Buying Land in Somerset County, Maryland

One of Maryland's most rural counties, at the Eastern Shore's southern tip

Somerset County occupies the southern end of Maryland's Eastern Shore, bordered by Wicomico County to the north, Virginia's Eastern Shore counties to the south, and the Chesapeake Bay and Pocomoke Sound to the west and south. It is consistently characterized in state and secondary reporting as one of Maryland's least populous and most thoroughly rural counties -- a description reflected in a land base still dominated by agriculture, watermen's trades, and a relatively small, dispersed population centered on the county seat, Princess Anne.

That rural character has practical implications for a land buyer beyond simple ambiance: a smaller county government generally means a leaner planning and zoning staff, potentially slower turnaround on permit reviews, and GIS or mapping resources that may be less frequently updated than in a larger, better-funded Maryland county. None of that is disqualifying, but it's worth budgeting extra time into any Somerset County land purchase timeline for these kinds of administrative steps.

That agricultural land base runs heavily on large-scale poultry production for Mountaire Farms, and the county's poultry buildout is dense enough -- more than 50 poultry houses within a 3-mile radius in some areas, per Bay Journal reporting -- that county zoning sets a specific commercial-poultry setback (200 feet generally, 300 feet in the county's R1 district) and that residents and public-health researchers have raised documented concerns about the industry's proximity to homes. See our dedicated standalone on poultry operations in Somerset County for the setback specifics and a 2025-2026 statewide permitting freeze that briefly halted new poultry-house construction.

Smith Island: a real Chesapeake community, and a genuinely distinct due-diligence problem

Somerset County's most distinctive geographic feature isn't on the mainland at all. Smith Island, reached by a roughly 45-minute boat ride from Crisfield, is Maryland's last remaining inhabited offshore Chesapeake island community without any bridge connection -- three small villages, Ewell, Rhodes Point, and Tylerton, with a combined population that recent sources place in the low-to-mid hundreds (older figures cite roughly 280 residents; more recent Census-tract-level data for the island cites roughly 202). The island's watermen-based culture and its physical isolation make it unlike anywhere else covered on this site.

Smith Island also faces a genuinely severe, well-documented land-loss problem: the island has lost roughly 3,300 acres of wetlands over the past 150 years to erosion, at a rate reported by multiple sources as roughly two feet of shoreline per year in places, and a widely cited 2008 study projected the island could be almost entirely underwater by 2100 under continued sea-level rise. Local and federal efforts, including a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers environmental restoration project and multiple living-shoreline installations funded at a state and county level, are actively working to slow that loss, but any land purchase on Smith Island itself should be treated as its own specialized inquiry -- covering flood risk, erosion history, insurability, and boat-only access -- rather than folded into ordinary mainland Somerset County due diligence.

Government structure, Critical Area, and septic/well basics

Somerset is governed by a traditional Board of County Commissioners, led by a President chosen by the board itself, holding combined legislative and executive authority for the county rather than splitting those roles between an elected County Executive and a separate Council. Zoning and permitting questions for mainland Somerset County parcels run through the county's own planning and zoning office under this structure.

Somerset's extensive Chesapeake Bay and tidal-tributary shoreline -- including the Manokin River, the Big Annemessex River, and Pocomoke Sound -- places it among the roughly 16 Maryland counties administering a certified Critical Area program under the state's 1984 Critical Area Act, described in full on our Maryland state page. Septic and well permitting follow the same statewide COMAR 26.04.02 and 26.04.04 standards used everywhere in Maryland, run locally by the Somerset County Health Department -- and given how much of the county sits near tidal water, the state's Bay Restoration Fund for nitrogen-reducing septic upgrades is genuinely worth asking about for any parcel with an existing older system.