By Barry Kessler
On a sunny weekend morning, hundreds of bikers, runners and families throng a trail on the Broadneck Peninsula that traces the old route of the Baltimore and Annapolis Short Line Railroad. About midway, sharp-eyed trail users might spot a sign in the ground that reads “Round Bay Station.” There, from 1887 until 1910, an excursion resort catered to Marylanders seeking recreation, entertainment and relief from summer’s heat. Hardly anyone on the trail, or anyone living in Round Bay today, knows the fascinating story of that resort, but it is one that illuminates dynamic shifts in relations between White and Black Marylanders, and divergent approaches within the Black community on how to live within the confines of America’s “Jim Crow” segregation. It is the prehistory of Round Bay.
Even before the United States Supreme Court legalized segregation in the 1896 case of Plessy v Ferguson, Black Marylanders were kept down in work, education, recreation and other domains. As White supremacy flared in the 1890s to early 1900s, it hardened the system of segregation, known colloquially as “Jim Crow.” Black people were excluded from public life, including access to the Chesapeake Bay and its tributary rivers. Beaches, parks, hotels and boarding houses refused Black patrons. Yet, in one remarkable instance, Black Marylanders enjoyed a summer paradise on the shores of the Severn River for a brief period before it, too, succumbed to the indignities of Jim Crow.
In the 1880s, the newly chartered Baltimore and Annapolis Short Line railroad saw the benefit of a proprietary resort to serve as a destination for tourists and large group excursions. Selecting a spot on the east shore of Round Bay, it purchased a tract of nearly 210 acres in December 1885. There it constructed a 10-bedroom hotel with a “plaza on all sides,” a spacious picnic area, a broad sandy beach with a bath house, and a large dancing pavilion. It laid a half-mile long spur track running from the main line of the road down to the hotel near the riverfront.
Round Bay formally opened as a resort on June 7, 1887, with the “annual basket picnic of the Presbyterian Sunday School.” One year later, an advertisement touted the “magnificent excursion grounds, with unequalled facilities for Boating, Bathing and Fishing. Pavilions and Music Stands have been erected, Restaurants opened, while Roller Coasters, Swings, Boating and Bathing-houses, and all other equipments [sic] necessary to a first-class Resort are here to be found at every turn.”
One evening in June 1891, audiences delighted in a grand free concert featuring Warner’s Imperial Brass Band, a duo of “unsurpassed cornetists,” and the Ogawe’s Japanese troupe performing “unexcelled acrobatic features,” followed by “a gorgeous display of fireworks.”
But the following year, the railroad announced that “Round Bay has been opened to the colored people.” The first “colored picnic” occurred on Aug. 30–a combined event for Ebenezer A.M.E. Church of Baltimore and Mt. Moriah A.M.E. Church of Annapolis, whose ministers, the Rev. I.S. Lee and Rev. I.F. Aldridge, respectively, were credited with convincing the railroad to open Round Bay to “the colored churches.”
Round Bay quickly assumed a position as the Black community’s premier destination. Credit for the success of the resort went to its popular manager and booking agent, the Rev. S. R. Hughes. His advertisements in the AFRO-American Newspaper promoted Round Bay as the “cheapest and best resort in the state,” with “free concerts,” a “medical fountain,” and “bathing suits at cheap rates,” as well as dining tables, stoves and dishes furnished at the site.
By 1902, the AFRO called Round Bay “our only Summer resort,” since there was “no other place… where the colored persons seeking recreation and pleasure is enabled to go and feel perfectly at home.” “Many thousands,” it reported, “annually patronize this resort.” And the paper lamented that other places were off limits due to the “disorderly and bumptious element of the race… to our great pain and shame.”
That summer, an “Athletic Carnival” drew visitors to Round Bay with over a thousand dollars in prizes. The event featured baseball and “Basket Ball” games, ping-pong, track and field competitions, a “diving contest for little boys, rope skipping contest for little girls,” and boxing exhibitions. Among the celebrities scheduled to appear were William Morris, the “champion runner of the race,” and Earnest Hogan, the “great unbleached American.” Round Bay, declared the announcement, was “the Atlantic City of the South.” [AFRO-American, Jun 28, 1902] It seemingly had no rival.
But this was soon to change. In 1904 Maryland passed a law to require racially segregated facilities in all public transportation. It remained on the books until 1951. This “Jim Crow” law had vast consequences, including, ultimately, the downfall of Round Bay as a Black resort.
The Black community’s response was divided as they figured out how best to cope with the new legal landscape. Some White observers thought that “the ‘Jim Crow’ law seems to be working in a satisfactory manner” when they observed a church group going to Round Bay in a segregated railcar whose “dusky occupants could be heard singing their camp-meeting hymns in the most approved fashion.”
July 4, 1904, brought clear evidence of pushback. When 500 Black holiday “excursionists” arrived at Camden Station, “fortified with boxes and baskets of eatables, and headed by a band,” the railroad forced them to stand in a roped-off section of the platform, awaiting the segregated trains. As the band played, “most of the crowd took the situation good-naturedly.… the habitual good nature and joviality of the race returned.” But a sizable number refused to ride the segregated cars, declaring they would rather stay in town than submit to “Jim Crow” accommodations.
Despite the efforts of the railroad and its agent Rev. Hughes, Blacks simply stopped going to Round Bay. Brown’s Grove, a new resort accessible by steamship, had opened in Pasadena. No doubt responding to the community’s outrage at being “jimcrowed” on the railroad, larger-than-life, innovative Black entrepreneur Captain George Brown proudly identified his business as “the only steamer and the only park in the State of Maryland run exclusively for colored people and by colored people.”
Soon, patronage having completely dried up, the railroad disposed of Round Bay altogether. In 1910, they sold 115 acres to a partnership of three investors including Norvell Chapman, considered the father of the community as it stands today.
A century later, physical evidence of Round Bay’s past as a summer resort is virtually undetectable. While the dance pavilion has been incorporated into one private home, and another is built around the old railroad depot, the recreational infrastructure is all but gone. The hotel burned a decade ago, and there is no historical marker to tell the story. The segregated prehistory of the real estate development–or of how Jim Crow legislation killed the resort–is virtually unknown.
The story of Round Bay during its incarnation as an excursion resort is a cautionary tale of how a people, dependent on a resource that they did not fully control, might lose it to economic, political and social forces entirely beyond them. It also demonstrates how the people did have some power even within a racist system: when conditions became intolerable, they voted with their feet. The Short Line Railroad, too, was buffeted by a discriminatory law it had to obey, with the loss of the customer base it had built up for more than a decade. Even so, it illustrates that a company and a community could both benefit from a system that offered flexibility and freedom. Within living memory of enslavement, and while daily experiencing the indignities and hardships of second-class citizenship, for a marvelous interval at the turn of the last century, Black Marylanders found a place where they could swim and dance, eat and drink, rest and rejoice, pray and laugh, commune with nature and gather as a people on the shores of the Severn River.