and dug a hole.

Meanwhile, in a climate-controlled garage in Lewes, Delaware, the actual answer to the long-debated and unresolved question – the exact location of New Yarmouth, the former seat of all law and order for Kent County – rested quietly in two large cardboard boxes.

…..

There are approximately 180,000 historical roadside markers in the United States, according to a 2024 survey by National Public Radio. The proliferation of those markers coincided with the proliferation of automobiles and highways in this country, with the greatest surge coming in the 1930’s.

Increasingly, people were able to travel longer distances for vacation or simple touring and the towns and cities along the way took that as an opportunity to celebrate what they had to offer in terms of historic or merely appealing points of local interest.

The average traveler is forgiven for assuming these markers are mostly significant, properly located, and accurate. That isn’t necessarily true 180,000 times over.

Both Missouri and Kentucky, for instance, have markers indicating that the bones of Daniel Boone are within their borders. NPR also reported that Michigan and Alabama each hold claim to having built the first railroad west of the Allegheny Mountains. A Texas marker heralds the site of the first manned airplane flight, which would be big news in Kitty Hawk, N.C.

There are more than 800 state historical markers in Maryland, including approximately 230 in the nine counties of the Eastern Shore, and the state’s program has wrestled with its own challenges regarding accuracy, proper placement, insensitive language, and the like.

According to Julie Schablitsky, MDOT’s chief archeologist, who was hired as the agency took control of the program in 2022, fewer than half of marker nominators are happy with where those markers are eventually located.

Since the first markers in the state were erected in 1930, by the Historical Society of Harford County, and through the rapid multiplication of the signs in 1932 to celebrate the bicentennial of George Washington’s birth, the administering of the marker program has passed through several sets of both private organizations and public agencies.

The first formal statewide program began in 1933, when the Maryland State Roads Commission partnered with the Maryland Historical Society, a private organization. That arrangement lasted until 1985 when the Maryland Historical Trust managed the program with funding from MDOT SHA. Finally, in 2022, MDOT assumed complete control, with MHT remaining vaguely in the picture as an advisory group, and the manager of the program’s searchable database. The database responsibilities also shifted to MDOT the following year.

The state agencies involved don’t comment on the recent changes, but from the outside it appears the workings of the program had slowed considerably. There was a backlog of markers to be completed, and there was a need to update some markers, or their language, or a need to just get rid of some. Again, only from indications that can be inferred from the outside, the program was kind of a mess.

New nominations were paused nearly five years as MDOT caught up with the backlog – including the New Yarmouth marker – and set about to update the existing inventory. The current plan is to reopen new applications to the public in 2027.

On MDOT’s official searchable marker database, which is still working its way toward reliability, there are markers that are noted as having been removed, but are still actually there; some are noted as missing; and some are listed as active and in place, but they are not. Eight hundred markers is a lot to keep track of, but still. Tidying up the program is an ongoing effort.

“I have begun checking the database against other records to ensure accuracy and have found some inconsistencies,” MDOT Senior Archeologist David Hanley wrote in an email. “I am currently working through the database to rectify these errors.

Many of the markers listed as “removed” were the sites of historic “estates,” that were, in fact, slave-holding plantations. Many other removed markers – or those listed as “removed” included references to Confederate actions during the Civil War, or Marylanders who joined the Confederacy.

A marker in Dorchester County in the Cambridge Cemetery notes the resting place of Thomas Holliday Hicks, who was the governor of Maryland from 1858-1862. He was pro-slavery, and a slaveholder himself, but was also anti-secession, which was a fairly narrow line to walk during his term.

When Hicks organized a state assembly to consider calling a convention on secession, he moved it from Annapolis to Frederick, a strongly pro-Union city where the assemblymen would feel safe regardless of their votes. Secession never came to the table in Maryland as a result – there is some indication a quorum wasn’t even reached – and, as a result, the small matter of the capital of the United States being completely encircled by enemy combatants was avoided.

Hicks has a place in Maryland history – no doubt about that – but, although his marker is still standing, the database lists it as “removed.” Maybe it was, but has returned Maybe it still will be taken down. Maybe it is slated to be. If so, then while his place in history is undeniable, his place in the Roadside Historical Marker program could be more tenuous.

Other markers statewide had to be updated or corrected, and each alteration takes time and research, as does the fabrication and installation, which costs approximately $5,000 per sign.

In Talbot County, for instance, a marker emblazoned, “FREDERICK DOUGLASS, NEGRO PATRIOT” was replaced with a more modern approach. Back in Dorchester County, the marker to Harriet Tubman that was sponsored by the Maryland Civil War Centennial Commission and erected in 1967, was replaced with a new marker that corrected the number of slaves Tubman helped lead to freedom. The previous number had been wildly inaccurate.

As for markers placed in a spot that is only tangentially accurate to the site they are commemorating, like the New Yarmouth sign, those inaccuracies are only rarely addressed.

