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About our Collections
The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum collects and preserves the nation's
most comprehensive assembly of material culture relating to the Chesapeake's
tidewater region. With the largest collection of Chesapeake Bay watercraft
in existence, an impressive array of working and decorative decoys,
and maritime paintings by some of the world's leading artists, the
Museum's 7,500 objects document the interaction of people and the
tidewater Chesapeake Bay region over a 200-year period.
Watercraft Collection
The Museum holds 85 vessels built from the
1880s to the 1970s, including wooden sail,
power, and row boats. It is the largest
and most important collection of its kind
in the world. All of the region's waterfowling
boats are represented, along with most of
the major types used in the region's fisheries,
as well as a good sample of recreational
watercraft. Five historic vessels are maintained
afloat: the 1889 oyster dredging bugeye
Edna E. Lockwood (a National Historic Landmark),
the 1912 river tug Delaware, a 1931 Potomac
River dory boat, the 1934 Hooper Island
draketail Martha, and the 1955 skipjack
Rosie Parks. The 1909 power crab dredger
Old Point is currently being restored in
the Museum's working Boat Yard.
Maritime Objects
Diverse in media, the Museum's 7,500 objects include items relating
to commerce and trade, navigation, fisheries, and waterfowling. The
collection also encompasses objects that were made and used in the
Chesapeake Bay tidewater region including: 288 duck, goose, swan,
and shorebird decoys by 70 regional makers such as Sam Barnes, Ben
Dye, Daddy Holly, Ira Hudson, and the Ward brothers, 67 marine inboard
and outboard gasoline and steam engines for propulsion, deck engines,
bilge pumps, and more than 210 detailed scale ship models of Bay watercraft,
folk art "sailor-made" models, and builders' half-models
used in lieu of plans for local construction (Including Pilot #1,
made by one of the boat's crew and representing the first steam pilot
vessel in America) 421 paintings and prints by significant regional
artists such as Louis Feuchter, H. Bolton Jones, and Otto Muhlenfeld,
474 tools of maritime trades, figureheads, decorative carvings, anchors,
ceramics, paper ephemera, navigational instruments, textiles, and
rigging gear.
Historic Structures
Five historic buildings are original to the Museum site including
the c. 1890 Eagle House, once the home of a steamboat captain; three
other historic houses (all contributing structures to a National Register
District), and a 1933 cannery warehouse built on pilings along the
waterfront, which was constructed from pieces of an earlier steamboat/railroad
terminal. Other structures were moved to the site including the 1888
Point Lookout fog bell tower and the 1879 Hooper Strait lighthouse,
one of only three surviving Chesapeake Bay cottage-style lighthouses.
If you have a research question regarding the Museum's collection,
please e-mail us at library@cbmm.org.
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