Home Again in the Mid-Atlantic: River Dancing on the Choptank

We put our 22 foot C-Dory, the River Dancer, into the Choptank River in Cambridge, Maryland, and floated it up to Denton, Maryland, and back. It's a good size, beautiful river and one that I have always loved ever since reading Michener's historic novel Chesapeake which covers the era 1583 to 1978. I credit his novel to my love of the Chesapeake region.

The Choptank is the largest of the Chesapeake's Eastern Shore Rivers. The Tuckahoe River, Harris Creek, Broad Creek and the Tred Avon River all flow into it. The Choptank is 68 miles long. We didn't take the River Dancer west from Cambridge towards the Chesapeake and Tilghman Island or out to Crook Point as it was getting darker and we wanted to get trailered. Also, we'd had our Omicron booster shots that morning and I could feel just a tad of the ugh setting in as the day wore on. As with many women, I seem to have more of a reaction to the covid boosters than Dave does.

The river was important for shipping in the early days of white habitation in the area as well as a major seafood source for commercial fishing. Today it suffers from too much nitrogen and phosphorus in upriver, and is brackish and impacted with whatever is in the Chesapeake Bay towards the mouth of the Choptank. The Riverkeeper was trying to do swims across the Choptank each year as a way to draw attention to the water quality and in 2018 it had to be cancelled because of too much bacteria making it unsafe for human contact. There had been a lot of heavy rains within the days leading up to the date of the swim so it had washed everything down into the river from all the settlements and farms.

Train bridge west of Denton in the Choptank. I believe this is called a pony plate girder bridge or drawbridge which swivels sideways instead of splitting upwards. It's been abandoned for years. It's called the Denton Railroad Drawbridge, the Queen Anne Railroad Bridge and the Baltimore and Eastern Railroad Bridge, among others.

There is a mix of forested and marshland areas along the Choptank as well as mansions, farm houses and farm fields. Above, someone's deck/pier.

Denton, where steamboats used to stop. Amazing.

During the 1850's steamboats traversed the Choptank River from Denton, Maryland, out into the Chesapeake and north to the Patapsco and Baltimore. It was important to the underground railroad too, and in Denton a captured Underground Railroad agent was put on a steamboat to be tried in Cambridge, Maryland. He spent 40 some years in prison and the African Americans captured were returned to slavery. The Choptank was a huge impediment for people trying to escape slavery. It was deep and wide.