For years, Denton, Md., greeted beach-bound motorists racing along Route 404 with a billboard of a cartoon cop leering, “Smile, You’re on Radar!” To vacationers, the town seemed merely a speed trap snarling their trips to Rehoboth; to townspeople, the traffic was a disruptive menace.

And then, to make matters worse, the bottom dropped out—literally. In 1976, the aged bridge over the Choptank River collapsed. The Route 404 bypass followed, and Denton resumed its historic isolation. Facing a dying downtown, the Caroline County seat reached an unprecedented decision: to welcome the outside world. These days, Denton is re-emerging from its isolated past. There’s a new heritage museum, a reviving main street, and plans to increase the town’s population fivefold in the next fifteen to twenty years.

>Denton historically had problems with outsiders, who inelegantly dubbed the spot Pig Point, perhaps for the pig iron transported there. Renamed for the British governor, two-year-old Edenton declared its independence by lopping off the initial E in 1776. Abolitionist Harriet Tubman perilously smuggled escaping slaves through its outskirts. Union troops occupied Denton during the Civil War, disenfranchising everybody opposed to Lincoln. Their conciliatory Fourth of July fireworks display in 1865 accidentally ignited most of downtown. In the 1880s, pudgy vaudevillians called The Two Johns threw wild parties for show-biz cronies at their mansion downstream. To win good will, the showmen hired a steamer to ferry suspicious townies to a lavish picnic there. Alas, a leading citizen fell overboard and drowned; the Johns soon decamped. During Prohibition, lawmen sneaked in, hoping to bust the remote area’s ubiquitous stills. And when the Bay Bridge opened, the beach rat-race made principal streets potential death-traps on weekends.

But any town whose economic development guru also runs its historical society is looking to its traditions when charting the future. The animated and opinionated J.O.K. Walsh, fifty-seven, traces his ancestry here back three centuries. Strolling through Denton’s Museum of Rural Life—past sections of four historic Caroline houses, along with relics of the old-time, agrarian Shore—he notes that, uniquely on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Caroline County borders neither ocean nor Bay. “Our fortunes rose and fell with the boom-and-bust cycles of agriculture, with twenty-five years of prosperity followed by seventy-five years of stagnation,” he says.

Denton’s last heyday was the vegetable canning boom in the 1920s, so Walsh figures that prosperity is just about due, to be perpetuated by diversifying the farm-based economy. “Industries looking at Denton like the fact that we have almost none of the ‘negatives’ they find in competing towns,” he declares, citing social or infrastructure concerns. Denton Development Corporation has lured to its business park an array of light industries: two yacht factories, Bartley Collection furniture kits, Furuno electronics, and others. To coax travelers off of Rt. 404, it even erected an attractions sign, minus the off-putting cartoon cop.

Unique among the attractions is the Choptank River Heritage Center, replicating the 1883 steamboat terminal that was once Denton’s lifeline to the outside world. Joppa Wharf had dwindled to a warren of pilings in 1987 when engineer Carl Scheffel got hooked on Denton’s maritime legacy by a lecture at St. John’s College in Annapolis. “I was fascinated with the legacy of the steamboat days, when the Bay and its rivers were the lifelines of the Shore,” he says.

Visionary yet realistic, he purchased a surviving fertilizer warehouse and rallied support. By 2003, he had opened the reconstructed Joppa Terminal as a museum, featuring historic exhibits and steamboat artifacts. He eventually added three skipjacks in various states of ongoing restoration. It is a vital center for riverine activities, and hub of the Choptank and Tuckahoe Water Trail, an eighty-mile boat route passing historic and environmental highlights. In a restored outbuilding, a museum concession offers kayak rental and instruction and—for the particularly dexterous—fly-fishing tours from kayaks.

Fishing and hunting were previously the sole reasons to “Spend Some Time in Caroline,” as the slogan went. Today, Denton finds an array of outdoor activities in all directions. One nearby B&B, Chesapeake Sporting Clays, caters to marksmen, while Idylwild Farm B&B serves equestrians. Adkins Arboretum features the native flora of the Delmarva Peninsula, with regular nature walks and sculptural displays. Trails on its 400 acres link to those of the 3,800-acre Tuckahoe State Park. In 2003, the 300-year-old Kenton Estate became the Upland Golf Club, handsome public links.

The town’s amenities built more slowly. Promising endeavors such as in-town B&Bs and sit-down dining have come and gone, and some wary retailers remain closed on Sundays, “hanging in there, waiting for business to increase,” as one puts it.

