Virginia Loses Kent Island to Maryland

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     Depending on your point of view, Kent Island’s founder could be the protagonist or antagonist in the island’s storied past as the third permanent English settlement behind Jamestown (1607) and Plymouth (1620). The “Isle of Kent” was settled in 1631 as part of the Virginia colony by William Claiborne, a royal surveyor and Virginia’s first secretary of state. The island’s name honors his home in Kent, England. 

     Having obtained a license to trade in the region from King Charles I in 1631 allowing Claiborne “freely and without interruption to trade and traffic in or near those parts of America for which there is not already a patent granted to others for trade,” the industrious adventurer obtained financial backing, paid local Native Americans the equivalent of 12 pounds sterling worth of trucke (axes, knives, combs, cloth, etc.), established trade with regional Native Americans, and built a trading post on Kent Island as his base of operations. The trade post blossomed into a thriving settlement enclosed by a wooden wall with dwellings, mills, gardens, orchards, farms stocked with cattle, a courthouse, a fort called Fort Kent, and Claiborne’s private residence at Craney Creek called Crayford. Claiborne possessed an armed sloop, the Cockatrice and a merchant pinnace, the Long Tayle.

     The Isle of Kent became the subject of a violent land dispute when a 1632 grant issued on behalf of George Calvert, First Baron of Baltimore, included lands extending across Kent Island and throughout the Delmarva peninsula. 

     George Calvert, a royal favorite, having previously established a settlement in Newfoundland but finding the weather not to his liking, petitioned King Charles for a land grant near the Virginia colony in what was to become Maryland’s first settlement in St. Mary’s. The grant was signed in 1632 granting lands west and north of the Potomac and east across what is now the Delmarva peninsula in “a certain region, in parts of America not yet cultivated and in possession of savages or barbarians who have no knowledge of the Divine Being.” 

     Claiborne argued that Kent Island was most certainly “cultivated” at the time and that it should be excluded from Baltimore’s land grant. Tensions arose, battles were fought on land, on sea, and in the royal court of King Charles. The first naval battle fought in the New World was over ownership of Kent Island, with Claiborne representing Virginia and Calvert representing Maryland. 

     In the end, the English court did not support Claiborne’s claim, instead upholding the terms of Calvert’s grant. However, the pertinacious surveyor from Virginia continued to plead his case for Kent island’s title until his death at the age of of seventy-seven, when his last 1676 petition to King Charles II was rejected. After a four-decade dispute, Claiborne lost his beloved Isle of Kent for good and Kent Island, Virginia was nevermore.