4 March, Lord Baltimore Hotel
The Chapter is chartered.
The first officers were drawn from the same lineage that had assembled the General Society in Plymouth in 1897: descendants of John Howland, Richard Warren, Francis Cooke, and others whose names had been kept in the Bibles and ledgers of Maryland families for ten generations and more.
A line of dates
Three centuries, four winters.
5 March 2011
The plaque at the hotel.
On the 5th of March, 2011, a plaque and a framed Crossing of the Mayflower by Captain Fritz Briggs was unveiled near the gift-shop entrance of the hotel — seventy-three years to the day after the charter.
The Lord Baltimore Hotel opened on the 30th of December, 1928, in the high years of pre-Depression Baltimore. Twenty-two stories tall and 289 feet from sidewalk to copper roof, it was the largest hotel in the state when the Society’s charter was signed in one of its private rooms. The plaque hangs near the Baltimore Street entrance, by the gift shop.
The founders
Names in the books.
The men and women who signed the Chapter into existence in 1938 carried the lines of John Howland, Richard Warren, Francis Cooke, and others — lines that had crossed Atlantic in 1620 and settled in Maryland by the lights of one century and another.
Today
A working fellowship.
The Chapter has remained what it was always meant to be: a small, durable fellowship of Maryland Pilgrim descendants — meeting twice yearly for a long dinner, awarding a scholarship, and tending the quiet labor of genealogy and record.
Per ardua, fideliter — through hardship, faithfully.
— the Chapter motto, in the form it has been kept since 1938