A familiar building on the campus of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum will be restored to reflect its important history in the seafood industry.
The museum in St. Michaels received a $242,000 grant from the State of Maryland to rehabilitate a Victorian home on Navy Point, which was most recently used for the Museum Store (which has since moved to CBMM’s new Welcome Center). It is one of five original buildings on campus.
The home once belonged to entrepreneur William H.T. Coulbourne of the Black-owned Coulbourne & Jewett Seafood Packing Company, which was the largest employer in St. Michaels during the early 20th century. Coulbourne’s home was just a short walk from the seafood packing business.
William Coulbourne and Frederick Jewett were among the earliest seafood packers in the region to specialize in canning crabmeat in the summer, not just oysters in winter. They devised a crabmeat grading system that is still used by the seafood industry today, marketing crab as regular, special, claw, backfin and lump.
Coulbourne’s home will soon include outdoor interpretive signage “detailing the story of these pioneering entrepreneurs and the laborers who made their living on Navy Point while highlighting historic connections between Black communities and the Bay,” CBMM says.
The home was built in 1875, as a residence for the miller at an adjacent sawmill, before Coulbourne lived there. The first phase of the rehabilitation will be an exterior renovation. The siding, roof, and single-pane windows will be repaired or replaced while keeping their historic integrity. In later phases, the interior of the home will be renovated for its use as education space.
The museum has already retrofitted the home to hold some education programs there, from the Rising Tide after-school program, field trips and homeschool programming, to summer camps.
The grant awarded last month that will pay for the work comes from Maryland’s African American Heritage Preservation Program (AAHPP). Once restored, the building will be renamed the Coulbourne & Jewett Education Center.
“We are thrilled to be able to further our mission through the implementation of this new education space while honoring and amplifying the very important historical story of Coulbourne & Jewett,” says CBMM President & CEO Kristen L. Greenaway.
Along with the Coulbourne & Jewett Education Center, the AAHPP awarded grants to fund 30 other projects for a total of $5 million in Fiscal year 2025. They include the Frederick Douglass Summer Home in Anne Arundel County, archaeological investigation of a holding cell related to the transatlantic trade of enslaved people in Chestertown, several churches, Baltimore’s Harlem Theater, and a Black cemetery at the Catoctin Furnace.
