Annapolis- home to sailors, powerboaters, and the slower, more low-tech kind of weekend captains and furry crew.

The Sheriff of Assateague Island by Big Mike 42 on Flickr.

Two world collide (fortunately, not literally) as the Pride of Baltimore navigates the freighters at the start of Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race.

Oak tree, Kent County, Maryland. Photograph by author.

A field grown oak that was just a sapling during the Civil War years. There  are many places in the Chesapeake landscape that are remarkably unchanged, even after centuries of intensive agriculture and in spite of the constant creep of development.

Scene of crabpickers in St. Michaels by Ruth Starr Rose. Lithograph on paper. Collections of Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.

This 1932 lithograph by R.S. Rose is one of the earliest images accessioned to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum’s collections when it was founded in 1965. It is also one of our most iconic. Depicting a scene of crab pickers hard at work in a St Michaels packing house, it reflects ordinary Eastern Shore summer piecework of the early 20th century- a part of Chesapeake life that has almost completely disappeared from the Bay’s small waterfront towns .  

These are women who would have known each other- they lived in the same neighborhood, attended the same church, and sang together in the same choir. Their children went to school together, and often, would accompany their mothers to the packing house where they’d earn pocket money cracking claws. That sense of familiarity, of friendly comfort, is communicated in relaxed postures and slight smiles of the pickers. A woman down the picking line sings as she works- a way to make the day go faster, perhaps. 

Crab picking is messy, smelly work, but from the serenity of the light drifting through the square windows and the immaculate white of the women’s light summer clothing, this picture conveys not the drudgery that picking can be but the almost spiritual atmosphere of community.

Rose probably based this scene on the local Coulbourne and Jewett packing house (today part of the Maritime Museum’s 18-acre campus) where a record 1 million pounds of crab meat were packed for 5 consecutive years. Over 200 pickers would line both sides of long tables piled with towers of steamed blue crabs, their hands flying as they dislodged the plump white meat. Experienced pickers could average 30 pounds a day, for seven days a week, throughout the summer and early fall.

Scene like this were not uncommon in St Michaels in the 1930’s, but a white woman artist documenting them during the height of the Jim Crow era certainly was.  Ruth Starr Rose had moved to a nearby community, Tunis Mills, as a young woman and had been deeply impacted by the African-Americans she came to know through church services and daily community activities. She became lifelong friends with members of the black community and as she became an established artist she frequently depicted ordinary events from their daily lives imbued with a deep strength, familiarity and humanity.

Remains of mastodon hunt, at the mouth of a prehistoric Chesapeake Bay

A mastodon skull and a flaked blade are discovered 60 miles off the current mouth of the Chesapeake- indicating that not only has the environment changed radically from the days this hunt took place, but that there is evidence of human habitation on the East Coast thousands of years earlier than previously assumed.

By the end of the century, ocean levels could rise by 2 or 3 feet. That’s enough to flood the colonists’ first settlement at Jamestown, Va. And it’s putting pressure on archaeologists to get as many artifacts out of the ground as quickly as possible — before it’s too late.

— With Rising Seas, America’s Birthplace Could Disappear

Photo: John Poole/NPR

Although erosion is a constant face of life in the Chesapeake Bay (and has been since the last ice age), the effects are compounded by sea level rise. It begs the question- what will be left of the landscape, marshes, and historic structures of the Bay’s watershed once the water begins to slowly reach into the land? Certainly, it isn’t a future John Smith ever could have foretold.

Keeping Watch above the Waves at the Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse

For more photos and videos from the lighthouse, explore the Thomas Point Lighthouse and Thomas Point Lighthouse, Chesapeake Bay location pages.

Off the coast of Maryland, the Thomas Point Shoal lighthouse has kept watch over the waters of Chesapeake Bay for nearly 140 years.

Unlike traditional tower lighthouses, the Thomas Point beacon stands a mile and a half (2.4 kilometers) off the shore atop a stilt-like series of metal rods, or screwpiles, that anchor directly into the sandbank. While all other screwpile lighthouses in the nation have either fallen to winter ice floes or been relocated, the Thomas Point lighthouse has survived in its original location, earning it the designation of a National Historic Landmark.

Up until 1986, a succession of men lived in and kept watch from the small six-sided Victorian cottage above the waves, lighting the oil lamp behind the crystal lens and hand-winding the fog bell. Nowadays, the Baltimore Coast Guard maintains the lighthouse from afar, and an automated foghorn and solar-powered lens have taken the place of their human-powered predecessors.

