Marshes at Jug Bay

Jug Bay, along the Patuxent River, Maryland. Mount Calvert, the house overlooking the marshes, dates to the 1780s. The treeline at right marks the roadbed of the Chesapeake Beach Railway, which crossed the river here on a swing bridge, until the line’s closure in 1935.

This landscape offers a hint of what Washington, D.C.’s rivers and shorelines might have looked like before the city’s late-19th century urban expansion.