Bishopville, MD

At the 2020 census, Bishopville was a Worcester County census-designated place of 499 people ten miles north of Berlin, just south of Delaware. The community grew around a mill and a road crossing on the Bishopville Prong of the St. Martin's River; Maryland Route 367 still follows that practical line through the place. It is part of the Salisbury, Maryland-Delaware metro, but the local geography is more creek, bridge, and low coastal plain than suburb.

Bishopville's old mill relationship has even shaped recent water work. At Route 367, a steel dam on Bunting's Branch was removed and replaced with pools, runs, and weirs to improve fish passage and reduce nutrient pollution. That is a very Bishopville kind of story: the road still crosses the same water, but the crossing now has to work for the river as well as the people using it. Between the prong, the mill site, the Delaware line, and the route to Berlin, Bishopville feels like a small Eastern Shore crossroads with its history written in moving water.