A classic Maryland view enjoyed by watermen, sailors, and other salty types- early morning fog between the double spans of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. 

photo by Kendrick Brennan

Trotlining

Watermen set their trotline in the early morning near Oxford, Maryland. Image by Jim Kidd, an.umces.edu/imagelibrary

Before watermen peppered the Bay’s bottom with crab pots, there was a simpler way. Older than brightly painted buoys, and in-board engines (or outboard, for that matter), people who worked on the water caught crabs with a baited line, a net, and a boat. Known as ‘trotlining,’ this technique is most rudimentary form of water work that can be undertaken by a single person in a small craft, propelled at first by sail and later by simple outboard engines.

Waterman Mark Adams makes a quick pass at a crab on his trotline.

To trotline, there’s just a few essential tools- a workboat, a waterman, a long baited line, a dipnet, and a roller. The waterman lays their line, which is attached to two buoys on either end. This line, sometimes 100 yards long, is weighted at regular intervals with tough bait: chicken necks, bulls lips, and razor clams. In the past, before the market for it exploded in Asia, watermen used salted eels. This long line droops to the riverbottom between the two buoys, and a watermen will cruise along it, threading the line up and over a roller. As the boat moves forward, the line, weighted with crabs like cherries on a branch, is pulled up to the water’s surface where a quick grab with your dipnet sends them scrabbling into a waiting bushel basket.

The author as a child, trotlining on the Chester River.

Trotlining is one of the few ways the commerical and recreational fisheries on the Bay overlap. Watermen have troltlined for generations, and so too have Chesapeake people, families with kids, pretty much anybody who wanted to catch a whole mess of crabs for the steamer and do it themselves. As a child, my father would take my sister and I trotlining, and we did the whole routine: cutting the salted eel into chunks to be threaded onto the line at the picnic table the night before (a hated task for the two of us little girls), waking before the sun rose and layering up for the frigid pre-dawn Bay temperatures. As the sun rose, we’d head out of Rock Hall harbor, lay our line, and work it in passes, taking turns with the net and being chastised when we missed a crab’s fast getaway: “That was the biggest one I ever saw and you let it go!” By lunchtime, the bushel basket was frilled with the emerging legs of blue crabs who bubbled in the sun. Clamped together with locked claws, a literal food chain, they quieted in the heat and awaited their admission to the steampot. 

Kids crabbing at sunset. Image courtesy Chesapeake Bay Program

This story is not just mine. Throughout the Bay in the summertime, people head out before sunrise to see what they can pull out of the dark bottoms of the rivers and creeks. The water is quiet and only a few buoys and markers blink red, white, and green in reflection on the glassy wake. Their bushel baskets are empty, and as engine cuts through the silence, the would-be crabbers look awake, ready to steel their reflexes for the dart and snatch as a keeper comes up the line. 

It’s an old tradition, and has been handed down for generations as grandfathers have guided a small hand on a dipnet to show them the way. That thin line, studded with snoods of razor clams or slick chicken necks is an unassuming thread connecting the past and the present, summer to summer, in the Chesapeake’s quiet coves and sandy-bottomed rivers. It’s a legacy- perhaps not as stunning as a skipjack, or as iconic as a lighthouse, but it’s a way of savoring the Bay’s best things, one feisty blue crab at a time.

Jeff Friesen isn’t looking to take over the world, but he is looking to re-create it – and he’s doing it brick-by-brick.

As the creator of the wildly popular LEGO scenes “The 50 States of LEGO,” Friesen’s work has been ruling the LEGO-loving internet since he laid the first brick last fall.

With a mix of sight gags  and pop culture, Friesen uses “The 50 States of LEGO” to riff on the impressions, history and stereotypes from each state in the union.  Despite being a native Manitoban, Friesen is confident in his insights into the 50 states.

“I lived in the states for a couple of years, and I’m pretty well-traveled,“ Friesen said. "I’ve been to about 37 states – though many of them were visited at high speed while driving.”

For Maryland, a state Friesen hasn’t visited, he seized on the state’s iconic seafood. The photo he created is titled: Maryland: "Today the crabs decided to have a picnic of their own.” Although native Marylanders might quibble over the cooking technique (fried hard crabs?), it does give the menacing crabs a zombie’s appetite for revenge- and provides a great perspective on what non-Marylanders think of the Old Line State’s claim to fame.

For more on Friesen’s series, or to see some of his Lego stereotypes of the other 50 states: http://huff.to/UyvEpp

The first crab caught at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum so far this summer- a papershell sook. This has been a terrible year for crabs, but there’s a lot to admire in this little beauty, with her fire-red “fingernails” and brilliant blue claws. Here’s hoping we see a lot more of these truly “beautiful swimmers” as we enter the dog days of summer.

