Come Visit Crisfield, the Crab Capital of the World - It's Changing

For thirty years we've been packing crabs in Crisfield, Maryland and shipping them to your door. Some of you have been ordering from us for most of that time. Most of you have never been here.

We'd love to change that, and now is a good time, because Crisfield is at the start of something. There are real plans in motion for this waterfront, the first of their kind here in a long time, and the town a few years out isn't going to be the town you'd find today.

Which is the case for coming twice.

Come this season and you'll get the unvarnished version. A working harbor nobody has tidied up for visitors. Watermen heading out before it gets light. Miles of marsh you can paddle without passing another boat. Crabs that have never seen the inside of a truck. And our own events packing this waterfront all summer.

Then come back once the rest of it is built, and you'll get to say you were here before.

Where the road runs out

Crisfield sits at the bottom of Maryland's Eastern Shore, at the end of Route 413, where the pavement stops and Tangier Sound starts. It was a waterlogged fishing settlement until 1866, when the railroad finally reached it, largely through the work of a Princess Anne attorney and former congressman named John Woodland Crisfield. The town took his name when it incorporated in 1872.

That rail line changed everything. Oysters and crabs pulled from these waters could be packed in the morning and be on tables in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York while they were still fresh. The town boomed. By the turn of the century this was one of the busiest seafood ports on the East Coast, and so much oyster shell was packed in to build the town out over the marsh that much of Crisfield still sits on a foundation of shells.

That business is smaller now, but it isn't gone. Our crabs still come off the same water, and the watermen who catch them still leave the harbor before it gets light.

What is already here

Here's the part worth knowing right now: Crisfield is already a good trip.

Somers Cove Marina is one of the largest marinas on the Chesapeake. It has 515 slips, about a hundred of them kept open for visitors, and it's protected by land on three sides with a straight shot out into Tangier Sound.

From that same marina you can catch a boat to Smith Island, the only inhabited offshore island left in Maryland, or across the state line to Tangier Island in Virginia. Cruises run May through October. Both are worth a full day. Smith Island cake, the real one, comes from there.

Just outside town is Janes Island State Park, which is the one most people drive past without knowing what it is. Twenty nine hundred acres of salt marsh with more than thirty miles of marked water trails cut through it, seven of them, running from a mile and a quarter up to twelve and a half. They all start and finish at the park marina, and you can rent a kayak, a canoe or a paddleboard right there from May through October. You'll see more herons than people.

Labor Day weekend is the National Hard Crab Derby, which has been running here for generations. This year it runs September 3 to 6. Crab races, boat docking contests, picking and cooking competitions, a parade, and fireworks over the water.

And the sunsets face west over the Bay, which on the Eastern Shore isn't a given.

Or come for Crab & Cruise®

If you want a reason with a date on it, that's ours.

Crab & Cruise® runs through the summer. You eat here, a full crab feast in our own venue at the Crab Place, and when the feast is done everybody heads down to the boat and goes out on the water. Every night has a theme, and the crowd commits to it. Motown night. Eighties night. People plan the outfit before they book the room.

The best part is how many of the same faces turn up year after year. A good share of that crowd has been coming so long they know each other, and they save each other seats.

That tent night was us testing a question. We wanted to know how far the demand would stretch if we went bigger, so we put up a tent, skipped the boat for once, and booked a ninety minute DJ Jazzy Jeff set to follow the feast. Eight hundred people came.

We got our answer, and we got a second one we didn't go looking for. Eight hundred people is more than this town has anywhere to put.

One more thing from that night. Hazel Cropper has picked crabs here for longer than most of the crowd had been alive, and she is a 16 time champion at the National Hard Crab Derby, which is the world championship for it. She decided the headliner needed a lesson.

What is coming

Now the part we're excited about.

We bought the waterfront property right behind us, and we're part of a group planning what goes on it. It is called Seventh Street Marina. The architects at Becker Morgan Group drew it.

The first thing it solves is that. People stay wherever they can find, and plenty of them drive home tired instead of staying the night and coming back out for breakfast. A town can't really host people it can't put up.

Around the rooms: a public boardwalk on the water, a restaurant, shops and a farmers market at street level, a pavilion and an event barn big enough for a real crowd, cottages, and open green with courts and lawn games. Kayaks and paddleboards in the water. A marina worth tying up at.

A lot of that is meant to stay public, which matters to us. We're not interested in a resort that turns its back on the town it sits in.

Look at the channel in that aerial, the one cutting in between the market building and the lodging. That's the part we're most interested in.

That's where the boats come in. Charter captains picking up a party at six in the morning. A kayak launch. A tour boat running over to Smith Island. A pontoon heading out for the sunset and back in.

And the one we most want to see happen: half a day out with a working crabber. Not a demonstration and not a show. A real boat on a real route, you work the pots, and you come home with some of what you caught.

None of that is us. Those are local captains, local guides and local watermen running their own businesses off a dock we built. That's the whole point. We're not trying to import an experience, because Crisfield already has one. It has just never had anywhere to tie up.

Why we're in it

Crisfield spent a century processing seafood and shipping it out. That's still part of what this place is, and we're still part of it. But a town can't run forever on one industry that keeps getting smaller.

The next chapter here is people coming to see the place. Eating crabs within sight of the water they came out of. Taking the boat to Smith Island. Going home and telling somebody about a town they had never heard of.

We'd rather that chapter get written by the people who live here than by somebody who buys up the waterfront and puts up something that could be anywhere. That's most of the reason we're involved at all.

We're not the only ones who think so. Governor Wes Moore came down last fall and walked both our plant and the Seventh Street site. Afterward he posted that when he talks about growing Maryland's economy, he is talking about what is happening in Crisfield with the Seventh Street Marina, and that once it is complete it is going to be "a MASSIVE driver for tourism, jobs, and economic growth on our Eastern Shore."

The Governor is right about the town, too. It's a working town full of people who know exactly what they're doing, and it has been overlooked for a long time.

The City has been part of it from the start. We sat down with the Mayor and City Council at an open special meeting in August to walk them through what is being considered for 7th Street, and the City posted afterward that "these concepts are preliminary and exploratory" and that it "will continue to share information with the community as the project and discussions progress." That is exactly how it should go, and it is why we keep saying plans rather than promises.

Come on down

So here's the ask, and it's a simple one.

Come now. The water, the islands, the marina, the Derby, Crab & Cruise® and the crabs are all here today, and they're worth the drive. If you're in Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia or anywhere in between, you're a few hours from a town most people in your office have never heard of.

Then keep an eye on us, because we're excited about what's ahead and there's so much more to come. We've been here for thirty years, and we're grateful to be part of this community. We look forward to being here for many more.