Close out the museum season with warmth, food, and history during Hearth & Home, taking place November 28 and 29, 2025, at Historic St. Mary’s City (HSMC). This year’s theme, Breaking Bread, celebrates the power of food to bring people together—across tables, cultures, and centuries.
Visitors are invited to explore how Maryland’s earliest residents—Indigenous peoples and English colonists alike—prepared and shared meals in the 1600s.
Throughout the museum’s living history sites, costumed interpreters will demonstrate traditional cooking methods over open hearths and fires, filling the air with the inviting aroma of wood smoke. Learn how people in the past baked, roasted, and preserved their food, and discover how communal meals strengthened families and communities.
In the spirit of sharing, visitors who bring a nonperishable food item or personal care product to donate will receive $1 off admission. All donations will support a local food bank, providing assistance to community members affected by the ongoing furlough and potential loss of SNAP benefits. Suggested items include canned goods, pasta, peanut butter, toiletries, and hygiene products. Maryland Food Bank offers a detailed list of suggested items.
Admission is $10 for adults, $9 for seniors, $6 for youth (ages 6–18), and free for children 5 and younger and HSMC members. Admission includes all activities and access to the museum’s exhibits.
Historic St. Mary’s City proudly participates in Museums for All, an initiative of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, administered by the Association of Children’s Museums.
This national program promotes access and inclusion by offering reduced admission to visitors with an EBT card. At HSMC, admission is $3 for adults and seniors and $1 for youth (ages 6–18). To learn more, visit www.museums4all.org
Tickets may be purchased at the Visitor Center (18751 Hogaboom Lane, St. Mary’s City, MD 20686). For more information about this event or the museum, call 1-800-762-1634 or 301-994-4370, or visit www.HSMCdigshistory.org.
ABOUT HISTORIC ST. MARY’S CITY: Historic St. Mary’s City is a museum of living history and archaeology dedicated to telling the diverse stories of those who lived in this place now called Maryland. For more information about the museum, contact 301-994-4370, 800-SMC-1634, or [email protected]
