Havre de Grace, Maryland: Who Gave It a French Name?

Nobody’s sure who gave Havre de Grace, Maryland, its French name: Lafayette, an old French fisherman or the man who laid out the town. The name itself is easier. It’s French for “harbor of grace,” and Henry Gannett, writing for the U.S. Geological Survey in 1905, said it was “probably named from the French seaport, Havre, formerly known as Havre de Grace.”

A ferry with no name

Before it was a town, it was a river crossing. Walter Preston, who wrote the History of Harford County in 1901, says that when the county was formed in 1773–74, the settlement at the mouth of the Susquehanna had nearly 200 people and “no distinguishing name save that of Susquehanna Lower Ferry.”

Then the French name shows up. Preston calls its origin “involved in considerable obscurity,” and he gives you two stories.

Lafayette, or a fisherman

“One tradition ascribes it to Lafayette,” Preston writes, “and another to an old French fisherman, who thought it resembled the harbor of that name in France, a view which is said to have been subsequently confirmed by Lafayette.” Either way, the Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman who served as a major general in the American army, ends up in the story.

Preston backs that up only loosely. The earliest use of the name he knew of was “a letter from Lafayette to General Washington during the Revolution, and dated at Havre de Grace.” And he concludes that “the present name of the city was coincident with the visit of Lafayette.” He doesn’t quote the letter or give its date, though.

There’s a wrinkle in his own book, too. In his chapter on Lafayette’s 1781 march south through the county, Preston has the general leaving Elkton on April 11 and crossing the Susquehanna “at a point now known as Bald Friar.” That’s Bald Friar, not the Lower Ferry. It doesn’t rule out a stop at the river’s mouth, but it’s worth knowing before you picture Lafayette naming the harbor from the deck of a ferry.

What the law says

That’s where it gets interesting. The earliest official record of the name in Preston’s book doesn’t mention Lafayette at all. The town was first incorporated by an act of 1785, and Preston summarizes its preamble: Robert Young Stokes, by then deceased, “did in his lifetime survey and lay out into lots a town at the mouth of the Susquehanna, which he called Havre de Grace.”

So the legislature gave the credit to Stokes. Did Stokes come up with it, or did he just write down a name that was already in use? None of these sources say, and that’s why the question stays open. The 1785 act is the strongest piece of evidence on the list, because it’s a record from the time, while the Lafayette and fisherman stories are traditions that Preston passed along more than a century later.

The town Stokes planned was big on paper. A pamphlet from 1795, quoted by Preston, says Havre de Grace had “about fifty good dwelling-houses,” but its plan covered 850 acres “laid out in squares in imitation of the plan of Philadelphia,” with 4,500 lots.

Sources & further reading

• Walter W. Preston, History of Harford County, Maryland (1901). Lafayette leaving Elkton on April 11, 1781, and crossing at Bald Friar (p. 138); Susquehanna Lower Ferry, the two traditions, the letter from Lafayette “dated at Havre de Grace,” the 1795 pamphlet and the 1785 act with Robert Young Stokes (pp. 249–250).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 152. “A French phrase meaning ‘harbor of grace.’ Probably named from the French seaport, Havre, formerly known as Havre de Grace.”
• GNIS feature 590437 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Havre de Grace: established 1785.