The Karen Noonan Center, 30 Years Strong

A victim of the Pan Am Flight 103 terrorist bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, 20-year-old Karen Noonan was a college student devoted to education and the outdoors. For more than 30 years, her legacy has lived on through this CBF education program.

Lighting the wick of an old oil lamp, CBF Captain Doug Walters sits down in a driftwood chair and clears his throat. Warm light flickers on the faces of 20 middle schoolers as they settle into the couches circling the room. They laugh and reminisce about the day they’ve had down at the very southern tip of Dorchester County, Maryland, on Bishop’s Head peninsula. 

One student points out specks of dried mud behind another’s ear, left over from the afternoon of marsh mucking. Two students exclaim about the white perch they caught off the dock at sunset using the grass shrimp they collected as bait. Another group discusses how many crabs might be caught in their crab pots, and they make their predictions. They are reminded of the early sunrise, the beachcombing at low tide, the oysters caught while dredging, and the legendary skipjacks docked in the Deal Island harbor. The stories of the day swirl around the room.

Morgan Jones/CBF Staff

Once the group settles, Walters begins the evening story calling back to the 1850s and the days before the Karen Noonan Center was used for environmental education. The building was an old farmhouse, and the surrounding land held tomato crops and cows. Now, only a few straight, hand-dug irrigation ditches cutting through the marsh remain from those long-gone farming days. 

At the turn of the century, Albanius Phillips transformed the farmhouse into one of the great hunting lodges on the Chesapeake Bay. Walters lists several well-known people who hunted the area, including Annie Oakley and Babe Ruth, names that still ring with recognition on the young students’ ears. After years of waterfowl hunting in the surrounding waters and marshes, the lodge hosted its final hunting trip in the 1970s. The property then sat vacant for many years.

Walters pauses and glances over to the portrait of a young woman hanging on the wall. He begins again by saying that there is a name written on the sign welcoming people to the property, on the boat that carries us around, and on several of the walls around the center; that name is Karen Noonan. He explains that Karen was a college student who dreamt of becoming a teacher. She loved working with children and loved the outdoors. Karen was tragically killed in the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland while traveling home after studying abroad in Vienna, Austria. It was just five days before her 21st birthday.

The room falls somber, and the students look solemnly over at Karen’s portrait. After a stretch of silence, the captain continues, explaining that Karen’s father, Pat Noonan, wished to honor Karen and her legacy. He worked to help the Chesapeake Bay Foundation acquire the property for use as a residential environmental education center. With the support of the Noonan family and other families that lost loved ones in the attack, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation opened up the Karen Noonan Memorial Environmental Education Center in 1995, combining two of the things that Karen loved most—education and the outdoors. 

Walters explains that their group is just the latest group in a long line of students and teachers to have experienced the Bay and its magic at the Karen Noonan Center thanks to Karen’s legacy, a legacy that is going 30 years strong.