Galena, MD

Galena was once Georgetown Cross Roads, a Kent County stop on the route between Maryland's Eastern Shore and Delaware. The town took its current name from a small deposit of galena, a lead sulfide, discovered in 1813, and incorporated in 1858. Its location mattered long before modern highways: colonial travelers moving between Virginia and Philadelphia passed through Downs Crossroads on the way to a ferry into Delaware. Today Main Street is a small-town center with the old crossroads logic still intact, just south of the Sassafras River and near the Cecil County line. Galena is the kind of Eastern Shore place whose name, roads, and county history all point back to what lay underfoot and beyond the next ferry.