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

In 1915 the leading agriculturalists in the nation took the railroad to the Eastern Shore of Virginia to study how the tiny peninsula had become a worldwide force in the potato market and in the process created a vital, wealthy, and by all accounts successful agrarian society. Clarence Poe, editor of the Progressive Farmer, was especially interested in the doings of the Eastern Shore Produce Exchange. He labeled it a “$5,000,000 truck marketing association” and proclaimed it one of the leading examples in the nation of the staggering profits that were possible in agriculture. The tightly-run exchange had shocked the financial establishments in Baltimore and Philadelphia when it declared a dividend of 70 percent.39

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The headquarters of the Eastern Shore of Virginia Produce Exchange stood adjacent to the rail yard in Onley. "Do not make the mistake of supposing that Baltimore can ever become the distributing point for Eastern Shore goods," the general manager of the Exchange warned a Baltimore reporter. "The little country town of Onley, Va., is now the distributing point and will be such so far as man can see into the future. Don't you know, sir, that we can get as good rates from this point as Baltimore or Philadelphia or New York can possibly get?"

Steady economic growth had followed the coming of the railroad to the Eastern Shore but a boom awaited the end of the decade-long depression of the 1890s. Revived prosperity in the urban North now combined with a growing population, both native and immigrant, to increase demand for fruits and vegetables. Although possessing favorable geographic and transportation advantages, Eastern Shore farmers hitherto had failed to enjoy the returns that the expanding market seemed to promise. "In pre-prosperity days on the Eastern Shore," an observer later remarked, "the farmers knew how to grow potatoes and grew them. But they didn't know how to market them, and so they weren't marketed. They were consigned to their fate, which more often than not was a tragic one." On occasion, returns were so small that farmers were paid in postage stamps. In 1900 a group of Eastern Shore farmers and businessmen sought to improve the region's position in the volatile national produce market by incorporating as the Eastern Shore of Virginia Produce Exchange.40