Howard County Courthouse (1843)

The granite courthouse on Capitoline Hill opened its doors in September 1843 — native stone raised above Ellicott's Mills on the lot the commissioners had bought from tavern-keeper Deborah Disney. It was the permanent seat of a district that had been holding court in rented rooms, and for the next twenty-one years its docket included the cases Maryland law required: prosecutions of people charged with encouraging the enslaved to run.

The most famous was William Chaplin's — the New York Underground Railroad agent transferred to Howard County in 1850 after his arrest in Montgomery County for helping two men escape from Washington. But the local cases kept coming — free Black residents like Warner Cook, charged with enticing the enslaved to run away, prosecuted in the courtroom above Main Street until November 1, 1864, when Maryland's new constitution ended slavery and the category of crime evaporated.

The building has served continuously — the 1938 WPA-era addition and the granite entrance structure grew it, but the 1843 courthouse still functions in the Ellicott City historic district, a Network to Freedom site where the law that prosecuted flight and the landmark that remembers it occupy the same building.

The 1843 courthouse is the archive's prosecuting file — the granite seat on Capitoline Hill where Maryland tried the people who helped the enslaved escape, until the day in 1864 when the state itself ended the law the courtroom had enforced.