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Lighthouse overnights at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels

Youth groups can now reserve fall dates for the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum’s Lighthouse Overnight Adventures program. Dates include select Fridays and Saturdays, Sept. 1 through Oct. 28, with advanced reservations needed for groups of 12 to 18 children and their chaperones.

Under the guidance of a museum educator, adventure participants can travel back in time to explore the life of a late-19th-century lighthouse keeper, all while spending the night in the historic 1879 Hooper Strait Lighthouse, situated on CBMM’s 18-acre campus on the Miles River and St. Michaels Harbor in St. Michaels, Md.

The program shares the stories of the keepers who lived and worked in Chesapeake lighthouses. From lighthouse engineering to the daily task of maintaining the great lamp, the overnight adventure uses games, costumes, and historic objects to explore the Bay’s lighthouses. The experience can also be used toward earning badges for Brownie, Junior and Cadette Girl Scouts, or just for fun among all groups and their chaperones.

The 1879 Hooper Strait Lighthouse, now standing at CBMM’s Navy Point, was originally built to light the way for boats passing through the shallow, dangerous shoals of Hooper Strait, a thoroughfare for boats bound from the Chesapeake Bay across Tangier Sound to Deal Island, or places along the Nanticoke and Wicomico Rivers. The Chesapeake’s iconic “screwpile” lighthouse is built on special iron pilings, which were tipped with a screw that could be turned into the muddy bottom for a depth of 10 feet or more. CBMM’s lighthouse is the second lighthouse constructed at Hooper Strait, with the first one destroyed by ice in 1877.

The adventure program is for children ages 8 to 12 and their chaperones and is $40 per person, with a 12-person minimum, 18-person maximum. The fee includes one overnight stay in the lighthouse with a dedicated museum facilitator, a drop-in scenic river cruise aboard the 1920 buyboat Winnie Estelle (subject to seasonal availability), the cost of program activities, two day admission to CBMM’s exhibitions and campus, and a souvenir patch. Overnights are reserved on a first-come, first-served basis, with a $100 deposit needed. For inquiries or to make a reservation, visit bit.ly/lighthouseovernight

Children ages 8-12 travel back through time to explore the adventurous, exciting, and sometimes dangerous life of a late 19th-century lighthouse keeper while staying overnight in the 1879 Hooper Strait Lighthouse at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum and on the Miles River in St. Michaels, Md.