History of 

White Marsh Property

Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church and Cemetery was originally known as White Marsh Plantation. It was given to the Jesuits as a bequest in 1729 by James Carroll, cousin of Archbishop John Carroll, later the first Roman Catholic Archbishop of Baltimore. By 1741, the Jesuits had taken possession and built the original chapel.  White Marsh contained about 2,000 acres at its height and was one of several such Jesuit-owned properties in central and southern Maryland.  Each Jesuit manor or plantation was organized in a similar fashion with a home farm, plantation fields, and numerous tenant farms. The home farm served as the home of the Jesuit priests and brothers.  At different times the plantations included the homes of the indentured servants, tenant farmers, overseers and the enslaved African Americans who worked there.   White Marsh included a Jesuit novitiate for part of its existence.  At times as many as 100 enslaved men, women, and children lived at White Marsh with the Jesuit priests, brothers, and seminarians.

Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church and Cemetery which is on the former White Marsh Plantation is significant as one of three former Jesuit plantations that today is an active parish church. As a former Jesuit Plantation, it stands as a testament to the early history of the Catholic Church in Maryland and the significant role that slavery played in the history of the American Church.  White Marsh is notable for its relationship to Archbishop John Carroll, the first Archbishop of Baltimore.  Beginning in 1783 a series of meetings, known as General Chapters, were held at White Marsh for the purpose of organizing the Roman Catholic Church in the new United States. It was at these that then-Fr. John Carroll, SJ was nominated to become Prefect Apostolic, the head of the Church in the United States, and later as the first Archbishop of Baltimore. The creation of what is today Georgetown University was discussed and decided at one of these meetings, which were held in the chapel.  The chapel, house, and novitiate buildings perished in a fire in 1853.  The current chapel was rebuilt inside the stone walls that remained after the fire.  Today the parish uses a new church completed in 1969 but retains the original site of the home farm and chapel of the plantation.

Present-day Sacred Heart church includes approximately 30 acres of property, of which about ten acres are developed (buildings, parking lots, cemetery, shrine); the rest is a mix of woods and fields. The cemetery adjacent to the historical chapel has documented burials back to 1819, with the earliest legible tombstone dating to the 1830s. In late 2022, initial clearing activities of thick brush at the edge of the woods along the cemetery yielded dozens of previously unknown fieldstones. This led to consultations with Archdiocese of Washington staff and a Catholic University archeologist on the discovery and its likely meaning. Subsequent clearing in 2023 and 2024 of the seven plus acres of hillside adjacent to the cemetery allowed for archeological fieldwork and cataloguing of the roughly nine hundred engraved markers (mostly on the hill top) and roughly the same amount of unmarked, potential grave markers on the hillside, many of which are likely those of enslaved or emancipated African Americans.  Related research of burial, Jesuit, sacramental, and other records have increased the list of people documented as buried at Sacred Heart/White Marsh from approximately 900 to over 2200.

The newly-discovered grave markers are mostly on a steep hillside and are unmarked field stones, suggestive of a less-desirable location and presentation that one would expect for enslaved persons or others of lesser means. The location of the vast majority of burials prior to the mid-1900s of any race are unknown.  Different factors contribute to the lack of knowledge of the property and the people who lived, worked, and worshipped there.  A fire in the 1850s destroyed much of the buildings and records on the top of the hill.  The cemetery and hillside gradually fell into disuse and was ill-maintained from about 1900 to the 1960s as new churches were built elsewhere (Ascension and Holy Family churches) and the center of gravity for Catholic worship and related religious activities mostly shifted to those locations. With that shift, much of the historical knowledge of the cemetery and who was buried there also departed, although there were rumors of burials of enslaved and emancipated blacks on the property.