The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary on the East Coast of North America. The bay is about 20,000 years old, having been formed when melting ice sheets flooded the lower watershed of the Susquehanna River and effectively "drowned" it. Chesapeake Bay encompasses a watershed of 64,000 square miles, a drainage area equal to the geographical area of six New England states. North to south the bay is 195 miles long with nearly 5,000 miles of shoreline.

The Chesapeake's value was early recognized by Captain John Smith, who circumnavigated the bay in 1608. His highly accurate 1612 map of Chesapeake Bay contains many points of navigational importance that despite centuries of erosion and changing shorelines can still be found in the region today. Although Smith followed the Indian term in calling the estuary the "Chesapeake," it is doubtful that the Indian word Chisapeack conforms to Smith's translation of it as "Mother of Waters."

In terms of environmental and social history, the Chesapeake Bay has been defined by its rivers and tributaries. Stretching 160 miles to the fall line, the James River was the first artery of commercial and military penetration by English culture in the seventeenth century. Other tributaries, notably the Potomac and Patuxent, offered long navigable waterways to the interior. In the colonial period the bay became a highway of tobacco commerce and reduced the need for the development of towns and cities.

The Indian presence in the Chesapeake Bay country goes back as far as ten thousand years. The Indians lived in small bands of fifty or so and were semi-nomadic. Indian settlements were usually at the mouths of rivers and streams. Indians of the region were largely Algonquian-speaking people and were deer hunters, corn planters, and food gatherers. The richness of the aboriginal food base indicates a complex tribal system based on shared values and an appreciation of nature that enabled them to live well in a generous land without spoiling it. During the period of contact with Europeans in the seventeenth century, Indian culture was decimated by European diseases like smallpox. Intertribal warfare with the hostile Iroquois Nation and the Susquehannocks to the north also harmed local Indian communities.

If Chesapeake waters defined the European settlements in Maryland, tobacco defined its economy. Borrowing from the Indians, Maryland and Virginia colonists turned tobacco into the first major cash crop of the New World. Tobacco smoking, made fashionable by English notables like Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618), unleashed a whirlwind of agricultural development in Maryland. Soon the Chesapeake Bay became widely known in the world as "the tobacco coast." Because of labor shortages on Maryland plantations, the English introduced white indentured servants and, after 1680, black slaves from Africa to till the soil and harvest tobacco. In the course of a century, the Chesapeake moved from being a society with slaves to a slave society.

The bay was also rich in marine life. Visitors in the colonial period and later remarked on the vast oyster reefs, the amazing and varied fishery, and the millions of waterfowl that in fight blocked out the sun. A Character of the Province of Maryland (1666), written by George Alsop, became a popular description of the rich bounty of Chesapeake Bay. A rich and highly stratified society of planters, freemen, and slaves quickly emerged in the colonial period. By the time of the Revolution, the Chesapeake Bay region was known for its wealthy lords of tobacco and the splendid plantation houses that dominated the countryside.

The Chesapeake Bay played a crucial role in the American Revolution as an artery of commerce and military supply. In the winter of 1776-77, the Continental Congress moved to safer quarters in small but growing Baltimore. That city and Annapolis were important supply connections between the northern and southern theaters of the Revolution. Naval vessels and privateers damaged British vessels on the Chesapeake. A few craft like the Defense, Hebe Johnson, and Amelia made captures in the bay and sailed outside its mouth. American naval barges also patrolled the rivers of the bay country and challenged British forces on the Eastern Shore and the lower counties.

During the War of 1812, Maryland was again invaded by British troops, who sailed up the bay on numerous raids. They recruited slaves into a force of Colonial Marines, burned Havre de Grace in 1813 and captured the nation's capitol in 1814. After the British burned Washington, they advanced on Baltimore. The naval bombardment of Fort McHenry prompted Francis Scott Key to write "The Star Spangled Banner," which in 1931 became the national anthem.

After Independence, a new kind of revolution came to Chesapeake Bay-steam technology. The first steamboats, the Eagle and the Chesapeake, demonstrated to marine financiers in Baltimore that steam transportation was cost-efficient.

The Chesapeake became a crucible of conflict again during the Civil War. A Union blockade, often broken by smugglers and swift, highly effective Confederate blockade-runners, forced the federal government to keep a permanent blockading squadron on its waters from 1861 to 1865. The Chesapeake also witnessed the celebrated naval encounter between the first ironclads, the U.S.S. Monitor and C.S.S. Merrimac. The defeat of the Confederate Merrimac off Hampton Roads in May 1862 ushered in a new era of steam-powered ironclad warfare.

