Solomons Island

We arrived in Solomons Island by boat road rather than water, but it hardly mattered — everything here still orients around the harbor, a sheltered notch where the Patuxent River empties into the Chesapeake Bay. Once a center of oyster dredging and, later, wooden shipbuilding, this small Calvert County community has reinvented itself gently over the decades into a boating and marine-science hub without losing the salt-worn character that built it. Workboats and million-dollar sailboats now share the same slips, an easy truce that seemed to define the place.

The Calvert Marine Museum and Drum Point Light

Our first stop was the Calvert Marine Museum, built directly on the waterfront, where the centerpiece is the Drum Point Lighthouse — a hexagonal, cottage-style screwpile light moved here in 1975 from its original spot a few miles up the bay. These “screwpile” lighthouses, built on iron legs screwed into the soft bay floor, once dotted the Chesapeake, and only a handful survive; climbing the tight spiral stairs to the lantern room, we could see how a keeper once lived out here alone, tending the light through fog and ice. The museum’s other halls trace the region’s fossil-rich cliffs and its long relationship with the oyster, once so abundant that Solomons canneries shipped them by the railcar.

A working harbor at the confluence

From the museum grounds we walked the boardwalk along Back Creek, watching charter fishing boats unload rockfish and blue catfish while sailors readjusted lines a few docks down. Solomons sits exactly at the point where the tea-colored Patuxent meets the greener water of the bay, and locals say you can sometimes see the line where the two currents mix. We took a late-afternoon cruise out past the mouth of the river, the Gov. Thomas Johnson Bridge arcing overhead, ospreys diving for menhaden all around the boat — proof that despite the marinas and museums, this remains, at heart, a fishing harbor.

Getting There

Solomons Island is roughly seventy-five minutes southeast of Washington, D.C., and about ninety minutes from Baltimore, via Route 4 and Route 2. There’s no airport or train service on-site; the nearest major airports are Baltimore-Washington International (BWI) and Ronald Reagan Washington National (DCA). A car is essential, and the final stretch down the Calvert County peninsula, with the bay glimpsed intermittently through the trees, makes a fitting overture to the harbor itself.