554                           The Counties op Maryland

Kent County with its County Court held on Kent Island until 1686,
when it moved to New Yarmouth on Grays Inn Creek. On the east
would be Talbot County to the eastern limits of the province, at this
time nominally extending to the Delaware Bay, although the representa-
tives of the Duke of York were just beginning to grant patents for its
lands. On the north the boundary of Talbot County with respect to
Baltimore County was obscure. The latter apparently included Sassa-
fras River and early land records and ferry-rights would seem to indi-
cate that the boundary line lay somewhere along the divide between the
Sassafras and Chester rivers. What are now the first and second, dis-
tricts of Kent County may possibly have been an unsettled portion of
Talbot in 1667, but it seems more probable that Talbot County did not
exercise jurisdiction on the north side of the Chester River. On the
4th of June, 1671, according to the Kent County records ²⁴ by proclama-
tion it was ordered

" that for the future the northeast side of Chester, as far as the bounds of
Talbot County were formerly on that side, shall now be added to Kent
County "

and it was also decreed that Poplar's Island, which had already been,
given to Kent County on September 24, 1657, should become a part of
Kent County. From the terms of this proclamation it would appear
that the territory had formerly been in Talbot County.

Twenty years later, on the 31st of May, 1692, the inhabitants of
Kent Island petitioned, asking that this historic spot, the first settled
in Maryland, might again become an independent county and not, as it
then was, an appendage to the more rapidly growing settlement on the
mainland. At the same time (June 8, 1692) the inhabitants living on
the north side of the Chester River petitioned that if Kent Island be
separated into a distinct county there might be a reasonable number of
inhabitants added from the settlements on the south side of the Sassa^
fras River. The latter petitioned also that this might be done as it was
quite a hardship to them to be compelled to transact their county busi-
ness on the western side of the Bay at the Baltimore County Court, which
at that time was held at old Baltimore on the Bush River.

²⁴ Liber A, p. 54, quoted in Hansen, Old Kent, p. 221.