Sassafras Soil Series

The Sassafras soil series is Maryland's official state soil. It sits on the gently rolling and nearly flat uplands of the Atlantic Coastal Plain — the wide band of ancient marine and river sediments that makes up most of the Eastern Shore and much of Southern Maryland west of the Chesapeake Bay.

Sassafras is a well-drained, sandy to loamy soil with a clay-enriched subsoil. The surface warms quickly in spring, drains fast after rain, and is easy to work with any kind of equipment — qualities that made it attractive to tobacco planters in the 1600s and to row crop farmers today.

The soil formed in old Coastal Plain sediments — layers of sand, silt, and clay deposited by rivers and the ocean over millions of years as sea levels rose and fell. Unlike the glacial soils of New England or the loess soils of the Midwest, Sassafras soil sits in material that was laid down by water long before any ice sheet reached Maryland.

The Sassafras series is named for the Sassafras River, which flows between Cecil and Kent counties on Maryland's upper Eastern Shore before emptying into the Chesapeake Bay. USDA soil scientists established the series in this region, where it is one of the most widespread and characteristic soils of the Coastal Plain uplands.

Maryland soil scientists and the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service identified the Sassafras series as the most representative soil of the state's dominant agricultural landscape. The Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland Coastal Plain together cover roughly half of Maryland's land area, and the Sassafras series is the defining well-drained upland soil of that landscape.

The series connects Maryland to its founding economy. English colonists began settling the Chesapeake region in the 1630s, and tobacco quickly became the cash crop of the Maryland colony — grown on Coastal Plain uplands exactly like those where Sassafras soil is found. Choosing the Sassafras series as the state soil recognized both its agricultural dominance and its historical depth.

The Sassafras profile is built in ancient Coastal Plain sediments — materials that were deposited by rivers and the sea over millions of years. The surface is sandy and light, warming quickly in spring and draining rapidly after rain. Below it, clay carried downward by percolating water has accumulated into a denser argillic horizon that holds moisture during dry summers.

The color shifts from brown at the surface to strong brown in the subsoil — the reddish tone from iron oxide that formed during long periods of warm, humid weathering. The parent material at the base is pale and sandy, relatively unchanged compared to the weathered clay-rich horizons above it.

Sassafras soil is found across the Coastal Plain of Maryland — primarily on the Eastern Shore east of the Chesapeake Bay, and on the Western Shore in the Southern Maryland counties south of Washington. Together these areas cover roughly half of the state's land area.

On the Eastern Shore, the soil is most extensive in the counties along the upper and middle shore — Cecil, Kent, Queen Anne's, Caroline, Talbot, and Wicomico. These are the counties where tobacco grew for centuries and where corn, soybeans, poultry houses, and vegetable operations define the agricultural landscape today.

Sassafras soil also extends into Delaware and Virginia on the Delmarva Peninsula, and similar soils appear in New Jersey and other Mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain states. Maryland, however, contains some of the most agriculturally intensively used concentrations of the series on the East Coast.

Tobacco defined Sassafras soil for three hundred years. English colonists planted their first Maryland tobacco crops in the 1630s on Coastal Plain uplands very similar to Sassafras soil, and tobacco remained the dominant cash crop of Maryland's Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland through the nineteenth century. The light, well-drained, easily worked surface made it practical to cultivate with hand labor and horse-drawn equipment long before mechanized farming arrived.

Corn and soybeans now occupy most of the Sassafras soil acreage that once grew tobacco. Maryland phased out its tobacco buyout program in 2010 after decades of declining acreage, and most former tobacco farms on the Eastern Shore converted to row crops. Vegetables — particularly sweet corn, melons, and green beans — are grown on Sassafras soil in the lower Eastern Shore counties where the growing season is longest.

Poultry is the other defining land use on Sassafras soil. Maryland's Eastern Shore is part of the Delmarva poultry belt, one of the most intensive broiler chicken production regions in the country. Chicken litter applied to the light Coastal Plain soils as fertilizer has been a significant source of nitrogen and phosphorus runoff into the Chesapeake Bay — making Sassafras soil central to one of the most complex environmental management challenges in the Mid-Atlantic.