Protestants gained sufficient power and influence to insist that the center of power for the colony be moved north to the more malleable city of Annapolis. The jilted capital soon faded into memory and its plowed fields, homes, businesses and government buildings forgotten. (The college, in fact, was established as a kind of consolation prize for the lost capital, starting life in 1840 as a girls seminary and ending up as the state’s public honors college. So over the years, the school and the lost city have maintained a uniquely special relationship, with their property, interests and activities widely overlapping.)
St. Mary’s City was never a city in the sense of a downtown, suburbs and business district. Even at its peak it was only a few dozen homes, a couple of taverns and a state house. The state house was rebuilt in 1934, but most of the other original buildings have been reconstructed only in an outline form called “ghost frames,” which gives the impression of a bankrupt 17th century housing development.
An important feature of St. Mary’s rebuilt past is the Dove—the maritime cargo van that accompanied the first settler’s Greyhound bus, the Ark. When not showing off elsewhere, the Doveis generally parked at a pier not far from the original landing place and at the bottom of a steep descent from the bluff where the “city” stood. On the weekend following our visit, the Dove would be out on the river, serving as the finish line for the 34th annual Governor’s Cup, a perennially popular overnight sailing race from Annapolis to St. Mary’s (from one capital to another)—a distance of about seventy miles, if you don’t count all the extra miles required on those many occasions when a beat to