Alan Shaffer photograph collection

An annual horse race event in Harford County, Maryland is the My Lady’s Manor Point-to-Point held at Ladew Topiary Gardens in Monkton. First run in 1902, the race has a 3-mile, 16-fence course. Along with the Grand National Point-to-Point at Butler, and the Hunt Cup near Glyndon, it is one of three important amateur hunt races traditionally run in the month of April in the Baltimore vicinity of Maryland.

The race takes its name from My Lady’s Manor, a 10,000 acre tract of land, lying in Baltimore and Harford Counties, which was presented by Charles Calvert, the third Lord Baltimore to his fourth wife, Margaret Charleton, just a few years before his death in 1715. Margaret never lived on the land, staying in England and remarrying after Charles’ death, and the land passed to her step-granddaughter Charlotte upon her death in 1731.

Almost immediately, Charlotte gave the land to her father-in-law, Thomas Brerewood, in order to resolve debt incurred by her husband. Brerewood lived on the land, leased plots to local families, and founded a town named for his daughter-in-law – Charlotte Town – at the site of present day Monkton. The town deteriorated by the late 1740s and disappears from the records, but other families moved into the area, including many whose descendants are still residents: Stansbury, Sparks, Bond, Hutchin, Cole, and Talbott. With the Revolutionary War, the lands were seized by the state of Maryland, being identified as property of the Lord Baltimore and the King of England. In 1782, the tract was sold in lots, at auction held at Slade’s Tavern on Old York Road.

The land was largely held among a stable set of families through the nineteenth century, and the region remained agricultural and/or residential, with large estates the locus for hunting, racing, and gaming. By the 1920s, family properties began to change hands, and in ensuing decades, some lots have been divided and subdivided as suburban development spread north from Baltimore, but farms and undeveloped areas remain in the area.