Things to Do in Cecil County, Maryland: Attractions, Parks & Family Activities

Looking for things to do in Cecil County, Maryland? From family attractions and outdoor recreation to historic towns, farms, waterfront parks and seasonal events, Cecil County has far more to explore than most visitors realize. Plumpton Park Zoo sits in Rising Sun near the northern end of the county, which makes it an easy starting point for a Cecil County day trip.

Cecil County is the head of the Chesapeake Bay — roughly 240 miles of shoreline, a working canal, granite cliffs, colonial waterfronts, horse country and orchards — and most of it sits within about half an hour of the zoo, with the farthest corners inside an hour. Here is what is worth your time while you are here, with the practical details the brochures leave out.

Best Things to Do in Cecil County

Popular things to do in Cecil County include:

• Plumpton Park Zoo in Rising Sun
• Historic Rising Sun, the zoo’s hometown
• Elk Neck State Park and Turkey Point Lighthouse
• Fair Hill Natural Resources Management Area
• Milburn Orchards in Elkton
• Chesapeake City and the C&D Canal Museum
• Port Deposit and the Susquehanna granite cliffs
• Great Wolf Lodge in Perryville

Each one is covered in more detail below.

Zoo Hours & Tickets

Cecil County Attractions at a Glance

Things to Do With Kids in Cecil County

If you are traveling with children, these are the places that reliably work:

• Plumpton Park Zoo — more than 200 animals, close up and without the crowds. Giraffe feeding runs every day the zoo is open (12:00 noon on weekdays and 11:00am and 1:00pm on weekends; 11:00am and 1:00pm daily from Memorial Day through Labor Day, weather permitting), and there is gemstone and fossil panning at the sluice and miniature golf on site.
• Milburn Orchards, Elkton — pick-your-own through the season, then hayrides, a corn maze and a pumpkin patch in autumn.
• Elk Neck State Park and Turkey Point, North East — a sandy swimming beach, and a lighthouse trail level enough for small legs.
• Great Wolf Lodge, Perryville — an indoor water park kept at 84 degrees whatever the weather.
• Fairwinds Farm & Stables, North East — trail rides for beginners, and pony rides for children too small for the trail.
• Painted Sky Alpaca Farm, Earleville — free tours, and a working fiber mill to walk through.

Things to Do in Rising Sun, Maryland

Rising Sun has been good to this zoo, and we would rather say so than not. It is a town of about 2,700 people just up Telegraph Road from our gate, and the things to do in Rising Sun, Maryland, are worth an hour or two either side of your visit — arrive early or leave late and spend part of the day in it.

The name came off a tavern sign. The inn stood on the old road between Baltimore and Philadelphia and hung a board painted with the rays of the sun coming up; travelers called the place the Rising Sun, and by the time the post office opened around 1815 the name had settled. The tavern doubled as the local hall for business, politics and elections, which is more or less what Main Street has gone on doing ever since.

SunFest is the big one. The Rising Sun Chamber of Commerce runs it on the first Saturday in June, opening with a parade through town at nine in the morning and carrying on all day with vendors, food, games and a good share of the county turning out. In October the Fall Spooktacular closes part of Route 273 in front of the Town Hall for carnival rides and food stalls, and in December there is a Winter Extravaganza with a tree lighting and a lighted tractor parade — which is exactly as good as it sounds.

For food to take home, three family places are worth the stop: Gifford’s Farm Market & Feed Store on Biggs Highway, which does Angus beef, fresh pork and weekend baked goods, and will sell you chicken feed and advice besides; BG’s Farm Market east of town on Chandlee Road, with homemade pies on Fridays and Saturdays; and Rising Sun Market on Dairy Street, an Amish family grocery with a butcher counter and house-made sausages.

Outdoors and on the Water

Elk Neck State Park in North East occupies the peninsula between the Chesapeake Bay and the Elk River: a sandy beach and swimming area, a canoe and kayak launch, picnic shelters, and around 14 miles of hiking trails through marsh, woodland and white clay cliffs. The signature walk leads to Turkey Point Lighthouse, built in 1833 and standing on a 100-foot bluff where the Elk River meets the Bay. The view is the reason people keep going back, and the lighthouse trail is level and short enough for young children. There is a campground too, with tent sites, hook-ups and rustic cabins, if you want to stretch the trip into a weekend.

Fair Hill Natural Resources Management Area, north of Elkton where Routes 213 and 273 meet, covers more than 5,600 acres of the former du Pont estate — a large network of trails for walking, biking and horseback riding, and the Foxcatcher Farm Covered Bridge over Big Elk Creek. It is free, it is rarely crowded, and it is the closest thing in the county to simply being let loose outdoors.

The Ben Cardin Recreational Trail runs flat and paved along the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal from Chesapeake City and carries on across the state line toward the Delaware River. Good for strollers, good for bikes, and you will almost certainly watch a ship go past.