“The location preferred by the applicant in a starting point, and we go from there,” Schablitsky wrote in an email response to a question about marker placement. “SHA has final word on location for maintenance, liability, and safety of the traveling public. Revisiting the conversation would not result in a different outcome.”

And somewhere in there is the reason the Worcester County sign that marks the southern shore boundary between Maryland and Virginia is 100 yards from the actual border.

……

When John Seidel and Elizabeth Seidel were hired to work at Washington College in 1998 and 1999, respectively, they heard quickly about New Yarmouth.

John was a professor of anthropology and environmental studies, and later the director of the Center for the Environment and Society. Elizabeth, an archeologist, became the director of the Washington College Public Archeology Lab and its Senior Archeologist.

“When we first came, we were invited to the Lions Club and the Rotary Club and that sort of thing,” Elizabeth Seidel said. “There would be a reception, and you gave a little presentation, and then people asked questions. And one of the first questions we always got was, ‘Are you going to find New Yarmouth?’ Somebody would ask the question and I would say, ‘Tell me more,’ and it was like a dam burst, and almost everybody in the audience had an opinion on where New Yarmouth was, and none of them agreed.”

Archeologists like mysteries, or at least solving them, and Elizabeth Seidel, along with John, went to work on this one. It wasn’t part of their day jobs, so it became a side project they undertook for the intellectual pursuit of it, and the chance to make a discovery.

“Over the years, when I had time, I would dive into this,” Elizabeth Seidel said. “It’s so complicated. You have to know that this is here and this happened here, and this one is that one’s father, and grandfather, and brother. And then you walk away from it for two weeks and come back and go, ‘Oh, God.’”

There were many fathers and grandfathers and brothers that settled Eastern Neck, and just as many deeds and transfers and inheritances and sales for a researcher to sort though. The neck was settled in the mid-1600’s by Englishmen almost exclusively from Kent Island. That’s why it is called Eastern Neck, even though it rides on the western edge of Kent County. The men who obtained the land grants from Lord Baltimore to establish settlements were looking eastward when they viewed it from the area near Love Point.

One of the first settlements of note was Eastern Neck Island, which was divided between Joseph Wickes and his partner, Thomas Hynson. Wickes is best remembered as the great-grandfather of Revolutionary War naval captain Lambert Wickes. But Joseph Wickes also was Kent County’s first chief justice and his home, Wickliffe, was the site of court proceedings, with Hynson as county sheriff. It operated as a de facto county seat for some years.

On the mainland neck just north of the island, land grants were given to other men, and the leader of one of the most prominent families was Col. Thomas Ringgold. His tract of land, named Huntingfield, was surveyed at 1,200 acres, and stretched from the Chesapeake across the neck to what was then written in some deeds as Gravesend Creek. (Over the centuries, the creek has name-shifted several times in documents; with variations like Graves Inn Creek, Grays End Creek, until finally settling on Gray’s Inn Creek, although the possessive is omitted somewhat randomly.)

The land was eventually inherited by one of Ringgold’s sons, James, who, in 1676, sold approximately 100 acres of it, on the eastern edge of the property bordering Gray’s Inn Creek, to a man named Samuel Tovey. The buyer’s intention, in conjunction with James Ringgold, was to establish a town. And so he did. But where?

The Maryland State Archives has a document that describe the “metes and bounds” of the land transfer, measured in perches, so that the rough shape of the property can be reasonably ascertained. But the document also describes the location as: “Beginning at a Marked white Oak standing in a point of Land upon the North side of Grays Inn Creek and bounded on the South side by Edward Rogers by a Line Drawn from the said marked white Oak South West one hundred twenty four perches back in the Woods to a marked Hickory…” And so on, to another two marked oak trees and a creek called “greate Neck Creek and thence by Greys End Creek…” And so on.

Well, points for the two different spellings of Gray’s Inn Creek – which runs roughly north and south and, therefore, does not have a “North side” – but finding the marked oaks and hickory is modern challenge. Part of that challenge, obviously, is figuring out the compass degrees of southwest travel from the oak to the hickory. The woods offer no clues. The southern border property owned by Mr. Edwards Rogers can be found, although the boundaries of that property are also arcanely described.

In other words, a difficult puzzle, and that is how Elizabeth Seidel describes it.

“I went through all the deeds in the area and it’s like a jigsaw puzzle, right?” Seidel said. “You follow the metes and bounds, and maybe it’s 100 acres, but you may have the shoreline wandering in and out of those lines, and maybe there’s a little less and maybe a little more.

“You can’t just look at the one individual property you’re trying to find, but all the properties around it. Every angle isn’t correct in every deed, so you tweak a little bit, but a little bit is okay. You don’t cram something in where it doesn’t belong. You plot out the surrounding deeds with software, put them on a map, and try to figure out where New Yarmouth would go, as the last piece of the puzzle.”

