Photography By Ryan Hulvat
Let’s get this straight right from the start: Cambridge is not just another pretty Eastern Shore waterfront town. Set on a sweeping mile-wide stretch of the Choptank River, Cambridge harbor serves as a picturesque point of departure for sight-seeing vessels during warm weather and oystermen’s workboats during months containing R’s.
“We’ve got some of the last, best waterfront there is - more of it than almost any town in Maryland,” says Jane Adams, proprietor of the Cator House, a homey new seafood-and-steak restaurant in a converted boarding house. Adams, a granddaughter of a former mayor who’s “related to everybody in town,” likes to point out that, to the delight of locals and come-heres alike, houses near that waterfront remain within the realm of affordability. “I met a woman at a meeting, who asked me, ‘Can I buy a house around here for under $200,000?’ I said sure, and I showed her where.”
Cambridge may lack the commercial hoopla of a St. Michaels, but it has what many come to the Eastern Shore expecting to find: a tangibly slower and quieter small-town atmosphere, proximity to areas of the great outdoors where environmentalists and hunters are equally welcome, and uneffusive but amicable local folks who have strong links to the town’s eventful past. It’s what lies in Cambridge’s future that has them divided. (More on that later.)
The seat of Dorchester County, Cambridge was settled in 1684. In the early 1700s the town prospered from trade in tobacco, seafood, and muskrat (which still occasionally graces local restaurant menus and takes center stage during the skinning competitions at the annual National Outdoor Show, occurring this year on Feb. 22 and 23). Historically, the area gained prominence during the Maryland oyster wars of the late 1800s when local watermen tried to keep the mollusk-rich local waters all to themselves. Bay-related industries - notably oyster-packing, shipbuilding, and maritime trade - financed the hefty eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Georgian, Victorian, and Queen Anne homes on High Street, a thoroughfare “like no other street in Cambridge, or on the peninsula,” commented native-son John Barth in his first novel, The Floating Opera. “A wide, flat boulevard of a street, gently arched with edge-laid yellow brick, it runs its gracious best from Christ Church and the courthouse down to Long Wharf.”
I absorbed some High Street grace by staying in the Cambridge House, a period-decorated, Queen Anne-style former sea-captain’s home with fireplaces and copies of James Michener’s epic Chesapeake in every room. Innkeeper Stuart Schefers is a former New York City restaurateur who moved down to Cambridge and then decided to open a B&B. “I was drawn to the area with the promise of the revitalization of what I consider a lovely downtown area,” says Schefers. He proves he still has his chef’s moves by concocting imaginative omelets - the shiitake-spinach combo is highly recommended - and griddlecakes.
But neither of the town’s most famous residents lived on or near High Street. Before the Civil War, Harriet Tubman served as the “conductor” on an Underground Railroad operation that transported more than three hundred slaves from bondage to freedom up north. A pamphlet available at the Sailwinds Park Visitor Center plots a twenty-nine-stop driving tour of Tubman sites, including her birthplace in Bucktown six miles south of town, the Underground Railroad Gift Shop/Museum, and interpretative signage about her life and career at the Harriet Tubman Memorial Garden (U.S. 50 and Route 343).
From 1913 when she retired from show business until she pulled a Michael Jordan four years later, the famed Annie Oakley and her husband Frank Butler lived in Cambridge. They settled here because of the hunting and designed the so-called Annie Oakley House (still a private residence, but you’re free to gape at its exterior) with a modified roofline that allowed them to walk right out of their second-floor bedroom and shoot at waterfowl across the road in Hambrooks Bay.
One historical attraction that welcomes visitors is the Spocott Windmill, an unusual English-style post windmill that, unlike the stodgy Dutch model, can rotate 360 degrees to catch a good breeze. Situated six miles west of town, its grounds also encompass a colonial tenant house once inhabited by Adeline Wheatley, a local chef famed for her “witchery in the kitchen,” a one-room schoolhouse, and a 1935 country store. The Spocott Windmill complex is free, usually unattended, and open 365 days a year.
Another attraction for all seasons, the Brannock Maritime Museum, has displays on steamboats, boat-building, and other watercrafts used during the oyster wars - plus a couple of cottage suites for paying guests.
Local history also lurks in the shadows of Cambridge’s outstanding shopping space. During the early twentieth century, the Phillips Packing Company was one of America’s biggest fruit, vegetable, and seafood canneries - and Cambridge was the company town. Phillips packed it in during the 1950s, and its one surviving plant is now Packing House Antiques, a sprawling warren of stalls where 135 dealers based from Connecticut to Florida sell old pianos, Georgia tobacco sticks, slot machines, oyster packaging and serving implements, and Phillips Packing Company labels. “But no Beanie Babies,” insists Keith Davidson, who owns the place in partnership with his wife and another couple. “We allow only antiques because real collectors don’t want to work their way past a lot of candles and other stuff to find what they’re looking for.”
Cambridge’s next historical era begins in March when the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Hotel opens on 342 acres of prime Choptank riverfront. The Eastern Shore’s first chain luxury resort will have a golf course, 150-slip marina, a Euro-style spa, 42,000 square feet of meeting space, five places to eat, pools, a wildlife refuge, a general store, and much more. “It will be our Greenbrier,” predicts one tourism official.
Some locals expect the 400-room gorilla to permanently transmogrify Cambridge as they know it. “I think the Hyatt is going to change things a lot, not necessarily for the better if we don’t have our act together down here,” says Stuart Schefers.
Others fear that the recent approval of an off-track betting facility puts Cambridge one new gubernatorial administration away from slots or casinos. According to even darker rumors, Donald Trump has snapped up property across the river in Talbot County.
But others think Hyatt could spark a much-needed downtown revival. “We need antique shops, novelty stores, and small restaurants that are open on Saturday and Sunday,” says Jane Adams. “Older people don’t want change, but now there’s nothing to keep the young people here.”
One part of Dorchester County (often shortened to “Dorset") that definitely won’t change is the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, a 23,000-acre tidal marsh twelve miles south of Cambridge. In some respects, winter is Blackwater’s prime time, with waterfowl in profusion, eagles golden and bald, easy to spot (the Second Eagle Festival is scheduled for March 9), and mosquitoes out of season. The visitors center displays taxidermic versions of refuge inhabitants, including waterfowl, miniature sika deer, muskrats, and nutria, the muskrat’s arch-foe. Blackwater also shelters the largest remaining population of endangered Delmarva fox squirrels, a bigger, lighter-colored, and somewhat bushier version of the gray squirrel. You can look for all of the above along Wildlife Drive, a five-mile road with eleven parking areas and two circular trails.
On the fringe of Blackwater - nine miles from the visitor center by car, one mile by canoe - stands Loblolly Landings and Lodge, an ecotourism resort with kayaks, canoes, and bikes for guests (and non-guests), a stocked fishing pond, a 3,500-foot airstrip, and hiking trails lacing 170 acres of wooded grounds. Accommodations consist of three smallish rooms in a main lodge, a whirlpool suite, and a ten-bed bunkhouse.
Innkeepers Marlene and Lenny Slavin consider this neck of the Dorset woods isolated - “Cell phones don’t work too well out here” - relatively undiscovered, and virtually immune to change. “It’s never going to be built up because the wetlands are protected by the federal government,” says Marlene. “It will stay untouched for the most part - and that’s a good thing.”
Terry Fischer has been covering travel in the Chesapeake region for more than ten years.
