Church Hill, MD

At the 2020 census, Church Hill was a Queen Anne’s County town of 808 on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, with a name probably tied to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and Parish House on the hill above Route 19. The church dates to about 1732 and is described by the town as Maryland’s oldest brick church, built with a Flemish-bond facade and a price measured in pounds of tobacco. Church Hill incorporated in 1818, grew around mercantile and grain trade, and had its business section nearly wiped out by two fires in 1927.

Then there is the Church Hill Theatre, an art-deco building that began as a 1929 community hall, hosted suppers, dances, graduations, town meetings, and silent films, and became a movie house in 1935. When the wrecking ball threatened it in the 1980s, local preservationists bought the building and brought it back as a volunteer-run performing arts center. Church Hill Park adds ball fields, trails, pavilions, and the everyday recreation piece. The town’s appeal is the way those layers sit together: colonial church, grain-town main street, movie-palace rescue, and a community still making use of its old rooms.