Historic Maryland church opens doors to visitors 320 years after closing down

Visitors have been able to step into a reconstructed 17th-century Catholic church in Maryland for the first time – an opportunity over 320 years in the making.

Historic St. Mary's City, an archaeological organization, opened up its Brick Chapel on April 12. The building was originally constructed in 1667. St. Mary's City is a colonial town located in St. Mary's County, off the western shore of Chesapeake Bay.

Fox News Digital spoke to Henry Miller, Ph.D., a senior research fellow at Historic St. Mary's City, about the opening, the result of multiple excavations since 1988. (See the video at the top of this article.) 

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While a wooden chapel was first built on the site in 1645, the structure burned down when Maryland was attacked by English troops from the English Parliament.

"But in the 1660s, things had settled down, and the Brick Chapel, the first major brick building in Maryland, began to be constructed," Miller said. "It was a very significant architectural achievement for the time and place."

In the colonial era, it was generally forbidden by law for Catholics to have any churches, but Maryland offered a notable exception.

"It was only because of Lord Baltimore's policy of liberty, of conscience and freedom of religion that [the church] could be erected," the expert said. 

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"So [the church] is really an important statement about the beginnings of religious freedom in what is now the United States and beyond."

The Brick Chapel was the center of Catholic worship in Maryland until 1704, when the colony's Protestant governor shuttered the building's doors, Miller said. The sheriff "locked the door, [took] the key with him, and never again allow[ed] that building to be used for worship."

"The freedom of belief, the freedom of religion that Lord Baltimore had championed totally ended at that time period," the archaeologist said. 

"A few years later, the building was demolished, and it basically disappeared from view and memory for over 200 years."

The church was entirely forgotten about until 1938, when an architectural historian spotted peculiar remains of a cross-shaped brick building. 

Today, the Brick Chapel – rebuilt between 2004 and 2009 – has a recently finished interior that accurately captures what a 17th-century Catholic church would have looked like at the time.

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Miller recreated the building's interior through several means, such as researching similar churches and obtaining art that was commonly used in Jesuit churches, he said. Not many artifacts survive at the site, thanks to Jesuits who dismantled their church and reused the materials elsewhere.

"The Jesuits were some of the first recyclers … They took everything above ground away and reused it," Miller said. 

"What we found were lots of fragments of plaster, of mortar and the five-foot-deep, three-foot-wide brick foundation."

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"We actually let visitors see some of that original brickwork," Miller added. "There was weird stone we found there in pieces, [and] we now know that they imported 14 tons of stone from Europe to pave the floor of this building."

But the church still retains some original features. Miller also noted that the original tabernacle of the church survived, along with 17th-century lead coffins that visitors can view under a glass floor.

"The graves are both all around and inside the chapel," Miller said. "There's maybe 60 or 70 graves in the chapel, but there's 300 to 400 outside."

He added, "This was the largest 17th century cemetery in Maryland. So the grave distribution showed us also where the altar area, the formal area, began."

Still, the process has been challenging – and Miller was only able to find one written description of the chapel, dating back to the late 1690s.

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"A Protestant governor, Francis Nicholson, was very anti-Catholic," the archaeologist said. "And he said in a report, 'The Catholics have several chapels in Maryland, including a good brick chapel at Saint Mary's.'" 

Miller joked, "Oh, how we wish he was a verbose kind of guy who would have given us more information. But for him to even say it was ‘good’ was probably a significant clue there."

He added, "So it is based on lots of different information. It is as accurate as we can come up with."

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Still, the historian emphasized that no formal worship will take place in the new building - instead, it will exist as an exhibit on the history of religious freedom in Maryland.

"The seeds of faith planted there … grew the church and the first diocese that was established in Maryland in the year 1790," Miller said. "So it truly is the founding place of the modern Catholic Church in the United States."

"But it's also a symbol, and this is what's important," he said. "That building could not have been constructed anywhere else in the English-speaking world at this time."

Visitors may be surprised by the elegance of the church's interior. Instead of a classic colonial New England church filled with wooden pews, the Brick Chapel has no pews at all. 

Miller noted that, in colonial-era Catholic churches, worshippers either stood or knelt.

"The pews are more of a Protestant innovation," Miller added. "If you had a two-hour-long sermon, seating would be very helpful there. Catholic sermons were probably considerably shorter."

Miller said that decades of work have created a "unique exhibit."

"We also want you, as a visitor, to walk in and have a sense of what a 17th-century person would have seen," the archaeologist said. "We've hidden the exhibits in the arms of the building, where you don't see them until you get right up on top of them."

"It's one that we have worked on for over 37 years, but I am delighted that it will finally be completed and we can start more effectively telling this significant American story."

Fox News Digital's Brooke Curto and Kyle Schmidbauer contributed to this report.