The present site of Bay Front Park includes the boardwalk and beach long known to residents as Brownie's Beach, a name taken from the nearby Brown family restaurant and bar. Just south of the beach begin the Cliffs of Calvert, called "The Great Bluff" in early photographs. In the first decade of the 20th century, paleontologists from the Smithsonian Institution came here to collect fossils, and families still find fossils along the shore more than 100 years later. Captain John Smith recorded the cliffs in a journal of his 1608 exploration of the Chesapeake Bay, and his description suggests that he and his crew may have spent a night at this location.