The town of Eagle Harbor is a tranquil enclave of vacation cottages and year-round homes on the Patuxent River in the southern tip of Prince George’s County. The progress of a people and of a nation has played out on the town’s quiet, storied shores.

Like most of the Aquasco area, agriculture drove the local economy in centuries past. In 1659, Lord Baltimore granted the land that now encompasses Eagle Harbor to a Joy Woods. For the following two centuries, the cultivation of tobacco and other cash crops by a labor force of African slaves made area plantations a vital part of the nation’s growing economy. Even after the Civil War, the population of the Aquasco area remained over 55% African-American.

In the 1890s, Captain George Weems, proprietor of the Weems Steamboat Company, built a tobacco warehouse on what is now Trueman’s Point Landing. This was one of several key stops for Baltimore trading ships. There were two hotels there serving commercial and recreational travelers. Nevertheless, the land remained largely under-developed until the late 1920s.

In the era of Jim Crow segregation, finding a refuge from the unforgiving summer heat of Washington, D.C., was no easy task for the city’s growing African-American middle class. But in 1926, black developer Walter Bean bought the parcel of land now known as Eagle Harbor and began selling the lots out of his office in Washington’s thriving Shaw neighborhood. With their quiet, crescent-shaped beach located on the placid Patuxent River, the 1,000-plus lots priced at less than $50 sold quickly. In addition to modest summer cottages, several more substantial houses designed for year-round use were erected. The Eagle Harbor Citizens Association incorporated the town in 1929, with John T. Stewart, Sr., as the Board of Commissioner’s first chairman.

History is never far away in Eagle Harbor. Indeed, the present Board of Commissioners includes a granddaughter and a great nephew of two pioneering families: the Delaneys and the Wades. The Board is leading the Town into the new millennium as charming 1920s bungalows are joined by new and remodeled homes. New generations are discovering the unequaled calm of life in a town where history rises with the morning mist.