The Countryside Transformed: The Eastern Shore of Virginia, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Creation of a Modern Landscape |
| William G. Thomas III, University of Nebraska
Brooks Miles Barnes, Eastern Shore Public Library Tom Szuba, University of Virginia |
Essay Sections:
Introduction | On
The Edge of Modernity | The Railroad and the Modern
Landscape | The Railroad's Direct and Indirect Effects
| Nature's Limits | Conclusion
| Notes | Recommended Resources
Notes:
Acknowledgements. The authors would like
to thank the readers for Southern Spaces for their helpful comments
and suggestions on this essay, and especially Sarah Toton, Melissa Sexton,
Stacey Martin and Franky Abbott for their work with web design and multimedia
components. They would also like to thank the participants of the Nineteenth
Century Studies Workshop at the University of Nebraska for their fine
comments on this essay, including Andrew Graybill, John Wunder, Douglas
Seefeldt, Laura White, Ben Rader, Ken Winkle, Wendy Katz, Greg Routledge,
and Ken Price. Other colleagues have provided careful readings and criticism,
especially Barbara Y. Welke, Edward L. Ayers, and Barry R. Truitt. Thanks
also to Scott Nesbit and Elizabeth Ladner at the University of Virginia
and Michael S. Scott, Lauren McDermott, and staff at the Eastern Shore
Regional GIS Cooperative at Salisbury University for their help in preparing
the digital objects in this work. The authors are especially grateful
for the support and encouragement of Tom Fooks for this project and for
his enthusiasm throughout.
1.An
entirely new infrastructure around the railroad developed on the Eastern
Shore in a tightly-compressed period of time, about twenty-five years.
The railroad came late to the Eastern Shore. In contrast, Lincoln, Nebraska,
had a railroad nearly two decades before the Eastern Shore of Virginia,
despite the latter's proximity to the large cities of the east. Perhaps
only the Texas Panhandle vied with the Eastern Shore in the 1880s for
the distinction of remaining so long unconnected to the nation's rail
network. See Tiffany Marie Haggard Fink, "The Forth Worth and Denver City
Railway: Settlement, Development, and Decline on the Texas High Plains,"
(Ph.D. Dissertation, Texas Tech University, 2004) for an analysis of town
development that followed the railroad in the Panhandle.
2. Computing digital technologies give us unprecedented capability to explore spatial relationships of the past in new ways. Through historical GIS and animation sequences, we hope to represent faithfully and accurately the development of this landscape, understanding the limits that the technology imposes. We have been guided in our idea of "landscape" and in ways of seeing the past by D. W. Meinig, ed. The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); especially Pierce F. Lewis, "Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the American Scene," and D. W. Meinig, "The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene." We are interested here in the recent literature on regionalism, modernity, and human geography that stresses the "context" and "open multiplicity" in landscapes and the literature in crucial social theory that works to synthesize structural approaches with human agency. Of particular importance to this essay are the following works: J. Nicholas Entrikin, The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity.( New York: Macmillan, 1991; esp. 27-59); Allan Pred, Making Histories and Constructing Human Geographies: The Local Transformation of Practice, Power Relations, and Consciousness. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990; esp. 126-170); Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979) and The Consequences of Modernity. (Cambridge: Polity, 1990); Doreen Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labor, Social Structures, and the Geography of Production. (New York: Routledge, 1984); and Spaces, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
3. Zelinksy, Wilbur. "Where the South Begins: The Northern Limit of the Cis-Appalachian South in Terms of Settlement Landscape," in Exploring the Beloved Country: Geographic Forays into American Society and Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994), 186, originally published in Social Forces 30 (1951), 172-178. D. Western identifies common characteristics of human-modified ecosystems, many of which apply to Eastern Shore Virginia between 1880 and 1920 (and ongoing), including: (1) high natural resource extraction (e.g., harvesting and exporting nutrients in produce), (2) habitat homogeneity (e.g., tightly managing forested lands), (3) landscape homogeneity (e.g., conversion to cropland), (4) large importation of nutrient supplements (e.g., fertilizers), and (5) global mobility of people, goods, and services (e.g., linking local resources and interests to national markets). D. Western, "Human-modified ecosystems and future evolution," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98 (2001), 5458-5465.
