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

The string of narrow barrier islands protecting the Eastern Shore mainland from the Atlantic Ocean is one of the most dynamic landforms on earth. Under pressure of current and tide they are continuously on the move, building on one end, diminishing on the other, all the while migrating gradually westward. Some of the islands are mere sandbars; others are heavily forested. Between the islands and the mainland lie the wide expanse of marshes, bays, and channels known as the Broadwater. The islands and adjacent marshes and waters teem with life and serve as a great nursery for creatures of the air and water.70

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Between the Eastern Shore mainland and the barrier islands lay the Broadwater, a wide expanse of marshes, bays, and channels. The Broadwater was nursery and way station for a myriad of animal life whose exploitation the coming of the railroad facilitated.

In 1870 humans resided on some of the islands. They made their livings by farming, herding, and market hunting. They also fished, clammed, and gathered oysters. Some gained temporary employment in "wrecking" – salvaging beached vessels and cargo or gathering debris from the wrack-strewn beach. The islanders sent their produce by steamboat and sailboat to Philadelphia and New York. On Cobb’s and Assateague islands, resort hotels catered to bathers in the summer and to gunners and anglers the rest of the year.71

Beginning in the 1870s a tremendous increase in the volume of shipping along the Virginia coast demanded improved maritime safety. The United States Coast Survey mapping of the Eastern Shore coastline was a first step, but the bars and shoals of the Atlantic took an ever-heavier toll in life and property. The federal government responded by improving the existing lighthouses on Assateague, Hog, and Smith’s islands, by anchoring a lightship off Assateague, by erecting a lighthouse on Killick Shoals in Chincoteague Bay, by establishing a quarantine station on Fisherman’s Island, and by surveying Chincoteague Inlet as a possible harbor of refuge.72

More important, in the 1870s and 1880s, the federal government established life-saving service stations on most of the barrier islands. Over the years the keepers and surfmen of the stations saved countless lives and millions of dollars in property. While the men of the life-saving and lighthouse services fought storms and shoals on behalf of mariners and their vessels, they fought a quieter battle against the insidious effects of current, tide, and shoreline migration. They had continuously to replace buoys and channel markers, to move or even abandon lighthouses and life-saving service stations. "The station buildings upon the coast are all constructed with a view to withstand the severest tempests," boasted the superintendent of the life-saving service in 1904. "This substantial construction also enables them to be easily and cheaply moved when threatened by the gradual encroachment of the sea, which upon many sections of the coast, effects in the course of years great changes in the configuration of the coast line." So rapid was shoreline migration on Cobb's Island in the late nineteenth century that the life-saving station had to be moved in 1896 and again in 1898.73