Eastern Shore of Maryland

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2008)

The Eastern Shore of Maryland is composed of the state's nine counties east of the Chesapeake Bay. They are Caroline County, Cecil County, Dorchester County, Kent County, Queen Anne's County, Somerset County, Talbot County, Wicomico County, Worcester County.

Caroline County has no Bay shoreline. Only Worcester County has seashore, consisting of coastal bays and marshes behind two barrier islands. The number of barrier islands on the Maryland seacoast and the location of inlets has varied over the years.

1 North and South Boundaries
2 Travel and Commerce
3 Area and Population
4 Tourism
5 Regional Characteristics
6 Sports and the Eastern Shore
7 Eastern Shore Development, Preservation and Ecology
8 Political Environment
9 Towns and Cities
10 See also
11 Notes
12 External links

[edit] North and South Boundaries

On the south, the Calvert-Scarborough Line separates the Eastern Shore of Maryland from that of Virginia. A modern Worcester County highway map (PDF) shows its location. While not exactly where it was laid down in the 1600-1700s, it has moved little once everyone could agree on where Watkins Point, on the western side of the peninsula, is and where the shore of the Bay began (since the bay side peters out into marshes and wetlands).

In 1668, Philip obtained recognition from Virginia of Maryland's claims to what is now Somerset County and actually participated in the survey of the dividing line between the two colonies with the Surveyor General of Virginia, Edmund Scarborough. At about the same time, he negotiated treaties with Lower Eastern Shore Indian tribes who were harassing English settlers. The terms of these treaties established rules of behavior in Indian-English relations that applied to whites as well as Indians, and on the whole, kept peace in the area thereafter. ^[1]

The northern limit is harder to place.

Some dispute Cecil County as a true Shore county, however, because of the presence of I-95 and related development, proximity to and influence from nearby urban areas such as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Wilmington, Delaware, and the state of New Jersey, as well as its position straddling the Elk River - leaving half geographically west of the Shore, if the Elk River is taken as its northern edge.

Land and water both figure in the argument about whether Cecil County is part of the Eastern Shore, and so do man-made features.

Why isn't western Cecil Co. connected to Harford County? Cecil County is separated from Harford Co. and the western part of Maryland by the Susquehanna River. The Chesapeake Bay is the drowned valley of the Susquehanna. Some might consider everything east of the Susquehanna to be part of the Eastern Shore.

Like New Castle County Delaware, Cecil County is crossed by the fall line, a geologic division where the rockier highlands of the Piedmont region becomes the coastal plain, a flat, sandy area that forms the coast. The coastal plain includes the Delmarva Peninsula and that includes the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The geology of Delmarva is an inseparable part of the Eastern Shore, which has few rocky outcrops south of Kent County, Md.

The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal crosses from Back Creek on the Elk River to Port Penn, Del. While it was a shallow canal with locks after its construction in 1829, it was deepened in the early 20th century to sea level, and physically separates the Delmarva Peninsula from the rest of the United States. Maryland, south of the canal, is usually considered the Eastern Shore by residents. (There is no capitalized "western shore" region in Maryland).

The north-south section of the Mason-Dixon Line forms the border between Maryland and Delaware. Like the canal, it's a manmade construct, originally marked every mile by a stone, and every five miles by a "crownstone." The line is not quite due north and south, but is as straight as survey methods of the 1760s could make it and is completely artificial.

It was surveyed as a compromise solution to a century-long wrangle between the Penn and Calvert families of England. If the Chesapeake Bay/Delaware Bay watershed was taken as the borderline, Delaware would be about half its current size.

Finally, although this has received less attention than other parts of Eastern Shore culture, commercial east-west ties between Delaware towns and Maryland towns were culturally significant in Colonial and Early American periods despite the border line (which largely cut through woods and swamps). Trade with Philadelphia was conducted by overland routes to Delaware towns like Odessa (then called Cantwell's Bridge) and Smyrna (then called Duck Creek). Agricultural products and milled grain were taken up the Delaware River by "shallop men" in small vessels called shallops. These cultural connections continue to this day.

[edit] Travel and Commerce

Until the 1820s, travel and commerce between the Eastern Shore and Baltimore were less important than the connections between it and Philadelphia. Water travel by sailboat and steamer linked the Eastern Shore to Baltimore more tightly beginning about 1813, when the first steamboat traveled the Bay. By the 1880s, railroad lines linked the Eastern Shore to Philadelphia and later, Norfolk, Va. by way of a railroad line straight south from Wilmington, to Dover, Salisbury, and Cape Charles, Va. Maryland's Eastern Shore was served by branch lines running generally southwest from the main route. See Delmarva Railroad Lines. The Eastern Shore's many branchlines were built after the Civil War by local companies; eventually all were controlled by the Pennsylvania Railroad (which also bought control of the steamboat and ferry routes); then Conrail; and now Norfolk Southern.

