Eastern Shore Tour

My wife and I were invited to a wedding on Kent Island this past Saturday (congratulations Brian and Jane!) In fact, we were more than invited – my wife Ruth was asked to be a bridesmaid for her friend Jane.

The ceremony wasn’t until 6:30pm, but Ruth had to be on the island at 9:30am to start doing hair, makeup, dresses, and photos. I wasn’t too interested in going back home only to return a few hours later, so I decided to poke around the eastern shore for a little while looking for historically-interesting sites. I had a few things in mind that I wanted to see, and I put my faith in the HMDB and my iPhone to guide me to other ones.

I’m going to do a few posts about what I found, but I wanted to start with what I didn’t find, but was hoping to.

As I learned from Maryland, A Middle Temperament, Kent Island was the site of the first permanent English settlement in what is now Maryland in 1631. That pre-dates St. Mary’s City by about 3 years. The reason I said “what is now Maryland” above, is because the man who settled the island, William Claiborne, was actually trying to claim it for our southern rival, Virginia. After several armed interventions, and the island consequently changing hands several times, it was eventually made part of Maryland.

I was hoping that there would be something on the island to tell that story, but if there is, I couldn’t find it. There’s a single marker along route 50 (that everyone going to Ocean City drives right past), but it only gives a sentence worth of information. There is a better one just a little bit off the main road across the island. But there is no museum. There is no marker at the spot of Claiborne’s 4-gun fort (let alone a re-creation of it – which I honestly didn’t expect). It’s a little disappointing for a site that is so important to the history of our state. You’d like to be able to see that ground without having to do a bunch of research to figure out exactly where it is.

Kent Island has plenty to offer – there’s bars and restaurants, antique shops, beautiful views, and wedding venues obviously. There just wasn’t a lot of easily-accessible history for people like me who want to find it. This is a theme I discovered in my travels on Saturday. While there is plenty of rich history to be found over there, it seems like the eastern shore of Maryland is content with being a farming community that only incidentally houses gas stations and restaurants that people use as stops on the way to the beach.

Come to think of it, that’s probably more an indictment of the beach-going crowd than it is of the residents of the eastern shore.

Either way, I’ll show what I did find in a series of posts to follow.