The outline of a seventeenth-century Jesuit church basks in the Maryland sun above. The screening over the wheelbarrow catches the site's pottery shards, buttons, and even these two medals shown to the right.

The year was 1634. Two ships, the Ark and the Dove, were nearing the Atlantic coast, close to what is now Maryland. On board were 150 English settlers, two of them Jesuits, who had endured three months on the stormy Atlantic to engage in a experiment, the details of which are coming to light through archaeology today, more than 350 years later. It's quite a story.

The expedition in which these English settlers and missionaries were involved differed significantly from other efforts to establish an English colony in America in an important respect: its sponsor, Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, was a Catholic. He sought to make Maryland a place where religious toleration would be the official policy of his colony. One consequence of this was that Maryland became the birthplace of the modern Catholic Church in the United States. Today, this significant story is being explored by historians and archaeologists at the site of Maryland's founding place and first capital, St. Mary's City, where an effort is underway to rebuild the first major Jesuit church in English America.

The Jesuits with these colonists were John Altham and Andrew White (the latter's diary details the voyage and the first weeks of settlement in the new colony). After entering Chesapeake Bay and reaching the Potomac, the settlers landed in March 1634 and offered a mass of thanksgiving. After several days of exploration, Governor Leonard Calvert, Lord Baltimore's brother, selected the location of a Native American village called Yoacomoco to begin the colony. The friendly Indians moved out of most of their village so that the colonists could take temporary shelter in their houses. The colonists renamed the location St. Mary's City. With all ceremony possible under the circumstances, the colonists carried Lord Baltimore's flag ashore and established Maryland.

The character of this seventeenth-century colony was closely linked to the situation of Catholicism in Protestant England, an outlawed and actively suppressed religion. Catholics in England could neither vote nor hold public office, were forbidden to worship in public, and were subject to many other oppressions. Jesuits there during this time had been persecuted and imprisoned; some had been executed. It was in this context that Maryland was an offer of haven for Catholics and Jesuits.

Archaeologist Timothy Riordan gives scale to three lead coffins that St. Mary's Church yielded.

Ironically, however, Maryland was not a Catholic colony. While many of the leaders were Catholic, the majority of settlers were Protestant: Anglicans, Puritans, Presbyterians, and Quakers among them. Lord Baltimore's declaration of "liberty of conscience" meant that in Maryland religion was to be a private matter and all Christians were to practice their faith in freedom. To further reduce the possibility of religious animosity destroying the colony, Lord Baltimore separated religion and government in Maryland. These concepts of religious tolerance and separation of church and state were revolutionary in the seventeenth century and made early Maryland an innovative social experiment.

The Society of Jesus's role in founding the colony dates to 1629, the year English Jesuits started supporting Calvert's effort. A colony on the east coast of the Americas, they figured, would allow them to conduct mission work among Native Americans while also ministering to Catholic settlers without government interference. It was White, eager to begin missionary work, who wrote the first promotional tract for the colony and solicited financial support for it.

After his arrival at St. Mary's at age 54, White built the first Catholic chapel in English America and began efforts to convert Native Americans. His work and that of other Jesuits ended abruptly in 1645, when St. Mary's was attacked by the English Parliament ship Reformation. This attack was linked to the civil war raging in England, with Parliament fighting King Charles I, who had the support of Lord Baltimore and thus Maryland's leaders.

The ship's soldiers, loyal to Parliament, burned the Catholic chapel and plundered the colony. White and others were sent back to England in chains. Only with the restoration of Charles II as king in 1660 did stability finally return and the Jesuit mission in Maryland was revitalized.

Under the leadership of Henry Warren, SJ, the Maryland provincial, a massive brick church at St. Mary's was begun about 1666. The structure was placed in a key location within the colonial capital. Archaeology reveals many important details about this building, the first prominent Catholic church built in the English colonies. The floor plan is in the form of a Latin cross, 54 feet by 57 feet.

Excavations show that the chapel's brick walls were three feet thick; its foundations went five feet into the ground (suggesting that the walls rose about 25 feet to the eaves), and it had a tile roof and a floor paved with stones imported from Europe. The distribution of burials under the floor reveals where the pulpit and altar rail were.

Based upon evidence from the site and data about other Jesuit churches built throughout the world at this time, it is likely that this chapel was one of the earliest examples of classically inspired architecture in English America. This impressive structure on the early American frontier was a powerful symbol of Maryland's religious freedom.

Among the religious artifacts found at St. Mary's are Jesuit medals, crucifixes, and a one-decade rosary, but all of these came from homes. After three years of digging only a single religious artifact has turned up at the chapel site: a brass medal of Santa Maria del Pilar, a pilgrimage site in Spain.

An illustration by L.H. Barker of "the first prominent church built in the English colonies."

Perhaps the most important surviving object from the chapel is now housed at a Sisters of Mercy school in Baltimore: a wooden tabernacle owned by Maryland's famous Carroll family during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Family tradition has it that this baroque-style tabernacle with the seal of the Society of Jesus on its door had been at the church in St. Mary's.

One clue as to how the chapel, a very expensive building for frontier Maryland, was financed may come from the north transept, where three seventeenth-century lead coffins were discovered. These coffins, extremely rare in the colonies, had a great potential for yielding new information; a major scientific investigation was conducted to collect the unique evidence they contained. The more than 150 people who volunteered their scientific and technical expertise came up with many new insights regarding health, diet, and medical practices in early America.

The collection of numerous clues led to the identification of the coffins' owners as members of Maryland's founding family: Chancellor Philip Calvert, brother of Lord Baltimore; Philip's first wife Anne Wolsley Calvert; and a six-month-old baby girl. Their burial site in the north transept on the right side of the altar is a prestigious location usually reserved for nobility and patrons of a church. Hence, it is possible that Philip and Anne Calvert were major contributors to the chapel.

Excavations have identified hundreds of other burials at this site; as many as 600 men, women, and children lie in unmarked graves under or surrounding the chapel. Archaeologists plan to locate these graves using remote-sensing equipment and mark each with period headstones to honor the dead and restore this long-forgotten cemetery.

When Philip Calvert died in 1682, Maryland was a growing colony in which religious pluralism prevailed. Within a decade, however, a revolution by Protestants toppled Lord Baltimore's government, led to the appointment of a royal governor, and brought an end to religious freedom in the colony. In 1692, the Church of England was established as Maryland's official religion. Two years later the colony's government moved to Annapolis. St. Mary's was soon abandoned, as government was its sole purpose for existing. Within a decade or so, Jesuit laborers dismantled the chapel and used its bricks to build a manor house a few miles from St. Mary's. Thus ended the first experiment in religious freedom in English America. It would be a century before Lord Baltimore's dream of "liberty of conscience" again prevailed in Maryland.

During the intervening period, Catholics suffered oppression and lost their political rights, and Jesuits were persecuted. Despite this ordeal, the underground church endured and from it emerged the first diocese in the United States, the See of Baltimore, led by Maryland-born Bp. John Carroll, SJ. From the seeds of faith first planted at St. Mary's in 1634 the modern American Catholic Church grew.

Today, physical traces of the founding era are being rediscovered to better understand that time and the struggles and achievements of early settlers. The efforts of Andrew White, Henry Warren, and other Jesuits are integral to this story. The chapel will be rebuilt and serve as a symbol of the religious freedom to which those early Maryland colonialists aspired and as a parable about the struggle for religious liberty and the fragility of freedoms taken for granted today.