Maryland Fun Facts!

• Maryland was the hometown of the Babe and the Raven: Baseball great Babe Ruth and Edgar Allen Poe lived there. Poe is also buried in Baltimore's Westminster Cemetery.
  
  

• The state sport of Maryland is jousting, a competition between two armored contestants mounted on horses in which each tries to strike the other with a lance. The sport has been enjoyed in Maryland for 300 years.
  
  

• Maryland is famous for great seafood, especially crabs. During lunch hour on Maryland's Chesapeake Bay, vendors sell almost as many crabcakes as hot dogs and hambugers combined.
  
  

• Maryland's Mount Clare Station, built in Baltimore in 1830, was the first railroad station in the United States.
  
  

• Notorious gunslinger Doc Holliday was called "Doc" because he was a dentist. Holliday learned his trade at the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery.
  
  

• Kunta Kinte, the slave ancestor of Roots author Alex Haley, arrived in Annapolis in 1767. This is now commemorated at the City Dock by a plaque and statue of Haley.
  
  

• The Mother Seton House in Baltimore and the National Shrine of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton in Emmitsburg both celebrate the life of the first American to be sainted, a Baltimore resident.
  
  

• America's first umbrellas were produced in Baltimore, beginning in 1828.
  
  

• Each year on September 17, 23,100 luminaries are lit at Maryland's Antietam National Battlefield to honor the dead of America's bloodiest one-day battle, fought during the Civil War.
  
  

• The Mason-Dixon line was drawn between Pennsylvania and Maryland in the 1760s to end a border dispute. The line is traditionally thought of as the division between America's North and South.
  
  

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