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. HOME | ABOUT US | WHAT TO SEE & DO | VISITOR INFO | EDUCATION & OUTREACH MEMBERS & SUPPORTERS| NEWS & MEDIA | Copyright 2003, The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.
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