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MARYLAND HISTORICAL MAGAZINE

Parceling Out Land in the Vicinity of
Baltimore: 1632-1796, Part 1

GARRETT POWER

The following essay describes the parceling out of land in the vicinity of
Baltimore between 1632 and 1796. The study provides a textual, graphic,
and pictorial "chain of title" from first patent to building lot. It details who
acquired which parcels when, over an era beginning with the establishment of the
Maryland colony and ending with the incorporation of Baltimore City.

This project came about by accident while I was preparing a study of leasehold
tenure in Baltimore. My analysis was based upon eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen-
tury reports of cases adjudged in the Maryland Court of Appeals1 and upon
nineteenth-century legal treatises.^

When I sought to determine who owned the land prior to the Revolution, I looked
to the standard works of J. Thomas Scharf. Colonel Scharf put together in the
second half of the nineteenth century a compendium of the "scattered and frag-
mentary facts" concerning Baltimore City and County.3 Therein I found a consid-
erable amount of disjointed and sometimes inconsistent information concerning
land ownership. But I recognized that the case reports and legal treatises provide
an alternative view of the same events. By combining and comparing the Scharf
materials and the legal material I was able to discern the best evidence of the chain
of title.

Later, while rummaging in the map collection of the Maryland Historical Society,
I came upon a survey of some of the first land patents in the Baltimore region
prepared by George Gouldsmith Presbury in 1786. Presbury overlaid the some-
times conflicting metes and bounds and included a wealth of information in his
notes. Working with the chain of title, and using the Presbury Plat to maintain a
sense of place, I found myself in a position to set the record straight. And in the
final analysis the links in this chain then could be verified in the land records found
in the Maryland State Archives.

The task of describing how two thousand acres were parceled out over almost
two hundred years is difficult. I try to do the job by impressing in the reader's mind
the dimensions of time, place, and personalities. The following text is ordered
chronologically with reminders of the outside events shaping the times—the
Catholic oppression and Glorious Revolution, the growth of the Maryland economy

Garrett Power is a professor at die University of Maryland School of Law.

MARYLAND HISTORICAL MAGAZINE
VOL. 87, NO. 4, WINTER 1992

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