William G. Thomas III, et. al., The Countryside Transformed

Finally, in 1884 the Eastern Shore not only had a railroad but also one of the largest corporations in the nation operating in its midst. The Pennsylvania Railroad had entered into a traffic agreement with the Peninsula Railroad, now renamed the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad Company. With this powerful connection the Eastern Shore's transformation seemed foreordained to many residents. It was to become the produce "garden" of the cities, the place of rest and relaxation for urbanites, the orchard land of the east coast. William L. Scott, the Erie, Pennsylvania, coal magnate who was a leading investor in the N.Y., P. & N., expected that the railroad would bring a "great revolution" in the variety of agricultural products that would enter the Philadelphia and New York markets. He noted the gentle climate of the shore, which he compared with Marseilles, France, and the superb quality of the soil, which, he said, exceeded that of Long Island.32

The natural features of the region were not the only sources for the bright future that William Scott envisioned. At a cost of nearly $300,000, the N.Y., P. & N. was dredging a new harbor out of a large fresh-water lagoon between King’s and Old Plantation creeks in lower Northampton County, and Scott planned to develop a new town around it called Cape Charles City. The appellation “City” for any place on the Eastern Shore was romantic, a vision of the future that the railroad might make possible. To dramatize the opportunities, Scott suggested, "Take a compass and draw a circle over the lower Chesapeake, within a radius of seventy-five miles of Cape Charles, and you will find that 18,000,000 bushels of oysters are gathered every year, while there are only about four millions taken from all other waters of the country."33

Cape Charles City and its harbor were planned as a hub for traffic flowing via steamboat and barge to and from Norfolk where numerous railroad lines extended South and West. Less than a year after its founding, a reporter described the place as “an embryo city . . . with a breakwater, long piers, and sundry warehouses and other buildings.” In 1887 the Pennsylvania, the N.Y., P. & N., and the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad agreed on a traffic arrangement, the “Atlantic Coast Despatch,” which greatly facilitated the shipment northward of Southern early fruits and vegetables. A few years later the N. Y., P. & N.’s allies in Congress placed Cape Charles harbor in the River and Harbor Act. In 1890 the Corps of Engineers dredged the harbor basin, its entrance, and a channel through Cherrystone Inlet and built stone jetties protecting the harbor outlet. By 1912 the Corps estimated that Cape Charles harbor handled 2,500,000 tons of freight a year.34

Over the next several decades the N.Y., P. & N. continued to expand and improve its infrastructure. Beginning in 1906, the railroad double-tracked its line using heavier rails and in 1912 completed an extension Southward from Cape Charles City to Kiptopeake. It installed a block signal system in 1908, substituted telephone for telegraph dispatching in 1912, and replaced manual signals with electric in 1923. It built new shops and offices at Cape Charles City in 1910 and all the while added and upgraded sidings. Boxcar capacity increased from 40,000 lbs. in the 1880s to 100,000 in 1901. Boxcars were equipped with ventilators for the shipment of seafood and vegetables and after 1913 were of all-steel construction.35

Where the earliest travelers on the new rail line had seen “little except pine forests, corn fields, fallow fields and here and there a farm house surrounded by a few fruit trees,” those that followed soon after discovered “new settlements appearing, and buildings going up wherever a station has been built.” From the new depots (eventually numbering twenty-eight) rail cars carried away seafood from the Broadwater, mine props from the swampy forests of the upper Accomack bayside, and produce – onions, cabbages, strawberries, and sweet and white potatoes – from the peninsula’s farms. “The stimulus of profitable trade piles up the stations with their produce,” an Englishman observed, “for they are engaged in feeding populations numbering several millions, from 200 to 500 miles northward. The rapid trains for the quick delivery of produce go as far as Boston, and in some cases to Canada. In 12 hours the fresh and tempting fruits and vegetables are delivered in New York, in 20 hours in Boston, and in 30 hours in Montreal.” A few of the depots remained villages busy only at the harvest, but others grew rapidly into towns.36

The towns developed as nodes on a greater network, as residents rearranged the landscape around the railroad. Local people, not the railroad corporation, developed most of the railroad towns. All were laid out in a more or less regular pattern with their business districts adjacent to and often facing the rail yard and their residential neighborhoods, developed by different people at different times, laid out in square or rectangular blocks. Cape Charles City and Parksley, planned by Northern investors, were more formally arranged. They were laid out in a grid with lots reserved not only for businesses and residences but also for a variety of community purposes. One of Parksley’s founders boasted that “foresight was shown in the reservation of a five acre site to be maintained as a park on the west side of the railroad and a one acre lot on the east side to be used as a playground. An additional five acres were reserved for school buildings and two choice lots were granted to each church which applied for same.”37

A network of new roads soon connected the countryside to the railroad towns. Neither stream nor swamp discouraged the farmers, watermen, and lumbermen who yearned for more direct access to the rails. In 1898, for example, the haul between the seaside necks and the station at Painter was shortened by the bridging of the Machipongo River. Meanwhile, Slutkill Neck on the bayside was more directly linked to the depot at Onley by the building of multiple spans across the upper reaches of Onancock Creek. Before the coming of the railroad, the Eastern Shore’s road pattern had resembled a grid with the north to south roads (known as the seaside, middle, and bayside roads) crossing those running east to west from sea to bay. Now it more closely resembled a sequential series of webs emanating from each of the railroad towns. So intricate had the pattern become that an architectural historian writing in the 1970s mistakenly attributed its origin to medieval England.38