CAMBRIDGE -- On a recent weekday, innkeeper Stuart Schefers spent the morning turning away callers from his fully booked Queen Anne-style bed-and-breakfast.
"This kind of business was unheard of in Dorchester County at this time of year," said Schefers, who operates Cambridge House. "Business is just waiting for people who are willing to work hard."
Schefers' experience is increasingly commonplace in Cambridge and Dorchester County on Maryland's Eastern Shore -- an easy drive from Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia.
Underscoring its newfound appeal is the $140 million Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay Resort -- a project valued at more than four times the county's annual budget -- that's slated to break ground as soon as early summer.
Long before it was almost a sure thing, the project boosted confidence in a town long down at the heels, spurring renovation and new business. These days, organ tape marks off the resort's planned golf course by the 2-mile-wide Choptank River.
Nearby, tall pines will remain home to blue herons, with no traffic from the proposed 400-room, six-story hotel allowed. Just offshore, workmen bore into the mud to prepare for 480 boat slips. Eventually, 100 single-family homes and 200 multiple-family dwellings will be built nearby.
"You have to come from an area that has economic problems to know what this will mean for our area," said Cambridge Mayor David J. Wooten. "For the first time in many years, we have people excited about the future."
Already, investors are gobbling up land near the proposed 350-acre site. Commercial property values have more than doubled since Hyatt's interest surfaced. A Holiday Inn Express has broken ground across the street, and downtown shops for sale are being snapped up.
Schefers, who left New York two years ago for a quieter life, got the idea of turning the 24-room Sea Captain's mansion into an inn within five minutes of entering the house. Business leaders and officials in this town of 15,000 told the longtime chef and restaurateur about the Hyatt, the 86-room Holiday Inn Express and other signs of new life. Schefers bought into the dream.
"Obviously these corporations are not going to invest in an area that they don't think will have some kind of boom," Schefers said.
Around town, people are excited about growth in a county where the population has held at 30,000 for decades, a region of double-digit unemployment where average household income hovers above $30,000.
"Cambridge needs a change, and if what it takes is the Hyatt, then bring it on," said Patti Webster, the 34-year-old owner of Looking Good Family Hair Salon near downtown. "Hopefully, it will give us more jobs. We don't have any young people who want to stay here."
The project, which includes a conference center, is expected to funnel about $30 million a year into the region -- employing about 350 and generating 500 construction jobs and 300 in other businesses.
State and Hyatt executives have predicted that the resort on the Choptank would become one of the leading tourist draws on the East Coast -- rivaling the Greenbrier in West Virginia and South Carolina's Myrtle Beach.
Dorchester County, the setting author James Michener chose for his epic novel "Chesapeake," boasts the 22,000-acre Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, Annie Oakley's house and Harriet Tubman's birthplace.
More than 100,000 people travel to Blackwater each year, but there is no exact count of Cambridge visitors. About 220 groups toured the area last year. Twenty buses signed up for the local Seafood Feast-i-val, up from nine last year. But people generally don't stay overnight.
"We haven't been able to capture the dollars that tourism can bring in," said Winifred J. Roche, director of Dorchester County Tourism.
A new emphasis on heritage tourism and a $3 million visitors center are part of the effort to change that.
One marketing approach taps into the area's rich African-American history and the popularity of heritage tourism, a niche in which tourists tend to stay longer -- and spend more -- as they probe their roots.
The Harriet Tubman Organization Inc. is working to create an authentic plantation near the escaped slave's birthplace and to develop self-guided tours of Underground Railroad sites, which she used to lead hundreds of slaves to freedom.
By next month, a 5,570-square-foot visitors center will greet drivers that cross the Fredrick C. Malkus Jr. Bridge into Cambridge, mostly en route to beach resorts. The center is expected to change the marketing of Cambridge and of Dorchester County.
In addition to providing brochures and maps, the building, with windows overlooking the Choptank, will house the county's tourism department. An exhibit downstairs will tell the story of Dorchester County and a boardwalk will lead to a marshland exhibit beyond the center, which is expected to have 40,000 visitors its first year.
