On March 28, 1634 (some sources cite March 25, depending on calendar reckoning), roughly 140 colonists led by Leonard Calvert landed at St. Clement's Island in the Potomac River, establishing the Maryland colony under a charter granted to the Calvert family. Maryland became notable for its early, if imperfect, experiments in religious tolerance for Catholics and Protestants alike.
The expedition had been financed by Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, who never set foot in the colony himself but sent his younger brother Leonard to govern in his place. The two ships, the Ark and the Dove, carried a mix of Catholic gentlemen and Protestant laborers—an unusual pairing designed to make the venture both pious and profitable.
Unlike Puritan New England or Anglican Virginia, Maryland's charter offered a rare promise: Catholics, still persecuted in England, could worship relatively freely. Leonard Calvert quickly negotiated with the local Yaocomico people for land, trading axes, hoes, and cloth for the right to settle what became St. Mary's City, Maryland's first capital.
The colony's religious tolerance was fragile and later collapsed into sectarian violence, but its founding charter and 1649 Act of Religious Toleration influenced later American ideas about the separation of church and state. The date of landing is still debated by historians due to differences between the Julian and Gregorian calendars in use at the time.