I love seeing everyone’s headcanons for where MacCready’s homestead would be located, and since I’m piecing together more parts of One if By Land, here’s my own unhinged way-overthought headcanon on the topic.
The first time I played through Mac’s affinity quests, a location for the homestead IMMEDIATELY clicked for me (complete with vocal “oh. well shiiiit.”) because, well, you’ll see!
Let’s take a look at the affinity dialogue about Duncan’s illness for a sec:
With that in mind, let me introduce y’all to still-partially-agricultural Frederick, Maryland, just north of Washington, D.C. - and its largest local employer, Fort Detrick. (For reference, the Bethesda, MD location for Bethesda’s/Zenimax’s studios is literally 30min away from this location…unless it’s rush hour! Then it’s 90min away. That commute sucks.)
1) Um, what do you mean, “there’s a military installation for WWII/Cold-War-era bioweapons research, turned military installation for modern infectious disease research, just outside DC?”
Yup! Welcome to Frederick City.
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Blah, blah. But I didn’t come here to show off population stats, I’ve got Actual Reasons™ I promise, so lemme skip to those:
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Back up, though: “Bioscience/communications research” doesn’t quite grasp the scope of what my homies at Detrick have going on. This is more like it: ______________________________________________________________
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If you hear “unknown disease” or “bioweapon research” or “Ebola zaire” or “the plague” or other scary phrases regarding disease around the DC-MD-VA area, this is kind of the one and only place that comes to mind. It was the center of US bioweapons research for an extraordinarily long time, starting prior to the Fallout universe’s continuity split.
After Detrick’s bioweapons research was, ahem, shut down (as far as we civvies know), biological defense research and biomedical research continued to persist and still persists through present date:
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Remember the US’s Ebola zaire outbreak a few years back? In 2014 (right before Fallout 4 was released)? They brought several Ebola patients to Detrick for observation when they weren’t under observation with the CDC.
Biomedical research has better optics than bioweapons development, though, right? Uhhh…Detrick’s recent history here has not been without its complications. Observe:
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Yeah. Just imagine how much worse the ‘safety violations’ would have been in the Fallout universe, right? And there’s more – decades of controversy regarding materials disposal methods predating the latest issues:
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There’s been argument for years about whether there is a “cancer cell” area for civilians located around Area B (colloquially ‘B-site.’) Funsies.
So - sometime in the 2280s after 200+ years of facility abandonment, a kid getting sick playing in the back 40 of a farm in this area? It’s not only believable, I’d freaking expect it.
2) Okay, but does the area have agricultural potential?
100% yes! Uhh…at least, it does pre-nuclear-apocalypse.
This area was (and in some places still is) HEAVILY agricultural, particularly up until about a decade and a half ago. There is still active farmland RIGHT next to Detrick. It’s good soil.
Basically: farms, the I-70/I-270 interchange, the Barbara Fritchie house, many DC suburbs, the downtown area, various important Civil War historical locations, and Fort Detrick. That’s the whole area in a nutshell.
3) But is it on the Fallout 3 map? I don’t remember seeing a location named “Frederick” anywhere.
Frederick isn’t a named location on the FO3 map, likely because the area where it would have been pre-war is half-on, half-off the northern map edge. However, consider: there’s a military installation nearby the area where Frederick would sit on the map, and it’s a sattcomm base. Fort Detrick, as you might’ve seen above, is also known for communications research.
Here’s a shitty overlay image for reference - I’ve traced some of the major roadways on the FO3 map and have labeled them with their likely IRL equivalents (everything’s very skewed to IRL locations), to give a general idea of where this area falls on the map.
TL;DR: I’ll die on my headcanon hill that Mac’s homestead is in what used to be Frederick County near Detrick’s Area B, just at or just above the northern edge of the FO3 map.
(Fun bonus fact: I took some summer courses with Detrick employees when I was college age! One of those classes was a public speaking course. For his demonstrative speech, one of them walked us through how he gets into his HAZMAT suit in a span of less than 15 seconds! Oof.)