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North Beach Welcome Center, 9023 Bay Avenue, tel. 301-812-1046.

Calvert County Tourism, tel. 800-331-9771, www.co.cal.md.us.

Events

The Antique Car Show the third Sunday in May brings scores of classic car buffs to the Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum (tel. 410-257-3892).

The nicest homes are open to the public during the North Beach House & Garden Tour the first Sunday in June (tel. 410-257-6127). The North Beach Bayfest is fun on the beach the fourth weekend in August (tel. 301-855-6681).

St. Mary’s City

Around Town

It was a beautiful summer evening driving down the southernmost tip of St. Mary’s County. We’d come on back roads past farm fields with their acres of gold-tinged corn, past glistening rivers, past small, snug inlets. We were thoroughly relaxed by the time we hit this rural peninsula, but in need of a town, or at least a hamlet. A place we could get out, walk around, maybe have a cold drink and a bite to eat.

We stopped to ask a couple walking their dogs along Point Lookout Road near St. Mary’s College. St. Mary’s River formed a storybook backdrop, surrounded by trees in full green leaf, with nary a building in sight. “Where’s the town?” we asked. Did we somehow miss it?

Well, turns out there really isn’t a town of St. Mary’s like we think of towns nowadays, at least not since the turn of the century – the 17th century, that is. Historic St. Mary’s City is an active archeological dig and 800-acre living history museum. Like Jamestown in Virginia, St. Mary’s City was the Maryland Colony’s first 17th-century capital, from 1634 to 1695. But when the capital was moved to Annapolis in 1695, the city was abandoned, and soon virtually all trace of the “Metropolis of Maryland” was gone. Even at its height, the term “city,” was pushing it a little. The 200 year-round residents were spread out on large plantations. Still, as the center of commerce, government and the courts for the colony, St. Mary’s was the most populous place in all of Maryland for a time. It had the first printing press in the Colonial South and was the first to practice separation of church and state.

A new exhibit in the Visitors Center opened in 2002 tells the story of the Maryland Colony’s first 60 years through objects recovered in the archeological excavations. Elsewhere in “the city,” costumed guides help interpret archeological sites. You can see a re-creation of the ship, the Maryland Dove, one of two vessels that brought the first settlers from the Isle of Wight in England in 1634. They purchased land from the Wicomico Indians and started farming. Tour Godiah Spray’s tobacco plantation, the re-created State House of 1676, and a Woodland Indian Hamlet. Stroll the miles of trails and rest by the St. Mary’s River – it’s a landscape that truly hasn’t changed all that much in more than 350 years.

The Shop at Farthing’s Ordinary is a gift shop adjacent to the State House (tel. 240-895-2088). St. Mary’s is open March-November, Wednesday-Sunday 10 am-5 pm. Call for hours in the off-season. Admission is $7.50 adults, $6 seniors and students, $3.50 ages six-12. (Route 5, 800-SMC-1634, www.stmaryscity.org)

Attractions

If you continue past Historic St. Mary’s City on Point Lookout Road (Route 5) to the tip of the peninsula, you will find some dining and lodging, and eventually come to Point Lookout State Park and Point Lookout Lighthouse. The historic 1830 lighthouse was purchased by the state from the US Navy in May 2002. State funding is in place to save and restore this unusual lighthouse, which will become part of the adjacent state park. The light is another of the eight lighthouses built by John Donahoo in the 1820s and 30s. It’s not your typical, cylindrical tower lighthouse, but rather an iron tower perched on top of a square brick house. To track the progress of the renovations begun in July 2002, and keep updated on when it might be open to the public, visit www.ptlookoutlighthouse.com. There you can even sign up for the Point Lookout Lighthouse News e-mail list.

Even before the