The district marks a location and site important in the 17th-century ecclesiastical history of Maryland, as an example of a self-contained Jesuit community made self-supporting by the surrounding 700-acre (2.8 km2) farm.

The original parish church was located at the site of the present-day St Francis Xavier Catholic Cemetery.

The second, existing church building, at the Jesuit's Newtown Manor site, dates from 1731, when Catholics met in clandestine houses of worship for safety.

The Jesuits had moved their communities and school from St Inigoes and Newtown Manor to their present location in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. Saint Francis Xavier's Church is a frame, rectangular building with two octagonally shaped brick additions, located on a neck of land for accessibility to early worshippers arriving by boat.

[2] The current Newtown Manor House was originally constructed in 1789 to replace an older structure that may have been burned during the Revolutionary War.