This part of the story (see part one) starts with work done by Dr. Grace Brush, a long-term faculty member at Johns Hopkins University. Grace and her students use a variety of techniques to “look back in time” to reconstruct what the Chesapeake Bay and watershed looked like in the past, even as far back as 14,000 years ago.

What they found was interesting and useful for all people living in this basin. For example, Grace found when John Smith starting exploring the Chesapeake the basin was “almost entirely covered with a diversity of forests on a wide variety of soils, drained by an intricate and dense system of over 100,000 streams and 150 major rivers surrounded by large marshes.” In addition, “beavers were abundant…building local dams and impoundments on ..virtually all… streams…the environment was wet and marshy throughout.”

The population of Calvert County in 1969 was about 17,000 people, there were two stoplights in the entire county and the nearest movie theater was in Annapolis. No one bothered with the stop signs because it was obvious no one was coming! Calvert now sports a population of almost 90,000 people and has stoplights galore. Houses have popped up all over the place as have businesses, schools and restaurants. Not as rural as it used to be and a lot more paved.