A Thumbnail Sketch of Kent County, Maryland. by Mary Kate O'Donnell

In 1608, Capt. John Smith first explored and mapped a portion of what is now Kent County. He named the Sassafras River "Tockwogh" for the tribe living there.

Twenty years later George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, planned the Maryland Colony. King Charles I signed its charter in 1632 and it was given to Calvert's son, Caecilius, for whom Cecil County was named. When settlers arrived in St. Mary's County in 1634, they heard that Claiborne was established in the northern Bay and were determined to oust him from what they believed was rightly theirs. (The dispute arose from some vaguely worded passages in the Charter).

Once the tenacious Claiborne was displaced by the Calverts Kent Island became the foundation site for Kent County. A date of 1642 is used since the earliest known court documents bearing Kent's name date from that year.

At that time Kent County, at least theoretically, encompassed Maryland's entire Eastern Shore. The Sassafras River to the north, the Chester River to the south, Chesapeake Bay to the west and the Mason-Dixon Line to the east form Kent's modern boundaries. According to the 2000 census there are about 19,000 residents. Eighty percent of its 284 square miles of land is agricultural. It is a peninsula joined to the rest of the Eastern Shore by several bridges and a few roads originating in neighboring Delaware.

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By 1650 settlers ventured across the Chester River and began populating Eastern Neck Island southeast of present-day Rock Hall. New Yarmouth, as the first community was called, was set on 100 acres of James Ringgold's land grant, Huntingfield. By 1678 New Yarmouth was an active trading port. There were houses, a church, courthouse, jail and taverns. (A conjectural model of New Yarmouth, the site of which is now underwater, can be viewed at the Rock Hall Museum.) Other settlers ventured farther north to the shores of the Sassafras and established Shrewsbury Town on that river's southern bank. This pushed Kent County's boundaries inland and northward.