The Golf Course Built Martingham. The Water Runs It Now.
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
Walk down to the Hambleton Cove pier on a September evening and you will find the actual center of Martingham. Not the clubhouse. Not the first tee. A dock with twenty-one slips, a kayak launch, and a handful of neighbors checking a phone before deciding whether the kids can swim before dinner. That small ritual, glancing at a water quality post before letting anyone off the dock, tells you more about how this neighborhood actually runs than anything printed on the golf scorecard.
Martingham was built around golf. It was designed by golf. But the course that shaped its lot lines is no longer the thing most residents use, and understanding why changes how you should think about daily life here.
The land under Martingham has a strange golf history. Pete Dye and his brother Roy started working the site in the 1960s, then walked away unpaid when the original development deal fell through. The course got built anyway, first as Martingham Country Club, later as Harbourtowne Resort Country Club, without their design finished. Dye came back decades later, in 2015, with his wife Alice and son P.B., and turned the old Harbourtowne layout into what opened in 2018 as the Links at Perry Cabin, complete with a replica of his TPC Sawgrass island green on hole 17, a hole regulars call the "Dye-abolical."
The course still threads through the community. Widgeon Place, one of Martingham's residential clusters, sits between the 12th and 13th fairways, close enough that the course shapes the view from the back windows. But the Links at Perry Cabin operates as a private club tied to the Inn at Perry Cabin resort, with access built around overnight guests and outside golf-association members rather than a standing resident tee sheet. So the course that gave the neighborhood its identity, and still gives it a good chunk of its scenery, is not where the average Martingham household spends a Tuesday afternoon. It is a landscape feature now, not a daily amenity.
That gap is worth sitting with, because it explains where the actual gathering point moved.
If the golf course is scenery, the water is infrastructure. Hambleton Cove sits along a creek of the same name that feeds into the Miles River, and the cluster there includes 28 townhomes built around a pier with 21 boat slips and a dedicated kayak launch. That single dock does the social work a clubhouse might do somewhere else. It is where people put a boat in the water, where kids learn to paddle, where a Saturday morning starts before anyone has decided what else the day holds.
The neighborhood's Community Park adds the second half of that equation, open ground along the Miles River set aside for picnics and the kind of unstructured outdoor time that does not require a membership card. Between the park and the cove, Martingham has built its own small waterfront commons, separate from the private course running through the middle of the property.
Here is the part that would surprise someone who assumes Martingham's rhythm is set by tee times and clubhouse dinners. The real seasonal clock for anyone using that pier belongs to a nonprofit based up the road in Easton, not to the golf resort next door.
ShoreRivers runs two programs that quietly structure how residents use their own waterfront:
Neither program has anything to do with the golf course. Both of them shape what a Martingham household actually does with its waterfront property on a given week between May and November. That is the calendar that matters if you live here, and it belongs to the river, not the resort.
There is a second reason the water outranks the fairway for daily life in Martingham, and it runs from June through September. Log canoe racing on the Miles River is a nineteenth-century Chesapeake tradition that survives almost nowhere else, wooden hulls built from hollowed tree trunks, still racing competitively on the same stretch of water Martingham sits beside. You do not need a boat or a ticket to watch it. A shoreline view and a summer evening are enough.
That is a genuine local advantage, and it has nothing to do with membership dues. It is one more example of the neighborhood's real entertainment infrastructure sitting on the water rather than behind a clubhouse door.
Martingham's entrance sits about a mile from downtown St. Michaels, and that mile earns its keep specifically on Thursdays. Fifteen of the town's restaurants now run a coordinated Thursday night program, prix fixe menus and chef-driven tastings across the board, effectively making Thursday the town's busiest dining night rather than Friday or Saturday. Pair that with the Saturday farmers market that runs April through November and Concerts in the Park on Thursday evenings through the summer, and the mile between Martingham and downtown starts to look less like a commute and more like a second living room.
None of that requires golf either. It requires knowing which night of the week the town actually shows up for itself, and building your own week around it.
The name Martingham still says golf course community, and the course still frames the views from Widgeon Place and the other clusters closest to the fairways. But the load-bearing amenities for a household actually living here in September 2026 are the Hambleton Cove pier, a nonprofit's weekly water quality post, a pumpout boat schedule, a summer of log canoe racing visible from the shoreline, and a Thursday night a mile down the road. The golf course built this place. The water, and the mile of town next to it, is what runs it now.
If you already live in Martingham, none of this probably surprises you day to day, it is just the rhythm you are already keeping. But it is worth naming, because it explains why the neighborhood feels the way it does even without walking distance to your own tee time.
If you are thinking about what a place like Martingham actually offers beyond the scorecard, or you are weighing a move somewhere else on the Eastern Shore with a similar mix of water access and small-town pull, Eddie Matthews has spent more than two decades working these communities from the ground up. Let's Connect.
Whether you’re buying your first home, selling a trust property, or navigating a probate sale, my goal is always the same: to provide honest guidance, strong advocacy, and a smooth experience from beginning to end. Real estate is about people, not just properties. I would be honored to help you take your next step.
