Author Description

The Amazing Story of Arundel-on-the-Bay:1600s to Today chronicles a community evolving from the Gay Nineties, through the segregated Jim Crow era, World War II, woman's liberation, and other 20th and 21st century realities. What emerges in the telling is a portrait of America's social and cultural history that shaped a community. It started in 1890, with the purchase of 350 acres south of Annapolis, Md. on the Chesapeake Bay, America's largest estuary. Lots on this waterfront land acquired by the Chesapeake & Colombia Investment Company were advertised for sale based on the beauty of the site and its solitude as a woodland paradise. Who were the owners of the Investment Company? One of the book's nine authors, Pamela Duncan, historian and preservationist, profiles the history of the Company owners. They were seven successful business men of Washington, D.C., members of America's Nouveau Riche, ready to enjoy the lifestyle of the Gay Nineties at their own seaside cottage community. They even built a railroad to get folks to the summer resort. While the majority of lots were purchased by white entrepreneurs, African American relatives of Frederick Douglass also bought building sites in the new Arundel-on-the-Bay. Lively summer activities were reported on in the society columns of the big city newspapers. The "Queen Resort of the Chesapeake Bay," Bay Ridge, an amusement park to the north, prospered with visitors using an extensive network of railroads and steamboats. Just down the road at Arundel-on-the-Bay, generations of urban families spent the hot months fishing, crabbing, wading, loafing and enjoying the wide-water vistas. It was the kind of American- country life style, steamboats and all, popularized by Mark Twain. The community distinguished itself in unique ways; * It began as almost all white to became almost all black in the 1950's, and then evolved into the proudly integrated neighborhood of today.<