In 1947, eleven attorneys admitted to practice in the courts of St. Mary’s County met in Leonardtown’s old Beacon Building to found the St. Mary’s County Bar Association. Though the oldest county in Maryland, St. Mary’s was one of the last to organize a formal bar association. At the time of the bar association’s founding the county had one courthouse, a part-time State’s Attorney, and three circuit court judges it shared with the rest of Southern Maryland. Prisoners at the old county jail checked in with their jailor in the morning, only to be let out during the day to play cards on the courthouse lawn and have dinners with their own friends. A few attorneys practiced law out of their own homes, without staff or typewriters, and clients could regularly pay their legal fees in oysters or farm crops.
Of those first eleven members of the bar, five were veterans of either World War I or World War II. One, Paul J. Bailey, was then serving as a state senator, and another, Joseph Aloysius Mattingly, would be elected to the House of Delegates later that year. Two, Philip H. Dorsey and Aloysius Fenwick King, owned county newspapers. Albert Kingsley Love, the first President of the Bar Association, was the postmaster in Loveville, named after him. Many were related by either blood or marriage, and all but one was a native of St. Mary’s County. Understanding that the county was greatly changing with the expansion of the Patuxent River Naval Air Station and the constant arrival of new residents, these attorneys established the St. Mary’s County Bar Association with the purpose of promoting collegiality and professionalism among the bar’s members, mentoring younger attorneys, and encouraging the bar as a whole to show service and humility towards their community.
For more about St. Mary’s County Bar Association’s founding, and for biographies of each of the eleven original members, read Chapter 2, “In Memoriam,” of The John Hanson Briscoe Historical Project here.
