Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Shady Side, MD

Shady Side is an unincorporated census-designated place (CDP) in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, on a low peninsula on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay, just south of the West River.

The 2020 census counted 5,806 residents in Shady Side, almost exactly the same as the 5,803 counted in 2010.

Shady Side grew quickly in the 1990s, rising from 4,107 residents at the 1990 census to 5,559 in 2000, before its population leveled off.

The 2020 census counted 2,599 housing units in Shady Side, and its residents had a median age of 44.2 years.

For generations Shady Side was a working watermen's village, its families making their living oystering, crabbing, and fishing on the Chesapeake Bay and the West River.

The Captain Avery Museum preserves that heritage in the home built about 1860 for Captain Salem Avery, a Long Island-born waterman and buyboat captain who purchased seafood directly from local watermen.

The Avery house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005 and is operated as a museum by the Shady Side Rural Heritage Society, which founded the museum in 1984; its boathouse displays the Edna Florence, a locally built 1937 Chesapeake Bay deadrise workboat.

In the 1920s the Avery property was expanded by the National Masonic Fishing and Country Club, a summer colony of Washington Masons, most of them Jewish and led by sons of labor leader Samuel Gompers, who were denied access to many beaches and clubs of the era and called the colony Our Place.

Franklin Point State Park, 484 acres of woodland and tidal marsh on the bay in Shady Side, opened in 2015 on the site of the former Deep Creek Airport, which had closed in the 1980s and was later eyed for a 300-house development.

Franklin Point is one of the last intact areas of undeveloped woodland on the western side of Chesapeake Bay and is used today for hiking, wildlife viewing, and paddling.