Salisbury historical timeline

Salisbury has been the Eastern Shore’s market town for nearly three hundred years.

Founding

Laid out in 1732 at the head of navigation on the Wicomico, where a mill and a landing already existed, and made a market town for the surrounding farms. Shipbuilding, milling and the shipping of grain and timber sustained it through the colonial period.

Fires and rebuilding

The town burned twice, in 1860 and again in 1886, the second fire destroying most of the commercial district. What stands downtown is therefore almost entirely late Victorian, rebuilt in brick with fire in mind.

Railways and canning

The railway arrived in the 1860s and turned the peninsula’s produce into an export business; canneries processed tomatoes, sweetcorn and oysters, and Salisbury became the commercial hub for a large rural area.

The chicken industry

In 1923, by the standard account, a Sussex County farmer ordered fifty chicks and received five hundred, raised them for meat and found a market — and the modern broiler industry followed. Vertical integration, feed mills and processing plants spread across Delmarva, and Perdue Farms, founded near Salisbury in 1920 as an egg business, became one of the largest poultry companies in the United States and remains headquartered here.

Segregation and after

Salisbury was a segregated Southern town and the Eastern Shore had a difficult record, including lynchings in the 1930s that drew national attention and contributed to the anti-lynching campaigns of the period. The history is documented locally, and a community remembrance project has placed markers.

Modern

The university expanded from a teachers’ college, and downtown has been redeveloped around the river since the 2010s.