Old Faithful

here are few signs of life in the tiny town of Oxford on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. There’s one road in, one road out, and one set of stoplights that blinks outside the fire hall full of shiny, yellow engines. “For Sale” signs stick in the manicured lawns of charming old Victorians that all sit sandwiched together along the long and narrow main street. There is no café or gas station, no hospital or school. But at the end of the road, past the old oak trees, brick sidewalks, and white picket fences, a crowd of people wait in line at the edge of the Tred Avon River, where the pavement seems to tumble into the bay. A mix of locals and tourists, most wait in cars, some lean on bicycles, but they’re all here for the one thing that keeps people coming to this cozy corner of Talbot County: the Oxford-Bellevue Ferry.

► The Oxford-Bellevue Ferry crosses the Tred Avon River in Talbot County.

► Tom and Judy Bixler have run the ferry for the past 17 years.

Across the water, toward the hamlet of Bellevue, a small white speck gets larger and larger as it returns to the southern dock. Soon enough, the air fills with the cacophonous sound of churning water and the guttural chug of diesel engines. A Maryland flag flaps in the breeze as the nine-car ferry eases toward its slip, and owner Tom Bixler grabs a line from a nearby piling. With a heavy clank, he lowers a ramp onto the boat’s deck, and with everything in place, lifts a thin metal gate and sends his passengers on their way. Judy, his wife of 44 years, waits up top at the wheel, the radio murmuring in the background, as the next queue of passengers begins to pile in.

“If you had asked me if I was going to be a ferryboat captain when I was a little girl, I would’ve looked at you like you were crazy,” she says with a laugh, her blonde ponytail spilling out of a bubblegum pink baseball cap that matches her turtleneck and sweater. “But we’ve had a lot of fun—as they say, this is our ferry tale.”

As the ferry’s owners and operators for the past 17 years, the Bixlers have not only landed their dream retirement gig, but also a piece of Maryland history. This year, the three-quarter-mile ferry line will turn 335, making it one of the oldest privately owned ferries in the country (the Rocky Hill-Glastonbury ferry in Connecticut is said to be the oldest at 363) and some nine decades older than the United States itself. “Most people can’t even comprehend that,” says Tom. “Before this was even a country, the ferry was here.”

Early accounts are somewhat spotty, but we do know the ferry was founded on November 20, 1683, as a service for “horses and men” between the bustling port of Oxford and what would become the Bellevue community in Royal Oak, just outside of St. Michaels. The first owner was a London merchant by the name of Richard Royston who operated the vessel for 2,500 pounds of tobacco a year. As one of Oxford’s founding fathers, he was a man about town, with a nearby island named in his honor. (Though he would later lose his reputation, being convicted of forgery before grovelling his way out of a public whipping and later dying at sea in the 1690s.)

From there on out, the evolution of the ferry and its town would reflect the ebb and flow of their soon-to-be new nation. In its beginnings, Oxford was a nexus for trade, its waters filled with ships bringing goods to and from the colonies. By the American Revolution, it suffered a series of blows as British commerce dried up and wheat replaced tobacco as the new cash crop, but later made a comeback during the post-Civil War oyster boom and with the advent of canning, when seafood and produce packinghouses peppered the banks of the Chesapeake Bay. At one point, in the late 1800s, Oxford even rivaled Ocean City as the premier destination for summer vacation.

All the while, ferry service transferred hands between local innkeepers, even landing under the stewardship of women. Judith Bennett ran the boat through three different husbands in the 1700s and for more than a decade by herself “between spouses.” Throughout its history, at least five other women would run the ferry, some alone and others with partners, like Judy and Tom.

► The ferry in the late 1940s. Courtesy of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum

Different vessels would also come and go, with upgrades and innovations added to each new incarnation. The old wooden sculler of the 1750s, powered by sails and oars, would later be towed alongside a new, coal-fired steam tug in the 1880s, reserved for carrying passengers’ horses, wagons, and, eventually, automobiles. By the 1900s, the tug had “a habit of sinking during the night,” as an old crewman once put it, and was replaced with an improved, gas-fueled version before moving aside for the first self-propelled ferry of the 1930s, built in Oxford, where working boatyards still dot the shoreline today. In the subsequent decades, she grew in size, making extra room as cars became commonplace.

In the mid-1970s, Captain Gib Clark brought a fortuitous new boat down to Oxford from New York, where it had previously run as the Shelter Island ferry. It was on that same Long Island line that Clark had mentored a young Tom Bixler, who started as a deckhand before working his way up to captain. “Gib gave Tom a chance,” says Judy. “The ferry was in his blood.”

Tom and Judy first met in 1971 as lab partners at St. Lawrence University. One day, while sitting on a split-rail fence with Tom’s roommate, the grown men’s weight snapped the wood in half and, in their fall, broke Judy’s leg. “I always say he had to break my leg to catch me,” she jokes, “and the rest was history.” The two married, raised three children, and embarked on many an adventure along the way—moving between suburban New Jersey and upstate New York, driving a motor home across the country, and cruising a sailboat up and down the Atlantic Coast after becoming empty nesters.