A history of Chesapeake Beach,
since 1886
Postcards, papers and photographs of Chesapeake Beach from public archives, woven together by decade. Neighbors fill in the gaps.
The story
from WikipediaRead it all ↗Chesapeake Beach was established as a resort community at the end of the Chesapeake Beach Railway, a short line railroad from Washington, DC. It was the site of many slot machines in the early twentieth century (despite efforts to prohibit them) as part of the "Little Nevada" area of southern Maryland. Between steamer ships from Baltimore and trains from Washington, the weekend population of Chesapeake Beach reached into the 10,000s during the 1920s, until economic depression, and a bad hotel fire, brought an end to the railroad. The construction of the Bay Bridge to the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the 1950s enabled many of the visitors who used to spend their summers in Chesapeake Beach to now spend their time in Ocean City, Maryland instead. A museum at the old railroad station still exists today in Chesapeake Beach with many historic photos and an old passenger car from the railroad…
Text from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Timeline
built from the dates on the items belowFinish Chesapeake Beach’s story
Most archives stop around 1920. The photos from after that are in family albums, not libraries.
2 of 10 decades since 1900 have photos 🔁Retake an old viewWalter Reed outing, Chesapeake Be…, 1919: stand where they stood+15 📦Share a family photoSign in to add one+10Famous people from Chesapeake Beach
See all 1 →Chesapeake Beach, decade by decade
1990s
1 historic place in Chesapeake Beach
1 place in Chesapeake Beach is on the National Register of Historic Places, the country’s official list of buildings and places worth saving.
Where they are
When they were listed
Then & now
No then-and-now pairs yet. Take a photo from the same spot as Walter Reed outing, Chesapeake Beach, (Maryland), July 1919 (1919) and it appears here side by side.
🔁 Retake this view · +15Stories next door
nearby towns’ historyFrom Wikimedia Commons (12). Images are copied here with their credits and licenses, shown on each photo’s page. Refreshed monthly.