Transportation on the Chesapeake Highway
"...two Ferry boats were procured...we made the mouth of the Severn River but the ignorance of the People on board, with respect to the navigation of it run us aground first on Greenbury Point from whence with much exertion and difficulty we got off; & then, having no knowledge of the Channel and the night being immensely dark with heavy and variable squals of wind - constant lightning & tremendous thunder - we soon grounded again on what is called Hornes point..." - George Washington, en route from Rock Hall to Annapolis, 24 March 1791.
Annapolis, at mid-18th century, the largest town on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, served as the main port for travelers crossing to the Eastern Shore and points north to Philadelphia and beyond. Those arriving at the harbor by sail could travel south by land from Annapolis to Upper Marlboro and across the Potomac River into Virginia. Sail-powered ferries carried passengers on the 15 mile voyage across the Bay from Annapolis to Rock Hall or to other locations on the Eastern Shore.
The new congress of the United States met in Annapolis from November 1783 until Jun 1784, drawing men to town from the thirteen new states that formed the nation's government. Two days before Christmas in 1783, George Washington resigned his commission in the State House Senate Chamber. Those delegates from Princeton, the previous meeting place, most likely arrived by taking a ferry across the Bay. Maryland's own delegates to earlier meetings of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia - like the state's four signer's of the Declaration of Independence (Charles Carrol of Carrollton, Samuel Chase, William Paca, and Thomas Stone) - had traveled the same route on the journeys back and forth. With ratification of the Treaty of Paris in January 1784, Annapolis became the country's first peacetime capital.
Sail and steam vessels continued to carry people and goods to and from Annapolis throughout the 19th century. This commerce became regional, rather than national once Baltimore emerged as Maryland's major metropolis. Annapolis became a market center for local farmers and fisheries, linked by steamboats to a network of towns and landings throughout the Bay.
Marker can be reached from Dock Street 0.1 miles from Market Space.
Courtesy hmdb.org
