St. Mary's County, Maryland in the context of "Baltimore–Washington metropolitan area"

The Province of Maryland was an English and later British colony in North America from 1634 until 1776, when the province was one of the Thirteen Colonies that joined in supporting the American Revolution against Great Britain. In 1781, Maryland was the 13th signatory to the Articles of Confederation. The province's first settlement and capital was in St. Mary's City, located at the southern end of St. Mary's County, a peninsula in the Chesapeake Bay bordered by four tidal rivers.

The province began in 1632 as the Maryland Palatinate, a proprietary palatinate granted to Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, whose father, George, had long sought to found a colony in the New World to serve as a refuge for Catholics at the time of the European wars of religion. Palatines from the Holy Roman Empire also immigrated to Maryland, with many settling in Fredrick County, with Maryland Palatines (Palatine German: Marylandisch Pälzer) reaching a population of 50,000 by 1774.

St. Mary's City (also known as Historic St. Mary's City) is a former colonial town that was founded in March 1634, as Maryland's first European settlement and capital. It is now a state-run historic area, which includes a reconstruction of the original colonial settlement and a designated living history venue and museum complex. Half the area is occupied by the campus of St. Mary's College of Maryland. The entire area contains a community of about 933 permanent residents and some 1,400 students living in campus dorms and apartments.

The city is an unincorporated community under Maryland state law and is located in southern St. Mary's County, which occupies the southernmost tip of the state on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay. The community is bordered by the St. Mary's River, a short, brackish-water tidal tributary of the Potomac River, near where it empties into the Chesapeake.

Southern Maryland, also referred to as SoMD, is a geographical, cultural and historic region in Maryland composed of the state's southernmost counties on the Western Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. According to the state of Maryland, the region includes all of Calvert, Charles, and St. Mary's counties and the southern portions of Anne Arundel and Prince George's counties. It is largely coterminous with the region of Maryland that is part of the Washington metropolitan area. Portions of the region are also part of the Baltimore Metropolitan Area and the California-Lexington Park Metropolitan Statistical Area. As of the 2020 Census, the region had a population of 373,177. The largest community in Southern Maryland is Waldorf, with a population of 81,410 as of the 2020 Census.

Initially inhabited by the indigenous Piscataway people, the first European settlement in Southern Maryland (and the state as a whole) was established in St. Mary's City in 1634. While the settlement was intended to be a Catholic refuge, religious strife was prominent in Maryland's early years. The passage of the Maryland Toleration Act in 1649 resulted in St. Mary's City being cited as the birthplace of religious freedom in North America. The area developed an agricultural economy based on tobacco with labor sourced from indentured servants and slaves. The War of 1812 saw military action in the region during the British campaign to capture Washington, while the American Civil War saw the end of slavery in Maryland and John Wilkes Booth fleeing through the region following the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Much of the area remains rural with agriculture still playing a large role in the region's economy. Despite this, the region has seen large suburban growth and development in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as urban sprawl from nearby Washington, D.C., expands southward.