Chesapeake Beach,
Maryland.

Chesapeake Beach is the bay's original resort town, 11 minutes north of our cottages at Plum Point on Maryland's western shore. Today it mixes working marinas and crab decks with a boardwalk, charter boats, and a museum that tells one of the Chesapeake's best stories.

The Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum with the historic railcar Dolores

The Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum, in the town's original 1898 depot.

The backstory

A resort built on a railroad.

In the late 1890s, developer Otto Mears imagined a grand bayside resort with trains running straight from Washington: hotels, bathhouses, a casino, a race track, and a boardwalk reaching 1,600 feet out over the water. For three decades, the Chesapeake Beach Railway carried city crowds to the sand, until cars and the Depression ended the line in the 1930s.

The depot survived, and the Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum now keeps the whole story, rolling stock included. It pairs well with our own steamboat-wharf chapter of that era, told on the story of Plum Point.

Illustration of Chesapeake Beach, Maryland around 1900: a steam train arriving at the boardwalk resort with bathing tents on the sand

Chesapeake Beach around 1900, illustrated: the train, the boardwalk, and the bathing tents.

Today

Crab decks and marina nights.

Summer days revolve around the boardwalk along Fishing Creek and the Rod 'N' Reel resort anchoring the waterfront: restaurants, charter fishing, and marina slips full of workboats and cruisers. The town's water park is mid-rebuild and due back in 2027.

At the town's south end, Brownie's Beach (Bayfront Park) is the area's most famous shark-tooth beach, where the Calvert Cliffs begin. Bring a bucket; our fossil guide covers the rest.

Fossil hunting 101