Southern Maryland Passport
Free passport booklet.
Fifteen stops.
Start anytime.
There’s a passport booklet making its way around Southern Maryland, fifteen custom stamps, one for each heritage site, and it’s free. Pick one up, hit the road, and see the region one stop at a time. It’s yours to keep: fill the margins with notes and doodles as you go.
No app. No account. Just ink on paper and a reason to take the long way home.
How it Works
- Get a passport: free at any participating site.
- Collect a stamp: one custom design per site, no two alike.
- Fill the book: all fifteen, at your own pace.
No app needed, no account. A few sites keep seasonal hours, so call ahead.
Go Where the Story Happened
Every stamp you collect was designed for one specific place — and standing in that place is the point. Sotterley isn’t a paragraph about an 1830s dwelling where enslaved families lived; it’s the ground you’re standing on when you read the marker. Piscataway Park isn’t a fact about ancestral homeland; it’s a shoreline the Piscataway have stewarded for generations, still.
Some of what you’ll find is proud. Some is hard. All of it is Southern Maryland.
Start Here
Not sure where to begin? Historic St. Mary’s City puts you at Maryland’s beginning. Piscataway Park — ancestral homeland of the Piscataway, past and present — has a 1770s farm and the Mount Vernon view across the water. Darnall’s Chance opens a window onto colonial women’s lives.
Bring the Family
The booklet doubles as an activity kit — scavenger hunt, map checklist, crossword, and a draw-your-own Megalodon (a nod to Maryland’s state shark, whose teeth still wash up at Calvert Cliffs). Print the whole thing at home to get started:
The Rewards
Collect all fifteen stamps and show your filled passport at any site to receive a Southern Maryland National Heritage Area magnet or sticker.
And if you’re one of the first ten to finish? You’ll take home the full prize pack — a Southern Maryland National Heritage Area t-shirt, mug, and poster.
Finished your passport? Show us.
Upload a quick video flipping through your stamped passport — or fifteen photos, one from each site. Your pick.
