Kent County
Maryland
Queen Annes County History and Details
Queen Anne’s County has two hundred sixty-five miles of waterfront, much of that being the shores of Kent Island, which stands out from the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay.
Queen Anne’s County was organized under a sheriff in 1706, bounded by Talbot, Kent, and Dorchester counties. In 1713, Queen Anne’s County became an English postal district; the sheriff was also appointed as the postmaster and would travel to Annapolis, Maryland by boat across the Chesapeake Bay to obtain mail. In 1773 a part of Queen Anne’s County, together with a portion of Dorchester County, was taken to form Caroline County. The county now is enclosed by Talbot, Caroline, and Kent counties, as well as the Chesapeake Bay.
By the time of Independence, the county had several churches, a government, school, and a postal system. It was developed for agriculture, and enslaved African Americans worked the fields of plantations. Tobacco was an early commodity crop but it exhausted the soil. By the Revolution, some planters were converting to mixed agriculture, which was less labor intensive. They sold excess slaves in the domestic trade to the developing cotton plantations of the Deep South.
In 1876, Queen Anne’s County had the first printed independent paper called the Maryland Citizen. A bank was located in Centreville; the Centreville National Bank is still operating. A railway was constructed here in 1868; it operated from Baltimore, passing around the top of the Chesapeake Bay down to Queenstown, and connected with other railroads that continued east into Delaware as far as Rehoboth, and southward to the Eastern Shore of Virginia.
Its county seat and most populous municipality is Centreville. The census-designated place of Stevensville is the county’s most populous place. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge connects Queen Anne County of the Eastern Shore to Anne Arundel County on the Western Shore.
As of the 2010 United States Census, there were 47,798 people, 18,016 households, and 13,314 families living in the county.The median income for a household in the county was $81,096 and the median income for a family was $89,188.
