Third Haven Meeting House The
Third Haven Meeting House of Society of Friends was built in 1682 by
Quakers. After
Charles I was executed in England in 1649, then
Virginia governor Berkley, who sympathized with the Royalists, drove Quakers out of Virginia for their religious beliefs.
Lord Baltimore invited the refugees to Maryland Province to settle, and passed the
Toleration Act. John Edmondson gave the Quakers land on which to settle near the
Tred Avon River in what later became
Easton, Maryland. The Meeting House sits on high ground surrounded by 3 wooded acres and is positioned along the Indian Trail (today known as Washington Street).
George Fox, father of the Quaker movement visited several times. Upon his death,
Third Haven Meeting House received his personal library and collection. The Third Haven Meeting House may be the oldest framed building for religious meeting in The United States. According to tradition, Lord Baltimore attended a sermon given there by
William Penn. In 1794, the rafters were extended on one side of the ridgepole. While this extension made more room inside the meeting house, it also made the building look lopsided. In 1879, a new
Third Haven Meeting House was constructed out of brick, and still remains in use today. The ground floor now contains meeting rooms, and Sunday School is held on the second floor.
St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church, which still holds weekly masses, is recognized as the oldest
Roman Catholic Church on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Father Joseph Mosely, a
Jesuit, established the church in 1765 on a farm north of Easton in
Cordova. St. Joseph Church was the second Catholic Church in Talbot County; a chapel at
Doncaster was the first. The church had additions built in 1845 and in 1903 (the cloverleaf apse at the left where the altar is now). Father Mosley and other priests are buried under the church floor. St. Joseph Church hosts an annual jousting tournament on the first Wednesday of August. The event has been held at St. Joseph for the past 142 years. The only time the event was canceled was in 1918, due to many of the riders' involvement in World War I.
Longwoods School House Longwoods School House or The Little Red School House is located on Longwoods Road (Route 662) just north of Easton. Longwoods School House is one of the few remaining one-room schoolhouses on the Eastern Shore. The school opened in 1865 with an average class size of about 30, and held its last class in 1967. It once had two outhouses: one for the boys and one for the girls, separated by a fence. Indoor plumbing was introduced in 1957 and electricity in 1936. The Talbot Historical Society restored the schoolhouse to it original form, removing the electrical lights and the modern plumbing and added the outhouse to the back of the building.
Poplar Island Popeley Island (later
Poplar Island) was one of Talbot County's first islands that was given a name and location on a map. Popeley Island was given its name by Captain William Claibourne after Lt. Richard Popeley. Popeley Island was the first land to be settled in 1632 by Captain William Claibourne. The first fields were planted in Talbot County on Popeley Island in 1634, and in 1635 Claibourne granted the whole island to his cousin Richard Thompson. During the summer of 1637, while Thompson was off the island on an expedition,
Native Americans, the
Nanticoke tribe, massacred Thompson's whole family and workers. although the Talbot County Court House has a record of repair made to the road to Old White Marsh Church in 1687. In 1751, repairs were made to the church, and it was doubled in size due to the fact the membership was so large. A few of the original items used at the church rest at the St. Paul's Church in Trappe: White Marsh's Bible, communion items and the old wooden alms box. The statue depicted a young boy holding and wrapped in a
Confederate flag, and bears the inscription: "To the Talbot Boys · 1861–1865 · C.S.A.". Talbot County also had over 300 Union soldiers in the war, but there has never been a monument to them. In August 2020, after the
George Floyd protests led to a new wave of
removals of Confederate monuments, the County Council voted down 3:2 a resolution to remove the statue, triggering loud public protests. By 2021, the statue was the only remaining Confederate statue on public grounds in Maryland. It was removed on March 14, 2022, and relocated to the
Cross Keys battlefield in
Harrisonburg, Virginia, under the control of the nonprofit Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation.
Frederick Douglass monument Near the Talbot Boys monument, a statue of the abolitionist
Frederick Douglass, born into
slavery near
Tuckahoe Creek, stands in front of the courthouse. Douglass had been held in jail at the rear of the courthouse after his aborted attempt to escape slavery on April 2, 1836. The Douglass statue was proposed by the Talbot Historical Society in 2002. The County Council approved it in 2004, after some local opposition, with a majority of one vote. It did so on the condition that its height not exceed that of the Talbot Boys monument. Altered in the mid-nineteenth century, the chapel was restored in Georgian Revival style in 1947–49 by the firm
Perry, Shaw, and Hepburn (who also directed much of the early restoration of
Colonial Williamsburg). The church is actively used today, one of two churches in Wye Parish. Old Wye Church (or Saint Luke's Church) is the oldest surviving brick church in Talbot County. ==Economy==