Sotterley Used to Close at Four. This Year It Doesn't.

For most of its three centuries on the Patuxent, Historic Sotterley kept a museum's hours. You came for a guided tour that started at 10:30, 12:30, or 2:00, you walked the grounds while there was still light to see them by, and you were back in your car well before dinner. That rhythm held for generations of Hollywood residents who grew up touring the Manor House on a school trip and never thought about the plantation again outside of daylight.

This year, that rhythm broke.

Second Saturday Family Nights now run into the evening with a live band and a food truck. A sunset event is booked for a Saturday in September. And this October, a cast of local actors will perform after dark in a Revolutionary War drama staged across the same fields where tour groups used to file through at 2 p.m. sharp. The gates that used to lock at dusk are now the reason people show up after dark.

The Old Rhythm, For Context

Sotterley's guided tour season has always run May 1 through October 31, Wednesday through Sunday, with three tour slots a day. The grounds themselves have stayed open year round for self-guided walks, but the buildings, the museum store, and the staffed programming shut down for winter and reopened each spring on the same daytime schedule. If you'd lived in Hollywood for a decade, you knew Sotterley as a place you visited on a Saturday afternoon, not a Saturday night.

That's the baseline worth holding onto, because everything that changed this year changed against it.

What Actually Opened on May 2

The season kicked off differently in 2026. Sotterley opened a new Visitor Experience Center on May 2, built as a central hub on the nearly 100-acre property, which holds 22 preserved structures including the 1703 Manor House and the only surviving original 1830s slave cabin. Board president Gwendoline Bankins framed the new building as more than a check-in point for tours, and executive director Scott Gray has been describing the property's other spaces, the Barn, the Tractor Shed, and a plaza with new custom brick, as venues built for weddings, business events, and community socials rather than one-off tour stops.

That's a shift in what the site is for. A visitor center is infrastructure for people who come once. A plaza built for socials is infrastructure for people who come back.

The Second Saturday Nobody Expected

The clearest evidence of the new rhythm is the monthly Second Saturday Family Night series, which runs at Sotterley through the rest of 2026 with a different band booked each time. A Second Saturday now includes:

• A farmers market set up across the grounds
• Bailey's Food Truck for dinner
• Wagon rides and farm games for kids
• Live music starting at 6 p.m., a different local band each month
• A flat $10 per car at the gate

The October 10 date has The Copper Pennies playing classic rock from 6 to 8 p.m. Bring a blanket or lawn chairs, because outside food and drink isn't allowed once you're on site, but the whole point is to stay for the sunset rather than leave before it.

Layer on top of that a separate Sunset at Sotterley event scheduled for September 19, and you have a property that now hosts two distinct evening draws in a single fall, on top of its regular daytime tour calendar. That didn't happen five years ago.

The Fall Calendar, Mapped

Why a Revolutionary War Drama Is Casting Your Neighbors

The most unusual addition is Legends & Lore: In a Time of Revolution, an immersive production Sotterley is staging over two weekends in October. Auditions were held August 6 and 7 at the Leonardtown branch library, open to actors, students, and community members with no professional theater background required, just a one-minute classical monologue and a willingness to do a cold reading from the script.

The setting is October 1776, months after the Battle of St. George's Island, the largest military engagement of the American Revolution fought on Maryland soil. That battle happened close enough to Hollywood that Sotterley's organizers are treating it as local history rather than a national footnote, and the production leans into that, building storylines around espionage, divided families, and the choices enslaved people made during the war, staged on the actual grounds where some of that pressure was felt.

A history museum casting local residents for an outdoor evening production is a different kind of civic event than a guided house tour. It asks people to show up after dark and participate rather than observe.

What This Actually Changes About a Saturday Night Here

Before this year, an evening out in Hollywood meant Toots Bar or Twisted B&G, both of which still book their own regular live acts. Daytime outdoor options meant Greenwell State Park down the road, 596 acres on the Patuxent with multi-use trails on an honor-system fee of three dollars for Maryland vehicles, five for everyone else. Greenwell was always the place you went before dinner. Sotterley was always the place you went before dinner, too, just for a different reason.

What's new is that Sotterley now competes for the same evening hours as the bars, not the same daytime hours as the state park. A family that used to treat Sotterley as a once-a-summer field trip now has a reason to check the calendar every second Saturday. A couple who used to drive past the gate without a second thought now has a sunset event circled in September and a theater production to watch for in October.

None of this changes what Sotterley is at its core, a National Historic Landmark preserving 300 years of Patuxent River history. It changes when you'd actually go.

If you've lived in Hollywood long enough to remember Sotterley as strictly a daytime stop, this is the year that stopped being true. And if you're the kind of person who tracks what's changing in a place before deciding whether it's home, that instinct serves you well here too. When you're ready to see what else has shifted in Hollywood, from the market to the neighborhoods around it, Hammer & Heels Realtor keeps a closer eye on this corner of St. Mary's County than most.