Historical archaeologist Henry Miller says that the reconstructed 1667 Brick Chapel in Historic St. Mary’s City, Maryland “is a small building in a small part of the world.”
But in a talk on April 12, 2025, he added “that building contains a huge story of state, national and international significance.”
A major milestone for the Brick Chapel – a landmark of faith that symbolizes Maryland’s status as a birthplace of religious freedom in the United States – unfolded that day, as the chapel’s interior features were unveiled, culminating more than four decades of historical research, archaeological excavation and painstaking reconstruction work.
Using 17th century building methods and tools, the rebuilt Brick Chapel’s exterior was completed and opened as an historic exhibit in 2009.
“It was a shell. It lacked the core for which it had originally been built, the altar,” Miller said at the ceremony for the chapel’s new interior.
Based on investigations of what mid-17th century Jesuit chapels looked like, the interior of the reconstructed Brick Chapel now includes an altar based on classical architecture with a replica of an historic painting of Mary and Jesus above the altar, a wooden tabernacle covered in gold-leaf, six candlesticks atop the altar similar to ones used at that time, and a wooden Communion rail. The chapel has benches along its side walls, since Catholic churches at that time did not have pews.
The chapel’s painting of Mary and Jesus is based on a Marian icon from the Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome, and the Jesuits used copies of that image in their missions around the world during that era when the chapel was built. The tabernacle is designed to be a copy of what is believed to be the chapel’s original tabernacle, which after the Brick Chapel was closed, was used in a private chapel of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. Family legend held that it had been in the chapel in St. Mary’s City, where members of the Carroll family had worshipped.
“We wanted, when they (visitors) come in the door, they would experience what a 17th century worshipper would,” said Miller.
Welcoming the guests to the ceremony revealing the Brick Chapel’s interior, John Seidel, the executive director of Historic St. Mary’s City, explained, “I just don’t know how it would be possible to accurately replicate a chapel in a city called St. Mary’s in a colony and state called Maryland without acknowledging that this chapel almost certainly would have been dedicated to Mary as well, and it would have borne her likeness above the altar.”
Miller, a Maryland Heritage Scholar and the Senior Research Fellow at Historic St. Mary’s City, has worked there since the 1970s, and he oversaw the chapel reconstruction project. In an interview before the ceremony, he said, “It is such an important site in both Church and American history. It represents the very beginnings of the Catholic Church in the 13 original colonies.”
And he added that the chapel represents the beginnings of religious freedom in what became the United States of America.
In a talk that afternoon, Miller – who has a doctorate in anthropology from Michigan State University with a specialization in historic sites archaeology – noted that Cecil Calvert, the Lord Baltimore, established the Maryland colony in a “bold experiment” based on the principles of liberty of conscience, free exercise of religion and that there would be no state church.
After a storm-tossed, four-month ocean voyage from England aboard the ships the Ark and the Dove, the initial Maryland colonists made landfall on March 25, 1634 at St. Clement’s Island, where Jesuit Father Andrew White, who is known as “the apostle of Maryland,” celebrated the first Catholic Mass in the English-speaking colonies.
At a time when England mandated the Church of England as the state religion, the new Maryland colony founded on the idea of liberty of conscience included Anglicans, Puritans, Anabaptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Lutherans and Catholics, who constituted perhaps 10 percent of the early population there.
In his opening remarks, Miller said the seeds of the Catholic faith planted by the original Maryland colonists eventually developed into the Diocese of Baltimore, the new nation’s first diocese that was established in 1789 to serve Catholics in the 13 original states and was led by Bishop John Carroll, the nation’s first bishop.
At the ceremony marking the reconstructed interior of the Brick Chapel, Baltimore Archbishop William E. Lori noted how Pope Francis has designated 2025 as a Jubilee Year of Hope.
“I think of Jesuit Father Andrew White and those souls aboard the Ark and the Dove as pilgrims of hope,” Archbishop Lori said, adding that those who disembarked on St. Clement’s Island “ came in search of something new, a new life, a life of religious freedom, a place where they could practice their faith without fear… a place to begin a new life for themselves and their families.”
