Annapolis served as the capital of the United States for a brief period between November 1783 and June 1784, during which the Continental Congress met in the Maryland State House, and it was there that General George Washington formally resigned his military commission and the Treaty of Paris, officially ending the Revolutionary War, was ratified. The Maryland State House used for these proceedings remains in continuous use as the state capitol today, making it the oldest state capitol still serving its original function in the country.
Annapolis has been Maryland’s state capital continuously since 1695, and its historic district retains one of the largest concentrations of original 18th-century buildings in the United States, its street plan, laid out around 1695 with two circles connected by radiating avenues, still substantially intact.
A Small City Built Around a Naval Institution
The United States Naval Academy, established in Annapolis in 1845, has shaped much of the city’s modern identity, its distinctive Beaux-Arts campus occupying a substantial waterfront portion of the city and its midshipmen a familiar presence on Annapolis’s streets. The academy was deliberately located in Annapolis partly for its relative isolation from the temptations of larger port cities, a rationale that shaped the character of the school for its first century.
Annapolis’s compact historic waterfront, still centred on City Dock much as it was in the colonial era, gave the city an early role in the transatlantic slave trade, a history the city has more directly acknowledged and memorialised in recent decades, including at the Kunta Kinte-Alex Haley Memorial on the dock itself.
Painting a Colonial Capital on the Water
Annapolis’s brick colonial buildings along its historic waterfront give a watercolourist warm, layered colour and genuine maritime character to work with. We’ve captured that setting in our own Annapolis Watercolor Print, painted first by hand and printed to order on archival paper, a small piece of Maryland for a wall at home.
Briefly the seat of a new nation and a naval city ever since, Annapolis remains a place whose small size has never quite matched the weight of what has happened there.