Port Deposit, Maryland

The name says everything. Port Deposit sits at the northern tip of navigable water on the Susquehanna River, the exact point where oceangoing vessels from the Chesapeake Bay could go no further. Flatboats and wagons loaded with lumber, grain, coal, and whiskey floated downriver and offloaded here, and ships took it south to Baltimore and Philadelphia.

The village began as Creswell's Landing, near a ferry later run by Colonel John Creswell. Soon after, the State of Maryland recognized the settlement's commercial importance and gave it the name Port Deposit. Incorporated in eighteen twenty-four, the town was built almost entirely of the distinctive local granite, quarried straight from the cliffs above the river.

Captain John Smith had been here first, navigating the Susquehanna in sixteen oh eight.