The Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in North America, covers 2,500 square miles. An estuary is a partly closed in area where tidal salt water mixes with freshwater from rivers. The Chesapeake Bay was formed thousands of years ago (12,000+) when melting glaciers from the last Ice Age caused sea levels to rise in the Atlantic Ocean. The rising ocean water backed up into the Susquehanna River Valley, to create the bay. The Algonquin Indians who inhabited the Bay area when the first European settlers came, called the Bay Chesepiooc, which meant “Great Shellfish Bay”.

The Bay has always been a region of plenty. Consider Captain John Smith’s words:

“The country is not mountainous nor yet low but such pleasant plain hills and fertile valleys…rivers and brooks, all running most pleasantly into a fair Bay. Of fish we were best acquainted with herrings, rockfish, shad, crabs, oysters…and mussels. In summer no place afforded more plenty of sturgeon, nor in winter more abundance of fowl.”

Captain John Smith (1612)
A Description of Virginia

About half of the water in the Bay is freshwater and half is saltwater. Most of the freshwater comes from the 5 major rivers in the Chesapeake drainage area -- the Susquehanna, the Potomac, the James, the Rappahannock and the York. The Chesapeake watershed covers 64,000 square miles, including parts of 6 different states.

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