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Maryland’s dispensation reflects the exalted place angling occupies in America. Around 50m Americans go fishing each year; not far off as many as voted for Donald Trump. A minority of them fly-fish. Yet (1)the sport’s elite reputation, which came with it from 18th-century Britain, and the commitment of its devotees, have made it especially influential and revealing. Presidents from Grover Cleveland to George H.W. Bush have been devoted to it. Three have written books on fly-fishing: including Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, who spent the day after his crushing electoral defeat in 1980 building an ingenious contraption to dry his fly-lines.

Fly-fishing's success in America reflects above all the country’s natural bounty. Within a few decades of the technique being mainly practised by British officers, homesick for their own chalk stream, Americans were fly-fishing in diverse conditions for bass and many species of salmon and trout. This led them to innovate; some American fly patterns were based on native American lures. (2)Yet the fly-fishing establishment remained concentrated on the Anglocentric east coast. This encouraged an unwarranted inferiority complex, which was compounded by the fact that early American fishing scribblers and fly-tiers tended to be British. (3)The first great writer, Theodore Gordon, initially wrote for a British journal.

But even then America was showing its genius for popularising elite culture. This was partly a reaction to the snooty Anglos. (4)“Our fish are too Republican, or too shrewd, or too stupid, to understand the science of English trout fishing,” wrote a peeved angler in 1830. A similar urge drove baseball to supplant American cricket around this time. (5)Yet the growth of a New World fly-fishing tradition, more capacious than the British one, reflected above all America’s vast socioeconomic, as well as piscatorial, possibilities.

An exploding rail network opened up new angling paradises to thousands of first-generation fishers. The connection between infrastructure and wilderness was sometimes overt; the owners of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad offered a $20 gold piece to anyone who caught a 10lb trout alongside its tracks. Other entrepreneurs also seized the opportunity fly-fishing presented. Wisconsin’s fly-tying industry (6)would soon produce over 10m lures a year. While the east-coast elite maintained an exclusive idea of fly-fishing, it had become a mass hobby.

The inevitable downside of this growth, overfishing and pollution, led to a pushback in the late 19th century. In the name of conservation, private fishing clubs grabbed areas that had previously been open to the public. Such enclosures at least led to better management- which was then applied nationally in the emerging conservation movement that fly-fishers had thereby helped launch. (7)America’s angling lobby has sometimes erred from its strong environmental record. To maintain bipartisanship, it has said little about the ominous threat of climate change to America’s rivers. And rainbow and brown trout- which the Lexington team was after- are two of America’s most invasive species. But as the Gunpowder, once a stagnant trickle, goes to show, the billion-dollar angling industry remains a powerful force for conservation.