St. Stephen's Episcopal Church is a historic Episcopal church located in Earleville, Cecil County, Maryland. North Sassafras Parish, as it was originally known, was one of the original 30 Anglican parishes in the Province of Maryland, named for its location north of the Sassafras River which separated Cecil County from Kent County, Maryland. On June 22, 1834, this parish hosted the ordination as an Episcopal deacon by bishop William Murray Stone of William Douglass, a Methodist preacher who then became the second rector of the historic African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in Philadelphia (after Absalom Jones), where the African American abolitionist was ordained as a priest and served until his death in 1862.