Bill
and Nancy Smith Family
Travels and Holidays
Travels and Holidays
This web site will both chronicle
(very briefly) our recent visit to Maryland and provide some useful background
material (via hyperlinks to additional information) for better understanding
of the ancestoral heritage of the Kinnick line (Bill's mother's father's line)
in colonial times.
Poplar Hill was the name of the plantation in southern Prince George's County
where Capt. Richard Brightwell lived when his daughter, Elizabeth, was born about 1686.
She became the mother of William Kinnick, the first named Kinnick we find in the Maryland records.
Poplar Hill
has continued to be the name of the area where two county roads intersect.
However, the latest maps have dropped the designation, andhere is why:
All four corners are either farm land or idle land. There is nothing there.
It is on record
that before he died in 1697, Richard Brightwell did donate a few acres
of land to provide for a Chapel for the southern portion of the parish (Church
of England
in the colonies, became the Episcopal church). A couple miles down the road
east, there is
a St. Mary's Episcopal Church which is the modern version on (or very near)
the land set aside by Richard Brightwell.
Here Bill stand by the sign in front of the chapel.
Driving to
the southeast from the Chapel (and from the Poplar Hill corner),
we were following Swanson Creek, the boundary between Prince George's
and Charles County, to the Patuxent River, and Benedict.
Always an important
tobacco port in colonial times, the port at Benedict took on further historical
significance in the War of 1812 as the location the British chose to land
the 5,000 troops
that attacked and burned the new United State Capital in Washingtion, D.C.
These troops marched within 15 miles of the former Kinnick land, near Bryantown.
Bill