Embedded atop a high bluff overlooking the Patapsco River is a small granite post engraved with an eight-point Maltese cross.

It’s easy to miss Patapsco Valley State Park’s smallest attraction, but this mysterious cross in the Howard County woods marks a spot on a 400-year-old map created by Capt. John Smith.

Although Smith is often remembered for his account of being saved by Pocahontas, the English explorer also created the first detailed map of the Chesapeake Bay region. In 1608, about 13 years before the first Thanksgiving, Smith led an expedition through modern-day Virginia, Delaware and Maryland, encountering dozens of Native American towns.

The map of his voyage is “a Rosetta stone for scholars and archaeologists who have studied that region,” said Wayne Clark, a former archaeologist for the Maryland Historical Trust and co-author of a book about Smith’s Chesapeake voyages.

In addition to documenting natural landmarks like Calvert Cliffs and the Potomac River, Smith peppered his map with 27 Maltese crosses that he said corresponded with real places where he carved crosses into trees. Everything beyond those symbols, Smith wrote, was relayed to him by Native Americans.

These days, people still carve various things into the trees along Patapsco State Park’s Ridge Trail, where the granite cross sits at a high point overlooking a bend in the river near Elkridge along what was named the Captain John Smith Loop in 2017.

Visitors can find the trailhead just steps from the park’s Avalon area parking lot and they consistently rank the roughly mile-long hike as easy, according to the All Trails hiking app.

The marker was installed as part of the Cross Project, a volunteer effort to place the crosses inspired by the 400th anniversary in 2007 of the founding of the colonial settlement of Jamestown, Virginia.

At the time, volunteers with the Friends of the John Smith Water Trail, a predecessor of the Chesapeake Conservancy, began exploring the idea of tracing Smith’s journey.

Clark worked with the group to lay Smith’s map over modern topographical maps to determine approximately where the crosses could have been located. Project volunteers later installed granite markers at 21 sites across three states between 2016 and 2020, including the one in Patapsco.

Of the six remaining sites, three were eliminated from the project based on doubts that Smith ever set foot there. The group was unable to secure permission to install crosses at the other three sites.

Researchers believe seven crosses refer to locations in Maryland including in Baltimore, Harford and Montgomery counties as well as the Eastern Shore.

“What Smith did was a magnificent achievement when you consider where these markers are,” said Edward Haile, who wrote two books about Smith and worked with Clark to scout locations for the crosses.

Even in the age of automobiles, traveling to potential sites on Smith’s map took days, Haile said.

Smith saw “more of the bay than most people see in a lifetime,” he said.

Smith’s expeditions through the Native American lands were intended for financial gain. The map became a tremendous resource for the English as they pursued colonization, with devastating consequences to Indigenous peoples.

Smith’s map is oriented around a European point of view, referring to Powhatan lands as “Virginia” and indicating north is to the right, as it was when he sailed to the New World.

Native Americans lived in the Patapsco Valley for at least 20,000 years. Archaeological sites have been identified along the full length of the river, though some have been destroyed by development, Clark said.

Even as Smith’s map became a tool for colonial conquest, it also preserved critical information about the Native American tribes that inhabited the region including the location of more than 200 towns and their names.

“It was really fantastic insight that we wouldn’t understand if not for his research,” Clark said.

Haile hopes the granite crosses installed across the Chesapeake region help researchers to identify historically significant sites in the future. He said he’s tinkered with laying Smith’s map of Native American settlements over modern maps, just as he and Clark did with the crosses.

Some of the locations for the 21 granite crosses were difficult to nail down, Haile said. The site at the Patapsco, which is known in Smith’s day as “Blands Content,” was identified based on the map, the position of hills, four streams and the head of the tide — the farthest point upstream reached by tides — 400 years ago, before deforestation led to sedimentation.

Clark and Haile debated how far upriver Smith possibly ventured. Clark suspects the explorer reached where I-95 now crosses the valley, several miles from the Patapsco’s mouth in the Baltimore harbor. Haile believed it was a little farther upstream and chose the spot in the state park on the high bluff.

The 82-year-old knows others may dispute the location of the crosses, but that’s not the only reason for the Cross Project.

The bald earth around Patapsco’s granite marker suggests that more than a few hikers have circled the little Maltese cross and looked out at a view of the river and the Patapsco Valley that has captivated people for centuries.

“It brings history to life,” Haile said.