4. The term "modernity" has been variously defined. Here, we mean social, technological, and economic changes that opened localities to fast, far-reaching, integrated communication and transportation. Our concern is with this process of transformation on the Eastern Shore and to understand the varied contexts for this process even in a relatively small, but environmentally-complex area. See especially Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity. (Cambridge: Polity, 1990, 18-19).
5. The concept of "transformation" in the countryside is one that William Cronon pioneered in Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. Rather than seeing the Shore as an outpost brought into the orbit of a major city for its natural resource advantages, we see instead a process that was directed both from within the region and without and that reconfigured the physical landscape, obliterated old commercial hierarchies, and spawned sweeping environmental changes. William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991). See also Cronon's "Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History," Journal of American History, 76, no. 4 (March 1990), 1122-1131. Cronon calls for greater specificity in defining stability and instability; not all capitalist or modern forces can be considered destabilizing and not all traditional forces stabilizing. Market integration, and the railroad's role in it, has been a longstanding debate in Southern history. See Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) for an interpretation that stresses the shift from self-sustaining agriculture to dependency and monoculture in the upcountry cotton regions. See also, Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, ed., The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
6. For another recent work of regional study in which the railroad's arrival figures prominently, see Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 27-37. For Johnson the railroad penetrated the isolated region along the Texas-Mexico border and disrupted the "distinctive racial order" bringing with it segregation and drastic changes in the labor and land markets that were disastrous for Tejanos.
7. On high modernist ideology and how governmental institutions have tried to "see" the landscape and its residents, see James C. Scott's innovative and excellent study Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Contemporary science stresses the complex and interdependent character of human and natural systems. Technological advances and economic forces are recognized as principal factors driving modern environmental change (see, for example, Veldkamp and Fresco, "CLUE: A Conceptual Model to Study the Conversion of Land Use and its Effects," Ecological Modelling, 85 (1996), 253-270). The "new ecology" focuses on "people in places" as a way of framing the environment as both the setting and the product of human activities (see, for example, Scoones, "New Ecology and the Social Science," Annual Review of Anthropology, 28 (1999), 479-507; and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment www.millenniumassessment.org sponsored by the United Nations.
8. The Role of Agriculture-Agribusiness in the Economic Development of Virginia's Eastern Shore (Blacksburg: Virginia Polytechnic and State University, 1971), 2, correctly divides the Eastern Shore into three main physiographic divisions: (1) the Mainland, (2) the Coastal Islands, and (3) the Marshes. The Mainland contains practically all cultivable, productive soils of the region; the Coastal Islands, low and sandy, occur as a chain along the Atlantic Ocean; and the Marshes are present in extensive tracts on both sides of the peninsula.
9. Discovering the Chesapeake: The History of an Ecosystem, eds. Philip D. Curtin, Grace S. Brush, and George W. Fisher (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) argues convincingly that the basic geography of the Eastern Shore was established about 2,000 to 4,000 years ago when sea level rise slowed after the end of the last Ice Age.
10. The Virginia Coast Reserve Long Term Ecological Research station has been funded by the National Science Foundation for the past 19 years to study the mosaic of transitions and steady-state systems that comprise the barrier-island/lagoon/mainland landscape of the Eastern Shore (see http://www.vcrlter.virginia.edu/). The fourteen coastal barrier islands of Eastern Shore Virginia, with their associated beaches, intervening inlets, marsh islands, mud flats, salt marshes, shallow bays and channels, are the only undeveloped barrier system on the eastern seaboard. For an explanation of sea level-marsh-barrier island dynamics, see J. Stevenson. and M. Kearney, "Shoreline Dynamics on the Windward and Leeward Shores of a Large Temperate Estuary," in Estuarine Shores: Evolution, Environments and Human Alterations (John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 1996); For a broad overview of environmental change on the Eastern Shore, see B. P. Hayden and J. Hayden, "The Land Must Change to Stay the Same," and P. Holleran "Islands on the Go," Virginia Explorer (Fall, 1994).
