Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum Inc

The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum was founded in 1965 on Navy Point in St. Michaels, a Talbot County riverfront village on Maryland's Eastern Shore. The Museum's 18-acre waterfront campus was once the site of a busy complex of seafood packing houses, docks, and workboats. A landmark on the campus, the Hooper Strait Lighthouse, has not always resided in its current location. In 1965 it had been condemned by the United States government and was slated to be demolished. The Museum purchased it from the demolition contractor for $1,000 and through the generosity of the Arundel Corporation, barged it sixty miles north to its new home on Navy Point in 1966.

Today, there are 35 buildings, 10 of which house exhibits that are open to the public. Ten exhibit buildings trace the geological, social, and economic history of the Chesapeake Bay through the age of sail and the steamboat era to the advent of the gasoline and diesel-powered engines. The Museum’s Howard Chappelle research library holds more than 10,000 volumes. The Museum’s collection of Chesapeake Bay watercraft is the largest in existence numbering about 85 boats. Six of the collection’s largest vessels are on floating display at the Museum’s docks. The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum is the only museum devoted to interpreting the entire maritime region of the Bay.

Our mission, our passion, is to go beyond the objects on display to the stories behind them––the people, their emotions, and their connections to these objects and the Bay. Every day we forge connections between people and the traditions and heritage of this special place, and fuel imaginations with what living along the Chesapeake really meant in years past and still does today. Your gifts keep our working boatyard active, with shipwrights and volunteers showcasing traditional wooden boatbuilding skills every day. Your gifts help us continue providing educational programs for our underserved youth, making it possible for a child to build a boat for the first time, and remember it for a lifetime. Please help us preserve more than just the rich artifacts and stories you expect to find here. Help us continue to make history come alive, allowing visitors from all walks of life to say “The Chesapeake is part of my history, too.”