St. Francis Xavier Church And Newtown Manor House Historic District

St. Francis Xavier Church and Newtown Manor House Historic District is the first county designated historic district in Saint Mary's County, the "Mother County" of Maryland and is located in Compton, Maryland, near the county seat of Leonardtown. The district marks a location and site important in the 17th century ecclesiastical history of Maryland, as an example of a self-contained Jesuit community made self-supporting by the surrounding farm. The two principal historic structures were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. Archaeological remains associated with the site date back to the early colonial period, mid-17th century. Saint Francis Xavier's Church is a frame, rectangular building with two octagonally shaped brick additions, located on a neck of land for accessibility to early worshippers arriving by boat. The center wooden section is understood to be the oldest part of the structure and was dated through dendochronology to circa 1731. The semi-octagonal brick vestibule dates to 1766/1767 and the semi-octagonal sacristy dates to 1816. The church has simple Federal woodwork, a mid-18th-century reredos, and an elegant triple-vaulted ceiling. The altar and reredos are crowned by a small dome. The reredos contains a large altar-portrait of the church's patron painted by the Brother Francis Schroen, S.J. circa 1910. The church building continues to serve as the parish church, for the parish of Saint Francis Xavier, a parish of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington. Newtown Manor House was originally constructed in 1789. It is a -story brick, five-bay brick house with a pair of interior chimneys at each gable end. The structure originally had a gambrel roof, which was raised and changed to its present shape in 1816. The house, which belongs to the parish, is currently unoccupied.