Beneath our feet and back in time, history is densely layered.

BY DWIGHT YOUNG

The logs for sukeek’s cabin came from the forests of southern Maryland. The stones for the foundation came from the bank above St. Leonard Creek. Sukeek herself came from Africa. She was a slave.

The cabin was destroyed long ago by fire or weather or the simple passage of time. But archaeologists and researchers, with enthusiastic help from some of Sukeek’s own descendants, have been exploring the cabin site, trying to learn more about Sukeek and the world in which she lived. The site is in Calvert County, at a place called Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum. That’s a pretty cumbersome name, so lots of people just call it “Jeff Patt.”

Calvert County is growing faster than just about anyplace else in Maryland. But once you get away from the new subdivisions and strip malls that have given Route 4 a virulent case of road rash, it’s still possible to find pockets of great tranquillity here. Jeff Patt is one of those pockets. Looking over this sun-washed 544-acre swath of woods and fields sloping down to the Patuxent River, you might think it’s a rural backwater where nothing ever happens. You’d be wrong. Things have been happening here for a very long time.

You can hardly stick a shovel into the dirt at Jeff Patt without turning up evidence of extensive Native American occupation, some of it dating back thousands of years. Early European colonists made their homes here, too. One of them was Richard Smith, the first attorney general of Maryland, who built a house (plus storehouses, barns, and slave quarters) close to the riverbank early in the 1700s. A century later, during the War of 1812, the largest naval battle in Maryland history took place here when British vessels traded fire with the war barges of the Americans’ grandly named Chesapeake Flotilla. The remains of some of the barges are still buried in the silt a short distance offshore.

Scattered over the landscape are links with Jeff Patt’s more recent history. The property’s years as a model farm are reflected in a collection of buildings designed by Gertrude Sawyer, one of the few women to gain admission to the old boys’ club that was the American architectural profession in the early 20th century. In a new building that houses the Academy of Natural Sciences’ Estuarine Research Center, scientists are investigating the impact of human activity on marine ecosystems. And in an even newer building nearby, staff of the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory—arguably the best facility of its kind in the nation—are conserving and studying more than 4.5 million artifacts from all over the state.

I read somewhere that the Cheyenne believe everything that has ever happened in a place is still happening there. If that’s true, Jeff Patt is a very crowded bit of geography. Hiking across a field, you pass a hastily built battery where men sweat in their itchy uniforms and watch for British gunboats. Idly throwing pebbles into the Patuxent, you watch a couple of Indians pull oysters from the water and toss them into their canoe. Stooping to pick a wildflower, you rub elbows with slaves tending their owner’s tobacco fields. Punching the keypad of your cell phone, you tap into a new world of instantaneous communication—while just over the hill, recently arrived English settlers explore a totally different New World.

History isn’t linear, it’s stratified. Events, lives, artifacts—they all get stacked up over time. We walk into a skyscraper lobby that sits on the site of an old country store that used to be an Indian campsite on land that was once at the bottom of the sea. Places have layers. More layers than the plot line of a daytime soap opera. More layers than—well, you get the idea. Keeping those layers intact (which, after all, is what preservation is all about) helps us realize what a tall stack of shoulders we stand on. That realization can be a bit unnerving—or enormously comforting. On a picnic at Jeff Patt as summer slides into fall, I choose the latter.

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