11. E. H. Stevens, Soil Survey of Accomac and Northampton Counties, Virginia (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1920), 6-7, 9, 10, 12, 23, 36, 59, 60 (third quotation); "The Eastern Shore," New York Evening Post, April 25, 1885; "Our Peninsula," Wilmington Morning News in Accomac Court House Peninsula Enterprise (hereafter cited as PE), November 22, 1884 (first quotation); Orris A. Browne, "The Eastern Shore, American Agriculturist in PE, April 11, 1885; ); A Handbook of Virginia (Richmond: Superintendent of Public Printing, 1879) (second quotation).
12. Stevens, Soil Survey, 5, 9; Annual Statements of the Chief of the Bureau of Statistics on the Commerce and Navigation of the United States, June 30, 1880 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880), 847.
13. The Statistics of the Population of the United States . . . Compiled from the Original Returns of the Ninth Census (June 1, 1870) (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872), 637; The Statistics of the Wealth and Industry of the United States . . . Compiled from the Original Returns of the Ninth Census (June 1, 1870) (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872), 266, 270; Stevens, Soil Survey, 16-17; Claude H. Hall, Abel Parker Upshur: Conservative Virginian (Madison: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1965), 28 (quotes Upshur); Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 170. For antebellum Eastern Shore agriculture see "Sketch of a Hasty View of the Soil and Agriculture of the County of Northampton," Farmers' Register 3 (1835), 233-240 and "Quantity and Value of the Exports of the County of Accomac," Ibid. 8 (1840), 255.
14. "Onancock and Accomack County," Richmond Times-Dispatch in Onancock Accomack News (hereafter cited as AN), October 30, 1909; "The Eastern Shore," Richmond State, July 24, 1883 (quotation).
15. Howard Pyle, "A Peninsular Canaan," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 58 (May, 1879), 801-817. On Pyle, see Lucien L. Agosta, Howard Pyle (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), and Elizabeth Nesbitt, Howard Pyle (London: The Bodley Head, 1966).
16. T. Abel and J. R. Stepp, "A New Ecosystems Ecology For Anthropology," Conservation Ecology 7 (2003), 12, and S. R. Cooper, "Chesapeake Bay Watershed Historical Land Use: Impact On Water Quality And Diatom Communities," Ecological Applications, 5 (1995), 703-723, are indicative of contemporary agreement of the generalization that "the landscape was in large part the product of an earlier time."
17. Howard Pyle, "Chincoteague: The Island of Ponies," Scribner's Monthly Magazine XIII (April, 1877), 737-745.
18. Frederick Law Olmstead, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States with Remarks on their Economy (Samson Low and Son: London, 1857), 17.
19. Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Life Worth Living: A Personal Experience (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1905). Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832-September 30, 1871, Microfilm Publication M841 (Washington: National Archives, 1973).
20. The plantation analogy should not be pushed too far. Both blacks and whites worked as guides and cooks, and out on the labyrinthian Broadwater even the wealthiest sportsman soon learned that the guide was master. For a recent assessment of Dixon, see Michele K. Gillespie and Randal L. Hall, Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), especially Fitzhugh Brundage's assessment that Dixon was eager to use the technology of the day, especially film and railroads (29-30).
