Signs at the Maryland Line

When stopped at the Maryland Welcome Center near Pocomoke City to get a map, we saw these historical markers.

Boundary Line 

Maryland - Virginia 

"State Line located approximately 100 yards south of this point. In 1668 surveyors marked large oak trees to to indicate the boundary. These came to be called “Marriage Trees” as couples traveled from Virginia to wed under more lenient Maryland Laws. Boundary stones were set after 1883 survey."

A few steps away is a Civil War Trails marker.

Maryland's Eastern Shore 

Hundreds of Enslaved and Free Black Men Enlisted

"Although isolated from Maryland's largest population centers, the Eastern Shore was important to the state's role in the Civil War and exemplified the citizens' divided loyalties.

 In the years before the war, enslaved African-Americans here began escaping bondage via the Underground Railroad to the North and Canada, helped on their way by sympathetic blacks and whites and such courageous "conductors" as Harriet Tubman, an Eastern Shore native. During the war, hundreds of enslaved and free black men from the Eastern Shore enlisted in the United States Colored Troops, the black units authorized in January 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Afterward, returning black veterans established towns and emancipation celebrations that still survive today.

 Some of the Shore's white residents held fast to the Union, while others supported the Confederacy. Although combat bypassed this area, families here as elsewhere suffered the loss of their men as well as the hardships of war. Newspaper publishers suspected of disloyalty to the Union were arrested. Streams and towns on both sides of the Chesapeake Bay became smugglers' havens as enterprising watermen ran the Federal blockade to supply Confederate forces. When the conflict ended, Eastern Shore residents returned to their fields and fishing vessels, and the passions of war subsided."

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