Chesapeake Country by Eugene L. Meyer, Lucian Niemeyer, Lucian Niemeyer (Photographer)

From the Publisher

A gracefully photographed guide to a region rich in national history and natural beauty.

The rarest kind of destination, Chesapeake country is an exotic locale that resides in our national neighborhood. Stretching from the Susquehanna to the Virginia capes, these eight thousand miles of shoreline boast a rare abundance of wildlife--from green-backed herons to white-tailed deer--inhabiting the charming villages and great cities of Chesapeake Bay, America's largest estuary. Here the settlers celebrated the first Thanksgiving in 1619, Francis Scott Key composed our national anthem, and the Civil War ironclads Monitor and Merrimack clashed.

Handsomely photographed and authoritatively written, Chesapeake Coutnry guides the reader through the varied wildlife, the towns forgotten by time, and serenely spectacular vistas, all within an easy drive from the Atlantic seaboard's megalopolis. But for everyone it is a journey of discovery.

Other Details: 189 full-color photographs 224 pages 9 x 9" Published 1990

James; Norfolk at Hampton Roads.

More than any other city, Baltimore became the capital of Chesapeake country. Steamboat lines emanated from it and brought the people of Tidewater Maryland and Virginia to Baltimore as the place to shop and visit. Southern Maryland tobacco growers shipped their crop in caskets from river wharves to the hogshead market in Baltimore until 1938, when five regional "basket" markets were established to cut hauling costs.

Captain John Smith, exploring the bay in 1608, catalogued its seemingly endless abundance of seafood. H. L. Mencken called it a "giant protein factory." Self-styled the "Land of Pleasant Living," the Chesapeake is quintessentially American, yet also distinguished by a unique culture and identity: it is the land of the skipjacks, the last commercial sailing fleet in America, and of the waterman, an independent breed of bay-based entrepreneur who, like the farmer, lives by the seasons and the weather rather than the clock. It's Crabtown, also known as Baltimore. It's Chesapeake City, Chesapeake Beach, Colonial Beach, Cobb Island, Crisfield, and Claiborne.

It is a pitcher of beer and a table full of steamed crabs, seasoned with Old Bay spice and attacked with a wooden mallet on plain brown wrapping paper. It's a bumper sticker that proclaims, "There Is No Life West of the Chesapeake Bay." It is sunrise over the Eastern Shore and sunset over the Western Shore. It's the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, a 4.7-mile link between the two.

It is defined by a jagged eight-thousand-mile shoreline of bay and rivers, among them the James, the York, the Rappahannock, Potomac, Patuxent, the West, the Severn, Patapsco, Magothy, Bush, Gunpowder, the Bohemia, Sassafras, Chester, Miles, Tred Avon, Choptank, Nanticoke, Wicomico. It's the Holland and Honga straits, Tangier and Pocomoke sounds, Eastern Bay, Kent and Knapps narrows. It's sleepy little towns, newly gentrified communities, and former resorts within commuting distance of Capitol Hill. It's John Barth's Sot-Weed Factor and James Michener's Chesapeake.

It is a drive down a deserted road leading to Eastern Neck Island National Wildlife Refuge, while the car radio broadcasts reports of traffic jams on the Washington and Baltimore beltways.

As a youngster growing up on Long Island, I easily escaped the water culture so close at hand. It somehow never dawned on me that place names like Oyster Bay, Port Washington, Glen Cove, Sea Cliff, Little Neck, and Great Neck, were decidedly nautical. The sailboats of Long Island Sound seemed of another world, and commercial fishing vessels were altogether foreign. A whaling museum in Sag Harbor told of another time, not mine.

