St. Mary's City was the site of Maryland's first capital, established by English settlers in 1634 not long after the founding of Jamestown and Plymouth, and it flourished until the capital was moved to Annapolis in 1695. Although the original city no longer stands, it is recognized today as a National Historic Landmark and as one of America's best-preserved archaeological sites, where historians and archaeologists have located and re-created many seventeenth-century roads and paths, houses, and public buildings. Many of America's great ideals, including religious toleration and separation of church and state, were first tested here, and extensive archaeology has uncovered much of the early capital's long-buried past. Re-created and reconstructed features include Godiah Spray Tobacco Plantation, Smith's Ordinary, a Woodland Indian Hamlet representing 1634 at a small Yaocomaco Indian settlement in the St. Mary's River valley, Cordea's Hope on the site of an original seventeenth-century storehouse, the replica trading vessel Maryland Dove, and the reconstructed State House of 1676, built in 1934 for the three hundredth anniversary of Maryland's founding.
