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

The trains that carried northward game and seafood returned with tourists – rusticators for the seashore, gunners and anglers for the bays and marshes. Many of the vacationers were middle-class urbanites taking advantage of the nation’s increased prosperity and leisure and its expanding transportation network. Between 1876 and 1905 hotels and boarding houses opened on half a dozen barrier islands and on the adjacent mainland. The buildings ranged in size from cottages to the fifty-two-room Atlantic Hotel on Chincoteague Island. Meanwhile, private lodges appeared on seemingly every island and on every high place in the marsh. Most were functional structures, but a few were the well-appointed retreats of financiers and corporate lawyers and their families. The larger resorts included the Revel's Island Club founded by Washingtonians in 1884, clubs on Wallop's and Hog islands established by Philadelphians in 1886 and 1889, and the Accomac Club founded near Parramore Island by New Yorkers around 1890. The Wallop's Island establishment embraced a commodious two-story clubhouse with veranda, guest cottages, a cookhouse, an icehouse, numerous outbuildings, and a steam launch for use as a pleasure craft.84

The effect of shoreline migration and a series of hurricanes in the late 1880s and the 1890s undermined these vacation retreats and made them increasingly untenable despite their elaborate infrastructure. The Cobb’s Island Hotel, the most famous of the barrier island resorts, gradually fell into the sea, a wrecked symbol of the toll nature took on the islands. In 1890, the Cobb family, aware that over the past thirty years the surf had crept ever closer to the hotel complex, sold out to a Lynchburg, Virginia, syndicate that envisioned turning the island into a premier seaside destination. In 1896 a hurricane wrecked the hotel and in 1897 another destroyed the remainder of the complex. Similarly harried by tide, current, and storm, the rest of the hotels and lodges soon disappeared from the islands and the Broadwater.85

The watermen's communities on the outer barrier islands underwent a similar experience of expansion and retreat. The booming seafood and tourism industries attracted people to the island villages. Diminished seafood harvests convinced some to leave, the coming of the power boat encouraged others to exchange the isolation of the islands for the amenities of the mainland waterfront villages, and the shifting shoreline eventually forced off the rest. Broadwater village on Hog Island, home to 162 residents in 1920, lies today a mile out into the Atlantic Ocean. The barrier islands south of Wallops are now virtually devoid of human presence and their landscape contains few relics of a human past. And yet, while the primeval forces of tide, current, and storm precluded permanent human settlement on the outer islands, emerging technologies such as the railroad, the power boat, the ice plant, and the automatic shotgun enabled human exploitation of the surrounding waters.86