Book Description

Excerpt from Old Maryland Manors, Vol. 7: With the Records of a Court Leet and a Court Baron A striking contrast between the North and the South is presented by the small landholdings of the former and the great estates of the latter. Tracts of thousands of acres were not at all uncommon in colonial Maryland, and sometimes land-grants included even tens of thousands. These great estates had a strong shaping influence on the life of early Maryland. Separating their owners by wide intervals, they prevented that association of interests and feelings that was strong in the towns of the northern colonies. The man who lived in the center of a tract of ten thousand acres must necessarily have been thrown largely upon his own resources for amusement and for culture. The cooperation which makes schools and libraries of easy attainment in a thickly settled community was absent among such people. Consequently education could be obtained only at great cost and inconvenience. The planter who was determined to have his children well taught had to send them abroad, as was done in the case of Charles Carroll of Carrollton. There were some towns founded in Maryland, it is true, in the earliest days. The vanished city of St. Mary's, the lost Joppa, and others that have disappeared as completely as the "cities of the plain," furnished a stimulus to civilization in some parts of the colony. But in spite of these instances, it is true that most of the life of Maryland in the latter half of the seventeenth and the whole of the eighteenth century, was country life. And it was a country life that presented many analogies to the country life of Englishmen during the same period. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.