What’s in a “name”?

Originally from: Letters from Linden
Written by: Cori Sedwick Downing
Date: January 2008

What’s in a Name?   European Roots of Colonial Calvert County Families.

While almost every town or city in America has a Main Street or a First Avenue, how many boast roads named Broome’s Island, Dares Beach or Sollers Wharf?  These names reflect Calvert County’s immigrant history and founding fathers, and so do many other geographical points of interest. Think about Parran Point, Turner Cove, or Hellen Creek. Add to those locales others such as Bowen, Mackall Estates and Williams Wharf.  These places and many more recall the earliest days of recorded history in Calvert County in the 1600s. Even when no trace of these first families remains in the population today, their surnames are memorialized in street signs, place names, and even ancestral homes still standing.  Who were these sturdy settlers who braved harsh conditions, privations, Indians, and homesickness to create a new life in America?

The colonization of Calvert County was due first to England’s desire to expand its base of power and wealth, and second to the Puritan’s expulsion from Virginia. Later came the Huguenots, the French version of Puritans; the Quakers; and the Scots.  The underpinnings of these groups where the settlers who cleared and worked the land thus producing the staple crop of tobacco were those who had been transported as indentured servants. In many ways, Calvert County reflects America’s melting pot in miniature.

In the 1630s, Cecilius Calvert, acting as the area’s first real estate agent, opened an office in London and offered one hundred acres of land free to anyone who could pay his own way to Maryland.  The idea was popular enough that the land grant was reduced by fifty percent after 1641, and by 1689, no more free land was granted since the county was mostly inhabited.  Even free land had a price, in the form of annual quit rents. It was in this way that younger sons of English gentry were able to acquire substantial homesteads. Had they remained in England, they would have been penniless and landless due to the doctrine of primogeniture where oldest sons inherited everything. Some of the earliest Cavaliers, or British gentry, were Robert Brooke, Edward Eltonhead and John Broome.

The Cavaliers couldn’t run their plantations with a workforce of nameless peasants from England, the indentured servants. Many a Calvert County place-name reflects these people whom were mostly single men who allowed themselves to be transported and  bound to servitude in the tobacco fields for five to seven years, after which time they would be rewarded with their freedom and fifty acres of land along with the tools, clothing, and supplies to cultivate it.  Among those were the Taneys, the Clares, the Hellens, the Biggers, the Stinnetts and the Sedwicks.

About the time Calvert County became a permanent settlement under the leadership of Robert Brooke in 1650, the Puritans began to arrive from Virginia seeking religious tolerance. Their numbers were great and surpassed all other classes of settlers.  The following list of names reflects that majority position:  Bennett, Lloyd, Howard, Hopkins, Thomas, Young, Cox, Mears, Williams, Dorsey, Fuller, Waring, Warren, Parker, Lawrence, Hooper, Emerson, James, Gray, Ward, Milton, Preston, Wood, Kent, Robinson, Veitch, Parrott, Stoakley, Letchworth, Dawkins, Little, Godsgrace, Turner, Day, Bond, and Manning. By and large these immigrants represented the middle class and provided the moral foundations upon which the county grew.

Although Robert Brooke provided the religious tolerance the Puritans sought, his employer, Lord Baltimore, did not. A tug of war between both sides ended with a truce called the Restoration in 1658.  After that time, Quakers arrived, having also been expelled from Virginia. The Puritan leader, Richard Preston, even converted to Quakerism!  Names associated with those first Quaker settlers are Hall, Smith, Johns, Billingsley, Hutchins, Hance, Harris, Freeland, Talbot, Dorsey, Bond, Pardoe, Kent, Allnutt, Roberts, Hunt, and Dixon.  They quickly settled in as industrious farmers.

Also among Calvert County’s earliest inhabitants were Huguenots or the French Puritans.  Some of their names were anglicized (Brasseur- Brashears) so you would hardly recognize them today. Other early Huguenot settlers and prominent families got their start with founding fathers John Laveille, Alexander Parran (French= Perrin), John Pardoe (French= Pardieu), John Sollers, and Isaac Monnetts (French= Monet).

The smallest group of settlers, some indentured and some not, were the Scottish, though their names rank among the most established. Ninian Beall, James Somervell, and James Mackall were prisoners of war shipped off to America and indentured to land owners in Calvert County. They too were awarded grants of land once their sentence was complete. Other Scotsmen such as Thomas Sterling, James Dalrymple, and David Weems arrived in Calvert County of their own accord from Scotland.

A preponderance of places names in Calvert County, one of the oldest counties in Maryland, reflects its immigrant population from England and beyond.  In this day of mobile societies and transplantation, it’s sometimes comforting to know that the names about which we scratch our heads in wonder belong to the people who made our todays possible.  The County has a rich and varied cultural history due to its ancestors, many of whose descendants still call Calvert County home.