Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall

On the night of September 13-14, 1814, British warships bombarded this star-shaped brick fort guarding Baltimore harbor for 25 hours during the War of 1812. A Washington lawyer named Francis Scott Key, watching from a truce ship in the harbor, saw through the smoke at dawn that the enormous American flag still flew over the fort — and scribbled the lines that became "The Star-Spangled Banner." The flag itself (a 30-by-42-foot garrison flag) survives at the Smithsonian; the fort survives here as a national monument, the only one also designated a "historic shrine." Its low star-fort walls and the harbor it guards are the whole point — built to be seen and to command the water approach to Baltimore.

Once a decaying industrial waterfront, Baltimore's Inner Harbor was reborn in the 1970s-80s as one of the first and most influential "festival marketplace" waterfront redevelopments in America — a model cities everywhere copied. The basin holds the National Aquarium, the historic ships including the USS Constellation (the last all-sail warship built by the US Navy, 1854), the Maryland Science Center, and Harborplace. Above it rises Federal Hill, with its commanding view. Baltimore is a working harbor town at heart — Chesapeake Bay crabs, the row-house neighborhoods, Fort McHenry guarding the approach — and the Inner Harbor is its front parlor, the place that turned the city back toward its water.

On the Severn River where it meets the Chesapeake Bay in Annapolis, Maryland — the U.S. Naval Academy ("the Yard"), founded October 10, 1845 by Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft as a permanent shore school for officer candidates. The Academy produced 990 admirals and 24 Marine Commandants, 53 Medal of Honor recipients, three of the twelve men who walked on the Moon (Alan Shepard of Apollo 14, Jim Irwin of Apollo 15, and Charlie Duke of Apollo 16), Apollo 8 and Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell (USNA 1952), one President (Jimmy Carter, USNA 1946), and 60+ NFL players. Bancroft Hall, the dorm, holds the entire 4,400-midshipman Brigade — said to be the largest single dormitory in the world at 4.8 acres of floor space. The 210-foot copper dome of the Naval Academy Chapel dominates the Annapolis skyline; in the crypt below rests John Paul Jones (the Revolutionary War naval hero whose body was recovered from a forgotten Paris grave in 1905 and reinterred at the Academy in 1913). The Class of 1845 cannon — captured at Vera Cruz in the Mexican-American War — sits outside the entrance to the Yard. Annapolis itself is the Maryland state capital, with the oldest functioning state capitol in the U.S. (1772 Maryland State House) where the Treaty of Paris was ratified and George Washington resigned his Continental Army commission in 1783.

Glenn L. Martin built one of America's great aircraft companies on the marshy edge of Middle River, Maryland — the plant that turned out PBM Mariner flying boats and B-26 Marauders during World War II, and that gave Martin State Airport (KMTN) its name and its enormous 1940-41 hangars. This museum preserves that legacy: the Martin Company's entire corporate archive (photos, factory drawings, engineering documents donated by Martin Marietta), and a flight line of about fifteen aircraft — a rare Martin 4-0-4 airliner, an RB-57 Canberra, an F-100, an F-105, an A-4, two AH-1 Cobras, and more. Indoor exhibits run from Martin's start as a Kansas barnstormer to the China Clipper Pan Am flying boats, the B-26, the Norden bombsight built nearby, the Titan rocket program, the Tuskegee Airmen, and Maryland's astronauts. The museum spent thirty years on Martin State Airport itself, in the original Hangar 5. In late 2025 it moved a couple of miles to a far larger home: the Maryland Aerospace Heritage Center, the former Lockheed Martin administration building at 2323 Eastern Boulevard — a five-floor, 100,000-square-foot facility where, for the first time, the aircraft, archives, and exhibits sit under one roof. The new location reopened to the public in spring 2026. Hours have shifted with the move, so it's worth confirming before you make the trip.