Climate of Maryland

Maryland has two climates. It is continental in the highland west, with temperature records from −40 °F (−40 °C) to more than 100 °F (38 °C). Average temperatures in western Maryland are 65 °F (18 °C) in July and 28 °F (−2 °C) in January. The east has a humid subtropical climate strongly influenced by Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, both of which moderate the weather but do not prevent ice formation almost every winter on the bay’s northern tributaries; summer calms can produce high temperatures up to 107 °F (42 °C), with nearly 100 percent relative humidity. Average temperatures in eastern Maryland are 75 °F (24 °C) in July and 35 °F (2 °C) in January. Ordinarily, precipitation levels are enough to make reservoirs overflow and to enable Baltimore and Washington, D.C., to draw all the soft water needed for municipal supplies. Storms sweep in from the west and south, except in late summer, when the fringes of passing hurricanes often drench Maryland from the east.

Plant and animal life

Before the arrival of European colonists in 1634, Maryland’s natural vegetation was quite different from what it is today. At that time about nine-tenths of Maryland was forested, but over the centuries people cleared, plowed, and urbanized the landscape, and by the early 21st century only some two-fifths of the state remained forested. Still, Maryland has more than 150 tree species. Oak and hickory are by far the most dominant types, constituting about two-thirds of the forests.

The Eastern Shore was formerly an area of oak, pine, cypress, and gum forests, and on the Western Shore there were oak, hickory, and pine forests. Today the Coastal Plain, primarily on the Eastern Shore, is largely cleared, and the forests that do exist reflect the mild climatic influences of Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Bald cypress and loblolly pine are common, generally representing the northern limit of these trees. The Piedmont area was forested by chestnut, walnut, hickory, oak, and pine; today it is dominated by oak, yellow poplar, ash, and some pine. In western Maryland the pattern was pine and chestnut on hilltops, with oak, poplar, maple, and walnut in the valleys; now the mountains and valleys are forested by oaks and other hardwoods (beech, birch, and maple).

Maryland is an ecologically diverse state that supports a wide variety of wildlife species, some of which are abundant enough to allow economic activities such as the Chesapeake Bay fishery, but over the centuries the loss and degradation of wildlife habitats to development has greatly diminished this diversity. Elk, bison, wolves, and cougars disappeared from Maryland in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the human population has grown and pressures for development have intensified, it has become difficult, yet critical, to protect wildlife habitats. In addition to development, there are threats from global warming (including potential climate change and rises in sea level) and air and water pollution. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ Natural Heritage Program monitors the status of more than 1,100 native plants and animals. Particular attention is focused on species such as the blue crab and the Chesapeake Bay oyster.

Population composition

The white population, at first all originating from the British Isles, began to vary when German-speaking farmers and artisans moved from Pennsylvania into western Maryland during the 1700s. The process accelerated in the 1840s during the Irish Potato Famine and as Germans and German Jews fled military conscription, and then Russian Jews, Poles, Czechs, Italians, Greeks, and others arrived at Baltimore—a major 19th-century immigration centre—and later fanned out into the countryside. Ethnic diversity was one of the first characteristics that set Maryland apart from the regions south of the Potomac River. Immediately after the American Civil War, this diversity was countered by an influx of Southerners who despaired of life in a defeated and devastated homeland. Many former slaves moved north to Baltimore, where they joined a well-established African American community who had been free for several generations.

Maryland’s Native American population had been mostly extinguished or pushed westward by about 1700. All that remains from their centuries of habitation are campsite artifacts, still being unearthed; some notable bayside oyster middens; and place-names corrupted by uncomprehending whites, such as Chesapeake, Patapsco, Potomac, Wicomico, Patuxent, Piscataway, and Susquehanna.

African slaves laboured in Maryland from the time of the first Calverts. The consciences of many Marylanders, particularly members of the Society of Friends (Quakers), were uneasy; from 1783 the importation of kidnapped Africans was heavily taxed. While Maryland did not formally outlaw slavery until 1864, it protected the liberty of more free Blacks than any other state as slavery neared its end. After the Civil War, Blacks found Maryland more congenial than the states of the former Confederacy, in which, by 1900, systematic lifetime disfranchisement of Blacks was under way. A similar effort in Maryland, led by the Democratic Party and coming to a head in 1910, was defeated in referendum by Republicans. Yet it took a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1934 to force the University of Maryland to admit a Black student into its school of law, and it was 1970 before Marylanders sent a Black representative (from a district that included Baltimore) to the U.S. Congress. The latter development reflected in part the changing population of Baltimore, now more than half African American.

In the early 21st century whites constituted about two-thirds of the state’s total population, and African Americans made up nearly one-third. Most of the remainder were Asian Americans, with a small number of Native Americans. The state also has a small but growing Hispanic population.