21. Historians of the South, as well as of the U.S. generally, have long determined that the railroads were widely significant and nearly every history of the region deals with railroads. For critical works that examine the railroads in the South, see Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), Maury Klein, History of The Louisville and Nashville Railroad (New York: MacMillan, 1972), William G. Thomas, III, Lawyering for the Railroad: Business, Law, and Power in the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), Kenneth Noe, Southwest Virginia's Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), Allen Trelease, The North Carolina Railroad, 1849-1871, and the Modernization of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), and the classic John F. Stover, History of the Railroads of the South, 1865-1900: A Study in Finance and Control (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955). There has not been a recent scholarly treatment of the Pennsylvania Railroad's history, see George H. Burgess, Centennial History of the Pennsylvania Railroad, 1846-1946 (Pennsylvania Railroad Co., 1949). See also, Richard T. Wallis, The Pennsylvania Railroad at Bay: William Riley McKeen and the Terre Haute & Indianapolis Railroad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
22. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space (University of California Press, 1987). "The American railroad's original and fundamental task was to create transportation where no natural waterways existed" (111).
23. PE, September 10, 1887, April 30, 1887, and October 15, 1887. The U.S.C.S. had undertaken a less intensive mapping of the Eastern Shore coastline in the 1850s.
24. A. Hughlett Mason, History of Steam Navigation to the Eastern Shore of Virginia (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1973), 1, 12; Brooks Miles Barnes, "Triumph of the New South: Independent Movements in Post-Reconstruction Politics," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Virginia, 1991, 14; John R. Waddy to William Mahone, January 23, 1882, William Mahone Papers, Manuscript Department, William R. Perkins Library, Duke University.
25. Barnes, "Triumph of the New South," 213; Stevens Soil Survey, 12. On the concept of "reach" and for an excellent overview of the history of the Gilded Age, see Edwards, New Spirits. See chapter 2, especially p. 55 on the postal service, as well as p. 19 for the LSS. For the effect of the railroad on postal service see G. Terry Sharrer, A Kind of Fate: Agricultural Change in Virginia, 1861-1920 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2000), 92. See Richard John, Spreading the News: The American Postal Service and Distorder in American History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). Rural free delivery, which began on the Eastern Shore in 1905, eventually reduced the number of post offices (James Egbert Mears, "The Eastern Shore of Virginia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries" in The Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia, ed. Charles B. Clark (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1950), II, 596.)
26. PE, March 29, August 30, November 29, 1884, and for the loss of service and its implications see May 16, 1885.
27. U.S. Post Office Department, Reports of Site Locations, 1837-1950, Microfilm Publication M1126 (Washington: National Archives, 1980).
28. Report of the Commissioners of the Eastern Shore Railroad to the Governor of Maryland, January 24, 1837, p. 7, in Report and Estimate in Reference to the Survey of the Eastern Shore Railroad, U. S. Senate, 24th Congress, 2nd Session, Document 218 (1837). See also James Kearney, "Report of the Engineer of the Eastern Shore Railroad," Farmers' Register 4 (1836), 552-554; G. L. Champion, "Eastern Shore Railroad," Ibid. 6 (1838), 246-247; Charles W. Turner, "The Early Railroad Movement in Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 55 (October, 1947), 367.
29. U. S. Senate, 24th Congress, 2nd Session, Document 218 (1837).
30. Better than three-fifths of Northampton's registered voters participated in the referendum. Registered black voters outnumbered white by nearly two to one (Norfolk Landmark, January 31, September 24 [quotation], 1874). In the 1850s and early 1860s several abortive attempts were made to build a railroad down the peninsula. William Mahone surveyed the line in 1854 (Nelson Morehouse Blake, William Mahone of Virginia: Soldier and Political Insurgent [Richmond: Garrett & Massie, 1935], 33-34; December 13, 1859, Accomack County Legislative Petitions, 1776-1862, microfilm, Library of Virginia, Richmond; Mears, "The Eastern Shore of Virginia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," II, 589). The route was surveyed a final time in 1881 and 1882 (John C. Hayman, Rails Along the Chesapeake: A History of Railroading on the Delmarva Peninsula, 1827-1978 [n.p.: Marvadel Publishers, 1879], 71).
