xxxiv Introduction.

At the 1763 session George Beall, one of the owners of land upon which
George Town, then in Frederick County but now in the District of Columbia,
had been erected in 1751, petitioned the Assembly that an injury had been
done to him by an "undue survey made in laying out" that town. Bealle and
the town commissioners were summoned to appear before the bar of the house,
but after Bealle had been heard, his petition was disallowed (pp. 340, 354,
368).

A petition was presented at the 1763 session in the Upper House by "Several
the Inhabitants of Baltimore County praying a Town may be erected near
the Mouth of the Susquehannah in the said County and called Charlotte Town",
but the petition was promptly rejected (p. 232). Doubtless this "paper town"
which seems to have died aborning, as it is not heard of again, was to have
been located on or near the site of what is now Havre de Grace, Harford
County, which was not erected into a town until the year 1785. It will be
recalled that at the 1762 session Rebecca Stokes had petitioned the Assembly
praying the erection of a town on the tract Harmer's Town, and that her peti-
tion had been rejected (p. 20). It is quite possible that there was a close
connection between these two petitions. It is of interest that Charlotte Town
was not a new name for a Baltimore County town, for some two decades
earlier, about 1744, Thomas Brerewood (d. 1746), lord of My Lady's Manor,
a tract of over ten thousand acres, lying about twenty-five miles to the west
of the mouth of the Susquehanna, gave the name of Charlotte Town to a
short-lived "private" town he had laid out on My Lady's Manor, without
an enabling act of the Assembly, and named in honor of his wife Charlotte
Calvert (1702.1744), the daughter of Benedict Leonard Calvert, Fourth Lord
Baltimore. It is probable, however, that the town at the mouth of the Susque-
hanna was to be named in honor of Queen Charlotte, who had recently become
the wife of George III.

A petition was presented at the 1763 session, signed by 123 inhabitants of
Somerset County, asking for the passage of legislation relating to the town of
Salisbury, located at the head of Wicomico River in that county. The petition
recited that an act had been passed at the 1732 Assembly for erecting this town
on fifteen acres of land at Handy's or Carr's Landing and dividing it into
twenty lots, and declared that although the town was commodiously situated
for trade and navigation few lots had been taken up because of defects in the
act. The petition prayed that the law of 1732 be repealed and a new act for
promoting the advantages of the town, to be framed by the petitioners, be passed.
This petition with its signers is printed in full in the Appendix (pp. 581.582).
A bill to this end was passed by the Lower House, and rejected in the Upper
House, the reason for its rejection not being disclosed by the record (pp. 364,
²5²> 33 ^J> 334, 354; 375)- It is likely that the bill was in some way considered
hostile to the Proprietary interest.

Two petitions from widows asking the enactment of legislation relating
to land were presented in the Upper House at this session and both were
rejected (p.26o). Catherine Scott, widow, of Frederick County, prayed that
a bill "be brought in to make over the Land therein Mentioned upon paying