Over 300 postcards and engaging text present Maryland's beach resorts of yesteryear. Before the completion of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and improved highways, the Chesapeake Bay was dotted with many beach resorts. By the 1890s, the two most popular beaches in Maryland were Betterton and Tolchester Beach. It was a time when going to the beach meant an excursion boat ride across the bay. Betterton's heyday was from the 1890s to the 1940s, when Betterton's Victorian wooden hotels were booked solid and served home cooked meals all summer. From its beginnings as a small picnic ground in the 1870s, Tolchester Beach grew to become the Chesapeake Bay's biggest and best-known amusement park and bathing beach until 1962. This book is a must read for beach lovers, historians, and postcard collectors alike.

An appendix details the workings of early steamboat engines. Other appendices provide data on steamboats discussed in the text and maps of the region. The narratives extend the history of the era from that included in other books on the topic. The book, above all, is an enthusiastic, nostalgic, and thoroughly readable exposition of a bygone era and a "vanished fleet."

"The name Weems, and the Weems line," writes David C. Holly, "symbolized nearly the entire epoch of the steamboat on the Chesapeake." The Weems line began in Baltimore in 1819, as steamboats first appeared on the Chesapeake and its rivers. It was sold to the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1905, at the height of the steamboat's "Golden Age," though its boats continued to serve the Bay until the 1930s. Illustrated with maps, drawings, and rare photographs, Tidewater by Steamboat is the vivid portrait of life on the Patuxent, the Potomac, and the Rappahannock, where Weems boats sailed and the course of the American republic was set.

In the golden age of the steamer, the rich bounty of the Eastern Shore was transported down the Chester River and across the Chesapeake Bay to the port of Baltimore. For over one hundred years, vessels like the Maryland, the Chester and the B.S. Ford traversed these winding waters laden with fruit, grains, crabs and oysters. For a dollar, passengers could enjoy the novelty of a ride and the slow panorama of the shoreline. Through freeze and fog, skilled captains plied the waterways until the last of the steamers--the Bay Belle--made its final passage in the 1950s. Author and historian Jack Shaum journeys back to the bygone days of the Chester River's steamboats.

The inspiring stories of the Underground Railroad come alive for our times in "Tubman Travels: 32 Underground Railroad Journeys on Delmarva." Join award-winning author Jim Duffy as he wanders the Delmarva Peninsula in search of sites and scenes that put modern-day travelers in touch with unforgettable tales from the courageous journeys of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and an array of lesser-known heroes who set out through this region in search of freedom from slavery.