31. PE, January 19 (first quotation), February 23 (second quotation), 1882.
32. Peninsula Enterprise, April 19, 1884; Hayman, Rails Along the Chesapeake, 70-72; "Our Peninsula - As the Hon. Wm. L. Scott See It," Philadelphia Times, April 18, in PE, April 25, 1885. The Pennsylvania Railroad did not purchase the capital stock of the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk until 1908 (H. W. Schotter, The Growth and Development of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company: A Review of the Charter and Annual Reports of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 1846 to 1926, Inclusive [Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 1927], 309-310).
33. "Our Peninsula - As the Hon. Wm. L. Scott Sees It" Philadelphia Times, April 18, in PE, April 25, 1885; Letter from the Secretary of War, Transmitting Reports on the Survey and Preliminary Examination of the Harbor and Approaches of Cape Charles City, Va., U.S. House of Representatives, 51st Congress, 1st Session, Document 29.
34. "The Eastern Shore," New York Evening Post, April 25, 1885 (quotation); Howard Douglas Dozier, A History of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920), 124-125; James L. McCorkle Jr., "Moving Perishables to Market: Southern Railroads and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of Southern Truck Farming," Agricultural History 66 (Winter, 1992), 54; H.R. (51-1) Doc. 29; Letter from the Secretary of War, Transmitting, With a Letter from the Acting Chief of Engineers, Report on Examination of Chesapeake Bay, with a View to Straightening the North Side of the Channel at the Entrance of the Harbor at Cape Charles City, Va., and to Increasing the Width of the Channel 200 Feet, U.S. House of Representatives, 62nd Congress, 3rd Session, Document No. 1112.
35. Eastville Eastern Shore Herald (hereafter cited as ESH), June 1, 1906, March 29, 1912; Hayman, Rails Along the Chesapeake, 84; Kirk Mariner, "Remembering the Old Cape Charles Railroad," Tasley Eastern Shore News, April 19, 2006; PE, January 27, 1923; Frederic H. Abenschein, "Pennsy's Perimeter of Plenty," The Keystone 31 (Summer, 1998), 28.
36. "Our Peninsula," Wilmington Morning News in PE, November 22, 1884 (first quotation); "New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad," London Times, October 11, 1887, in PE, January 7, 1888 (second quotation); Mears, "The Eastern Shore of Virginia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," II, 592-593.
37. PE, December 6, 1902; Jim Lewis, Cape Charles: A Railroad Town (Eastville, Va.: Hickory House, 2004), 9-11; J. B. H. Carter, C. W. Holland Jr., W. E. Johnson, and C. L. Miller, "An Economic and Social Survey of Accomac County," University of Virginia Record Extension Series XIII (March, 1929), 5-6 (quotes H. R. Bennett).
38. PE, June 25, October 15, 1898; Emma LeCato Eichelberger, "The Little Old Town of Quinby," PE, May 7, 1953; H. Chandlee Forman, The Virginia Eastern Shore and its British Origins: History, Gardens and Antiquities (Easton, Md.: Eastern Shore Publishers' Association, 1975), 5.
39. Clarence Poe, How Farmers Cooperate and Double Profits (New York: Orange Judd Company, 1915), 113-122; PE, November 22, 1902; "Big Dividends for Farmers: How Agriculturists of the Eastern Shore Combined for Self-Protection and How Their Combination Works," Baltimore Sun, December 7, 1902. For the best, recent examination of a farmer's cooperative, see Victoria Saker Woeste, The Farmer's Benevolent Trust: Law and Agricultural Cooperation in Industrial America, 1865-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
40. Twelfth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1900: Agriculture, Part II, Crops and Irrigation (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902), 311; Sharrer,Terry. A Kind of Fate: Agricultural Change in Virginia, 1861-1920 (Ames: Iowa State University Press), 147; McCorkle, "Moving Perishables to Market," 42-43; James L. McCorkle Jr., "Southern Truck Growers' Associations." Agricultural History 72 (Winter, 1998), 79-80; William Harper Dean, "Potatoes - F.O.B. Eastern Shore: What Their Exchange Did For the Virginia Growers," Country Gentleman, July 5, 1919, in PE, August 2, 1919 (quotation); Benjamin T. Gunter, "Farm Group Activities," PE, August 10, 1929; Acts and Joint Resolutions Passed by the General Assembly of the State of Virginia, during the Session of 1899-1900 (Richmond: Superintendent of Public Printing, 1900), 194-195.
