Excerpt from Tidewater Maryland an Embayed Coast Plain
A line drawn from Washington to Baltimore and on toward Wilmington, Delaware, will cut the State of Maryland into two almost equal portions, the eastern and slightly larger one of which is the Coast Plain, often called Tidewater Maryland. This Washington-Baltimore-Wilmington line is the famous "Fall Line," where the rivers descending from the upland meet tidewater; it marks the point of contact between two regions of very different geological age and physical composition, the ancient Piedmont and the recent Coast Plain, the first composd chiefly of hard crystalline rock, the second entirely of soft sedimentary material.
Though the Coast Plain of Maryland is but a small part of that great lowland which fringes the Atlantic and Gulf Shores of the United States from New York Bay to the Mexican border, in actual land surface it covers over 5000 square miles, an area exceeding that of Connecticut. By a partial drowning of the region, the sea has flowed into the ancient valley of the Susquehanna, thus forming Chesapeake Bay, which occupies the heart of the Plain, and by converting the lower courses of the tributaries into estuaries, has made the region typically embayed. The Maryland portion of the Chesapeake, with its numerous estuaries, thus gives, within the Plain, a water area of more than 2000 square miles, over 40 per cent, as large as the Plain's land surface. This embayment has profoundly affected the life of the inhabitants on both sides of the Bay. It is a striking geographic control.
The two parts into which the Bay cuts the Plain have been distinguished from early colonial times as the Eastern Shore and the Western Shore, the mass of the Western Shore, lying south of Baltimore, being now commonly called Southern Maryland. The Eastern Shore is the larger of the portions, containing 60 per cent, of the Plain, or 3200 square miles, while the whole Western Shore comprises only 2100 square miles. Though much alike in some respects, other factors have caused these two sections to differ greatly in development.
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