But the tide seems slowly to be turning. With its population set to swell from 3,000 to 15,000 in short order, driven by an influx of retirees into several housing developments currently taking shape on its outskirts, Denton’s downtown merchants are hanging on in hopes of a full-blown revival. In 2003, Denton got its first motel, a Best Western, soon to be joined by a new B&B named for the old doctor’s office it will occupy. An easy stroll through downtown reveals an array of specialty shops in old commercial storefronts clustered around Market Street: Susie’s Cards & Candy, Tracey’s Country Treasures, Vickie’s Turn-Er-Round consignment store, What’s New inspirational gifts, Market Street Café, and half a dozen others. There is also a hundred-booth antiques outlet—Denton Station Antiques Mall—across the river, and a farmers’ market that enlivens the courthouse lawn on Saturday mornings. A massage therapist—rare in a small, rural town—is thriving sufficiently to expand her business, and a row of houses on Fourth Street is converting to residential artisans’ studios.

Caroline County native Julie McMahon’s By the Creek Antiques & Primitives exemplifies the fits and starts of Denton’s revival. Her business occupies an old home, which formerly held several restaurants. Now it contains several rooms full of gifts and antiques and McMahon’s specialty, decorative antique pewter ice cream molds. In 2004, she rented part of the building to restaurateurs who opened the Lily Pad Café, a charming sit-down eatery, offering light gourmet fare and sandwiches. “We are drawing a mix of beach traffic and local people,” McMahon observes. Like much of Denton, the business is evolving by trying new things.

Denton is planning a major restaurant replicating its long-gone historic Brick Hotel. Starting up is the Chesapeake Culinary School, a hospitality training center whose students will offer fine dining to the public. And as the present trickle of boaters up the Choptank increases, somebody inevitably will open a bar.

In Algonquian, Choptank translates to “it flows back strongly.” Right on schedule, it appears that Denton, too, is flowing back.

Washingtonian S.J. Ackerman wrote about Prohibition on the Bay in the Jan/Feb issue of CL.

Locals’ Guide to Denton

Roots of Frederick Douglass
Disturbed that signs consistently misidentified the birthplace of African-American icon Frederick Douglass, a Denton sixth-grader named Amanda Barker determined to set the facts right as a school project. With her father, Don, she ransacked historical evidence and identified the site of that long-gone slave cabin at Tappers Corner (on Route 303 in Talbot County). Now a senior at American University, she maintains a Web site (bluecrab.org/fdouglas) telling the story. Researchers are seeking elusive details about Douglass’s first wife, born free in Denton.

Niftiest Nightlife
On a hill above the Choptank in nearby Greensboro, Riverside Hotel offers a rollicking happy hour—sometimes with entertainment—an accomplished dining room, and offbeat lodgings in a restored 1912 traveling salesmen’s hostelry. North Main St., Greensboro, 410-482-7100

Most Dastardly Dentonian
The flamboyant 1880 Victorian home behind the courthouse at 119 Gay Street belonged to an “Old Man Taylor,” who allegedly ensured a sound sleep by poisoning all the dogs in town. Local author Sophie Kerr (1890-1965) fictionalized the atrocity in her short story, “Peace is Wonderful.”

Back to Nature
Martinak State Park, located two miles east of Denton, boasts boat access to the Choptank River and Watts Creek as well as sixty-three campsites and four camper cabins. 410-820-1668 or http://www.dnr.state.md.us

Contacts

Denton Information
410-479-2050 or http://www.dentonmaryland.com

Adkins Arboretum
12610 Everland Rd., Ridgley, 410-643-2847
http://www.adkinsarboretum.com

Best Western Denton Inn & Suites
2910 W University Dr., 940-591-7726

By the Creek Antiques & Primitive
s and Lily Pad Café
4 South First St., 410-479-0015

Choptank River Heritage Center
10219 River Landing Rd., 410-479-4950
http://www.riverheritage.org

Chesapeake Sporting Clays B&B
16090 Oakland Rd., Henderson
410-758-1824

Denton Station Antiques Mall
24690 Meeting House Rd., 410-479-2200
http://www.dentonstation.com

Idylwild Farm B&B
27203 Chipman’s Ln., Federalsburg
410-754-9141
http://www.idylwildfarm.com

Market Street Café
200 Market St., 410-479-3100

Museum of Rural Life
12 North 2nd St., 410-479-2055

Susie’s Cards & Candy
12 N. 7th St., 410-479-2940

Tracey’s Country Treasures
220 Market St., 410-819-3393
http://www.sellerstravel.com/traceys.htm

Tuckahoe State Park
13070 Crouse Mill Rd.
410-820-1668

Upland Golf Club
23780 Thawley Rd., 410-634-1200
http://www.uplandgolfclub.com

What’s New
202 Market St., 410-479-0006

Vickie’s Turn-Er-Round
206 Market St., 410-479-3828