MDMaryland Fun Facts

Near Hancock, Maryland is about 1.83 miles wide. A driver can leave Pennsylvania, cross the entire state, and enter West Virginia in under three minutes. That pinch is the leftover of a boundary argument that ran for eighty years and produced the most famous line in American geography, which almost nobody remembers the real purpose of.

Facts most people get wrong

• The Mason-Dixon Line was not drawn to separate slave and free states. Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon surveyed it between 1763 and 1767 to settle a property fight between the Calvert family of Maryland and the Penn family of Pennsylvania. Its symbolic meaning came decades later, around the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
• Baltimore has never been the capital. Annapolis has held that role since 1695. It was also the capital of the United States from November 1783 to August 1784, and it was in the Maryland State House that George Washington resigned his commission and Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris.
• The Star-Spangled Banner waited 117 years. Francis Scott Key wrote the words in September 1814 while watching Fort McHenry hold. Congress did not make it the national anthem until March 3, 1931, and the tune is an English social club song called "To Anacreon in Heaven."
• Lacrosse is not the state sport. Jousting is, adopted in 1962, which made Maryland the first state in the country to name an official sport at all. Lacrosse was later named the official team sport, in 2004.
• Old Bay is not a colonial recipe. Gustav Brunn, a spice merchant who fled Nazi Germany, began blending it in Baltimore in 1939 and named it for the Old Bay Line steamships that worked the Chesapeake.
• Maryland stayed in the Union. It was a slave state, and Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and jailed legislators to keep it from leaving. Its state song, written in 1861 to urge secession, was repealed in 2021, which left Maryland with no official song.

Records and firsts

• Annapolis served as the capital of the United States from November 1783 to August 1784, the only Maryland city ever to hold the job.
• The United States Naval Academy opened in Annapolis in 1845 and still commissions most of the Navy's officer corps.
• The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, chartered in 1827, was the first common carrier railroad in the United States. It is also the B&O on the Monopoly board.
• Samuel Morse sent the first long distance telegraph message, "What hath God wrought," from Washington to Baltimore on May 24, 1844, along the B&O right of way.
• Maryland was the first state to adopt an official sport, jousting, in 1962.
• Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened in 1992 and started the retro ballpark wave that most of Major League Baseball copied within a decade.
• Maryland's flag is the only state flag taken directly from English heraldry, combining the Calvert and Crossland family arms.

Geography that surprises

• At its narrowest, near Hancock, the state measures about 1.83 miles from the Pennsylvania line to the Potomac.
• Backbone Mountain in Garrett County reaches 3,360 feet at Hoye-Crest, while the Eastern Shore sits barely above the tide. Maryland ranks 42nd in area and still contains Appalachian highland, tidewater marsh and Atlantic beach.
• Maryland owns the Potomac River out to the Virginia shoreline, under an 1877 arbitration award. Someone standing ankle deep on the Virginia side is standing in Maryland.
• All of modern Washington DC is former Maryland land. Virginia donated the southern third in 1790 and took it back in 1846.
• The state counts about 3,190 miles of tidal shoreline around the Chesapeake and its rivers, against only 31 miles of open Atlantic coast.

Where the name comes from

The 1632 charter that Charles I granted to Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, named the colony Terra Mariae, Maryland, for Henrietta Maria of France, the king's Catholic queen consort. Calvert had proposed Crescentia. The king supplied the name himself. Maryland's Catholic settlers were free to hear the Virgin Mary in it, which was almost certainly the appeal of a name that worked two ways in a kingdom where Catholicism was suspect. The state motto, Fatti maschii, parole femine, comes from the Calvert family arms and is in Italian rather than Latin. Its long standing translation, manly deeds and womanly words, was officially replaced in 2017 with strong deeds, gentle words.

Quick stats

• Population: 5 to 10 million
• Area rank: #42 of 50
• Admitted: 1788
• Capital: Annapolis
• Largest city: Baltimore
• Time zone: Eastern

Bordering states

Explore further