With luck, the county will win back the 110-foot-tall sail designed as part of the building, but cut to trim costs. Locals hope a combination of private and government efforts can come up with the needed $375,000.
Realtor's dream
By most accounts, the man credited with winning Hyatt executives over to Cambridge is Realtor Bob Spedden, 64, owner of Spedden & Associates.
His decade-long effort to spur tourism evolved into a nonprofit group called Sailwinds Park Inc. in the early 1990s, with plans for a $30 million project to include a hotel, restaurants, a marina and shops. So far, that complex includes a meeting hall, playground and festival grounds about a mile west of the proposed Hyatt.
Hyatt officials rebuffed an initial feeler about including a hotel in the project because the site was too small, but jumped when Spedden found out 350 acres acres surrounding the Eastern Shore Hospital Center, a state psychiatric hospital east of Cambridge, would be available.
Gov. Parris N. Glendening announced the Hyatt deal in early 1998, with the state kicking in a $2 million Sunny Day Fund loan.
The Hyatt project, in the final stages of securing financing, has avoided any organized opposition. But its fate could hinge on a bill pending in the General Assembly.
As part of the agreement with Hyatt, Cambridge officials promised a 25-year tax abatement on the resort complex. That promise was contingent on a 1 percent boost in the Dorchester County hotel tax to 5 percent, with 4 percent going to the city.
But the Maryland Hotel and Motel Association is fighting the bill implementing the tax increase because the revenue is not earmarked for tourism.
"They've got to use the money to advertise what they've got or they're going to have a great big white elephant sitting there on the point," said Mary Jo McCulloch, president of the Maryland Hotel and Motel Association.
William W. McAllister Jr., who represents Chesapeake Resort LLC, the Hyatt project, says passage of the hotel tax bill is crucial.
"The allocation to the city of their percentage of the room tax was an express condition of the city's agreement to provide a tax abatement for the resort," McAllister said.
"It was their view that the money would be needed to provide essential services like police, fire and ambulance to the resort and to provide revenue while the tax-paying residential component develops," he said. "If the bill is not passed, then a condition of the city's commitment to provide an abatement is not met."
Ray White and partner Joe Peters, owners of several Holiday Inn Express locations in the area, are happy about their Cambridge Holiday Inn Express, slated to open in September, across from the proposed Hyatt. But, he says, the Hyatt wasn't a deciding factor.
"We were committed to the Cambridge project regardless of whether the Hyatt became a reality or not," he said. That's how much we believed in the area."
But there's no doubting the impact the Hyatt has had, said Pam Wingate, owner of Pam Wingate Real Estate.
"Before the Hyatt officially announced, commercial real estate went through the roof," she said. "It was pretty much known it was going to happen."
Real estate boom
One- and two-acre parcels across from the Hyatt that once would have sold for $200,000 are now at least $400,000, she said. And evidence of heightened activity is visible in the investment housing markets as well, she said.
"There's always been a lot of people coming here buying second homes, but now people are coming out of the woodwork investing in duplexes and wanting to build apartments."
Within the past six months, her investment property business has more than doubled, she said. The Hyatt project is even fueling property sales downtown. "Local people are buying them," Wingate said. "They like the area, and they see where it's going."
Even though the first shovel has yet to dig into the ground for the Hyatt project, businesses downtown are seeing the effects.
"We're getting added business already, said James Simmons Sr., 86, who opened Simmons Center Market, in 1937.
Today, the small store is bustling. Sales were up about $20,000 last year, with another 2- to 3-percent increase expected this year.
Up the street, Craig's Pharmacy, established in 1867, has seen its business jump 20 to 30 percent since moving in July from its 800-square-foot store to a 6,000-square-foot one 100 yards away.
"I believed five years ago that there was promise in the downtown area, and I believe it today, said owner Charles W. Kelly. "My belief is that even if the Hyatt canceled, we're on the verge of economic success and economic recovery. I think Cambridge has been discovered. I think Dorchester County has been discovered."