But to live on or around the Chesapeake Bay is different, or so it appears to me at least. It seems inconceivable that anyone could live within the bay's sphere of influence and not feel a part of it. There is a sense of place that sets it, and the people who inhabit it, apart. Living here engenders a certain possessiveness, a protectiveness; it's everybody's bay, but it is also my bay. I not only enjoy it, I thrive on it. I relish the memory of my first fresh-shucked oysters, given me by a member of the Bowen clan of Calvert County, southern Maryland; their home overlooked the Patuxent River. And few images are as deeply etched in my memory as the purple hues of sunrise from the pilot house of a crabber's workboat. Or there is the view I enjoyed of a fleet of oyster-dredging skipjacks in full sail on the Choptank River. There is almost nothing I can think of that is as relaxing as anchoring in a back creek, or as exhilarating as riding the bowsprit of a sailboat driven by blustery ten-knot winds.

I have seen the bay from the air, land, and water. I've flown over it at fourteen hundred feet, on a twenty-minute shuttle flight from Washington National Airport to Easton, Maryland; it unclutters the mind, to pass from metropolitan madness to Eastern Shore serenity. I've flown, too, in the single-engine craft of aerial fish spotters, searching for the dark patches on the water that signal the presence of schools of menhaden. I've driven down many of the bay's countless necks to water's edge; some I have approached from the water itself. I've been on research vessels with scientists surveying the latest crop of baby oysters on the Potomac or taking water samples near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel tying the Eastern Shore to Tidewater Virginia. I've taken the mailboat to Smith Island, where Elizabethan speech survives despite the presence of cable television and other modern intrusions.

Among other things, my Chesapeake travels have taught me that water time is different from land time--and that time apparently lost in the slow passage over water isn't really lost at all. Yet, in the two decades that I have come to know the bay, covering it as a Washington Post staff writer, I have seen change work at an alarming--and accelerating--rate. Centuries of glacial shifts seem to have been telescoped within my own lifetime--some drastic, some more subtle. Studies have documented the negative effects of industry, agricultural pesticides, and population growth. But while environmentalists crusade to "Save the Bay," sport fishermen and watermen chafe at any restrictions government would place on their catches, and they recall other--apparently premature--obituaries for the bay.

Indeed, eels marketed to Europe and Japan and clams harvested for New England buyers still thrive on the Chesapeake. And, even as landings of freshwater fish have declined, the ocean-spawning bluefish have burgeoned on the bay (but declined sharply in 1989). Seemingly endless resources have dwindled, threatening to make the waterman--along with the oyster, yellow perch, shad, and rockfish--an endangered species. Villages that for so long seemed happily remote and secure havens for classic Chesapeake culture have become homogenized by the relentless advance of metropolitan affluence. Quaint has become a commodity, pricing out watermen and others who toil for a living. Even waterfront neighborhoods in working-class Baltimore have gone upscale.

The Chesapeake community of the future may be little more than a cluster of museum buildings, antique and gift shops, marinas for pleasure craft, and pastel-painted homes and condos for wealthy retirees. There is, in such a picture, a great sense of impending loss. But sadness over what may be is mixed with gratitude for what is: the variety and the vitality of the Chesapeake Country as it exists today.

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It began fifteen thousand years ago with the receding Ice Age. The primordial Susquehanna River flowed all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Then, as a greenhouse effect took hold, the river valley flooded to become Chesapeake Bay.

Chesapeake. The name is Indian in origin, meaning "Great Shellfish Bay." And great it is. From its headwaters fed by the Susquehanna, to the Virginia capes that form the opening of the bay onto the Atlantic, the nation's largest estuary stretches for 185 miles. It varies in width from three miles to twenty-two--so wide in places that it seems like an island sea, no shore in sight, nothing but water and sky. A deep channel--the fossilized Susquehanna riverbed--cuts through its center, allowing ocean-going vessels to navigate. Yet in places the bay is so shallow that it is almost possible to walk across. Forty-six main rivers from six states drain into Chesapeake Bay, mixing fresh water with the ocean's salt to form the brackish tidewater that distinguishes the bay from an inland lake. Half its fresh water cascades down from the Susquehanna, which begins as a tiny stream in upstate New York, the basin's northernmost reach.

