Point Lookout

August 30: Point Lookout is the tip of the St. Mary's peninsula where the Potomac flows into the Chesapeake Bay. In 1830, Congress appropriated funds for a lighthouse to help mariners find the Potomac (the Potomac is so wide that it just looks like the middle of the bay). It was a very hazy, humid day on both the bay (l) and the Potomac (r).









There was lots and lots of fishing:

During the Civil War, a large hospital was erected at Point Lookout and, following the Battle of Gettysburg, a large POW camp as established for captured Confederate soldiers. In 1870, Maryland moved the graves of about 4,000 Confederate dead (the number is apparently disputed) to a mass grave on higher ground and erected a white obelisk; in 1920, the United States took over maintenance of the cemetery and erected a granite obelisk with the names of the known dead at the base:









More than a century later, descendants of the Confederate dead have started a memorial park on a nearby site:













St. Mary's Episcopal Church (l) and Maryland's "Freedom of Conscience" statue (r).