Introduction. xxxiii

(pp. 242, 350, 394.395. 270-271, 396-397). The acts of 1765 show, however,
that the Assembly did in that year confirm the lease of lot No. 71 at the
northwest corner of Baltimore and Gay streets, doubtless the same lot referred
to in the 1763 petition, from Thomas Harrison to the Baltimore Town com-
missioners for market purposes (Hanson's Laws of Md. made since 1763,
Chapter xxxiv).

In Charles County the magistrates asked authority to build a prison, and
Charles Town in that same county requested an act to prevent the keeping
of geese or swine in the town except within enclosures. Charles County did
not secure the passage of the prison bill, but the town was given authority to
regulate its hogs and geese (pp. 254, 369, 376, 381, 384, 510).

At the session of 1762 an attempt had been made to establish a town at
Elk Ridge Landing, but action upon it had been deferred until the next As-
sembly (p. 148). When it came up again in the Lower House at the 1763 session,
there seems to have been opposition, apparently from a member of the Upper
House, Charles Hammond, of Anne Arundel County, heir of Philip Hammond,
whose lands seem to have been involved. The Lower House by a vote of
nineteen to eleven decided that a jury be empanelled if the proprietors of the
land and the commissioners appointed to lay the town out could not agree.
This house then passed the bill but it was rejected in the Upper House on
November 23, for reasons undisclosed (pp. 307, 323, 333, 351, 379, 383, 269).

This attempt in 1763 to establish a town at Elk Ridge Landing in Anne
Arundel County, at the head of tide water on the Patapsco River, although
unsuccessful, is mystifying to the writer, as a town had already been estab-
lished there by an act of the Assembly passed in 1733. This 1733 act (which
had not been subsequently repealed) erected a town to be called Janssen Town
at Elk Ridge Landing. Forty lots were to be laid out on a town site of thirty
acres, and the usual procedure in such acts for erecting a town was ordered
to be followed. Six commissioners were named in the act who were to have
the land surveyed, a town clerk was to be appointed by them, and town records
were to be kept. (Archives. Md. XXXIX; 125-127). Elk Ridge had pros-
pered and had a flourishing trade with the back country and was the site of
important iron foundries, although it never seems to have been called by its
legal name, Janssen Town. Why an attempt should have been made thirty
years after the erection of Janssen Town to found another town on what
seems obviously the same, or a nearby, site, is not clear to the writer, unless
the bill introduced in 1763, of which no copy has been preserved, among other
things would have repealed the earlier law, changed the name from Janssen
Town to Elk Ridge Landing, and contained provisions not in the law of 1733.
Or perhaps the earlier act had become obsolescent because its terms had not been
carried out. It was not long afterward, however, that the harbor of Elk Ridge
Landing filled up with silt, and ships could no longer reach its docks. The
name Janssen Town was in honor of Barbara Janssen, daughter of Sir
Theodore Janssen, Bart., who had married in 1730, Charles Calvert, Fifth
Lord Baltimore.