At times, the Chesapeake Bay seems like a very tame body of water. But on hot, humid summer afternoons, when thunder rolls and lightning strikes, the wind whips the bay into frenzy. Sudden storms don't differentiate between the artifices of man and the creations of nature. Boats seek refuge in any nearby harbor, even as large chunks of shoreline disappear into the water. Over the years, entire islands have simply washed away, along with any trace of human habitation.

This is Chesapeake country, the crucible of much thatis America. It is the cradle of American democracy--and slavery. It encompasses the site of the first "permanent" English settlement in America and, along the James River, the place where settlers celebrated the first Thanksgiving in 1619--a year before the Massachusetts Pilgrims celebrated theirs. Major naval events of the American Revolution, War of 1812, and the Civil War were enacted here. Cornwallis scuttled the British fleet on the York River to prevent French troops from boarding and seizing it. Three decades later, U.S. Commodore Joshua Barney sank his fleet on the Patuxent, to keep it out of British hands. Fort McHenry was bombarded from Baltimore Harbor, inspiring Francis Scott Key to write "The Star Spangled Banner." The Monitor and the Merrimack clashed at Hampton Roads, and a new era in naval warfare began. From the shipyards of Hampton Roads and Baltimore went forth the Liberty Ships, destroyers, and other naval vessels of two world wars.

Battles have been fought, too, over the bay's bounty. Marylanders clashed with Virginians and with each other over the succulent oysters. The Maryland Oyster Navy tried to enforce the laws and keep the peace, with limited success, and the oyster wars of the Chesapeake Bay were as fierce and bitter as any range battle fought in the Wild West.

Water is what ties it all together. Early explorers hoped the bay and its rivers would lead them to the Pacific and, ultimately, Asia. While they never found the Orient, they did discover a land rich in resources and ripe for the taking. The water would transport them to it. As is true today, waterfront property was at a premium, and the earliest colonists were quick to establish their "plantacions" along the rivers. Well into the twentieth century, waterways were often the only way to get anywhere around the Chesapeake.

Towns sprang up by decree, rather than by chance or choice, though the planters resisted them. "Our country being much intersected with navigable waters, and trade brought generally to our doors, instead of our being obliged to go in quest of it," observed Thomas Jefferson in 1782, "has probably been one of the causes why we have no towns of any consequence." Towns of consequence did develop--eventually--and all of them on the water: Washington on the Potomac; Baltimore on the Patapsco; Richmond on the James; Norfolk at Hampton Roads.

More than any other city, Baltimore became the capital of Chesapeake country. Steamboat lines emanated from it and brought the people of Tidewater Maryland and Virginia to Baltimore as the place to shop and visit. Southern Maryland tobacco growers shipped their crop in caskets from river wharves to the hogshead market in Baltimore until 1938, when five regional "basket" markets were established to cut hauling costs.

Captain John Smith, exploring the bay in 1608, catalogued its seemingly endless abundance of seafood. H. L. Mencken called it a "giant protein factory." Self-styled the "Land of Pleasant Living," the Chesapeake is quintessentially American, yet also distinguished by a unique culture and identity: it is the land of the skipjacks, the last commercial sailing fleet in America, and of the waterman, an independent breed of bay-based entrepreneur who, like the farmer, lives by the seasons and the weather rather than the clock. It's Crabtown, also known as Baltimore. It's Chesapeake City, Chesapeake Beach, Colonial Beach, Cobb Island, Crisfield, and Claiborne.

It is a pitcher of beer and a table full of steamed crabs, seasoned with Old Bay spice and attacked with a wooden mallet on plain brown wrapping paper. It's a bumper sticker that proclaims, "There Is No Life West of the Chesapeake Bay." It is sunrise over the Eastern Shore and sunset over the Western Shore. It's the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, a 4.7-mile link between the two.

It is defined by a jagged eight-thousand-mile shoreline of bay and rivers, among them the James, the York, the Rappahannock, Potomac, Patuxent, the West, the Severn, Patapsco, Magothy, Bush, Gunpowder, the Bohemia, Sassafras, Chester, Miles, Tred Avon, Choptank, Nanticoke, Wicomico. It's the Holland and Honga straits, Tangier and Pocomoke sounds, Eastern Bay, Kent and Knapps narrows. It's sleepy little towns, newly gentrified communities, and former resorts within commuting distance of Capitol Hill. It's John Barth's Sot-Weed Factor and James Michener's Chesapeake.

