Local folks have fond, wistful memories of the Bay Country Festival that ran annually from the late 60s to the early 2000s. It was most popular when the Cambridge Jaycees set it up at Long Wharf, a remarkably small location for an expansive event that included carnival rides (even a Ferris Wheel), game booths, musical acts (The Commodores, Roy Clark, and more), a beauty pageant (Miss Neptune), a watermelon-eating contest, etc.
I was reminded of this classic celebration while brainstorming events for modern Cambridge. See, my original plan for this column was just to list local summertime happenings for residents and tourists, but I got to wondering why we don’t have one big, signature seasonal festival to draw people in and really put us back “on the map.” The results of my ponderings might seem like a follow-up to my previous column comparing Cambridge to St. Michaels, but it’s more concrete than that.
Cambridge definitely has the ingredients for a major summer event: waterfront, history, seafood culture, music venues, tourism traffic, a major resort, proximity to Blackwater, and Route 50 visibility. But those ingredients have never really been unified into one identity the way other Eastern Shore towns like Easton, St. Michaels, Crisfield, and Chestertown have managed to do. Even the Bay Country Festival was more of a generic carnival than a themed, cultural shindig.
The problem is that we try to be everything to everyone—seafood location, working-class town, historic Black community, eco-tourism gateway, revitalizing arts district—and end up being nothing to anyone. That disparate collection of things dilutes our brand, as it were. We need something cohesive with a single identity that can program one of the best waterfronts on the Shore, a waterfront that for years has functioned more as scenery than as a constant activity generator.
Cambridge needs one “anchor” event that people across Maryland recognize instantly. The strongest possibilities are a major seafood-and-music festival, a Chesapeake working waterfront festival, a Harriet Tubman cultural/history weekend, a Choptank River festival, a combined ecology + seafood + music event. But these are just quick ideas. The point is, we should pick one and commit to it. Then get the whole city involved in the theming—downtown businesses, neighborhoods, tourism venues, the Hyatt, Blackwater Refuge.
And therein lies the real challenge. One common refrain on social media among locals involved with the Bay Country Festival is that it died because it was too hard to get volunteers to work on it. That event was a year-long project that required many people to create it, and eventually too few bothered to show up. Sure, there were heavy financial costs—insurance, musical talent, police overtime—but Cambridge could handle that. It’s the desire of the community to be involved that we need to work on.
So, who’s ready to make that happen?
The person in the water is me. The other person not shown in photo is Mr.Càrter Hughlet, my tenth grade math teacher ,Cambridge sr. high. We worked together that summer , board of ed. maintenance.
I was a Jaycee during the Bay County Long Wharf festival..Got i canoe joisting with Fred Jackson …We joisted aginst Billy Wise and another person whom I cannot remember…Did good on first pass, the Fred decided to stand Up in canoe,(Fred was a big guy) dumped us, and well…That was all she wrote..Good times though