Havre De Grace, MD Summary

Havre de Grace could be found on nautical charts and in short histories about the upper Chesapeake Bay and Susquehanna River as early as the 1620s. The town with the lovely name “Harbor of Grace” was incorporated in 1785. Its streets reflect the fact that it narrowly lost out to Washington, DC, as the site for the nation’s capital, with names such as Union, Adams, Washington, and Lafayette. General Lafayette often visited Havre de Grace and remarked how it reminded him of Le Havre in France.

With a population of 12,000, Havre de Grace is 39 miles northeast of Baltimore along I-95. Its remarkable Historic District of some 800 buildings was shelled by the British in the War of 1812. After laying siege to Washington and burning the White House, they sailed to Havre de Grace where Lt John O’Neill manned a lone cannon at Concord Point and fired back. Havre de Grace was sacked and burned, with only two houses and St John’s Episcopal Church spared.

After the war, Lt O’Neill was released, and 16 years later was made the keeper of Havre de Grace’s famous lighthouse at Concord Point. Today it remains the most photographed and painted structure in this charming seaside town, as well as being the oldest lighthouse in continuous use on the East Coast.

Havre de Grace houses a Maritime Museum, the Steppingstone Museum on the site of a working farm, and the Decoy Museum. The latter features a history of duck and geese decoys, roughhewn from wood, used to lure waterfowl to within range of the hunter’s shotgun. Today they have become valuable collector’s items, more likely to be found adorning a collector’s mantelpiece than floating in a hunter’s rig. With more than 1,200 decoys, the museum represents a unique glimpse into this centuries-old slice of Chesapeake Bay culture, celebrating the art of decoy making which has made Havre de Grace the “Decoy Capital of the World.”