As I steered the car into the tiny town of Oxford (population about 600), I began to feel calm. My breathing slowed, my body relaxed and I noticed that my wife, Fyllis, seated beside me, was having the same reaction.
Welcome to Talbot County, Maryland, where visitors are immersed in chapters of the past in meaningful ways. The destination offers a deep dive into intriguing stories of people and places.
Native Americans here were followed by Captain John Smith, who surveyed the region in 1608. The first English settlers arrived in the 1630s and established tobacco plantations. Many early immigrants were Quakers or Puritans seeking a haven from persecution or people from Ireland and Scotland who came as indentured servants. Adding to the mix were free and enslaved African Americans.
Each town has a museum that relates its historical tale. The Tilghman Watermen’s Museum celebrates the work and culture of people who earn their livelihood on rivers and bays. It brings their story to life with videos, boat models, tools of the trade and art.
The centerpiece of the Oxford Museum is a lighthouse lens named for Augustin-Jean Fresnel, a French engineer who in the 1820s devised a light that produces a very strong beam. Other more typical exhibits are devoted to oysters, ducks and watermen.
This region is home to the oldest continuing free Black community in the United States, and their story is told in museums, trails and other locations. The Water’s Edge Museum in Oxford portrays the lives of Black farmers, watermen, sailmakers and others who played important roles in the area’s commerce and culture.
The crown jewel of the collections is the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, an 18-acre campus that has evolved from a humble beginning into a world-class display. It contains a variety of historic structures, more than 100 boats and boat models, decoys, a lighthouse that was moved there and much more.
Each town also has its own memories to share, and together they weave a fascinating account. Easton (population about 17,000) is deemed the “big city” of Talbot County. The Third Haven Meeting House traces its roots back to about 1684. Among notable Quakers who have worshiped there was William Penn. The town’s Hill Community has been home to free African Americans since the 1780s.
St. Michaels dates back to the mid-1600s, when it was a trading post for trappers and tobacco farmers and later a ship-building center. During the British navy’s bombardment in the Battle of 1812, when several houses were struck by cannon balls, a contemporary account related that the townspeople escaped serious damage by turning off house lights and hanging lanterns in nearby trees, and it was those at which the Brits aimed their fire. That trick resulted in St. Michaels becoming known as “the town that fooled the British.”
When we crossed the short drawbridge that connects the mainland with the tiny waterman’s village of Tilghman Island, we were retracing the route of spans that have existed at that site since the late 1600s. We were greeted by a 10-by-40-foot mural on the side of a building named “Pride.”
The painting depicts a waterman in his boat, other vessels docked nearby and displays of the seafood for which Talbot County is rightly famous. A plaque pays tribute to the people “who have been working the Chesapeake Bay waters since the 1800s,” demonstrating and facing “Endurance. Perseverance. Hard Work. Ingenuity. Danger. Drive. Respect for the natural world.”
Fyllis and I chose Oxford as our home base for a variety of reasons, including its serene setting. Officially established in 1683, although the town had existed earlier, this is a charming hamlet of brick sidewalks that lead past white picket fences enclosing elegant historic homes.
In Colonial days it developed as a booming port, and later an active boat-building business thrived there. Much later the author James Michener chose it as the place where he wrote his novel “Chesapeake.”
Oxford also is notable for two other reasons. One is the Robert Morris Inn, built in 1710 as a home and since 1800 operating as a venerable hotel. Prominent dignitaries who have slept there include George Washington and Morris himself. He was a British-born merchant who moved to Colonial America, personally helped to finance the Revolution and signed the Declaration of Independence. The original wood paneling and oak timbers were handmade by ship carpenters, and bricks in the fireplaces were brought from England as ballast in vessels.
The village also is home base for the Oxford-Bellevue Ferry, the oldest privately owned ferry boat in the country. It began transporting passengers in 1683 and now also carries cars, trucks, bicycles and motorcycles across the Tred Avon River.
Talbot County has more than 600 miles of shoreline, and we were never far from rivers and the Chesapeake Bay, which are dotted by marinas and plied by both working and pleasure boats. This provides a perfect backdrop for sightings of eagles, ospreys and other resident and migrating birds, a long list of fish species, and occasional encounters with bull sharks, cownose rays and bottlenose dolphins.
The county’s coastline is sprinkled with historic hotels, boutique inns and charming bed-and-breakfast inns. When it comes to dining, three denizens of local waters—crabs, rockfish and oysters—are known as the “holy trinity.” They are augmented by locally grown vegetables and fruit, which are available spring to fall at roadside farmers markets.
