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St. Michaels/Oxford Very Southern looking, this imposing white brick plantation-style home at the end of a long lane is surrounded by uncommonly attractive grounds and backs up to the Chesapeake Bay about five miles west of St. Michaels on the way to Tilghman Island. The original house was built in 1819 by Baltimore shipwright Thomas Kemp. A summer wing was added in 1890 and it has operated as a guesthouse in the old Bay tradition ever since. “We’ve been updating it but want it to stay comfy and homey,” said innkeeper Betsy Feiler. The newer Mildred T. Kemp Building has twelve hotel-style rooms, each with one or two queen beds and four with kitchenette facilities to encourage families. All but two have waterfront balconies that you may never want to leave. Each is furnished individually with down comforters, plush carpeting and interesting window treatments, with Bibles on the nightstands, and TVs noticeably absent. The main house has eleven guest rooms, all now with private baths. Separate baths (with showers) were added lately in the Victorian summer wing, whose high-ceilinged rooms open off a long corridor and are barely big enough to hold a double bed but yield water views through tall windows. Larger bedrooms and baths are located on the second floor of the main house and in the third-floor attic. Two of the latter rooms have clawfoot tubs from which you can watch the sun set, if you’re so inclined. The country farmhouse out front sleeps up to fourteen in five more bedrooms, three with private baths. Inn guests enter a reception area in the original summer kitchen. The main parlor is comfortably furnished with sofas, a piano and more books than a Southern gentleman could possibly have read. Beyond is the large Bay Room, a sensational space with columns and arches, a fireplace, white wicker furniture, bleached floors topped with colorful patterned rugs and windows on all sides onto the water. Here is where guests linger over an expanded continental breakfast of fruit salad, cereal, muffins, french rolls and sometimes eggs contributed by chickens raised on the inn’s 80-acre organic farm. A rear porch looks onto the bay, where Betsy says guests catch the biggest crabs off the dock (she’ll boil them for you). There’s great fishing, and you’ll marvel at the deer and birds along the inn’s mile-long nature trail. That is, if you leave the hammocks or Adirondack chairs spread out on the shady lawns facing the Eastern Bay and Kent Island.
For more information: www.wadespoint.com. Twenty-six rooms with private baths. Doubles,
$140 to $240. Closed January and February. Material excerpted from Waterside Escapes in the Northeast, by Nancy and Richard Woodworth. Copyright 2005. Wood Pond Press E-mail feedback to: Home
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