Photography By Vince Lupo
“Hidden away from the main highways of the Eastern Shore, the river hamlet of Whitehaven might easily be overlooked by the hurrying motorist. It’s hardly bigger than a movie set. Yet it contains quite naturally and completely the very essence
of those qualities that scenarists often strive to label as idyllic and untainted.”
—“Utopia on the Wicomico,” The Sun, 1946.
Nearly fifty years later, that description still applies.
If anything, Whitehaven, Md., is even quieter these days. There are no traffic lights. No restaurants. The town’s only post office closed in 1983. The two-room schoolhouse hasn’t had a class in session since 1935. At last count, thirty-four people called Whitehaven home—and not all of them live there year-round.
To find out what it’s like to live in a town with a population smaller than the roster of a football team, I booked a room at the Whitehaven Hotel, a grand inn with a mansard roof, a fresh coat of yellow paint, and a history that dates back to 1810.
The inn had accommodated travelers during Whitehaven’s boom years—the 1880s through the 1920s—when the town was a stopping point for trawlers traveling between Vienna and Princess Anne and overnight visitors who’d booked passage on steamers to Baltimore. Many of the hotel’s guests were “drummers,” salesmen from Baltimore who would try to drum up business by selling household goods that ranged from soap powder to mattress ticking. Drummers would pay a quarter a night and sleep four to a bed. But during the 1940s, engineers dredged the Wicomico all the way up to Salisbury, about twenty miles northeast. The ships bypassed the town, local canneries closed, and Whitehaven seemingly stopped in time.
Innkeepers Dorothy and Don Daniel, two retired bankers who moved to the area seven years ago, greet me upon arrival. Don, who worked for J. P. Morgan for thirty-five years before trading in his Ford Mustang for a pick-up truck, gives me the tour of the hotel. The building is still undergoing the last phases of renovation, he says, a project begun in 1998 by owner Ken Trippe, a New York investment banker with familial ties to the area.
We start off in Room With a View, the only store in town, located just off the hotel’s cozy living room. The room once housed a post office but now holds an eclectic collection of crafty knick-knacks, paintings, and household furnishings made by local artists, many by store owner Cindy Curran. “We think this shop used to be a speakeasy,” Don says, showing me a secret compartment in a wall where bartenders once stashed the hooch. He also shows me a brochure for the hotel from the era, which prom-ised “new girls every Saturday night.”
The inn is decorated with wonderful antiques, many from Trippe’s family. One of the claw-foot bathtubs in the hotel’s seven rooms belonged to poet Ogden Nash, who once lived up the road in Salisbury. “We’re just not sure which one,” Don says.
My room for the evening is the Victorian Room, a sizable second-floor roost with a four-poster bed, a working fireplace, a semi-private porch, and a cozy sitting area from which to watch the Whitehaven Ferry make its way back and forth across the river. The ferry has transported people across the river since the 1600s, making it the oldest continually operating ferry in the nation. “Take out that one house across the river,” Don tells me as we stand on the porch, “and the view probably looks pretty much like it did during the 1700s.” Indeed, all I can see is river and a flock of white gulls. The marsh that surrounds Whitehaven on three sides has spared the town from development.
Back downstairs I meet Dorothy, an affable Baltimore native and amateur chef who has earned a reputation for her delicious multi-course breakfasts.
(I dined on a wonderful baked pear with cranberries and then a Danish puff, a kind of pancake with powdered sugar and fresh raspberries.) “People arrive here all stressed out,” she says. “They ask, ‘What is there to do around here?’ I tell them, ‘Not much.’ But by Sunday they have their shoes off, and they don’t want to go home.”
She’s right. There’s not much to do in Whitehaven—and that’s exactly the point. The hotel does, however, have a couple of kayaks and bikes for guests, and it makes a good base from which to explore the Lower Shore; Ocean City is thirty-five minutes away.
An eclectic bunch of people make up the town’s population, and Dorothy points out who lives where as we take the five-minute stroll around town. There’s a retired curator from the National Gallery of Art, a former test pilot from the Eisenhower administration who apparently rides around town on his propeller-powered bicycle, and several artists, including Bertil Whyman and F. Wayne Taylor, whose studios are open by appointment. All but one of the twenty-six houses in Whitehaven date to the nineteenth century.
Since there’s no place to eat in town, I head to Boonies restaurant in nearby Tyaskin for a tasty dinner of barbecued oysters and broiled sea scallops. (The Red Roost and its famous all-you-can-eat crab dinner is also nearby.) After dinner, Don and Dorothy invite me to attend a Christmas service—one of just two services held all year—at the old Methodist Church, built in 1892. (The other service takes place during an October homecoming when former townsfolk and their descendants return.)
After the service, we head next door to the two-room schoolhouse, now a community center and town museum, for homebaked cookies, brownies, and hot apple cider.
With a belly full of baked goods, I walk the two blocks back to the hotel along the unlighted streets. So far from illuminated parking lots and all-night filling stations, I look up to see a beautiful star-filled sky—something else in Whitehaven that’s remained the same for years.
Whitehaven Hotel
2685 Whitehaven Rd.
Whitehaven, Md. 877-809-8296
http://www.whitehavenhotel.com
Rates range from $85 to $120 per night. Includes breakfast.
