Loretto Roots Trip to Maryland

Four years ago four Loretto friends ended a driving trip to Santa Fe, N.M., with a promise that our next trip would be to explore our Loretto roots in Maryland. Covid-19 delayed us but finally, on September 29 this year, Karel Disponett, Neil Tucker, Julie Popham and I set out from the Motherhouse for a week-long adventure eastward. The onslaught of Hurricane Helene detoured us from Asheville, N.C., where we had hoped to visit Julie Kerber, and an unexpected case of Covid-19 kept us from meeting the archivists of the Visitation Sisters in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., but nothing could lessen our enthusiasm for all we experienced on our 2000-mile adventure.

We went to find the roots of Maryland colonial families who became Kentucky settlers, including the family of Mary and Ann Rhodes. In St. Mary’s County at the southern tip of the Maryland peninsula, we learned that the colonists were a “water people,” accustomed to harvesting food, transporting goods and moving about on the waters of the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay that surrounded them. We realized that as Kentucky settlers, they must have found our dense forests, small creeks and narrow valleys a disorienting challenge.

We went to Maryland hoping for insight into the roots of slavery, both in Loretto and in the whole settler society. At two living history plantations, we were able to explore slave quarters and experience everyday activities of the slave society. We visited the Durham, N.C., plantation where Neil’s ancestors were once enslaved. We also visited Antietam in Maryland and Harper’s Ferry, W.Va., where we explored the efforts and the evidence of ending slavery through the Civil War.

Through our comings and goings, we learned a good deal about how settlers moved westward. Protestant settlers entered Kentucky from the southeast, through Daniel Boone’s Cumberland Gap Trail. The Great National Road, which Catholic Marylanders followed northwest to the Ohio, was originally a military road followed by George Washington when, as a young British officer, he led troops to fight the French and Indians. Nearby was the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal built alongside the Potomac River, with tow paths and waterways still existing today. In Wheeling, W.Va., we looked for old warehouses along the Ohio where Father Nerinckx stored treasures from his European trips until river barges were available to transport them downstream to Louisville, Ky. Following the Ohio ourselves, we returned enriched with insight about and appreciation for our settler forebears.