Betterton is located at the mouth of the Sassafras River on the upper Chesapeake Bay in Kent County, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore region of the Bay and Delmarva Peninsula in the Eastern United States).

[5] The Betterton Historic District consists of a collection of vernacular Victorian era-style wooden frame resort structures.

The district includes many of the homes, hotels and cottages built to accommodate steamboat passengers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Notable buildings within the district include the hotels and boarding homes which catered to the steamboat passengers, several churches, and summer cottages, dating from the golden age of the passenger steamboats on the Chesapeake Bay.

The house located at 104 Ericsson Avenue contains foundation bricks dating back to 1698.

For the next 100 years, Crews Landing was a small fishing village and then later a port for the waterborne transport of local farm produce to urban markets.

Eventually townspeople rented out rooms to the travelers, salesmen, and shippers attracted to the beach.

These were joined by such lodging establishments as the Betterton, the Chesapeake, the Country Cousin, the Southern, and many others.

The Ericsson Line was named after John Ericsson (1803-1889), the Swedish-American inventor of the "screw propeller" (and of Civil War revolutionary naval Ironclad warships) to more speedily and efficiently power ships.

It was this invention that allowed steamboats to be built with narrow enough beam to allow them to traverse the recently opened Chesapeake and Delaware Canal then only 25 feet wide (before it was later widened and improved), connecting the upper Chesapeake with the Delaware River and Bay.

For some time before the turn of the 20th century, there were 11 scheduled steamboat landings daily at Betterton's piers.

The boom period for Betterton is generally thought to be from 1918 to 1930, when increasing numbers of restaurants, taverns, dance halls, bowling alleys, and amusement arcades all helped create the bayside town's pleasure resort image.

Routes and Interstate Highways systems in following decades to North Atlantic Ocean beaches and growing resort towns there like Ocean City, Maryland and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware [7] Betterton is governed by a mayor and a town council with four members.