CHAPEL POINT -- St. Thomas Manor at Chapel Point is a Maryland architectural landmark, the earliest surviving Georgian mansion in the state, according to the Historical Society of Charles County.

Since it was constructed in 1741, the manor house has been a residence for Jesuits. And it was they who built the adjoining church in 1798, naming it St. Ignatius after St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of their Roman Catholic order, the Society of Jesus.

Today, the church and manor house are part of the oldest continuously active Catholic parish in the United States, according to a historical marker at the entrance.

Before the building of the church, the property had other houses of worship. Its first chapel was built in 1662, giving Chapel Point its name.

The manor house was built by slaves under the supervision of two Jesuit fathers, the Rev. George Hunter and the Rev. Richard Molyneux. Today, more than 200 years later, the manor house's basic structure and brickwork remain intact.

The bricks used in its construction were handmade by slaves who lived on the property. A glasslike glaze over the bricks is thought to be the structure's most unusual surviving element, said the Rev. Edward O'Connell, associate pastor of St. Ignatius.

Although some of the glaze has been worn away, bricks near the base of the manor house have tended to keep the coating.

The house contains three slender chimneys that are typical of the Maryland Georgian style. There were originally eight fireplaces -- one in nearly every major room -- but only one is used today. The other seven were covered to save money on heating.

A fire Dec. 27, 1866, ruined the interior of the manor house and the church, but restoration of both was finished by June 7, 1868, according to the church history on its Internet site (www.chapelpoint.org/history.html).

Although the restoration kept to the 1741 floor plan for the mansion's nine main rooms, a second floor was added to the service wing, and gables were added to the roof.

In 1875, fancy plasterwork was added to crown the manor's 14-foot ceilings. The plasterwork is stylistically more mid-Victorian than Georgian, as is the rest of the interior.

The manor house has a distinguishing, classic 18th-century Catholic feature -- a sacristy connected to the mansion.

The sacristy, also known as the Old Chapel, was originally free-standing, having been built in 1662 under the supervision of the Rev. Henry Warren. But in 1692, the colony established the Anglican Church as its official religion resulting in a law that banned the use of public buildings such as the chapel for Catholic worship.

In 1747, a royal decree eased the ban somewhat by permitting Catholic worship in chapels entered through private residences. To meet this requirement, the porch of the free-standing Old Chapel was covered over and connected to the then-6-year-old manor house.

Eventually, the sacristy and manor house were connected to St. Ignatius Church. Today, the sacristy remains in use as a storage area and serves as a dressing room for the priests and altar servers. Several of the Jesuit mission's earliest priests are buried beneath the sacristy.

The property containing the manor house and St. Ignatius dates from 1649, when Cecil Calvert, Second Lord Baltimore, decreed:

"Whereas Thomas Mathews [Matthews] of our province of Maryland has assigned him 4,000 acres of land from [the Rev.] Thomas Copley, who transported 10 able men servants at his own charge into our said province in the year 1633 to plant and inhabit there, who does give, grant ... and confirm unto the said Thomas Mathews all the parcel of forest land lying on the north side of Potomac River near unto a creek formerly called Port Tobacco Creek, but now St. Thomas Creek. And we do by these patents will and appoint that the said recited parcels of land shall from henceforth be one entire manor and be called by the name St. Thomas Manor."

The Rev. Andrew White, who accompanied the first Maryland settlers in the Ark and the Dove in 1634, established a mission church on the Chapel Point tract overlooking Port Tobacco River.

White, a Jesuit missionary priest, and local Piscataway Indians erected a small one-room structure known as the Indian House.

White worked among the Indians, breaking the language barrier, writing the catechism in their tongue and converting many to Catholicism. A stained-glass window on St. Ignatius Church's top floor behind the choir loft depicts White's baptism of the Piscataway king.

The second house built on the property was known as the Wooden House, where White subsequently lived and offered Mass.

A chapel was built in 1640, nine years before Maryland's famous Act Concerning Religion -- more popularly known as the Act of Toleration -- guaranteed freedom of religion for Christian denominations in the state.

The Jesuits worked the property with the help of slaves. A one-story, two-room slave house built about 1711 still stands next to manor house's service wing.

When the Catholic Church in Rome suppressed the Jesuits, or Society of Jesus, in 1773, the Maryland priests formed a private corporation and worked the manor. Staples from the farm were sent to the American army besieging Yorktown, Va., in 1781 at the close of the Revolutionary War, according to the church's history brochure.

When the Jesuit order was allowed to re-establish itself, it did so at Chapel Point in 1805.

The two-room slave house was converted to the cook's house in 1830 after the Jesuits stopped holding slaves and turned to share-cropping the property.

In 1963, a tunnel was discovered in the basement of the slave house. Theories vary on the tunnel's use, from smuggling Jesuits into the colonies to being a stop on the Underground Railroad that slaves used to escape to free states in the North.

A piece of china recovered from the tunnel is dated 1856, suggesting that it was in use before the Civil War.

During the Civil War, Union troops occupied and vandalized the property, which was in an area of Confederate sympathizers who were hostile to the occupying Yankee troops.

After the war, the church received damages from the federal government and the Jesuits returned the property to profitable uses. Almost nothing of the antebellum cemetery stones could be restored; they had been destroyed when used for target practice by the Union troops.

In 1970, Maryland purchased 828 acres from the Jesuits for development as Chapel Point Park.

Today, the parish cemetery takes up a large swath of the church's remaining grounds. One of the Jesuit farm's original barns remains. It houses a petting zoo created by the current pastor, the Rev. Salvador R. Jordan.