The Civil War provided a tremendous stimulus to the American economy. Earlier in the nineteenth century, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O), and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (C&O) connected the Chesapeake with its western hinterland, and commercial routes to the Midwest had established themselves. One great and unforeseen development after the war was the rise of the commercial fishery on Chesapeake Bay. Once a subsistence business in small bay villages, oystering grew to a multi-million dollar business in response to a national demand for status foods. During the 1870s and 1880s, Maryland and Virginia watermen harvested millions of bushels of oysters from the bay. Chesapeake watermen were mostly black freedmen, Irish and German immigrants, and poor whites. Heated conflicts over access to the valuable oyster beds led to fighting and mayhem on the bay-the "oyster wars"-that had to be curtailed by a hastily created state Oyster Navy. Oystering also ushered in new types of fishing boats. The most notable were the Chesapeake bugeye and skipjack, which were used for dredging oysters commercially. At the high point of oyster fishing in the 1880s, nearly 15 million bushels were harvested annually, a strain on resources that subsequently led to the collapse of an industry that once fueled the maritime commerce of the Canton docks in Baltimore.

Rail and steamboat links also provided access to a growing number of bayside resorts. A post-Civil War generation of affluent city-dwellers craved recreation and cool breezes on the bay. Among the popular resorts were Tolchester Beach in Kent County and Chesapeake Beach in Calvert County. The bay also became a favorite place for recreational waterfowl hunters and fishermen.

The Chesapeake Bay remained an artery of commerce in the late nineteenth century, though the products changed. Increasingly ram schooners laden with fruit, melons, and lumber made their way down the bay to fuel an active coasting trade that connected Maryland ports with the Carolinas, Georgia, and Cuba.

In the twentieth century the Chesapeake Bay environment began to deteriorate because of industrial pollution and urban growth. As early as 1900, sewage contamination of oyster beds and fishing grounds became serious social and political issues. Also the rise of the steel industry at Sparrows Point in Baltimore contributed along with other industrial companies and military reservations in depositing large amounts of toxins in Chesapeake waters. The Bureau of Tidewater Fisheries, the precursor of the current Maryland Department of Natural Resources, coped with a growing number of environmental concerns of a fishery at risk. Industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of the suburbs have brought numerous changes to Chesapeake Bay. The most fundamental issue has been that of deteriorating water quality both in the watershed and the bay. The passage of the Federal Clean Water Act in 1972 empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to impose limits to the amounts of fertilizer, sewage, and other toxins that can flow into the bay. The bay country in recent times has had two environmental crises from water toxins, kepone and pfiesteria. The former was a carcinogenic chemical pesticide dumped in the water and the latter a toxic microbe from runoffs of chicken waste nutrients. Well-organized efforts by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the Chesapeake Bay Alliance, and the Sierra Club have increasingly made the bay's problems part of the growing civic engagement on saving the bay from environmental harm.

In the modern age, the watermen and fisherfolk of Chesapeake Bay are becoming extinct. Watermen's culture can more easily be discovered in maritime museums and literature than in actual personal contact. Today recreation and historical tourism are the Chesapeake's principal industries. The bay, however, has always nourished a rich Chesapeake literary tradition. James A. Michener's popular 1978 novel, Chesapeake, brought the bay and its intriguing history to the attention of American readers and helped to promote tourism in the region. Chesapeake-born author John Barth has written a number of books about life in the bay country and the people who inhabit it. Among his most notable are The Floating Opera (1956) and The Sot-Weed Factor (1960). Gilbert Byron's The Lord's Oysters (1957) continues to delight readers interested in Chesapeake folklore. Hulbert Footner's Rivers of the Eastern Shore (1944) provides an historical introduction to the river communities of the Chesapeake peninsula. And This Child's Gonna Live (1969) by Sarah Wright provides an informative glimpse of the Chesapeake African American community in the mid-twentieth century.

Middleton, Arthur Pierce. Tobacco Coast: A Maritime History of Chesapeake Bay in the Colonial Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.

Stubble, J.R. The Living Chesapeake. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.

Sherwood, Arthur. Understanding the Chesapeake. Cambridge, Md.: Tidewater Publishers, 1973.

Warner, William W Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay. Boston: Little-Brown & Co., 1976.

Wennersten, John R. The Chesapeake: An Environmental Biography. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2001.