Bryantown, MD

Bryantown is a Charles County census-designated place along Maryland Route 5, a crossroads community south of Washington and near the roads toward Waldorf and St. Mary’s County. The community occupies part of the old Boarman’s Manor, a 4,000-acre tract granted to Major William Boarman in 1674. Route 5 now carries the through traffic, but the village remains arranged around the church, cemetery, school, and old crossroads.

St. Mary’s Parish was formally established in 1793, and the present brick church was built in 1846 on the site of an earlier chapel. The parish cemetery holds the grave of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who treated John Wilkes Booth after the assassination of President Lincoln, a connection that places Bryantown on Southern Maryland’s Civil War history map. St. Mary’s School has served local children since 1915, and the church grounds still give the crossroads its clearest public focus. The parish grounds continue to function as a church and school campus alongside the cemetery and old Route 5 crossroads. Bryantown is less a town center than a historic Maryland crossroads that kept its institutions.