Point Lookout

John Smith came ashore here in 1608 and told the king of England it was a prime spot for a colony.

Point Lookout is the southernmost tip of a peninsula where the Chesapeake Bay meets the Potomac River, in St. Mary's County, Maryland, and the southernmost spot on Maryland's western shore. Smith surveyed the area, noted the game and the fishing, the fertile soil, and above all the strategic value of ground overlooking the confluence of the Potomac, the Patuxent and the St. Mary's rivers, with a commanding view of the bay itself.

Maryland's first settlement followed in 1634 at nearby St. Mary's City, and Point Lookout became part of St. Michael's Manor, one of the principal holdings of Leonard Calvert, leader of the new colony and the first proprietary governor. It was originally named St. Michael's Point; the name Point Lookout was in use at least as early as Emanuel Bowen's New and Accurate Map of Virginia and Maryland, published in 1747. Its position made it a target, and British forces raided it during the American Revolution.

The park today preserves two things. One is the Point Lookout Light, built in 1830. The other is the site of an American Civil War prisoner of war camp, which is the reason this place carries the weight it does.

It is now Point Lookout State Park, run by the Maryland Park Service, which operates one of the oldest state park systems in the country. The first state park land was set aside in 1907, when the Catonsville philanthropist John Mark Glenn gave 43 acres of his estate to the Maryland Board of Forestry, and the service's own timeline records Point Lookout among the parks planned and then opened in the expansion that followed. Most Marylanders now live within 15 miles of a state park because of that head start.