![]() ![]() Philadelphia merchants moved south along Indian trails, scouting for grain, finding eager suppliers along the Choptank River. ![]() By the 1750s, fields of tobacco were replaced by fields of corn, as planters found it less labor intensive and more profitable to plant food for export to the West Indies. Commercial rather than domestic agriculture flourished, as tobacco farms dominated at first. The Eastern Shore was separated from its sister slave counties by the oyster beds that spread underneath the water to Maryland's other, western, shore, where the bustling ports of Annapolis and Baltimore dominated the regional economy.īeaver traders originally populated the Eastern Shore, but by the 1660s the pelt trade was depleted and planters began to settle the region. Waterfowl and wildlife were abundant, offering hunters as rich a harvest as that gathered by those who cultivated the land. Fields dappled with sun and lush with grain were crisscrossed by dozens of waterways throughout the peninsula, joining rivers flowing from marshes out to the beckoning salt water. AT THE TURN of the nineteenth century, the Eastern Shore of Maryland was in many ways a world apart - the rich, rolling fields semicircling Chesapeake Bay, abutting Delaware to the east and grazing Pennsylvania to the north. ![]()
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