Jesuit Father Ronald Anton, the superior of the Colombiere Jesuit Community in Baltimore, offered the invocation at the ceremony, noting how Father Andrew White aboard the Ark on its way to the New World wrote that “the first and most illustrious design” of Lord Baltimore in establishing the Maryland colony, “which also ought to be the aim of the rest who go in the same ship, is not to think so much of planting fruits and trees in a land so plentiful, as sowing the seeds of religion and piety.”
The Jesuit priest prayed that people, with God’s help, will “continue the work of religious freedom, of respect for the dignity of every individual and tolerance of all people which they (Maryland’s first settlers) started here.”
Father Andrew White had a wooden chapel built at the site of where the reconstructed Brick Chapel stands now, but that first structure was burned down in 1645 during an attack on St. Mary’s City by Richard Ingle, a Protestant privateer. Father White was taken back to England in chains. But Lord Baltimore later regained control of the Maryland colony, and the Brick Chapel was constructed in 1667.
That chapel, Miller said, became “the first permanent Catholic structure in English America. It was the main church for the Maryland Catholic community. And it was the first brick building in Maryland.”
For that time and that place, the chapel was a major achievement, he said.
“This (chapel) stood out in an amazing way, and that was intentional. The effort was huge, clearly a costly undertaking, making 300,000 bricks, producing several thousand roof tiles, getting tons of oyster shells and burning them for lime for mortar and plaster, cutting trees for stout rafters,” and importing tons of stone for the floor, Miller said.
The archaeologist emphasized that “as the founding site of a major religion in the United States, this is clearly a place of national significance.”
In 1697, Maryland’s royal governor, Francis Nicholson, wrote that the structure was “a good Brick Chappell.” But in 1704, a later Maryland royal governor ordered the sheriff of St. Mary’s County to lock the doors of the chapel, and Catholics in a state founded on religious toleration could no longer worship in public. The chapel was later dismantled brick-by-brick, with some bricks used to construct the Jesuits’ manor house in St. Inigoes, Maryland.
Archbishop Lori noted that “the hopes of those colonists for religious freedom did not die. Penal laws, the loss of their beloved chapel, and other restrictions, none of that resulted in the loss of faith or a loss of hope. Quietly but persistently, the faith was handed on, generation after generation… It could be said that these colonists, these pilgrims of hope, they hoped against hope.”
Religious freedom was restored in Maryland following the American Revolution, and those principles championed by Lord Baltimore about 150 years earlier were enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights in 1791, with the First Amendment beginning with the words, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”
Over the centuries, the site of the original Brick Chapel became a farm field. To mark Maryland’s 350th anniversary in 1984, two Southern Maryland Catholics, the late Fred and Beth McCoy, led a grassroots effort to raise money to locate and mark the chapel site. Garry Wheeler Stone, an archaeologist at Historic St. Mary’s City, located the site, and excavations directed by archaeologist Timothy Riordan began at Chapel Field in 1988. The artifacts uncovered were processed by Silas Hurry, the archaeological laboratory curator at Historic St. Mary’s City.
“This is a brick building that rests on sacred ground,” Miller said, noting that hundreds of unmarked graves of the founders of Maryland were discovered at the Chapel Field site.
International attention came to Historic St. Mary’s City in 1990 with the discovery of three lead coffins during the excavation of the chapel site, the first such coffins in the New World to be investigated by archaeologists. The three lead coffins were found to contain the remains of Philip Calvert, a governor and chancellor of Maryland who died in 1682, his wife Anne Wolseley Calvert, and an infant boy.
Douglas Owsley, the curator of biological anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, studied the nearly 70 human remains that had been moved from the chapel site so they would not be disturbed during the reconstruction. A reinterment of those remains at Chapel Field is scheduled for Sept. 20.
More than 1,000 people contributed to the effort to rebuild the Brick Chapel, with some of the key support for the project coming from the late Ben Bradlee, the legendary former Washington Post editor, and his wife Sally Quinn; The Philip Graham Fund; the Save America’s Treasures Program of the National Parks Service; the Society of the Pilgrims of St. Mary’s; and the State of Maryland.
Jimmy Price – a renowned brick mason and founder of Virginia Lime Works who has conducted restoration work at Monticello and the White House – led the physical construction efforts at the chapel site and laid the first brick for the reconstructed chapel in 2004.