41. Poe, How Farmers Cooperate and Double Profits, 113-122; Gunter, "Farm Group Activities," PE, August 10, 1929; W. A. Burton, "A Review of the Potato Industry of the Eastern Shore of Virginia," Chicago Potato World in PE, March 17, 1939; William Gordy, "The Organization and Development of the Eastern Shore of Virginia Produce Exchange," PE, August 1, 1931; PE, August 9, 1902 (quotation); "Onancock: The Year One of Continued Prosperity on Eastern Shore," Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 1, 1906. For an example of pumpkins packed in barrels of sweet potatoes, see PE, September 25, 1897.
42. Poe, How Farmers Cooperate and Double Profits, 113-122; "The Chesapeake Bay Trade," Baltimore Sun, July 30, 1907 (quotes William A. Burton).
43. Dean, "Potatoes - F.O.B. Eastern Shore," Country Gentleman, July 5, 1919, in PE, August 2, 1919 (quotation); Charles H. Barnard and John Jones, Farm Real Estate Values in the United States by Counties, 1850-1982 (Washington: United States Department of Agriculture, 1987), 3, 100, 102, 104; Sharrer, A Kind of Fate, 184; PE, January 7, 1922; Gunter, "Farm Group Activities," PE, August 10, 1929; Richmond News-Leader, March 15, 1922, in PE, March 25, 1922; Dun's Mercantile Agency Reference Book, July 1880, July 1928; M. E. Bristow, "Banking on the Eastern Shore of Virginia," PE, December 26, 1925.
44. Richmond News-Leader, March 15, 1922, in PE, March 25, 1922; ESH, August 10, 1906 (quotation); Baltimore Sun in AN, October 24, 1908.
45. Onancock Eastern Shore News (hereafter cited as ESN), October 11, 1940; AN, October 27, 1906 (first quotation); Norfolk Landmark (hereafter cited as NL), October 30, 1901 (second quotation).
46. Stevens, Soil Survey, 31; PE, May 17, 1884, May 22, 1886, May 28, 1887; Etta Bundick Oberseider, So Fair a Home: An Eastern Shore Childhood (n.p.: Author, c1986), 5, 22-23.
47. PE, February 9, 1884, March 16, 1895; Brooks Miles Barnes, "The Onancock Race Riot of 1907," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 92 (July, 1984), 336-351; Oberseider, So Fair a Home, 21 (quotation). The Bundick farm "was more than one man could take care of, and we always had one tenant, and sometimes two" (Ibid., 5). Further research has shown that Barnes's analysis of the labor situation was far too facile. For migrant labor see Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 (Chapel Hill and London: University to North Carolina Press, 1997).
48. "Onancock: The Year One of Continued Prosperity on Eastern Shore," Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 1, 1906; Frank P. Brent, The Eastern Shore of Virginia: A Description of Its Soil, Climate, Industries, Development, and Future Prospects (Baltimore: Harlem Paper Company, 1891), 4-5 (first quotation); Carter, "An Economic and Social Survey of Accomac County," 54; C. W. Holland Jr., N. L. Holland, and W. W. Taylor, "An Economic and Social Survey of Northampton County," University of Virginia Extension Service Series XII (November, 1927), 35, 37 (quotes Wilbur O'Byrne), 38; Wilbur O'Byrne, "More and Better Pines on the Eastern Shore," ESN, October 23, 1936. For the necessarily more intensive cultivation of small farms see John Fraser Hart, The Rural Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 279.
