History
The town was created in 1706 when the colonial Maryland Legislature authorized surveying and laying out the towns of Queen Anne Town, Nottingham, Mill Town, Piscataway, Aire (also known as Broad Creek) and Upper Marlboro (then known as Marlborough Town).
Queen Anne's Town was created as part of a 1706 act "for the advancement of trade and erecting ports and towns in the Province of Maryland." The town grew to a population of about 150.
In 1747, the legislature tried to improve the quality and the method of marketing tobacco, then the major crop of the area, and established a formal system of tobacco inspection and quality control. A tobacco inspection station and warehouse was located on Hazelwood, then owned by Thomas Lancaster, one of the towns leading merchants. This was one of seven state tobacco warehouses built in Prince George's County. A horse racing track was also built in the town.
By the mid-18th century, upland farming in the Patuxent basin without erosion control led to massive silting of the river. The ports along the Patuxent quickly filled with silt and could no longer take in ocean-going vessels such as the snows that frequented the town. The last cargo ship left for England about 1790, and the town began to decline.
During the War of 1812, the Chesapeake Bay Flotilla commanded by Joshua Barney scuttled his entire fleet in the half dozen miles of river below Queen Anne to avoid the vessels being captured by the advancing British.
Read more about this topic: Queen Anne, Prince George's County, Maryland
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.”
—Henry Geldzahler (1935–1994)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)