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.

"Days of Gratitude" captures the role the steamboat Gratitude played in connecting Kent County, Maryland with the centers of commerce in Baltimore and Annapolis.

"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.

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."