William G. Thomas III, The Chesapeake Bay

Indians moved into the Chesapeake region about 12,000 years ago and adjusted to a series of environmental shifts in the region. We know that Paleo-Indians hunted in what is now the offshore Atlantic coast since fishermen have recently found Paleo-Indian hunting implements and the remains of extinct species. About 4,500 years ago, a major decrease in the rate of sea level rise made water salinity and temperatures stabilize enough for the growth of numerous species of shellfish and fish. The earliest known shellfish middens in the Chesapeake date back no earlier than 4,500 years ago. Later, Indians began to cultivate corn, squash, and beans 1,000 years ago probably in response to increasingly dry conditions and consequently reduced foods.

What was the Chesapeake like when first European settlers arrived? From the archaeological evidence, several patterns are relevant. First, there were perhaps 30,000-45,000 Indians in 1600 living in the Chesapeake coastal region. They practiced mixed agriculture, lived in villages, hunted deer in the upper coastal plains and Piedmont, and slashed and burned forests to clear land for cultivation. When necessary, they moved to locations with fresh soil. Second, while Woodland Indians had lived for thousands of years in close relationship with the changing environment, they were not conservationists. They cleared lands and moved as necessary, their low numbers making little impact on the available resources (with the significant exception of white-tail deer which Indians had hunted too extensively in the coastal plain). Finally, these peoples were experiencing significant social and economic change when the colonists arrived. Increasing population, conflict over limited resources, and reliance on cultivated crops contributed to the development of territories and chiefdoms. At a major shellfish midden on the lower Potomac, for example, archaeologists found roasting pits first used about 700 years ago, probably to dry oysters for storage and transportation to inland villages. Indian populations were rising and there were probably scheduling conflicts over the use of the oyster beds.

Much of what we know about the Chesapeake before colonization comes from John Smith and William Strachey, who wrote detailed accounts of their travels in the region in the seventeenth century. They often saw the region as a "wilderness, as God first ordained it." They were struck by the forests especially and the density of foliage, and like most Englishmen they considered the land to be "improved" when it had been cleared for cultivation. English visions of the landscape included the introduction of domestic livestock, the first beasts larger than a white-tail deer on the land in millennia.

The Chesapeake's colonial experience with tobacco and the development of slavery marked it as a region of the South. The origins of African slavery in the Chesapeake colony remain obscure, but records indicate the arrival of Africans at Jamestown in 1619 and possibly earlier. Over the seventeenth century as mortality rates declined, planters slowly replaced indentured servitude with enslaved laborers. Largely because of its high rate of mortality in the early years and its turn to slavery and forced labor, the Chesapeake society, especially Jamestown colony, has often been considered an aberration in the founding of the American colonies--materialistic, exploitative, company-driven, profit-seeking, competitive, and unreligious. Some scholars, notably Jack Greene, have argued on the other hand that the Chesapeake society of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was far from a "peripheral, much less a deviant area" and instead was "in the mainstream of British-American development."

Over the nineteenth century, the landscape of the Chesapeake shifted again as planters moved from tobacco to wheat and small grain production and then to truck farming crops such as potatoes, tomatoes, and beans. Farmers tilled more land, used nitrogen fertilizers to enhance productivity, and reclaimed wetlands. The development of mechanized agriculture and its widespread practice in the Bay region helped cause the deterioration of the Bay's ecosystem. In the late nineteenth century oyster harvests from the Bay were shipped by rail all over the east coast, and commercial hunters harvested waterfowl for market. Studies indicated that the peak of oyster production on the Bay occurred in the late 1870s when the average annual harvest was 7 million bushels. By the 1920s the oyster harvest was reduced to 2 to 4 million bushels annually until the 1950s. Since the fifties several virulent diseases have crippled the oyster beds, in some years depleting harvest to just 100,000 bushels. Drought, decreases in eelgrass, and other environmental factors took a toll on the region's bird populations. Industrial growth in the watershed combined with population increases in its urban and suburban centers in the twentieth century to put further pressure on the sensitive balance in the Bay's ecosystem. For many historians, environmentalists, and observers, the declension model--from health and balance to sickness and instability--remains the dominant way of understanding and evaluating the ecosystem's history.