Historians Matthew and Juliann Krogh interpret the lives of US Navy and Revenue Cutter Service mariners during the War of 1812 in a living history program at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.

The program explored the shipbuilding traditions, uniforms, navigational techniques, rope work, small arms, medicine, games and sailing terms of marlinspike sailors, a fascinating chapter in the Chesapeake Bay’s long maritime history.

The food was bad, the work was hard, and the medicine was downright ugly, but there was opportunity for a regular wage and a bed (even if it was hanging from the rafters of a ship) for the courageous men and women who dared a seafaring life.

The Chesapeake’s most recognizable icon, the blue crab (Callinectes sapidus), is one of the significant commercially-harvested species on the East Coast, but this summer, the catches have been incredibly, scarily low.

There is a parasite lurking in the depth of the Bay that could be the source of this summer’s empty crab pots and record-breaking low harvests: hematodinium.  At best, hematodinium can make the meat of the infected crab taste like aspirin, but at worst, the parasite spells large scale crab mortality- something that could have enormous consequences for the ecology of the Chesapeake environment and the watermen that rely on a bountiful harvest. Learn more about the parasite that might stop a crab from reaching your picnic table this summer.

A few details from an archaelogical dig in Easton, Maryland’s “The Hill” neighborhood, where low tech teaspoons and colanders are being used to painstakingly excavate traces of daily life in the Chesapeake, a century or more ago.

One of the great things about a maritime museum is the dockside scene is always changing. Tall ships are a special treat. These floating villages from another era seem perfectly at home among the flashy yachts and elegant sailcraft of St. Michaels harbor– a reminder that once, with full bellied sails and salty crew, they were the queens of this Chesapeake world, a century or more ago.

Sunset over a crab scrape, Smith Island, Maryland.

Photo courtesy of StateMaryland on flickr: http://bit.ly/1psV8QT

The Chesapeake we know, the Chesapeake we love, the Chesapeake we remember is the summertime Chesapeake. When a dip on a hot day leaves a salt line on your bathing suit as it dries, and the heated air pushes sailboats ahead of thunderstorms in a white crest. June, July and August along the Bay means fat, sweet crabs, harbors teeming with sails and engines, and bare feet in all the places they’re normally frowned upon.

Simple things change little here, and pleasures like chicken necking for crabs with a few buddies,a picnic under a shady tree, and running a little wild with a pack of friends while the sun sets late are timeless.

In our collections, we have boxes of snapshots like these, meant to preserve for ever the magical fleeting moments that flash in the past like lightning bugs in a jelly jar. Intimate and shockingly modern, they remind us that as they are, so too are we- our digital lives in fully saturated color will one day be as thrown back as this sweetly sentimental array. But they also remain as legacies of the Chesapeake that was, and echo strongly in the Chesapeake that is. 

It’s true, that saying- take a picture. It’ll last longer.

All photographs, collections of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.

On June 30, 1952, the first Chesapeake Bay Bridge opened, connecting Sandy Point on the Western Shore to Kent Island and points east. That was also the last day of operation for the Kent -Island-Sandy Point ferries, including the Gov. Herbert R. O’Conor pictured here.

The first 2-lane bridge was so successful in easing the flow of traffic that it rapidly proved inadequate. A second span, opened in 1973, was built to guarantee smooth travel across the Bay for years to come. The new, broader access roads were built right over unspoiled marshland, and the new interchanges brought “easy-on -easy-off” access for booming industry and housing. 

If you’ve traveled over the bridge recently, you have likely had plenty of time to study this view, with Sandy Point State Park to the North and the remnants of the old ferry slips to the South. 

The early, ca 1947-50 photograph shows the ferry Gov. Herbert R. O’Conor docked at the Sandy Point end of its run. If you look to the left of the bridges in the newer picture, you can still see some of the ferry terminal structure, along with Old Ferry Slip Road leading to the water alongside Route 50.

Modern photo courtesy of Hunter N. Harris, Aerial Aloft Photography.

Vintage photo c. 1947-50 by H. Robins Hollyday. Talbot County Historical Society collections.

Crabbing season opened last month, but the low crab population and cool spring has many watermen stuck on the dock, waiting for the first beautiful swimmers to arrive. It means a lot of empty picnic tables and crab feasts turned into last-minute barbecues here in the Chesapeake, where crabs mean summer, prosperity, and the essence of the best of the Bay.

Photo courtesy of Edwaste on Flickr: http://bit.ly/1ko0X0B