It is a drive down a deserted road leading to Eastern Neck Island National Wildlife Refuge, while the car radio broadcasts reports of traffic jams on the Washington and Baltimore beltways.

As a youngster growing up on Long Island, I easily escaped the water culture so close at hand. It somehow never dawned on me that place names like Oyster Bay, Port Washington, Glen Cove, Sea Cliff, Little Neck, and Great Neck, were decidedly nautical. The sailboats of Long Island Sound seemed of another world, and commercial fishing vessels were altogether foreign. A whaling museum in Sag Harbor told of another time, not mine.

But to live on or around the Chesapeake Bay is different, or so it appears to me at least. It seems inconceivable that anyone could live within the bay's sphere of influence and not feel a part of it. There is a sense of place that sets it, and the people who inhabit it, apart. Living here engenders a certain possessiveness, a protectiveness; it's everybody's bay, but it is also my bay. I not only enjoy it, I thrive on it. I relish the memory of my first fresh-shucked oysters, given me by a member of the Bowen clan of Calvert County, southern Maryland; their home overlooked the Patuxent River. And few images are as deeply etched in my memory as the purple hues of sunrise from the pilot house of a crabber's workboat. Or there is the view I enjoyed of a fleet of oyster-dredging skipjacks in full sail on the Choptank River. There is almost nothing I can think of that is as relaxing as anchoring in a back creek, or as exhilarating as riding the bowsprit of a sailboat driven by blustery ten-knot winds.

I have seen the bay from the air, land, and water. I've flown over it at fourteen hundred feet, on a twenty-minute shuttle flight from Washington National Airport to Easton, Maryland; it unclutters the mind, to pass from metropolitan madness to Eastern Shore serenity. I've flown, too, in the single-engine craft of aerial fish spotters, searching for the dark patches on the water that signal the presence of schools of menhaden. I've driven down many of the bay's countless necks to water's edge; some I have approached from the water itself. I've been on research vessels with scientists surveying the latest crop of baby oysters on the Potomac or taking water samples near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel tying the Eastern Shore to Tidewater Virginia. I've taken the mailboat to Smith Island, where Elizabethan speech survives despite the presence of cable television and other modern intrusions.

Among other things, my Chesapeake travels have taught me that water time is different from land time--and that time apparently lost in the slow passage over water isn't really lost at all. Yet, in the two decades that I have come to know the bay, covering it as a Washington Post staff writer, I have seen change work at an alarming--and accelerating--rate. Centuries of glacial shifts seem to have been telescoped within my own lifetime--some drastic, some more subtle. Studies have documented the negative effects of industry, agricultural pesticides, and population growth. But while environmentalists crusade to "Save the Bay," sport fishermen and watermen chafe at any restrictions government would place on their catches, and they recall other--apparently premature--obituaries for the bay.

Indeed, eels marketed to Europe and Japan and clams harvested for New England buyers still thrive on the Chesapeake. And, even as landings of freshwater fish have declined, the ocean-spawning bluefish have burgeoned on the bay (but declined sharply in 1989). Seemingly endless resources have dwindled, threatening to make the waterman--along with the oyster, yellow perch, shad, and rockfish--an endangered species. Villages that for so long seemed happily remote and secure havens for classic Chesapeake culture have become homogenized by the relentless advance of metropolitan affluence. Quaint has become a commodity, pricing out watermen and others who toil for a living. Even waterfront neighborhoods in working-class Baltimore have gone upscale.

The Chesapeake community of the future may be little more than a cluster of museum buildings, antique and gift shops, marinas for pleasure craft, and pastel-painted homes and condos for wealthy retirees. There is, in such a picture, a great sense of impending loss. But sadness over what may be is mixed with gratitude for what is: the variety and the vitality of the Chesapeake Country as it exists today.