from 1806 to 1851 109

filed. Thomas Harris, Junior, of Annapolis, was
appointed clerk of the court, and the sheriff of
Anne Arundel County was ordered to attend the
sittings in person or by deputy to preserve order.
Members of the bar came in groups to be read-
mitted to practice before the court. And the
court then heard its first argument, that in the
case of John Baker v. The State, one of the cases
brought on writ of error to the General Court.¹⁵
It was the first on a docket of three hundred and
two cases in the Court of Appeals.

For its sessions on the Eastern Shore, the court
was permanently housed in part of the court house
at Easton, completed in 1794, still used by the
Circuit Court for Talbot County, and previously
used by the General Court for the Eastern Shore.¹⁶
James Earle, who had been clerk of the General
Court for that shore for about twenty years, was,
in December, 1806, made the first clerk of the
Court of Appeals for the Eastern Shore.

The appointment of Thomas Harris, Junior, as
clerk for the court on the Western Shore was an
event of importance to the profession in Maryland.
He was a man of extraordinary industry, and an
exact workman; and he applied his labors to the
benefit of the State in many directions. No one
who delves in the archives of the court will long
remain unfamiliar with his handwriting, for books
and papers written by him abound. He had been
born in Charles County in 1770. Since 1789 he had
been a deputy clerk in the General Court, and he

15. 2 Harris & Johnson, 5.

16. A plan of having the General Court sit in a court house to be
built at Dover, in Talbot County, was abandoned by authority,
act of 1788, ch. 16.