Port Tobacco
According to the Sperling's Best Places.net, as of 2011 there were only 18 souls occupying the quiet and quaint rural community of Port Tobacco Village, Maryland, making it the tiniest officially incorporated town in the state. The village is small, there is no question about that, but what it lacks in population, it more than makes up for in stature, lore and legend, and historical significance.
Located in the heart of Charles County, Maryland, the community that would become the Port Tobacco Village of 2012 was initially settled by English colonists way back in the year 1727, which makes it one of the oldest in Maryland. At one time during that era of American history, when it carried the moniker of “Port Tobacco River,” the village was the second biggest river port community in the state of Maryland.
Port Tobacco Village served as the county seat city for Charles County. Its close proximity and easy access to the Port Tobacco River, Chesapeake Bay and subsequently out to the Atlantic Ocean proved a very advantageous one, turning it into a relatively calm water, weather-protected seaport. The village's seemingly charmed existence would not last long, however, as Mother Nature and advances in transportation conspired together to bleed Port Tobacco Village nearly dry of its commerce and consequently its inhabitants.
At some seemingly arbitrary point in the late 1800s or early 1900s, nature essentially cut Port Tobacco Village's umbilical chord by slowly sifting more and more silt from the ocean into the Port Tobacco River. Over time, this and other tidal changes served to eliminate the community's easy access to the Chesapeake Bay and therefore the Atlantic Ocean, making the “Port” in Port Tobacco Village superfluous.
The nearly fatal blow to Port Tobacco Village was delivered by the proliferation of railroad tracks and trains, which at the time served primarily larger communities. The county seat was moved closer to the railroad traffic in La Plata in 1895, thereby causing many of the village's remaining occupants to move away in turn.
One of the village's oldest residents, so to speak, is the Legend of the Blue Dog. Since about 1897, every year at Halloween the tale is told of the ill-fated Charles Thomas Sims, his Blue Dog, Rose Hill and greedy old Henry Hanos. Local myth says that the ghost of the Blue Dog stands guard over the spot on Rose Hill Road at which it and its master, Sims, were murdered by Hanos for Sim's alleged deed to an estate and fortune in gold. So, while Port Tobacco Village is no longer the force it once was, some of its legend still lives on.
