If the well-to-do sought the cool comforts and exclusivity offered by the rambling mountain resort hotels of Western Maryland, other folks with less disposable income boarded steamboats in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor for a pleasant cruise to Eastern Shore destinations.
They arrived by streetcar to the Pratt and Light Street piers dressed in their summer finery and straw hats waiting to climb the gangways of such venerable bay steamers as the Lord Baltimore, Ferdinand C. Latrobe, Ericsson, Chippewa, Tolchester, Emma Giles and Bay Belle.
A long blast on their steam whistles signaled that they would soon be underway, leaving a sweltering Baltimore behind, as engines began throbbing far below churning up brackish harbor waters.
Ports of call included Tolchester, Betterton, Chesterwood and Brown’s Grove.
Some were day-trippers bearing picnic hampers of fried chicken, deviled eggs, cakes and jugs of lemonade, while others planning to stay several weeks watched as porters jostled steamer trunks and Port Said valises.
During its heyday from the 1890s to the 1940s, Betterton was known as “Maryland’s Foremost Bay-side resort” or “the Jewel of the Chesapeake.
Betterton offered four hotels: the Rigbie, the Chesapeake, the Maryland or Betterton.
During the 1920s, room rates were $25 a week, which included three meals a day; cottages could be rented weekly for $15.
Crab houses, dance halls, beer gardens, piers, arcades, a movie house provided plenty of diversion and entertainment as did water sports, fishing, horseback riding and dancing under the summer moonlight.
Until the 1960s, bay resorts remained segregated, and as a result, African Americans took steamers Avalon and Starlight to Brown’s Grove, on Rock Creek in Anne Arundel county, that was operated by Capt. George W. Brown and J. Langley.
Brown’s Grove advertised itself as the “only park in the State of Maryland run exclusively for Colored People and by Colored People.”
With highways spreading throughout the East in the 1920s, the popularity of the automobile and the opening of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge 1952, motorists could now speed along to Ocean City, Rehoboth, Bethany, or board ferries at Lewes for a salty voyage across the Lower Delaware Bay to such South Jersey resorts at Cape May, Stone Harbor, Avalon,Wildwood and Atlantic City.
As upper bay resorts fell out of favor with the public and the old hotels were pulled down one by one, the curtain finally had been wrung down by the late 1950s on the glorious era of steamboat resorts in Maryland.
