Rediscovering America_ Exploring the Small Towns of Virginia & Maryland - Bill Burnham [141]
Chesapeake Beach, 32 miles east of metro DC, marketed its proximity to the nation’s capital long before the new homes started sprouting up. Back at the end of the 19th century, a Colorado entrepreneur named Otto Mears poured his own and his investors’ money into building a railroad from DC to the beach and creating a resort. Arrow-straight SR 260 follows the former railroad bed.
On summer weekends, thousands of city-dwellers rode the rail to the beach to escape the humid city. Once here, they played in the water and sand, rode a roller coaster that was built on stilts right over the water, and walked the 1,600-foot boardwalk over the water. The boardwalk had a dance pavilion, carousel, and booths for vendors. A mile-long pier extended into the Chesapeake Bay to receive steamboat passengers from Baltimore. The resort was built to rival New York’s Coney Island and New Jersey’s Atlantic City.
North Beach sprang up north of the resort, linked by a trolley, with housing for those who wanted to rent summer cottages and for those who worked at the resort.
The heyday was relatively short-lived, however. The railroad went bankrupt in 1935, due in part to the Great Depression. But also, the advent of the automobile and the building of the Bay Bridge over to the Eastern Shore meant city-dwellers could get to the more desirable ocean beaches under their own steam, rather than packed into hot train cars. Gone are the hotels, the roller coaster and the carousel – although that last amusement ride found a new home in a park in Camp Springs, Maryland. What really killed the amusement park in the 1970s was the outlawing of what had kept it thriving after World War II – slot machine gambling.
Today North Beach has a nice boardwalk, a bathing beach with a fishing pier, and some quaint boutiques and antiques shops, but it’s still primarily residential. Chesapeake Beach also has a scenic boardwalk, a water park, restaurants and marinas, and is home to Maryland’s largest sportfishing fleet.
One gem from the resort era remains. The Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum (see Attractions, below, for additional information) tells the whole boom-and-bust story through exhibits, old photographs, a short film. Outside the miraculously preserved railway station stand Delores, the railway’s last remaining train car. Curator Harriet Stout believes the station escaped destruction, dilapidation and damaging remodeling because the amusement park used it as a storage facility for slot machines for decades, and in the process, kept it secure from vandalism and fairly intact. Ironically, while the station remains, all traces of the amusement park are gone, replaced by a housing development called Chesapeake Station.
The depot’s greatest saviors were probably the owners of the Rod ’N’ Reel restaurant next door (more about them below). Early on, shortly after the amusement park closed, they saw it as a benefit to their restaurant and the community to have a museum on-site, and offered it to the Calvert County Historical Society for a 99-year lease of $1 a year. It opened in 1979.
The museum offers tourist-type brochures on the area, including other railway museums throughout the mid-Atlantic. “Within 100 miles of Baltimore, there’s more railroad history than anywhere else in the country,” says Stout.
Attractions
Chesapeake Beach is the charter boat capital of Maryland. Some of the outfitters are: Breezy Point Charter Boat Association (tel. 410-760-8242), Chesapeake Beach Fishing Charters (tel. 301-855-4665), or Rod ’N Reel Charter Captain (tel. 301-855-8450).
Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum is near the boardwalk in Chesapeake Beach. Open 1-4 pm daily, May-September. Open weekends 1-4 pm in April and October, by reservation at other times. It’s handicapped-accessible and admission is free. (tel. 410-257-3892)
Chesapeake