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

The good times encouraged young people to remain on the Eastern Shore and attracted strangers to the peninsula. Between 1870 and 1910 the population nearly doubled, growing from 28,455 to 53,322. In 1906 an official of the U.S. Department of Agriculture noted "the increase of population, especially of young married couples, seeking homes, making new settlements and improving old ones." An indicator of the Eastern Shore prosperity was the growth of its black population. While the black population of Virginia grew by only 24 per cent between 1870 and 1910, that of the Eastern Shore grew by 78 per cent (the Eastern Shore's white population increased by 95 per cent). The demand for labor attracted black immigrants from North Carolina and the Western Shore of Virginia. "This is a promising field for good farm labor," an Eastville man advised, "prices ranging from $1 to $2.50 a day. There are some 500 watermen on the seaside waters getting on an average of $2.50 a day."45

With the local economy booming across the board, labor enjoyed a seller's market. The fisheries, farming, lumbering, and construction competed year-round for labor. In certain sectors demand peaked at the same time. Tourist resorts siphoned off agricultural workers during the summer, and the fall sweet potato harvest coincided with the opening of the oyster season. When times became slack in an occupational specialty, workers enjoyed opportunities elsewhere. At the close of the oyster season in the spring, oystermen might clam or crab or fish pound nets. In May they might help with the strawberry harvest and in July pick up white potatoes. Or they might drive a timber cart or tend the saw at the local mill. During the winter they might leave the oyster grounds for a day or two to work as guides for Northern duck hunters. None of the labor forces was racially exclusive. Both black and white worked for wages in the fields, in the woods, or on the water. Lumbering was a male preserve and female labor in the fisheries was restricted to the packing houses, but the agricultural harvests, essentially races against spoilage, required the services of all available hands regardless of race, gender, or degree of kinship.46

The competition for and flexibility of labor created tensions between workers and employers. In the seafood industry these found expression in occasional and usually successful strikes of oyster tongers and shuckers. In agriculture, tension was especially high at the harvest when farmers worried that their crops might rot in the fields for want of hands to pick them. Racial animosity and distrust exacerbated the situation. A dispute over farm wages set the stage for a minor race riot at Onancock in 1907. As white potato production increased exponentially in the 1910s and 1920s, Eastern Shore farmers employed black migrant laborers to help with the harvest. The farmers themselves were, overwhelmingly, small holders well acquainted with the physical demands of farm labor. A woman who grew up on an eighty-acre farm at Nelsonia recalled that for her father "it was up with the sun all spring, summer, and fall, a short stop for lunch, then back to the farm until sunset. He tilled the fields, planted white potatoes, corn, sweet potatoes, hay, and rye. He scattered clover seed and together he and God raised the crops."47

The expanding population put pressure on the supply of farmland. Farms were divided and sub-divided. As early as 1891 an Onancock man had discovered "a tendency to break up the larger estates of former days and divide them into small farms that can be easily cultivated by two or three men." Between 1890 and 1925, the number of farms in the two counties increased from 2,997 to 4,856 while the average acreage decreased from 86 to 46.1. Curiously, throughout the period the acreage under cultivation remained about the same. In Northampton County farmers brought only 646 new acres under cultivation notwithstanding the value of land increased by over 700 per cent. The farmers' need to preserve their woodlots thwarted the impulse to break new ground. The farmers valued their woodlots as windbreaks protecting the peninsula's level fields and as a source of lumber for building and repair, for fence, and for stove wood. They valued it as a refuge for insect-devouring birds and for the game they so loved to hunt. The farmers especially valued their woodlots as a source of pine needles. "Ever since truck raising displaced general farming, pine needles have been used as a substitute for straw as bedding and as a source of humus," a forestry expert explained. "A truck farm without an adequate supply of pine 'straw' or 'shats' could scarcely compete with its more fortunate neighbors. It would be difficult to place a monetary value on this resource, but it is generally recognized that the trucking industry, as now organized, is largely dependent upon forest litter as a source of humus." Although the Eastern Shore was wealthier in 1920 than in 1910, the latter year's population of 53,322 remained the peninsula's historic high. Farm size had reached its practical minimum. The smaller the farm, the more intensively it must be cultivated to achieve a decent standard of living. Prosperity could not be sustained by ever-smaller farm units divided among an ever-greater number of farmers. Population growth necessarily halted.48

