Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum
Coordinates: 38°47′14″N 76°13′13″W / 38.787343°N 76.220229°W
The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum is located in St. Michaels, Maryland, United States and is home to a collection of Chesapeake Bay artifacts, exhibitions, and vessels. This 18-acre (73,000 m2) interactive museum was founded in 1965 on Navy Point, once a site of seafood packing houses, docks, and work boats. Today, the Museum houses the world's largest collection of Chesapeake Bay boats and provides interactive exhibits in and around the 35 buildings which dot the campus. The Museum also offers year-round educational seminars and workshops.
First opened to the public in 1965 the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, was a project of the Historical Society of Talbot County, which acquired three waterfront houses along St. Michaels Harbor. Within the first few years, the museum acquired historic watercraft and exhibited them afloat, notably the oyster sloop J. T. Leonard in 1966 and the log-bottom bugeye Edna E. Lockwood the following year. Adjacent land became available as seafood industries began closing on Navy Point, and the museum acquired land from the former Coulbourne and Jewett crab and oyster packing house in 1966. By the end of the year, the Hooper Strait Lighthouse, which had been threatened by demolition, was moved to the newly-acquired parcel. It opened to the public the following May. By 1971, all of the former industrial land of Navy Point had been acquired by the museum. In 1968, Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum incorporated as an independent nonprofit corporation under article 501(c)3 of the IRS code. The museum hired its first permanent director, R. J. "Jim" Holt in 1971, who set the museum on a course for expansion and professionalization. In 1976, under Holt's leadership, the museum acquired adjacent acreage fronting Fogg's Cove, and in 1978, the institution was first accredited by the American Association of Museums (now American Alliance of Museums). Too deteriorated for the fledgling museum to save, the J. T. Leonard sank and was cut up in 1974, but the vessel's plight emphasized the need to create the infrastructure to maintain floating exhibits, so a traditional marine railway was constructed in 1974 and a boat shop in 1977. A major four-year restoration rebuilt the Edna E. Lockwood, from her original nine logs, and the vessel was relaunched in 1979. New purpose-built exhibition buildings were added, including the Waterfowling on the Chesapeake building (1975), Bay of the Chesapeake building (1980), and Steamboat building (1990). Beginning in the 1980s, the museum acquired several small historic structures, most notably Mitchell House, former home of Eliza Bailey Mitchell, sister to Frederick Douglass, and located them in the field fronting Fogg's Cove. By the time Jim Holt retired at the end of 1987, the museum had grown to a collection of historic structures and multiple exhibition buildings along a 17-acre waterfront campus.
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