49. Dean, "Potatoes - F.O.B. Eastern Shore," Country Gentleman, July 5, 1919, in PE, August 2, 1919 (quotation); PE, January 19, 1929; Stevens, Soil Survey, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25; Sharrer, A Kind of Fate, 56; ESH, March 24, 1905. For the use of fertilizer in the South see Douglas Helms, "Soil and Southern History," Agricultural History 74 (Fall, 2000), 751-752.
50. Acts and Joint Resolutions Passed by the General Assembly of the State of Virginia, during the Session of 1895-1896 (Richmond: Superintendent of Public Printing, 1896), 144; Acts, 1901-1902, 441-442; PE, September 6, 1890; Sharrer, A Kind of Fate, 111.
51. Stevens, Soil Survey, 23; Holland, "An Economic and Social Survey of Northampton County," 37; Sharrer, A Kind of Fate, 84; PE, November 15, 1902, March 15, 1931, March 29, May 3, 1956.
52. Virginia: A Handbook Giving its History, Climate, and Mineral Wealth; Its Educational, Agricultural and Industrial Advantages (Richmond: Everett Waddey Company, 1893), 193; Ibid. (1909), 83; Ibid. (1926), 131; PE, May 10, 1902; AN, May 4, 1907, January 11, 1908; ESH, May 10, 1907; Letter from the Secretary of War, Transmitting, with a Letter from the Chief of Engineers, Report on Examination of Chincoteague Inlet, Va., with Plan and Estimate of Cost of Improvement, with a View to Obtaining a Channel Depth of 15 Feet, U.S. House of Representatives, 62nd Congress, 3rd Session, Document No. 1094; Stevens, Soil Survey, 23; Holland, "An Economic and Social Survey of Northampton County," 37 (quotes Wilbur O'Bryne).
53. "The Eastern Shore," Richmond State, July 24, 1883 (quotation); Stevens, Soil Survey, 11; AN, April 27, 1907; Virginia (1923), 103; ESH, December 3, 1909; PE, June 17, 1922, November 17, 1923. The closing of the open range early in the century hastened communication by eliminating the need for livestock gates across the public roads (Forman, The Virginia Eastern Shore and Its British Origins, 206).
54. John L. Lochhead, "The Boat Trains," National Railway Historical Society Bulletin 43 (1978), 19; Letter from the Secretary of War, Transmitting, Report from the Chief of Engineers on Preliminary Examinations and Surveys of Pungoteague, Nandua and Occohannock Creeks, Va., U.S. House of Representatives, 71st Congress, 2nd Session, Document 165. In 1894 the Pennsylvania Railroad gained control of the Baltimore steamboats (Abenschein, "Pennsy's Perimeter of Plenty," 40).
55. Drummer, "Pocomoke Neck and Sykes," PE, July 23, 1887; AN, April 27, 1907 (quotation); PE, May 9, June 13, 1885, October 29, 1898, March 3, 1900, September 20, 1902; "Onancock: The Year One of Continued Prosperity on the Eastern Shore," Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 1, 1906; John R. Spears, "A Curious Virginia City," New York Sun, May 7, 1890; Kirk Mariner, Wachapreague, Virginia: Then and Now (New Church, Va.: Miona Publications, 1995), 9-14; Ernest Ingersoll, "The Oyster Industry," in The History and Present Condition of the Fishery Industries, ed. G. Brown Goode (Washington: Department of the Interior, 1881), 183; Letter from the Secretary of War, Transmitting, with a Letter from the Chief of Engineers, Report of Examination of Oyster Harbor, Virginia, U.S. House of Representatives, 58th Congress, 2nd Session, Document 202; U.S. Post Office Department, Report of Site Locations.
