Can a regional history museum serve as a place to think about the

future? “If you save the Museum but don’t save the Chesapeake Bay,
what’s the point?” -John Roberts, emeritus board member, Chesapeake
Bay Maritime Museum

Provoked by this question and facing the challenges confronting history

museums in general and outdoor museums in particular, the Chesapeake
Bay Maritime Museum is transforming itself from a regional maritime
history museum into a museum that inspires stewardship of the
Chesapeake’s cultures, landscapes, and environment. We are using our 18-
acre campus, exhibitions, programs, collections, staff, membership, and
volunteers to foster learning and conversations about the Bay region’s
future, based on the perspectives that centuries of living in this place
provide. Toward this end, we are partnering with our communities, our
members, and other nonprofit and cultural groups. We are also greening
our campus and our operations.

This is urgently needed on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and Baywide. Today

the Chesapeake Bay region faces tremendous pressures to its environment,
cultures, and ways of life. The health of the Bay region is now more than
ever dependent on human decisions and actions. Environmental and
cultural sustainability is certainly not a new goal in the Chesapeake Bay
watershed, but the work done thus far by water quality, marine science
organizations, and heritage professionals has not succeeded in engaging
the region’s broad population. We hope that we can provide experiences
and facilities to highlight the enduring human connections to the Bay and
the urgent human responsibility to sustain it.

During the past year, in dozens of discussions with cultural, advocacy, and
scientific leaders in the region, we have heard consistent confirmation that
the Museum can play a critical role in providing exhibits, programs, and a
site that inspire people to connect with the Bay region as a place and to
envision its future. With the renewed legislative and advocacy efforts for
Bay stewardship and sustainability on the Eastern Shore and Baywide, this
offers the Museum an opportunity to play a much more significant role in its
community than it has in the past.

Program“A lot of people who live in the watershed are not engaged with
the Bay. Stories about the Bay’s recovery are often a set of calculations or
backwards looking. The Museum needs to tell the real stories about what
the Bay could be and what kind of life that would be.”
-Stuart Clarke, current board member We have begun to view our
exhibitions, 18-acre site, and interpretive expertise in new ways -- to teach
and inspire stewardship. We are talking more explicitly about changes in
population, land and resource use, work and play, and their impact on the
region’s health and sustainability. We have opened a Living Shoreline along
the Museum’s Miles River waterfront; we host an annual Bay Day; we are
revising several permanent exhibits to include messages about the future
of Bay communities, fisheries, forests, and land use.

With planning grant funds, we have created a multi-disciplinary team of

advisors and regional leaders—including many scientists, ecologists, and
land use experts that we have never worked with before. Since program
partners are critical to our success, we have reached out to regional
institutions including Adkins Arboretum, the Eastern Shore Land
Conservancy, the Bay Hundred Foundation, Chesapeake Wildlife Heritage,
University of Maryland’s Horn Point Lab, and Washington College’s Center
for Environment and Society. With their advice and guidance we have
drafted new interpretive messages that explicitly state that the Bay is
facing huge challenges and that the future depends on each of us. These
are appearing this summer as new tours, orientation labels, revised
website, and print materials.

This fall we are hosting a charette with our new partners to develop region-
wide programs that will allow the public to select from future Bay scenarios
and learn about the choices they will need to make. In the coming year, we
will open the exhibit “A Rising Tide in the Heart of the Chesapeake.” With
global warming and sea level rise, life along the edge of the Chesapeake
Bay will change dramatically over the next century. Low lying areas will
surely be inundated, islands will disappear, and the lives of the people who
live along the edge shores will be forever altered. This visitor experience
project is designed to provoke conversation about the endangered cultures
and environments of the Bay’s island communities. We are also planning a
traveling (on the water, on the Museum’s historic crab dredging vessel Old
Point) exhibit that explores the history of conservation, forestry, living off
the water and land, and the future of the Bay region. On board will be a
Story Corps-inspired audio kiosk for capturing stories of what people value
about the Bay region and their dreams for the future.

QuestionsAs we move forward, it is really too soon to tell if we are

succeeding, except that we are receiving encouragement through new
sources of grant funding and from our new partners.

And we have many new questions:

How do we sustain the interest of our current audiences and funders who
have been connected to the museum because they romanticize the past.
Are we losing them as we take our traditional stories up to date?

The challenges facing the Chesapeake region are serious and complex.
What kinds of programs can we offer that will engage our publics and not
turn them off?
More and more newcomers are arriving on the Eastern Shore every day and
they cannot see the past stories here. The past here isn’t part of their story.
How can we better connect to all these new people who are moving here
and have no connection to this place?

If we are still going to be the Chesapeake Bay Maritime MUSEUM, there is a

notion built into that about the past. Should we change our name?

As we redefine the Museum, who are our new stakeholders, which new
partners should we be reaching out to?

This takes all of us outside of our expertise, so we are uncomfortable. How

can we continue to be willing to experiment, to make mistakes?