Washington’s Route to Beach: A Country Cornucopia

When summer turns sticky and humid heat settles over the East like a wet wool blanket, weekend beach traffic clogs this tiny town’s Market Street. Laden with ice chests, beach chairs and an occasional surfboard, the cars creep slowly down the narrow street, past screened porches and lawns, under the town’s only traffic light and out again into the country, where the road gets no wider and the pace is only a bit faster. They are on their way to the Atlantic shores of Delaware and Maryland.

Tens of thousands of people from the Washington area make the 125-mile trek each weekend, and the rising flood of summer traffic is slowly transforming the rural regions of Maryland and Delaware between.

Tourists spent about $300 million in the region east of the Chesapeake Bay last year--up 300% from 1979. Much of it went to the resort towns, where population increases fiftyfold in summer, but a growing share of the tourist dollar went to Eastern Shore roadside markets such as John Hamstead’s. Hamstead’s Elmer’s Market has grown from a tiny shack to a market that is jammed from Friday to Sunday with out-of-town customers buying ears of corn by the dozen and peaches by the peck.

Bridge Spans Bay

Hamstead helped his father build the first Elmer’s Market in 1954, two years after the Chesapeake Bay Bridge replaced a ferry linking the Eastern Shore to the mainland. Since the bridge, change has come slowly on the Eastern Shore. Near the bay, the life of many still revolves around harvesting the blue crab and other shellfish. Inland is farm country.

But the throngs of visitors from the city are having an impact. Scores of markets, offering homemade preserves as well as fresh produce, prosper along Eastern Shore roads. Nearby are open-air booths peddling “the best barbecued chicken around” and general stores with crab cakes and cold beer. Some of them, such as the Fisherman’s Inn, a tiny red brick restaurant just east of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, have grown mightily from humble origins. “We’ll serve 1,000 people today,” owner Sonny Schulz said on a recent Friday afternoon, “and 25,000 this month. . . . We’ll see ‘em come in tonight, and they’ll be back again Sunday.”

“When the traffic comes,” said Emily Venskiver, a waitress there, “everybody around here complains. But boy, they make the money!”

The narrow roads have proved a boon to business. “A lot of them won’t even take the time to turn the motor off,” said Barbara Coady, an owner of Farmer’s Market, another expanded produce stand. “They just hop out of the car, grab a load of corn and hurry back.”

On Sundays, when the beaches seem to empty all at once, a miles-long backup will materialize on the road ahead.

“You feel sort of fresh and clean and sunburned, and then you hit the traffic and the good feeling disappears,” said one Washington man who has spent summer weekends at a family home in Rehoboth Beach for 15 years.

Delaware Road Study

Tourism officials say they do not believe that visitors are deterred by the narrow roads, but the Delaware Transportation Department says the east-west traffic is “a problem we’re looking at and are definitely anxious to address.” The department is scheduled to begin next spring a study of the beach traffic that could lead to the building of bypasses or new roads.

“The problems used to be isolated to 10 weekends out of the year, but now it starts in late April and goes well into autumn,” state spokesman John Moyed said.

In the winter, traffic dwindles to a fourth of summer volume and speed picks up, but the pace of roadside business slows to a crawl. By New Year’s Day, even Elmer’s Market has been shut for the season.

“There’s not much out here but snow,” Hamstead said.