TALBOT COUNTY.

          Although there is no formal contemporary record of the erection of Talbot
         County, this unquestionably occurred early in 1662, as the first mention of the
         county which is to be found was on February 19, 1661/2, when the Governor
         and Council appointed a certain Moses Stagwelh Sheriff of Tahbot “till the
         County Cort can meete to present other persons to the Governor & Council”
         (Arch. Md. iii, 448). The county was named for Grace, the sister of Cecilius,
         second Lord Baltimore, the wife of Sir Robert Talbot.
          The boundaries of Talbot as first established are not accurately known as
         the order for its erection cannot be found. That it included not only the present
         Queen Anne's County, but also at first extended further north and west than
         Chester River and embraced some parts of what is the present Kent County
         seems probable, but the matter is too involved to be discussed here. The whole
         question is comprehensively treated by Edward B. Mathews in his The Coun-
         ties of Maryland (Maryland Geological Survey; 1907, pp. 552-556). In 1696
         Kent Island was taken from Kent County and made part of Talbot, and in
         1707 what is now Queen Anne's County including Kent Island became a new
         county.
          The shifting dividing line between Kent and Talbot counties in the sixties
         and seventies may account for the fact that what appears to be a change in
         the residence of certain justices from one county to another was really due to
         changing county boundaries.
          The first patents to land on the upper Eastern Shore in what was then Kent
         County, but was later subdivided into Talbot, Queen Anne's and Kent counties,
         were issued in 1658, when it was felt that relations with the Indians were
         sufficiently satisfactory to justify settlement on the mainland. That there had
         been squatters, traders, and hunters already scattered along the bay shore is
         known, but no actual grants to land had been issued before 1658. Envious eyes,
         however, had been cast upon the fertile mainland by the Kent Islanders and
         the people of the Western Shore, and as early as 165 1 a few warrants for
         land had been issued although no actual grants were made until 1658. In that
         year there was a rush of applicants, and land was rapidly taken up between
         1658 and 1662 in that part of Kent which was in the latter year to be Talbot
         County.
          In Talbot County, as in Kent, several waves of immigration contributed to
         its settlement. On Kent Island was a population made up of the Virginians
         who had come on the island with Claiborne and their descendants, to which
         had been added in the late thirties and throughout the forties Marylanders from
         St. Mary's, many of whom had played a part in the pacification and subsequent
         settlement of the island. To this old Kent Island element belonged Thomas
         Vaughan, Philip Conner, and Thomas Bradnox, who figure so prominently
         in the early Kent County court proceedings. In the early fifties important