Visitors were able to step into Maryland’s reconstructed 17th-century Catholic Church for the first time. This is an opportunity that lasts over 320 years.
The historic city of St. Mary, an archaeological organization, opened its brick chapel on April 12th. This building was originally built in 1667. St. Mary’s City is a colonial town located in St. Mary’s County off the west coast of Chesapeake Bay.
Fox News Digital spoke to Dr. Henry Miller, a senior researcher at Historic St. Mary’s City, which is the result of multiple excavations since 1988.
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A wooden chapel was first built on the premises in 1645, but the structure burned out when Maryland was attacked by British forces by the British Parliament.
“But things settled in the 1660s and the brick chapel began to be built, the first major brick building in Maryland,” Miller said. “It was a very important architectural achievement for time and place.”
The church was “the heart of Maryland’s Catholic worship” until 1704, said Dr. Henry Miller, whose Protestant governor closed the church. (Historical St. Mary’s City)
During the colonial period, Catholics were generally prohibited by law from having a church, but Maryland provided a notable exception.
“Because there is a possibility that the Baltimore Lord’s freedom, conscience and freedom of religion (the church) could be built,” the expert said.
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“So (the Church) is an important statement regarding the beginning of religious freedom in the present day of the United States and beyond.”
The brick chapel was the heart of Maryland’s Catholic worship until 1704, when the colony’s Protestant governor closed the building’s doors. The sheriff said, “We will not allow the door to be locked, and we will again steal the keys with him and use the building for worship.”
The historic city of St. Mary, an archaeological organization, opened its reconstructed brick chapel on April 12th, after decades of historic work. (Historical St. Mary’s City)
“Freedom of faith, religious freedom that Baltimore Lord defended, was completely over that time,” the archaeologist said.
“A few years later, the building was demolished and essentially disappeared from vision and memory for over 200 years.”
“This building could not be built anywhere else in the English-speaking world at this time.”
The church was completely forgotten until 1938 when an architectural historian discovered the distinctive remains of a cross-shaped brick building.
Today, the brick chapel, rebuilt between 2004 and 2009, features recently completed interiors that capture exactly what the 17th century Catholic Church looked like back then.
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Miller recreated the interior of the building through several means, including obtaining similar church studies and art commonly used in Jesuit churches. Many artifacts will not survive on the site thanks to the Jesuits, who dismantled their churches and reused the materials elsewhere.
“The Jesuits were some of the first recyclers… They took everything on the ground and reused it,” Miller said.
“What we found was a lot of plaster, mortar, five feet deep and three feet wide brick foundation fragments.”
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“In fact, we let visitors see some of that original brickwork,” Miller added. “There was a strange stone we found there (and) we now know that they imported 14 tons of stone from Europe to pave the floors of this building.”
However, the church still retains some original features. Miller also pointed out that the original tabernacle of the church survived, along with a 17th century lead cow that visitors can see under the glass floor.
The chapel required extensive construction work and research to determine what the 17th century Catholic Church looked like. (Historical St. Mary’s City)
“The grave is around and inside the chapel,” Miller said. “The chapel has 60-70 graves, but there are 300-400 outside.”
He said, “This was Maryland’s largest 17th century cemetery, so the significant distribution was also shown where the formal area, the altar area, began.”
Still, the process was challenging. Miller was able to find only one written description of the chapel dating back to the late 1690s.
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“Protestant governor Francis Nicholson was very anti-Catholic,” the archaeologist said. “And he said in his report, “Catholics have several chapels in Maryland, which include a good brick chapel in St. Mary.”
“As visitors, we want people to visit us with a sense of what people in the 17th century saw.”
Miller said, “Yeah, why did he want him to be a redundant guy who gave us more information?
He added, “It’s based on a lot of different information. It’s as accurate as we can come up with.”
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Still, historians have emphasized that formal worship will not be held in the new building – instead it exists as an exhibition on the history of religious freedom in Maryland.
“The seeds of faith planted there… raised the first parish and church founded in Maryland in 1790,” Miller said. “So, that’s really where the contemporary Catholic Church of America is founded.”
The brick chapel was an accurate reconstruction of the original 1667 structure of the same site (the foundation you can see here), and it took decades to recreate the church. (Historical St. Mary’s City)
“But it’s also a symbol, and this is what matters,” he said. “This building could not be built anywhere else in the English-speaking world at this time.”
Visitors may be surprised at the elegance inside the church. Instead of the classic colonial New England church, the New England church, filled with wooden feet, has no legs at all in the brick chapel.
Miller said that in the colonial Catholic Church, worshippers were either standing or kneeling.
“Puse is like a Protestant innovation,” added Miller. “A seating would be very helpful if you had a two-hour sermon. The Catholic sermon was probably pretty short.”
Visitors can see the original 17th century lead co-worth through the glass plates of the chapel. (Historical St. Mary’s City)
Miller said decades of work have created “unique exhibits.”
“We also want to be a visitor to have a sense of what people in the 17th century saw,” the archaeologist said. “We hid the exhibits in the arms of the building, where we won’t see them until you get up on them.”
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“This has been working on for over 37 years, and we are pleased to be able to finally complete it and tell this important American story more effectively.”
Brooke Curto and Kyle Schmidbauer of Fox News Digital contributed to this report.
