This area preserves many layers of the past at St. Mary's City, where artifacts from nearly 9,000 years span prehistoric Native American sites through recent times. After the first capital at St. Mary's was abandoned in the 1700s, the property was farmed. In the 1840s, Dr. John Mackall Brome built a large Greek Revival-style house and various outbuildings for an 1,800-acre plantation. Archaeologists later found that Brome's house stood over the ruins of another house built by Governor Leonard Calvert at the town center about 1635, more than two centuries earlier. In 1991, the Historic St. Mary's City Commission decided to relocate the Brome-era buildings so the Calvert house and the original town could be studied and interpreted.