Sharptown, MD

Sharptown is a Wicomico County town on the south bank of the Nanticoke River, about two miles from the Delaware line. The 2020 census counted 691 residents. Maryland Route 313 provides the main connection toward Salisbury, Laurel, and the Delmarva interior, while the river points across to Dorchester County. The town incorporated in 1874 and was named for Horatio Sharpe, Maryland’s proprietary governor.

Sharptown’s older economy was tied to the river, timber, and shipbuilding. The channel and nearby forests supplied the materials for masts and keels, and the town’s waterfront position kept it connected to the wider Chesapeake trade. San Domingo School, built in 1919 as a Rosenwald school for Black children, is now on the National Register and remains one of the clearest local reminders of the community’s twentieth-century history. Today Main Street, the town hall, churches, parks, and river roads keep the town’s scale intact. Sharptown is a small Nanticoke town whose story runs from ship timber to a preserved schoolhouse and the working river beside it.