It's said Ernest Hemingway...

Came here to Smith Island and docked the Pilar at the Island's general store. The old store is still here, but the Pilar is said to have rotted away in a Castro-Cuba shipyard.

  It is also well argued that Hemingway could not have come here or else he would have stayed. He'd have found his quiet solitude for writing. Found the waters, wildlife, wind, weather, and women to inspire him. They say he might have forsaken Ketchum, Idaho and Key West, never going back to the rivers of Michigan. Maybe even passing up trips to Havana and Paris.

  Lots of stories written about this historic place. On Smith Island you can see how things used to be. It's a place within America still pristine, but peppered with strong American individualism, personified in the rugged watermen and their capable wives. Folks here are independent people who daily make their way with and against Mother Nature harvesting crabs and oysters for the rest of the world. Yet you'll quickly find that Smith Islanders are exceptionally hospitable to visitors of all types.

  Until recently the streets of the island's three villages, Ewell, Rhodes Point, and Tylerton generally had no official names and the houses had no numbers on them. At Ewell, people call everything below the church "Down the Field" and everything above the church is "Over the Hill."

  The island was first chartered by Captain John Smith in 1657, but the first British settlers, most from Cornwall, arrived a couple of generations later in the early 1700s. Today, the local islanders still retain a quite distinctive Elizabethan/Cornwall dialect, with it's own unique grammar pattern, a sure inheritance from their British ancestors.

  Ewell Tide Bed & Breakfast is on Maryland's only inhabited offshore island. Populated by folks who won't be told how to live or what to think or do. Yet you'll see there's a special charm to the community. People live in harmony, neighbor helping neighbor. No policemen reside on the island. No need.

  Sail into Ewell harbor in your own craft, like Hemingway did, or take one of the several scheduled ferries. There's a landing strip, too, for small aircraft. Whichever way you get here Ewell Tide Bed & Breakfast can accommodate you and your vehicle.

  For a fuller appreciation of our island read An Island Out of Time, A Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake, by Tom Horton

"Tom Horton lived for nearly three years on Smith Island, recording through observation and interview the traditions of oystering, crab catching, churchgoing, hunting and poaching, and the social rituals of these fiercely independent men and women. His beautifully elegiac story is about community and isolation, harvest and exploitation, and the risks and charms of being different from the surrounding world."