War Comes to Breton Bay

In 1812, the young United States went to war with Great Britain, whose forces blockaded the Chesapeake Bay and sent raiding parties ashore from large warships to seize supplies, terrorize residents, and lure several thousand free and enslaved African Americans into British service. State and local militias tried to protect homes and towns and suppress slave uprisings the British hoped to provoke, but when the invaders arrived, local militia often fled into the woods because they were outnumbered and overpowered. If wives, servants, and slaves did not resist, the British were not to harm them while taking supplies and tobacco, yet homes and courthouses were burned throughout the tidelands. Miss Elizabeth M. Key of Tudor Hall and Mrs. Thompson saved the Leonardtown courthouse by telling the British it was used as a house of worship. Tudor Hall stands on land granted in 1649 to Bertram and Dominick Obert and became part of a property later owned by Phillip Lynes, who called it Shephard's Old Fields; in 1708, the Assembly endorsed a petition from Lynes for a town and county courthouse to be erected there. By 1744, Abraham Barnes owned a house on the land he named America Felix Secundus; he was a ship owner, planter, and public servant who served in the Assembly and the Albany Congress, and the Barnes family lived there from the late 1760s until 1817. In 1798, when owned by Abraham's son Richard, the house was described as a wooden dwelling 46 by 22 feet with a brick addition on each end, plus separate kitchen and storehouses. When Richard Barnes died in 1804, his will freed several hundred slaves three years after his death and required them to take the Barnes name, which continues in St. Mary's County through their descendants. Philip Key bought the property in 1817, and its name came from his connection to Tudor royalty; his cousin Francis Scott Key wrote "The Star Spangled Banner," and the Key family transformed the house into the form seen today by renovating it in the Georgian style between 1810 and 1817, adding a full second story with eight bedrooms, symmetrical wings at an inset portico, a ballroom, and a hanging staircase in the central hall, with an exterior finish made to resemble limestone blocks. Joseph Harris Key, who died in 1917, was the last Key to live there. In 1947, through the generosity of Mrs. Mary Patterson Davidson, the house was purchased and restored as a public library dedicated to those who gave their lives in World Wars I and II, and in 1984 it was purchased by the St. Mary's County Historical Society; twentieth-century restoration revealed the brick detailing visible today.

Leonardtown, Maryland · United States