Point Lookout State Park

The United States government leased Point Lookout in 1862, and by that August it had opened Hammond General Hospital here to treat wounded Union soldiers, drawn by the peninsula's isolation and its access by water. In 1863 the point took on a grimmer role when a prison camp, officially Camp Hoffman, was established to hold captured Confederate enlisted men. It grew with terrible speed.

By late 1863 more than nine thousand men were confined here, and after prisoner exchanges broke down the camp swelled past twenty thousand, far beyond anything it was built to hold. Over the course of the war more than fifty-two thousand prisoners passed through its gates. Conditions were brutal: the low, exposed point offered little shelter, wells grew foul, food and clothing ran short, and men froze in flimsy tents through the bay winters. More than four thousand prisoners died here, and their loss is memorialized nearby.

Set aside the history for a moment and Point Lookout is simply a lovely stretch of the Chesapeake. The land narrows to a slender point with the bay on one side and the broad Potomac on the other, so the water and the light change constantly and the breeze rarely stops. Bay beaches invite swimming and wading in the calm shallows, and the shoreline is a favorite of anglers and crabbers working the productive waters where river and bay mix.

At the tip stands the Point Lookout Lighthouse, a modest keeper's-house-style light first built in 1830 to guide ships into the Potomac. Long famous in ghost-story circles for tales tied to the prison dead, the lighthouse is a quiet landmark that anchors the point and opens for limited tours in the warm season. Marshes and pine woods behind the beaches draw herons, ospreys, eagles, and migrating songbirds, making the park a rewarding spot for birdwatchers as well.

After the war the point went quiet again, its prison torn down and its story fading into the peninsula. In 1965 Maryland's park service began assembling the land into a state park, and over time it grew into today's park of about a thousand acres, balancing public recreation with the care of a solemn historic site.

The park's visitor center now holds a Civil War museum whose exhibits lay out the hospital, the prison, and the lives caught up in them, and a section of the prison pen has been reconstructed on the ground where it stood, giving visitors a physical sense of the camp. Together with the memorials to the Confederate dead nearby, these keep the memory honest, so that families coming for a beach day also leave knowing what happened on this shore.

Point Lookout sits at the end of Point Lookout Road (Route 5) in St. Mary's County, a scenic run down the peninsula from the Route 4 corridor and a couple of hours from both Washington and Annapolis. A per-vehicle day-use fee applies in the busy season, and the park draws crowds on hot summer weekends, so arriving early helps with both parking and a good patch of beach.

Come ready for an open, sunny, sometimes buggy landscape, with sunscreen, water, and insect repellent in the warm months. Give yourself a half-day to do the point justice: start at the visitor center and the reconstructed prison wall to understand the ground, then walk out to the lighthouse and the tip where the two great waters meet, and finish with a swim or a stroll along the bay. Few places pair a beach day and American history quite so directly, and the meeting of the Chesapeake and the Potomac is worth the drive on its own.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.