Jesuits, Slaves and Scholars at "Old Bohemia," 1704-1756, as Found in the Woodstock Letters

Jesuits, Slaves and Scholars at “Old Bohemia,” 1704–1756, as Found in the Woodstock Letters Joseph S. Rossi, S.J. O ld Bohemia,” near what is now the town of Warwick, Cecil County, Maryland, was the earliest permanent Catholic enterprise in the English Colonies, beyond the Jesuit foundations in Saint Mary’s and Charles Counties. Bohemia Manor, or Saint Xaverius Mission as it was known originally, was founded in 1704 by Jesuit exiles from Lower Maryland, and predates even the introduction of the Roman Catholic faith into Pennsylvania.1 The oldest and most venerable Catholic establishment on the Eastern Shore, it is, in addition, the Mother Church of the Diocese of Wilmington, Delaware. Located in a quiet agricultural region on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, the name “Bohemia Manor” in the early eighteenth century would have referred to an enormous tract of land granted to Augustine Hermen by Cecilius (Cecil) Calvert, Lord Baltimore in the 1630s. Situated near the head of Little Bohemia Creek, this district , even today, is secluded, encircled as it is by both prosperous farms that can claim some of the richest soil in the state and small, scattered developments of substantial weekend houses. Nearly all of the mission stations of the Society of Jesus in the Royal Colony of Maryland were located in such isolated regions. These rural sites were deliberately chosen because the Jesuit Fathers wanted to escape both the scrutiny of hostile colonial officials and the eruption of periodic anti-Catholic mob violence, erratic yet genuine threats in the Crown Colony after the Glorious Revolution of 1689. Although there is little doubt that with their partial relocation to Bohemia Manor, as far as possible from their original foundations, yet still in Maryland, the Jesuits hoped for some degree of relief from their sectarian and political predicament. They were also keenly aware that the absolute economic necessity for all Catholic missioners remained: to 1 1. Bohemia Manor antedates the first permanent Catholic establishment in Pennsylvania by twentynine years, at which time Father Joseph Greaton, S.J. built Old Saint Joseph’s Church in Philadelphia in 1733. In fact, Jesuit circuit riders first visited Pennsylvania traveling north from Old Bohemia. “ make provision for their own livelihood and support their apostolic labors through plantation farming, since Roman Catholic clergy could expect no financial subsidy from the government of the colony. No locality was more advantageous for such a goal than northeastern Maryland.2 Jesuits in Cecil County Father Thomas Mansell, S.J., Saint Xaverius’ founder, had been born into an old Catholic family in Oxfordshire, England, in 1669. Along with all the other incentives enumerated above for selecting a site in the far northeastern corner of Cecil County, he could not have failed to note that Bohemia was not far from the Pennsylvania border, a line that promised friendlier and more tolerant officials and neighbors in an age of anti-Catholic intolerance in Maryland directed against the “Romish faith.”3 Additionally, the property was near two vital colonial transportation links: the important trading post on the Little Bohemia Creek known as Bohemia Landing, where supplies straight from the continent of Europe could be unloaded and tobacco exported in return, and the Delaware Path or Highway, which skirted the Chesapeake Bay. As the old geographies used to say when commending this otherwise isolated settlement, it “was accessible both by land and water.”4 Father Mansell, who had arrived in Maryland no later than the year 1700, had most probably visited Bohemia in 1703, at least one year before he took up residence there, in order “to study the situation.” It was in 1704,5 however, that the mission’s founding actually took place and the long process of the acquisition of property commenced . Saint Xaverius was at length “granted to [Mansell] as vacant land by Patent,” the date of which is July 10, 1706. Other tracts of land were subsequently added, but in these cases the Jesuits had to purchase the properties, the most significant addition being the purchase of Worsell Manor from a Catholic landholder, Mr. James Heath, the founder of the town of Warwick and “a sterling Catholic.”6 In all the legal documents...