Maryland's wedding venue landscape is organized around the Chesapeake Bay — the largest estuary in North America, whose influence shapes the geography, the architecture, and the visual character of weddings across the state. The Bay's Western Shore has Annapolis, whose colonial capital character — the Naval Academy, the historic district's brick street grid, the City Dock — makes it one of the most recognizable small-city wedding settings on the East Coast. Baltimore lies at the northern end, with the Inner Harbor's skyline-and-water combination and the Charles Village and Mount Vernon historic neighborhoods providing urban depth.
The Eastern Shore is where the Bay's agricultural and maritime character is strongest. St. Michaels, Oxford, and Cambridge have a tidewater plantation and skipjack fishing heritage that shows in the architecture and the waterfront venues. The flat agricultural landscape of the Eastern Shore — fields running to the edge of tributaries that feed the Bay — has a light quality in the late afternoon that is specific to the Mid-Atlantic coastal plain.