A west-east rail route ran from a ferry terminal at Claiborne, west of St. Michaels, to Ocean City, via the Baltimore and Eastern Shore Railroad and the Wicomico and Pocomoke Railroad. Travelers could also take a ferry to Love Point on Kent Island, board a Queen Anne's Railroad train, and travel east to Lewes and Rehoboth Beach, Del.

[edit] Area and Population

Although the Eastern Shore comprises more than a third of Maryland's land area, it has a population of only 420,792 (2004 census estimate), about 8% of Maryland's population.

The main economic activities on the Eastern Shore are vegetable and grain farming, seafood, large-scale chicken breeding (Perdue Farms was founded in Salisbury, Maryland and is headquartered there today), and tourism. Tobacco was grown during Colonial times but no longer. The farm economy switched to grain in the second quarter of the 1700s.^[2]

[edit] Tourism

Ocean City is a modern resort on what was once called the "seaside" or "seaboard side". It is on a long north-south sandspit that is essentially a barrier island.^[3]

Ocean City has long been popular with Baltimoreans, thus rendering the flavor of Ocean City life unlike that of the rest of the Shore. The skyline, featuring many tall hotels and condominiums, is also a stark contrast to the rest of Delmarva.

Ocean City was founded July 4, 1875 when the Atlantic Hotel opened on Assateague Island. At the time, Assateague Island was continuous from the Delaware state line to well south of Ocean City. Early transportation to the island was by train.

There was no Ocean City Inlet until a hurricane in August 1933 cut across the south end of the town. The inlet was cut, not by waves sweeping inland, but by 4 or 5 days' worth of freshwater runoff from the coastal creeks running seaward. By 1935, government money had built jetties to make the inlet permanent. The inlet divides Fenwick's Is. (north) from Assateague Is. (south).

In the early 1960s developers began selling lots on Assateague Island, south of the inlet. However, a hurricane in the middle fof the decade wiped houses, shacks and roads off. The state and federal governments intervened and created the Assateague Island National Seashore and Assateague State Park.

Other picturesque tourist destinations include the town of St. Michael's on a neck surrounded by water; Colonial Chestertown; and isolated Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay.

Automobile transportation across the Chesapeake Bay was by ferryboat until 1952, when the first Chesapeake Bay Bridge was opened for traffic. The bridge spans 4.35 miles (7.00 km) of the Chesapeake Bay and is the longest continuous over-water steel structure.^{[citation needed]} A second parallel span was added in 1973 and a third has been discussed, most recently in 2006. A third span would not open, according to state officials, until about 2025.

The bridges made Kent Island, site of the first Englsh settlement on the Shore, into a bedroom community for Washington, Annapolis and Baltimore. Kent Island is part of Queen Anne's County. The county is included in the Washington-Baltimore SMSA.

[edit] Regional Characteristics

The Eastern Shore has always been a distinctive region, and has several times attempted to split off from the state of Maryland.^{[citation needed]} Proposals have been debated in the Maryland General Assembly in 1833-1835, 1852 and recently in 1999 for the Eastern Shore becoming its own state.^{[citation needed]} Early proposals encompassed a state of the entire Delmarva Peninsula.^{[citation needed]} The proposal in 1999 by state Senators Richard F. Colburn and J. Lowell Stoltzfus did not specify the status of the nine counties of the Eastern Shore after secession.^{[citation needed]}

The advent of easy transportation and tourism to the Eastern Shore did much to erode its distinctive culture and its many accents that date to the 17th and 18th centuries, but which persist in remote places like Smith Island.^{[citation needed]} Southern accents are still sometimes found in this part of Maryland, usually in the Southern Eastern Shore near Salisbury, and also near Cambridge.^{[citation needed]} The other areas of Maryland where southern accents can be found are in Southern Maryland on the Western Shore, especially in St. Mary's County and in Charles County near Hughesville, Nanjemoy, Newburg, and by some of the residents of Waldorf.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Sports and the Eastern Shore

An Eastern Shore Baseball League operated on three different occasions between the 1922 and 1949.^{[citation needed]} It was a Class D minor league with teams in all three states of Delmarva.^{[citation needed]}

Duck and goose hunting from raised platforms ("blinds") is popular, and carved wooden duck decoys are prized as works of art.

[edit] Eastern Shore Development, Preservation and Ecology

The population of fish and other marine life is threatened by pollution and development, most of which originates elsewhere.^{[citation needed]}

"Delmarva Bays" are upland kettleholes or circular wetlands, ranging from large to small, of uncertain origin. See

[edit] Political Environment

Though seven of the nine counties have a majority of Democratic-registered voters, most elected officials are Republican. The entire Eastern Shore is in Maryland's 1st Congressional district.

Nine-term Republican Congressman Wayne T. Gilchrest was defeated for his party's nomination in February 2008. The 2008 race for Congress will be between state Senator Andy Harris and Queen Anne's County district attorney Frank Kratovil.