Cambridge, MD
A 17,000-acre landscape park on Maryland's Eastern Shore, established 2014 and centered around the Bucktown area south of Cambridge, Dorchester County — the birthplace and home country of Araminta "Minty" Ross, later Harriet Tubman (c.1822-1913). Tubman was born into slavery on the Brodess plantation; after escaping to Philadelphia in 1849, she returned to Maryland thirteen times over the next decade, leading approximately 70 enslaved people — including her parents, brothers, and siblings — north to freedom on the Underground Railroad. She never lost a "passenger." During the Civil War she served as a Union scout and spy in South Carolina, and on June 2, 1863 led the Combahee River Raid — the first armed raid led by a woman in U.S. military history — freeing over 700 enslaved people. The park's Visitor Center on Golden Hill Road in Church Creek tells her story through a 5-mile self-guided driving tour to the actual sites: the Bucktown Village Store (where 13-year-old Minty was struck by a two-pound weight, leaving lifelong head injuries), the Brodess plantation, the Stewart Canal she worked digging, and the marshlands she used as cover for her freedom raids. The Underground Railroad Byway extends 125 miles across Maryland and Delaware to Philadelphia, tracing routes Tubman is documented to have used.
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.
A 37-mile barrier island shared by Maryland and Virginia, Assateague is famous for the wild horses that roam its dunes and marshes — small, hardy "ponies" descended, legend says, from survivors of a Spanish shipwreck (more likely from colonial owners avoiding fence taxes on the mainland). They've lived feral here for centuries. The Maryland herd roams free in the national seashore; the Virginia herd, at the Chincoteague end, is rounded up each July in the famous Pony Swim across the channel, immortalized in the book "Misty of Chincoteague." Beyond the horses, Assateague is a pristine, undeveloped barrier island — wide Atlantic beach, shifting dunes, salt marsh — deliberately kept wild, a stark contrast to the high-rises of Ocean City just to the north.
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.