Although I have visited Maryland many times, I don't ever remember visiting Maryland's Eastern Shore Region; so we decided to extend our stay for a few extra days and spend some time in the area.
Just outside of Snow Hill, in the Pocomoke Forest, is the 19th-century Furnace Town Living Heritage Museum. The Nassawango Iron Furnace and many other structures are still intact and open to the public. The person that operates the blacksmith shop builds some really interesting sculptures!
In Princess Anne we stopped by the 10,000 square foot 200-year old neoclassical Teackle Mansion, but it was closed. (One of the problems when traveling off-season is that many facilities have limited hours or they are closed for the season.)
In Salisbury we toured the Ward Museum of Wildfowl Art, which contains the largest, most comprehensive bird-carving collection in the world. Many of the pieces that you see featured in magazines are located in this museum. Even if you are not into birds or wood carving, this is a must stop if you are ever in the area.
In addition to a theater that provides a wide variety of bird related movies, one area of the museum is dedicated to the history of and use of decoys that goes back to the Native Americans before the time of European settlers. Other sections of the museum include a reconstructed workshop where the Ward Brothers produced many early decoys and another area is dedicated to the story of major American flyways. The stories are enhanced with many decoy examples indigenous to each region. However, for me the most impressive part of the museum was the World Championship Gallery that features hand-carved pieces from the annual Ward World Championship Carving Competition. Many of the wooden feathers on the sculptures appear to be real feathers.
In Cambridge we stopped by the Richardson Maritime Museum where they have a large collection of Chesapeake Bay ship models and other artifacts that honor early Eastern Shore boatbuilding. I observed one artisan working on a small ship model, so I asked him how many months it takes to build a model. He just gave me disgruntled look and explained that model builders measure their time in years, not months!
Near Trappe we stopped by the Rural Life Museum, which is a one-room schoolhouse, but it wasn't open. A little farther up the road, just outside of Easton, we stopped by the Little Round Top Church. This is a hexagonal structure that was designed so "The devil would have no corner in which to sit and hatch evil."
Another place we enjoyed visiting was the Linchester Mill in Preston. This mill was once the nation's oldest running business and sold grain to George Washington's army during the Revolutionary War. The facility was not open when we arrived, but we happened to find a worker that was making some repairs to the house and he gave us a personal tour of the facility. He even showed us an old Walter Cronkite news clip that was made when the mill was still in operation! And "Yes," that is a quilt design on the front of the red building. The quilters have their own quilt tour of the area and each location has a different quilt patch that has some significance to the Underground Railroad, which used these facilities as a stopping point.
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