The serious search for the last piece has been ongoing since the mid-19th century when Dr. Peregrine Wroth, a physician and history buff, gathered oral histories that had been passed down. He and some other interested investigators also tromped about the shoreline and discovered the remains of a wharf near Brown’s Point and Brown’s Cove, along with some artifacts that included blue, rounded stones, not indigenous to the area, that were similar to ballast stones used at shipyards of the time.

A Washington College research team took up the hunt in the 1930’s and also found some artifacts, but didn’t reach a conclusion. In the early 2000’s, a post-graduate thesis authored by a former Washington College archeology student, did some field work in the same area, and turned up brick and glass fragments and some pipe stems and bowls among other things. Elizabeth Seidel was able to determine for the student that “W.E” inscribed on one of the pipe bowls was the mark used by a pipe-maker in England named Will Evans.

It was all very interesting, although the smoking gun searched for during these efforts had long since cooled.

But Elizabeth Seidel kept working on the puzzle.

“It takes finding the right document that kind of looks back at another document and links the two together,” she said. “And then I did find the document that allowed me to confidently place New Yarmouth. You pop it in place and it’s so satisfying.”

The Seidels have relocated twice since leaving Washington College in 2024. They first worked with Historic St. Mary’s City – St. Mary’s County is the only county in Maryland older than Kent – and have since moved to a semi-retired lifestyle in Lewes, Delaware. It’s been a busy time of transition.

“I have not been able to write all of this up yet,” Seidel said. “We just recently moved, but once we get everything settled, I’ll get the boxes out of the garage and get to it.”

The methodology and the documentation and the exact mapping are Elizabeth Seidel’s to reveal and receive the credit for, and she will do accomplish that as soon as possible. For the time being, however, she was willing to give up the unadorned answer to the question.

“It’s up there at Harry Green’s,” she said.

The lane entrance to the wildlife preserve donated in 2005 to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation by the late Harry C. Green, an avid outdoorsman, is at 4673 Eastern Neck Road. The foundation has constructed wetlands on the property to filter sediment, created wetland ponds, and done all manner of forest and grass buffer plantings to return those areas to nature. The lane that begins at Eastern Neck Road is just where the Historical Society of Kent County suggested the state should place the marker.

“Someone at the Historical Society mentioned to me that they were nominating a New Yarmouth marker, and I figured they would put it in the wrong spot,” Seidel said. “At that point I knew where it was. So, I offered (MDOT) assistance and they blew me off. I thought, ‘Okay, fine I’ll keep it to myself.’”

That was in 2020 when the original nomination was submitted by Amanda Tuttle-Smith, then the executive director of HSKC.

She relied on the best available research, and advice from Seidel when she wrote, in part, “I believe the marker would best be located in the 4600 block of SR 445, on the east side of the road, in a horizontal line from Brown’s Cove (the approximate location of New Yarmouth), off Gray’s Inn Creek.”

At the Maryland Department of Transportation, and the State Highway Administration – which would enter soon into a massive upheaval and restructuring of the marker program, and wouldn’t get the New Yarmouth marker erected for six years – the suggestions of nominators are only that.

“I am assuming they had taken my suggestion and placed it wherever they chose,” Tuttle-Smith said. “To my knowledge there was no dialogue about the sign’s final location.”

The state agencies tell it differently. Marker locations are not that easily decided. There are questions. Will the sign be visible where suggested? Will motorists be in jeopardy if they slow or stop to read it? Is there a safe shoulder? Does the state have right-of-way?

“Along this state road, the State Highway Administration has a very narrow right-of-way that makes installation difficult,” wrote David Broughton of MDOT’s Office of Public Affairs, addressing questions about the New Yarmouth marker. “Additional considerations include the 50 MPH speed limit of the road as well as the absence of any guardrail and unimproved space to offset the marker.

“With the New Yarmouth marker, MDOT worked with the nominator to find a compromise between where the town was located and where SHA could safely install the marker within their right-of-way.”

The past and present HSKC executive directors that were reached don’t recall these compromise discussions, but sorting out that he-said-she-said is just beating a horse as dead as Samuel Tovey’s dream of a prosperous town that would last centuries.

Where the marker was erected, the speed limit is still 50 miles per hour, at the end of a long straightaway. There is also no guardrail and no shoulder. If a motorist wishes to read the sign, he or she must pull into the apron of an adjacent private lane.

Where the marker placement was suggested in the nomination, there is a wide, graveled apron at the entrance to Harry C. Green’s former farm. A motorist could stop safely, although it is also private lane, owned by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

Adjacent to that lane, there is a brick pillar of relatively modern vintage, that bears a stone insert on its face with the name of Mr. Green’s farm: YARMOUTH.

History buffs can take heart that the location of the former town, thanks to Elizabeth Seidel’s soon-to-be-published work, will not remain “lost,” even if, somewhat ironically, the marker that commemorates it will probably always be.

Bob Ford has been a professional journalist for nearly 50 years, beginning his career at the Easton Star-Democrat. He spent most of his working career at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Bob lives on Eastern Neck with his wife, Bonnie, and their two cats, Sam and Max.