La Plata, population 8,753, is the county seat of Charles County in Southern Maryland. It's also a predominant suburb for workers in Waldorf, the Naval Air Station, and Andrews Air Force Base. It generally marks the boundary of where people commute into DC and its suburbs from.
At first notice, the town stands out for its Spanish name. The name means “Silver,” supposedly after a river in Argentina. Samuel Chapman, a predominant landowner in the area (the town’s first store was “Chapman’s Store”), went to Argentina to explore and find personal healing, and he loved it so much, he named his land after it.
La Plata is interesting in that it isn’t as old as surrounding Charles County. Nearby Port Tobacco was founded in 1634, and Charles County was chartered in 1658, but La Plata wasn’t incorporated for another 230 years, in 1888.
The planned boundaries for La Plata seem informal, but they give us a sense of what town incorporation was like. “The corporate limits of the town shall be as follows: Beginning at a tree at Mathew’s gate and running south 500 yards thence NE to a locust tree on farm of John Chapman’s land, thence NW 800 yards to a white oak tree at Farrall’s mill; then across in a straight line to the commencing point.”
The land that makes up La Plata today spent those 250 years pre-incorporation mostly as tobacco plantations and farm land. Southern Maryland had higher numbers of slaves than elsewhere in the state, excepting the Eastern Shore. Southern Maryland was founded as a Catholic colony and later became tobacco country. La Plata stayed this way until the late 1800s.
There were no Civil War battles in Southern Maryland, and landowners tended to side more with the Confederacy. John Wilkes Boothe passed through the area on his attempted escape from DC, trying to cross the Potomac south of La Plata near Faulkner. Additionally, rumors still persist that a spur of the mysterious Underground Railroad passed through the fledgling town.
In 1878, La Plata’s population was just 35 people. By 1887 the number rose to 120. As seems to be the case with every town I research, a spur of the Pennsylvania Railroad was responsible for La Plata’s growth. This connected Southern Maryland with larger markets north in the cities and east in the ports. La Plata, due to its location near the top of Southern Maryland, acted as a holdover point for farmers farther south to store, pack, and send off their merchandise.
Just 4 years after its incorporation, La Plata was named county seat of Charles County. It took over the title after a fire destroyed most of the previous seat, Port Tobacco. The town never recovered, as the decline of the American tobacco industry ruined the town’s prospects. After years as one of the most important ports in Maryland, second only to Baltimore, Port Tobacco is now the smallest town by population in Maryland. But La Plata still had its own natural disasters coming.
The 1900s brought more growth to La Plata. During the 1920s, gambling took hold, so much so that it was sometimes called “Little Vegas.” However, the town shut the casinos down, fearing dependency on a shady industry as well as a bad reputation. The railroads began to decline, but in 1940, the Harry Nice Bridge spanned the Potomac, bringing North-bound traffic through La Plata on its way to the northern port cities.
Southern Maryland has always been the Tornado Alley of Maryland. The flat terrain creates a suitable environment for tornadoes. In fact, Maryland’s two worse tornadoes occurred in or near La Plata. The first was in 1926, when a category F4, with winds up to 180 miles per hour, killed 17 people. Maryland’s worst tornado was in 2002, when another F4 had speeds up to 200 miles per hour.
Former NFL and Redskins running back Larry Johnson was born near La Plata in 1979. He scored 61 career touchdowns, and rushed for 6,223 yards. He was named a 1st Team All-Pro in 2006, and 2nd Team All-Pro in 2005. In 2002, he was a unanimous college football All-American at Penn State, even winning the Doak Walker Award, which is given to the country’s top running back.
Since the 1980s, La Plata has been growing both as an urban suburb and self- dependent town. Businesses open in La Plata every year, as more and more residents live in newly built neighborhoods. La Plata is definitely a town on the rise.
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