Annapolis is one of Maryland’s most important cities. The Chesapeake doesn’t care.

The first humans to lay eyes on what would eventually become Annapolis, more than 10,000 years ago, likely gazed upward and saw it as a ridge above a wide river valley that led out to the Atlantic Ocean. Over millennia, fresh water from the rivers and creeks of the coastal plain and salt water from the sea devoured the shoreline, filled in the valley and created what we know as the Chesapeake Bay.