Company Profile

Company Overview

The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum is a waterfront museum that captures the history and culture of one of America’s major maritime regions. Located on an eighteen-acre campus in the center of the town of St. Michaels, a village and tourist destination in Talbot County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The Museum takes a broad, multi-disciplinary approach to the maritime history of the region, focusing on the interrelationship of culture and history, of people and place. On permanent display is the nation's most complete collection of Chesapeake Bay artifacts, visual arts, and indigenous water craft. Interpretive exhibitions and public programs cover the range of Chesapeake Bay maritime history and culture. Recent permanent exhibitions include Waterman’s Wharf, Oystering on the Chesapeake, and At Play on the Bay. If one phrase characterizes the visitors' experience at the museum it is that "history isn't so far away." You can look watermen and other local people in the face, talk to them, find out what they are like. You can hear the stories of the of the Chesapeake-stories of communities making a living in the "water business," harvesting and packing crabs, oysters, rock fish, and clams from the Bay. You can hear stories of urban residents of Baltimore and Norfolk, on opposite ends of the 180-mile-long Bay, who built and operated the shipyards, and imported and exported the goods, building those cities into world-class ports, linking the region and the nation to global markets. You can hear about vacationers and tourist-those who come to sail and fish and sit and watch the sunsets over the Bay. The Museum’s boat yard is a principal center of activity-craftsmen work to restore what remains of the Bay’s once-prolific skipjack fleet, used for oyster fishing as well as maintain the museum’s small craft collection. Through the Apprentice for a Day program, visitors of all skill levels have an opportunity to learn and practice traditional boat building skills under the guidance of a shipwright. Each year, more than 20,000 children and adults participate in the Museum’s educational programs. Both Museum- and school-based programs are available for students in preschool through twelfth grade. One popular program recreates the life of the lighthouse keeper, as children spend a night in the historic Hooper Strait Lighthouse on the campus. In the summer, the Museum offers sailing programs. Opportunities for continuing education are made available to local adults through the Museum’s Academy of Lifelong Learning, which offers informal courses developed and taught by Museum members.

The Museum’s Breene M. Kerr Center for Chesapeake Studies allows visiting scholars, fellows, students, visitors and staff to study and interpret how the Chesapeake’s natural environment has shaped the culture that occupies it, and how the region’s peoples shaped their environment according to their visions, prejudices, and economic needs. The Center also serves as a forum for the general public to discuss and evaluate current regional issues.