Museum Hours
The museum is open every weekend from 10 am to 3 pm, May through October.
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Off-hour tours are available by appointment. Please call 410-996-1025 to schedule an opening.
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For any questions, please contact us.
About the Museum
Tilghman Watermen’s Museum celebrates, documents, preserves and shares the history, traditions, heritage, and culture of Tilghman Island.
The mission of the Tilghman Watermen’s Museum is to preserve, document, and interpret the maritime history and cultural heritage of Tilghman Island and the region.
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The Museum is dedicated to honoring the contributions of the watermen and women whose labor, skills, and traditions have shaped the Island’s identity and economy. Through engaging exhibitions, educational programs, archival preservation, and community partnerships, the Museum fosters public understanding of the working waterfront, supports heritage tourism, and promotes awareness of the island’s maritime traditions. The Museum contributes to the community vitality and ensures this important legacy is sustained and shared with present and future generations.
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In 2007, a handful of Tilghman’s Island residents came together to try to preserve a historic workboat, the Kathryn. This singular idea soon expanded into the larger effort to record the ongoing story of Tilghman’s Island’s unique community, a community rich in history and with a culture centered on the work of watermen and their families. These early efforts led to the birth of the Tilghman Watermen’s Museum.
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The Museum opened in June 2008, in a small building that was once the island’s barber shop. Two barbers, Duckey Scharch and Johnny Moore, worked at the drawers and mirrors. Johnny was also the island’s undertaker and kept a display of tombstones in the field across the street.
When TWM opened, the focus was primarily on capturing, on audio and video, the stories and experiences of the watermen before the old way of life on Tilghman disappeared. That effort produced an initial video, “Growing up on Tilghman,” featuring the memories of 11 distinctive island residents who grew up in a place they considered “paradise.” The Museum then went on to produce four more videos “Tilghman Tales”, Til-Made”, “Another Day”, and “The World of William Cummings”.
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The Museum moved and expanded to the Lee House in 2015, a late-19th-century Victorian “W” house to house the growing art collection. Tilghman attracts artists. Not only do locals and “come heres,” people who have moved to the island, celebrate its history, natural beauty, and fascinating residents through art, but so do well-known artists like John Barber and Marc Castelli.
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Collecting boat models and other artifacts is an ongoing activity. The Museum is packed with examples of watermen’s tools, past and present, as well as explanations of their craft and the different techniques used in harvesting the Bay - pound netting, tonging, dredging, crabbing, etc.
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Current exhibitions focus on local area landmarks, islands, island art and artifacts, and boat models: a remarkable collection of original paintings and remarqued prints, boat models by Bill Sommers, Vincent Haddaway, and others, and historic photographs.