Jesuit Father Thomas Lucas, an expert in Jesuit art and history who is now the pastor of St. Ignatius Loyola Parish in Sacramento, California, provided guidance on the chapel’s reconstruction.
When the reconstructed Brick Chapel opened in 2009, Timothy Cameron, then the sheriff of St. Mary’s County, unlocked the chapel doors with a replica key, as a symbolic gesture countering what his colonial-era predecessor had done. Then-Washington Archbishop Donald Wuerl helped push open the doors, and said that offered “a reminder of how we have to keep the doors of our hearts open, first to God, and then to one another.”
A wrought iron cross made by blacksmith Peter Himmelheber – based on a cross at Georgetown University that may have been on the original chapel – was placed atop the rebuilt Brick Chapel.
History repeated itself at the 2025 unveiling of the chapel’s interior, as Steven Hall, the current sheriff of St. Mary’s County, again unlocked the doors of the Brick Chapel, this time with Archbishop Lori standing beside him.
Interviewed afterward, Sheriff Hall reflected on what that experience meant to him. “For me, it’s symbolic, because it’s incumbent upon all of us to make sure that the doors to the freedom of conscience remain unlocked and open to all.”
In his remarks that morning, Archbishop Lori said today’s Catholics, like those early Maryland colonists, need to be “pilgrims of hope” at a time when there are those who seek to limit the freedom of religion. That freedom, he said, is a gift from God, while also being “an American value that recognizes the role of all religions in their diversity in a free society, and the contribution which religions in our diversity make to the common good.”
Archbishop Lori added that freedom is “a great gift, but religious freedom, like all of our rights, is fragile. It can be eroded, little by little.”
Concluding his remarks, Baltimore’s archbishop said, “With the same persevering hope as those early Maryland colonists, we must seek to preserve this God-given right, not only for ourselves, but also for all of our fellow citizens, and for those generations who will come after us. Let the unlocking of this chapel and our entry into its interior be for us an expression of hope, hope for the endurance of religious liberty now and always.”
Also speaking at the ceremony was Washington Auxiliary Bishop Roy Campbell Jr., who has played a leading part in the Archdiocese of Washington’s efforts to bless the unmarked graves of formerly enslaved people at parish cemeteries. In the decades after its founding, slavery became an entrenched part of life in Maryland, including at plantations operated by the Jesuits.
Bishop Campbell noted, “Although these pilgrims and their descendants were not perfect, they strove to live their Catholic religion in a new land where they were not readily accepted. Unfortunately, even some of them and their descendants fell victim to not accepting others as equal to the same human dignity that they sought to have, enslaving people, some of whom (might be) buried outside the walls of this chapel, who did not look like them because of the color of their skin or the country that they originally came from. This is part of the history of the land that became the United States of America.”
The bishop emphasized the enduring importance of religious freedom, and the need to remember that all people are created in God’s image and likeness.
Also speaking at the ceremony were Rear Admiral Timothy Heely, U.S. Navy (Retired), the chair of the Historic St. Mary’s City Commission, who read a citation from Maryland Gov. Wes Moore; and Maryland Delegate Todd B. Morgan (District 29C, Calvert County and St. Mary’s County).
Danaisha Janell Proctor, a staff member for Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland), read a statement from the congressman, who has offered key support for the chapel project over the years.
Concluding his remarks at the ceremony, Henry Miller noted how Maryland’s status as a birthplace of religious freedom in what became the United States has been overshadowed by William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania about 50 years after Lord Baltimore established the Maryland colony, and by the Puritans at Plymouth Rock, “who did believe in religious freedom – for themselves.”
He pointed out how James Wilson, a Protestant lawyer who played a key role in writing the U.S. Constitution and was on the first Supreme Court, once wrote that “an ungracious silence” existed about Lord Baltimore and Maryland’s history.
The story of the reconstructed Brick Chapel in Historic St. Mary’s City can break that “ungracious silence” about Maryland’s role in laying the foundation for religious freedom in the United States and offers a reminder about the importance of that right, Miller said.
That chapel’s story, he said, “is as relevant to our times as it was in the 17th century.”
