Imagine Yourself on the River

In the past, rivers served as the roads linking the people and products of Shady Side with Baltimore, Annapolis, and other Bay villages, and in every season they were places both for work and for recreation. In winter, Galesville felt much closer by water than by land, and longtime residents remembered skating in front of the Avery House and across to Galesville, even when oystermen had to break through the ice to gather oysters. Working the water was also a livelihood: Salem Walter Avery, like his father, was a buy boat captain and oysterman, and in 1908 he prepared to load oysters onto the Louisa as the West River oyster fleet approached. Buy boats gathered in the middle of the West River to freight oysters to market for cash, with catches of seventy to eighty bushels a day and sometimes more than one hundred. In summer, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, steamboats such as the Emma Giles made regular trips up the West River, stopping at local landings to deliver people and store goods, pick up oysters and tobacco for Baltimore markets, and bring visitors to the area's hotels, boarding houses, fishing, and boating.

Shady Side, Maryland · United States