CBMM’s long-term exhibitions offer an in-depth look at the Chesapeake’s boatbuilding traditions and watercraft, the seafood industry, recreational boating, lighthouses and maritime navigation, drawing from our unique world-class collections of objects, art and photography, to tell the stories of individuals, groups and communities along the Bay.
Opened in the fall of 2023, CBMM’s Welcome Center provides an introductory experience with three new exhibition spaces. The new orientation exhibition, Navigating the Chesapeake’s Maritime Culture, uses photos and artifacts to set up the themes found across campus, while Water Lines: Chesapeake Watercraft Traditions features the history and stories behind nearly thirty small craft from CBMM’s collection selected from our long-term storage facilities.
Coming in the spring of 2026, the Stories from the Shoreline exhibition will illuminate the perspectives of people and communities about their connection to the unique Chesapeake Bay landscape, a place where water and land intertwine. Drawing from oral histories, manuscripts, and memoirs, the exhibition’s firsthand accounts provide a richer understanding of pastimes and passions like shoreline fishing, waterfowling, muskrat trapping, riverside baptisms, plein air painting, market gunning, eco-tourism, waterfront clubs and gambling, and community conservation.
Explore our current long-term exhibitions, including Historic Structures, below.
Historic Structures
Five structures are original to the Navy Point site and have been a part of the National Register for Historic Places St. Michaels District since 1986. The District includes Miller’s House (Museum store) and the cannery warehouse (Small Boat Shed), as well as Higgins, Dodson, and Eagle Houses, historic 19th–century homes now used as the administration buildings of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. Vulnerable to storm surge and high tides, the structures were stabilized, renovated and raised on higher foundations and grading, and an archeological survey of the site was commissioned by CBMM. They now sit comfortably above the flood plain.
