Bill
and Nancy Smith Family
Travels andHolidays
Bryantown,Maryland, area,August 2001
This web site will both chronicle (very briefly) our recent visit toMaryland and provide some useful background material (via hyperlinksto additional information) for better understanding of the ancestoralheritage of the Kinnick line (Bill's mother's father's line) incolonial times.
Area Highlights
The remaining buildings of Bryantown areclustered in the
southwest corner of the
intersection of Highway 5 and the Bryantown Road.
To the south of the intersection, about a mile and a half, is the St.Mary's
Catholic Church
on the former Boarman's Manor.
William
Boarman received a multi-thousandacre grant from Lord Baltimore in this area,
which was subsequently sold in parcels as individual plantations ofvarying
sizes.
Boarman was a devout Catholic andprovided the land for the founding of St. Mary'sChurch.
The land where these to signs stand arestill part of the Catholic Church and School in thearea.
Bryantown is now most recognizable by itsstore and post office.
This is the east end of the building, gaspumps out front.
Post office in the west end of thebuilding:
On the
road behind the store (was thehighway in times past) is the most famous,
or "infamous" location - the Bryantown Tavern - now a
privateresidence.
Stories
suggest that it was in thistavern/inn that John Wilkes Booth planned the
assasination of President Abraham Lincoln.
The doctor who set Booth's broken leg, after the assasination, livedand had is
office,
just four miles north of here. That site in now also a museum andhistoric site.
Let's go back north, up the BryantownRoad, past the Soccer Field, and find PoplarHill.
Bill