As America's most productive estuary, the Bay has always been teeming with life, from the shad and herring runs of the eighteenth century to rockfish today. This abundance offers plenty of sport for recreational anglers and harvests for commercial watermen. The Bay's distinctive watercraft and harvesting tools have developed as adaptations to local materials, fisheries, weather, and waterways.

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, residents from Baltimore, Washington, and other western shore cities sought relief from the summer heat, and the noise and bustle of the city by traveling to the Bay and the Eastern Shore. Regular steamboat service between Baltimore and communities around the Bay offered an escape from the city. A variety of boarding houses, camps, and hotels that sprang up near the wharves. Much of the recreation was oriented to the water, with swimming and boating as favorite activities.

During the twentieth century dramatic changes occurred on the Chesapeake Bay. Most notably, recreation eclipsed the traditional agricultural and seafood economies, disrupting communities and ways of life. Today, locals co-exist alongside vacationers, retirees, and "come-heres." Shores once covered with farms and seafood packing houses now sport golf courses and marinas. The water itself is crowded with pleasure boats of all varieties. The Chesapeake Bay has become a recreation destination.

The nearly 15 million residents of the region are facing difficult issues-increasing population and development of rural landscapes; recreation superceding trade and seafood harvesting; traditional communities dispersing and ways of life disappearing; newcomers arriving with diverse backgrounds, interests, and expectations. These transformations are redefining the way citizens interact with the Bay.

Today the people who use and enjoy the Chesapeake Bay are a diverse group- watermen, farmers, business people, lifelong residents, newcomers, recreational boaters, developers, and tourists. They hold widely varying and often conflicting opinions over which of the Bay's natural and cultural resources are most important and worth preserving.

What divides them is their respective histories, each group seeing the area's problems and solutions through the lens of its own experience. What will unite them is a better understanding of those varied experiences and perspectives.

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