Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum

The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum spreads across eighteen waterfront acres on Miles River Creek in St. Michaels, a colonial-era maritime town on Maryland's Eastern Shore approximately eighty miles east of Baltimore. The museum's campus includes a working boatyard where craftspeople restore traditional Chesapeake Bay watercraft using period methods and materials, and visitors can watch active restoration projects on vessels including buyboats, log canoes, and deadrise workboats that defined the bay's commercial fishing and oystering economy for centuries. The iconic Hooper Strait Lighthouse, a screwpile cottage-style structure built in 1879, was relocated to the museum campus in 1966 and serves as the waterfront's visual centerpiece; visitors can climb to the lantern room for views across Miles River Creek and the surrounding tidal marsh. The museum's collection of more than 130 floating and static bay craft constitutes the largest assembly of Chesapeake Bay watercraft in existence, including original buyboats, a skipjack, pound nets, crab pots, and gill nets alongside interpretive panels on the ecology and culture of the bay. A major exhibit hall dedicated to oystering traces the boom-and-collapse history of the bay's oyster industry through artifact-rich displays including hand-tongs, dredges, and a reconstructed shucking house interior. Seasonal programming includes skipjack sailing excursions on Miles Creek, fall oyster roast events, and the November Waterfowl Festival, one of the largest wildfowl art and carving festivals in the United States. The village of St. Michaels surrounding the museum campus offers additional waterfront dining, antique shops, and galleries within easy walking distance, making a half-day museum visit easily expandable into a full day on the Eastern Shore.