Eastern Shore farmers compensated for the dearth of cropland by dramatically increasing the yield of their staple crops. From 1900 to 1924, sweet potato production increased from 2,529,339 bushels to 2,932,849 while that of white potatoes increased tenfold, from 1,269,055 in 1900 to 12,873,750 in 1924. "Back in 1907," a railroad official remarked in 1919, "we used to get a little chill of joy up and down our spinal columns if we could see a million barrels of white potatoes promised at harvest, if we don't get 3,000,000 barrels now we feel sick." In 1928 the Produce Exchange alone required 14,153 boxcars to move the white potato harvest, a logistical demand that tested the organization and ingenuity of the Exchange and of the railroad. Farmers achieved the increased production by a greater concentration on potatoes (although onions, cabbages, and strawberries remained important cash crops and corn was grown to feed livestock), by improved farm machinery, by the use of pesticides to control the Colorado potato beetle, and by the liberal application of fertilizer. Expenditures for fertilizer increased from $63,000 in 1879 to nearly $1,000,000 in 1909. The end of the open range in the early 1900s also helped by curtailing the depredations of foraging animals and by reducing the farmers' expenditures of time and money on the erecting and mending of fence.49

The ramifications of these changes extended in a ripple effect across the peninsula. The closing of the open range in the early 1900s combined with the importation of cheap pork and beef by rail to prompt the peninsula's farmers to reduce their herds of hogs and cattle. With fewer animals rooting in the woods, the bones of dead animals were less frequently gathered from the woods' floor for grinding into fertilizer. Indeed, around 1910, the county boards of health ordered the timely interment of the carcasses of domestic animals. While the numbers of hogs and cattle declined, those of horses and mules increased in response to the demands of expanding farm, lumber, and seafood sectors. The importation by rail of horses and mules from as far away as Missouri doubtless introduced the diseases that so vexed and worried the owners of Eastern Shore horseflesh.50

Charts:

Click here to view charts showing agricultural change on the Eastern Shore.

The success of the agriculture and seafood industries placed tremendous pressure on the peninsula's forests. By 1917, farmers and watermen annually required nearly 4,000,000 barrels in which to ship their potatoes and oysters. Farmers also needed fence rails, shipping containers for other produce, and frames for sweet potato beds. Everyone needed stove wood (farm families consumed at least fifty cords a year) and lumber for repairs and construction. Eastern Shore forests also supplied the national market. Rafts of lumber and stove wood were towed from the peninsula's creeks and inlets to Northern ports, and beginning in the 1890s companies out of Scranton and Hazelton, Pennsylvania, sent mine props from the swampy lands of the upper Accomack bayside to the anthracite fields.51

Lumbering was almost as omnipresent as agriculture. At least one barrel factory stood in every railroad and waterfront town, portable steam sawmills moved constantly from woods to woods, timber carts passed frequently on the roads, and prop-laden cars filled the rail sidings of Parksley, Bloxom, Hallwood, and other upper Accomack depots. In 1891 Chincoteague Island alone handled 34,690 tons of lumber valued at $159,300. In 1917 the value of the lumber industry on the Eastern Shore was nearly $1,000,000. By the mid-1920s, faced with ever-increasing potato production and with the advent of the pulpwood industry, demand appeared poised to surpass supply. "The demand for barrels alone probably exceeds growth and any wood shipment out . . . must ultimately be replaced by wood grown elsewhere," a forester warned.52

The peninsula's sandy roads were excellent in the summer — "smooth enough for a race track," remarked a traveler who passed through in July – but often badly torn up, particularly by heavily-laden timber carts, in the winter and spring. Growing commerce stimulated public demand for improved roads, and the coming of the motor truck in the 1910s gave it greater urgency. By 1923 the Eastern Shore's best roads were of a sand-clay mixture with a few miles of oyster-shell and macadam in and near the larger towns. In that year began the construction of a concrete highway paralleling the railroad tracks down the spine of the peninsula. The new highway confirmed the inland corridor as the preferred route of business and communications.53