Retro: Eastern Shore and Western Maryland resorts once lured Marylanders from sweltering summer heat

As the summer of 2023 slowly lays its hot and humid grip on the city and surrounding environs, it recalls a time when Baltimoreans and Marylanders had only two options for escaping the searing heat and humidity that July always inflicts upon its victims.

It was to board the steam cars of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad or Western Maryland Railway and head for the cooling breezes that were to be found at such fashionable resorts as the Deer Park Hotel in Garrett County or the Blue Mountain House in Pen Mar.

The other option was to board such venerable bay steamers as the Lord Baltimore, Ferdinand C. Latrobe, Ericsson, Chippewa, Tolchester, Emma Giles and Bay Belle as they bid Baltimore farewell from their Light and Pratt Street piers, with throaty blasts from their steam whistles, while engines far below rumbled to life.

Passengers settled in for a waterborne journey and bay breezes to destinations including Tolchester, Chesterwood, Brown’s Grove or Betterton, which in its heyday from the 1890s to 1940s, had earned the reputation of “Maryland’s Foremost Bay-side resort” or “The Jewel of the Chesapeake.”

Some were day-trippers while others spent several weeks at one of Betterton’s four hotels, the Rigbie, the Chesapeake, the Maryland or Betterton, where porters trundled guest’s steamer trunks and valises into the rambling, whimsical wooden hotels.

In the 1920s, room rates for an extended holiday were $25 a week for a room, which included three meals, while the cost for a cottage was $15 a week.

Vacationers passed the time swimming, fishing, horseback riding and dancing under the summer stars or enjoying the various vagaries of crab houses, dance halls, beer gardens, piers and arcades.

Tolchester featured an amusement park with merry-go-rounds, bumper cars and roller coasters.

Chesapeake Bay resorts remained segregated until the 1960s, and African Americans sailed aboard such steamboats as the Avalon or Starlight to Brown’s Grove, on Rock Creek in Anne Arundel County, which billed itself as the “only park in the State of Maryland run exclusively for Colored People and by Colored People.”

The Deer Park Hotel was the brainchild of B&O President John W. Garrett, who envisioned the resort “On the Crest of the Alleghenies.” The location, five hours from Washington on the railroad’s mainline, was dubbed the “Switzerland of America,” according to an 1897 Sun article.

Sitting at an elevation of 2,500 feet above sea level on 600 wooded acres on a site known as the “Glades,” it became a fashionable summer resort for the bon ton, not to mention several U.S. presidents, who escaped the infernal heat of Washington, an equal to Baltimore’s, and quietly passed the summer on its broad porches painted white with pale yellow trim, or on long carriage rides through the surrounding forests.

Sumptuously furnished and with an elegant ballroom, the hotel had electricity and featured telephones. Recreational pursuits included golf, tennis, cricket and croquet, and for the less athletically inclined, small pavilions on its grounds offered the perfect place for a rubber of bridge, poker or other card games.

Guests also were able to sip its legendary Deer Park water that bubbled from its springs and was served aboard the B&O dining cars as well.

Guests arriving by train were met and returned to the station by an open barouche, a six-horse tallyho that brought them to the three-story-high wooden structure with a roof of gray-red-peach bottom slate, that was modeled after Swiss Alpine hotels.

It opened for its first season of 1879 and received the nickname of the “Summer Capital” of the United States.

President Ulysses Grant visited in 1883, as did President Benjamin Harrison. President Grover Cleveland, who insisted on carrying his own luggage to and from the station, spent his honeymoon at Deer Park with Frances Clara Folsom Cleveland, and returned often to fish in Western Maryland streams while relaxing from the demands of the presidency.

“As predicted in this correspondence a week ago,” wrote a Sun reporter in August 1893, “the Deer Park Hotel is full and the season is very gay. In fact, every room in the hotel and all the cottages are taken. There are now about three hundred guests here.”

But the coming of the automobile and competition from Atlantic City, New Jersey, and other nearby vacation destinations ended the era of such mountain and bay resorts.

Deer Park, which began losing its luster when the B&O stopped operating it in 1911 and sold the building 12 years later.

It welcomed its last guest in 1924 and then remained empty until being demolished in 1944.

Betterton and Tolchester fared no better.

With the opening of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in 1952, motorists could speed across the Eastern Shore onward to the beaches of Ocean City, Bethany and Rehoboth or board the ferry in Lewes, for a trip across the Delaware Bay to Cape May, and access to numerous South Jersey resorts such as Wildwood, Stone Harbor and Avalon.

In 1962, the Wilson Line terminated daily service to Tolchester and Betterton, citing mounting financial difficulties and lack of traffic.

Eventually, the old hotels that had welcomed generations of families were pulled down one by one, and passengers no longer asked for tickets to Deer Park or Betterton, and thus the curtain descended on the glorious era of railroad and steamboat resorts in Maryland.