Laurel has developed from a fraction of a vast tract patented in the late seventeenth century by one Richard Snowden, a wealthy Welsh Quaker. His specialty was the ability to process sod iron taken from the rich surface veins which once abounded in this region. A few links down the Snowden genealogical chain, came Major Thomas Snowden, a contemporary of George Washington. After Thomas, his son Nicholas Snowden "as early as 1811," according to the "Laurel Illustrated Directory" of 1894, built a stone grist flour mill on the Patuxent River, a short distance northwest of the future site of St. Mary's Church.