Farms, Orchards and Animals

Milburn Orchards

Milburn Orchards in Elkton has been in the same family since 1902. Pick-your-own runs right through the season — cherries, then berries, then apples — and the autumn weekends bring hayrides, a corn maze, a pumpkin patch and a play yard that will tire out a small child properly. Those fall festival weekends are the busiest days on this whole page, and tickets are sold online ahead of time rather than at the gate.

Horseback Riding at Fairwinds Farm & Stables

Fairwinds Farm & Stables in North East is the one to know for riding. Trail rides begin with a short confidence-building loop in the ring before heading out through the woods and fields, which means they genuinely work for people who have never sat on a horse. There are pony rides for children too small for the trail, lessons, hayrides, horse-drawn carriage rides, summer camp for ages 8 to 13, scout and school programs, and a bed and breakfast in the farmhouse.

One thing worth knowing before you go looking: Fair Hill Stables, which ran the guided rides inside Fair Hill for years, has closed — its lease was not renewed while the five-star event course is developed. Some listings still show it as open. You can still ride at Fair Hill on your own horse, on some 70 miles of riding trails, with camping and stabling for riders and separate routes for carriage driving.

Painted Sky Alpaca Farm & Fiber Mill

Painted Sky Alpaca Farm & Fiber Mill in Earleville is a twenty-acre farm where you can meet the alpacas and walk through Maryland’s only full-service fiber mill — fleece going in one end and yarn coming out the other. Tours are free. They also run painting sessions and yoga classes in the company of the alpacas, which is exactly as unusual as it sounds.

Cecil County Farm Museum

The Cecil County Farm Museum on Appleton Road in Elkton keeps antique tractors, horse-drawn equipment, a blacksmith shop, a vintage general store and a good deal of rural home life besides. It opens for monthly events rather than daily, so check the calendar before you drive over — this is the one people most often turn up to find shut.

Farm Markets and Christmas Trees

The Cecil County Farmers’ Market runs May to September in North East, in the church lot on South Main Street: strawberries and cherries early on, then peaches, sweet corn and melons as the summer goes. Farm stands sit along most of the back roads between here and Elkton, and there are choose-and-cut Christmas tree farms at Pusey Tree Plantation in Colora and T-n-T Trees at Maple Springs Farm in Elkton once December comes round.

For the grown-ups, the county has a small cluster of wineries — Dove Valley Vineyard, Broken Spoke Winery and Bohemia Manor Farm Winery — that make an easy afternoon tasting circuit.

Small Towns Worth Exploring

Chesapeake City is on the National Register of Historic Places and makes the most walkable afternoon in the county — restored houses, inns, shops and restaurants along the canal. The C&D Canal Museum there is housed in the original stone pump house and still holds the steam engines and the 39-foot waterwheel that once worked the canal locks. Children who like big machinery do very well here.

North East has a Main Street of antique and gift shops and a park down on the creek. Charlestown is a colonial waterfront village with a small museum of eighteenth-century local and maritime artifacts. Port Deposit is built into a narrow strip beneath granite cliffs along the Susquehanna, and keeps a museum of the Bainbridge Naval Training Center that once stood on the heights above the town.

Historic Places in Cecil County

Almost everything old in Cecil County is here because of water. The creeks that drew millers in the seventeen-hundreds also drew the canal builders, the granite quarries and the colonial ports, and the towns above are the downstream end of the same story.

The 1734 Grist Mill at Plumpton Park Zoo

You can start it at the zoo, as it happens. The oldest thing on our grounds is not an animal: it is a water-powered corn and grist mill built by Jeremiah Brown Sr. in 1734 on North East Creek, with a stone house added in 1757. It ground grain for the farms around it for the better part of two centuries, and the site joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1987. The mill was heavily damaged by lightning and fire in 1971 and later reconstructed on its original stone foundation, though portions of the earlier structure survive — original framing with visible charring and smoke staining, and massive floor timbers planed flat on one side. It sits at the front of the zoo housing the gift shop — you walk straight past it on the way in. Read more about the Jeremiah Brown Mill and the history of Plumpton Park Zoo.

Cecil County’s Covered Bridges

Two of Maryland’s six surviving covered bridges are in this county, and both of them were mill bridges. Gilpin’s Falls Covered Bridge, on Route 272 just north of North East, is the longest in the state at 119 feet — built over the winter of 1860 by a Cecil County bridgewright named Joseph George Johnson, and thrown across the millpond beside Samuel Gilpin’s mills. It crosses the same North East Creek that runs through our grounds a few miles upstream: the same water, the same century, the same reason for being there. It is closed to traffic now, so you can walk through it. Foxcatcher Farm Covered Bridge, over Big Elk Creek inside Fair Hill, went up the same year as Strahorn’s Mill Bridge and took its present name in 1927, when William du Pont Jr. bought the land around it for his Foxcatcher Farms estate.

Downstream from the Mill

That same creek runs south past Charlestown and out into the Chesapeake, and if you follow the water you have the rest of it: a colonial port at Charlestown, granite quarried from the cliffs that Port Deposit is wedged beneath and shipped downriver, and a canal cut between two bays at Chesapeake City. Four sites, one afternoon, and the whole argument for why anybody settled here in the first place.

