Salisbury Culture

Salisbury’s culture belongs to the Eastern Shore, and one strand of it is internationally significant.

Decoy carving

Hunters on this coast carved wooden birds to lure waterfowl within range, and on Delmarva that working craft became an art. Lem and Steve Ward, barbers in Crisfield, carved decoys between customers from the 1920s and progressively shifted from working birds to decorative ones of extraordinary refinement, and collectors followed. The museum named for them holds the definitive collection, and the world championship it runs each April brings carvers from many countries to compete in categories from working decoys to interpretive sculpture. It is one of the few genuinely American folk arts to have developed a competitive high-art form, and it happened here.

Watermen

Crab and oyster fishing on the Chesapeake supports a culture with its own boats, language and seasons, under pressure from stock decline and regulation.

Food

Blue crab steamed with Old Bay seasoning and eaten with a mallet on newspaper, soft-shell crabs in spring, oysters in winter, and chicken in every form.

Chesapeake foodways

The crab feast is a regional institution rather than a meal: a table covered in newspaper, a pile of steamed blue crabs coated in seasoning, wooden mallets, and several hours of picking. The technique is taught to children and judged in adults, and the season runs from spring into autumn.

Music and festivals

Salisbury hosted the National Folk Festival for three years from 2018 — the touring event that settles in a different American city for a three-year run and then leaves an established festival behind it. That is exactly what happened here, and the town now runs its own free folk festival on the same downtown streets each autumn.