How Maryland Got Its Name (It Was Meant to Be Crescentia)

As the old story goes, Maryland was almost called Crescentia, and the king’s first idea for a name honoring his queen, Henrietta Maria, got shot down. The name that went into the colony’s charter in 1632 was Maryland, for her. The rejected one, Mariana, had a problem you wouldn’t guess.

A blank space in the charter

The colony was the project of George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore. J. Thomas Scharf’s 1879 History of Maryland passes along the story that Calvert wrote the charter himself and left a blank where the name should go. The story Scharf quotes says he “designed” it to be Crescentia, “the land of Crescence,” but left it to the king to fill in.

Here’s how that conversation went, in the account Scharf quotes. Before signing, King Charles I asked Calvert what he should call the place. Calvert said he would have liked to name it for the king himself, but he couldn’t, because there was already a province “in those parts” called Carolina.

Mariana? No thanks

“Let us therefore,” the king said, “give it a name in honor of the Queen; what think you of Mariana?”

Calvert didn’t like it. Mariana, Scharf explains, was also “the name of a Jesuit, who had written against monarchy.” That’s not a name you’d want on a royal grant.

So the king offered another one: Terra Mariae, “in English, Maryland.” That’s the one that went into the charter. Scharf adds that writers of the time usually called Henrietta Maria “Queen Mary,” so a name built on Mary pointed right at her. She was French, by the way, a daughter of King Henry IV of France.

The charter of 1632

George Calvert didn’t live to see it granted. He died on April 15, 1632, before the grant could pass the royal seals. The charter went instead to his son, Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, and was dated June 20, 1632. John Bozman’s 1837 history of Maryland tells the name story in short form: the country “should have been called Crescentia,” but when the charter was presented to the king, the name was changed to Maryland, “in honour of his queen, Henrietta Maria.”

The charter itself, in the English translation Scharf prints, says the king makes the land a province and names it “Maryland, by which name we will that it shall from henceforth be called.”

And the rent for all that land? Two Indian arrows a year, delivered to Windsor Castle on the Tuesday of Easter week, plus a fifth of any gold and silver found there. The queen got the name, and the crown got the arrows.

Sources & further reading

• J. Thomas Scharf, History of Maryland, vol. 1 (1879). The blank in the charter, Crescentia, the conversation with the king about Carolina, Mariana and Terra Mariae, and “Queen Mary” as the usual name for Henrietta Maria (pp. 51–52); George Calvert’s death on April 15, 1632 (p. 52); the charter, with the naming clause and the rent of two Indian arrows (pp. 53–54); George Calvert as the first Baron of Baltimore (p. 30) and Cecilius as the second Lord Baltimore (p. 63). Scharf takes the conversation from old manuscripts in the British Museum, and he introduces it with “it is said.” So it’s a story passed down, not a word-for-word record.
• John Leeds Bozman, The History of Maryland, vol. 1 (1837), p. 271. The charter executed to Cecilius Calvert on June 20, 1632; “It was intended, it is said, that the country granted by this charter, should have been called Crescentia,” and the change to Maryland “in honour of his queen, Henrietta Maria.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 201. “One of the thirteen original States, named for Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, of England.”
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Maryland’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 1714934).