History of the first 100 years of the settlement of Hoopers Island in Dorchester County on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Based on an event from January 1753, reported in the records of the Maryland Assembly, in which the sheriff charges tobacco planter Roger Hooper with unpaid quit-rents and threatens to seize two of Hooper's slaves. On a small scale, ROGER HOOPER AND THE SHERIFF is the story of one colonial tidewater family who settled on an island on the east side of the Chesapeake Bay. On a larger canvas, through the story of this family, one can learn about the development of colonial Maryland--the difficulties the pioneers experienced, their relationship to the Indians, the importance of tobacco, the change to slave labor, the deterioriation of religious toleration, the role of women, and, finally, the economic changes that eventually isolated one side of the Bay from the other.