Indoor and Rainy-Day Activities

Great Wolf Lodge opened in Perryville in 2023 and is the largest thing to arrive in Cecil County in a long while: 700 suites and a 126,000-square-foot indoor water park held at 84 degrees whatever the weather is doing outside, plus duckpin bowling, an indoor ropes course, a mirror maze and a climbing wall. The catch worth checking in advance is that water park wristbands come with the room, so it has been built around overnight stays rather than walk-in visits.

The C&D Canal Museum at Chesapeake City and the Cecil County Farm Museum in Elkton both work in poor weather, the farm museum on its event days only. Hollywood Casino Perryville, Maryland’s first casino, sits just off I-95 at the southern end of the county, for adults with an evening free.

Plumpton Park Zoo — A Family Attraction in Rising Sun, Maryland

And the zoo, of course. We are a short drive from I-95 and Route 1, with free parking and a hand stamp that lets you leave and come back the same day — which makes us easy to combine with anything else on this list.

More than 200 animals live here, about half of them taken in from owners who could no longer care for them, and once an animal arrives this is its home for life. You can feed the giraffes at the feeding station, pan for gems and fossils at the Jeremiah Brown Mining Company sluice and keep what you find, play a round of miniature golf, and see white lions, tigers, bears, wolves and sloths without the crowds or the cost of a big-city zoo. The historic 1734 mill stands at the front of the property and houses the gift shop.

Check hours and tickets, find directions and parking, see what is coming up on our events calendar, or read the visitor FAQs before you set out. There is more about Cecil County’s local zoo, including driving directions from every corner of the county.

A One-Day Cecil County Family Trip

If you have a single day and want to use it well:

• Morning — Plumpton Park Zoo in Rising Sun. Arrive near opening while the animals are active, and time your visit around the giraffe feeding. Take the hand stamp on your way out.
• Lunch — Rising Sun or North East, both a short drive.
• Afternoon — Elk Neck State Park and the Turkey Point Lighthouse trail in warm weather; Milburn Orchards in late summer and autumn, when pick-your-own and the corn maze are running.
• Evening — the Chesapeake City waterfront for dinner and a walk along the canal.

Zoo Hours & Tickets

Cecil County is also an easy day trip from Newark and Wilmington, Delaware; southern Chester County, Pennsylvania; Harford County, Maryland; and communities along I-95 between Baltimore and Philadelphia.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best things to do in Cecil County with kids?

Plumpton Park Zoo in Rising Sun, the swimming beach and lighthouse trail at Elk Neck State Park, pick-your-own and the autumn corn maze at Milburn Orchards, trail and pony rides at Fairwinds Farm in North East, free alpaca tours at Painted Sky in Earleville, and the indoor water park at Great Wolf Lodge in Perryville. At the zoo itself there is giraffe feeding, gemstone and fossil panning, and miniature golf.

What can you do in Cecil County for free?

Fair Hill Natural Resources Management Area has more than 5,600 acres of trails and costs nothing to walk. Tours at Painted Sky Alpaca Farm are free. Gilpin’s Falls Covered Bridge is closed to traffic, so you can walk through it. Wandering Chesapeake City, North East, Charlestown and Port Deposit costs nothing either. Note that Elk Neck State Park charges a day-use entrance fee in season.

What are the best outdoor activities in Cecil County?

Hiking the lighthouse trail to Turkey Point at Elk Neck, swimming and paddling at the North East beach, walking or cycling the flat Ben Cardin Recreational Trail along the C&D Canal, and riding — either a guided trail ride from Fairwinds Farm, or some 70 miles of trails at Fair Hill if you bring your own horse.

What is there to do near Rising Sun, Maryland?

Plumpton Park Zoo is on Telegraph Road just outside town. Rising Sun itself has a historic Main Street, SunFest on the first Saturday in June, the Fall Spooktacular in October and the Winter Extravaganza and lighted tractor parade in December, plus Gifford’s Farm Market, BG’s Farm Market and Rising Sun Market for food to take home. Fair Hill is a short drive east.

What can you do in Cecil County when it rains?

The indoor water park at Great Wolf Lodge in Perryville is held at 84 degrees year round, though it is built around overnight stays. The C&D Canal Museum at Chesapeake City is indoors, as is the Cecil County Farm Museum in Elkton on its event days. Hollywood Casino Perryville is an option for adults.

Can you visit Plumpton Park Zoo and other Cecil County attractions in one day?

Yes. Most of what is on this page is within about half an hour of the zoo, and our hand stamp lets you leave and come back the same day, so a morning at the zoo and an afternoon at the shore, an orchard or a canal town is an ordinary day out here. The one-day itinerary above is the version we would suggest.

Last updated: September 2026.

Seasons and opening times vary at all of these, and several are seasonal or event-day only. We check this page from time to time, but ring ahead before you travel a distance for any one of them.