56. Brent, The Eastern Shore of Virginia, 6, 8; Virginia (1919), 84; Carter, "An Economic and Social Survey of Accomac County," 31; Holland, "An Economic and Social Survey of Northampton County," 51. For the feverish building of churches after the coming of the railroad see Kirk Mariner, Revival's Children: A Religious History of Virginia's Eastern Shore (Salisbury, Md.: Peninsula Press, 1979), 240-637. The term "archipelago of villages" is Joel Kotkin's. See his The New Suburbanism: A Realist's Guide to the American Future (n.p.: The Planning Center, 2005) at www.joelkotkin.com (pdf). For a somewhat dissimilar process of layering and town development in a rural region, see Joseph Walden Baumli, "Prairie Trails, iron rails, and tall tales: the settling, town building, and people of Nodaway County, Missouri, 1839-1910," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2004. Baumli charted the development of infrastructure in this northwestern Missouri border county, from schools to churches, rural mail delivery routes, roads, and railroads. He argued that the development pattern of the county in the nineteenth century emerged around the railroad between 1869 and the late 1880s. In this period town development centered on railroads, and earlier settlement towns went dormant while new towns exploded. Most of these new towns grew steadily but none of them "acquired any semblance of an urban landscape." (358) Baumli argued that the county remained overwhelmingly rural despite the new railroads, and that the towns were successively rearranged as the railroads arrived.
57. AN, January 5, 1907 (quotation); Stevens, Soil Survey, 24; PE, May 7, 1892, September 11, 1897, September 10, 1898, November 22, 1902; NL, November 9, 1902; Mears, "The Eastern Shore of Virginia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," II, 599; "History of Growth of the Telephone on E.S. of Virginia," PE, August 18, 1928.
58. Kirk Mariner, Once Upon an Island: The History of Chincoteague (New Church, Va.: Miona Publications, 1996), 87; PE, December 16, 1899, November 22, 1902, June 22, 1907; Drummer, "Pocomoke Neck and Sykes," PE, July 23, 1887 (first quotation); Oberseider, So Fair a Home, p. 118 (second quotation); ESH, Janurary 12, 1906, April 19, 1907; Stevens, Soil Survey, 24. For emerging styles of Eastern Shore architecture see Gabrielle M. Lanier and Bernard L. Herman, Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic: Looking at Buildings and Landscapes (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
59. Mariner, Revival's Children, 135-144; PE, September 14, 1882, April 18, 1885, October 4, 18, 25, 1902; NL, August 21, 1903; ESN, June 24, 1949 (quotation). On Virginia's segregation and disenfranchisement, see Ayers, The Promise of the New South; Michael Perman, The Struggle for Mastery: Disenfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Charles E. Wynes, Race Relations in Virginia, 1870-1912 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1971).
60. Brooks Miles Barnes, The Gallows on the Marsh: Crime and Punishment on the Chesapeake, 1906 (Eastville, Va.: Hickory House, forthcoming).
61. Mariner, Revival's Children, 239-637; Frances Bibbins Latimer, Landmarks: Black Historic Sites on the Eastern Shore of Virginia (Eastville, Va.: Hickory House, forthcoming). For black migration to the Eastern Shore see above page 32.
62. PE, December 20, 1930; Carter, "An Economic and Social Survey of Accomac County," 89; Holland, "An Economic and Social Survey of Northampton County," 140. On relative black tenancy and landownership, see the Historical Census Browser, University of Virginia for 1900 census data at:
63. PE, February 23, 1882; Winthrop A. Roberts, "The Crab Industry of Maryland," Forest and Stream 65 (September 30, 1905), 275-276. See PE, November 21, 1891, on the employment of African Americans from Delaware.
64. PE, March 23, 1882.
65. PE, February 9, 1882. For the Readjuster Movement see Barnes, "Triumph of the New South," 1-265.
66. "The Eastern Shore," Richmond State, July 24, 1883; Grace S. Brush, "Forests before and after the Colonial Encounter" in Discovering the Chesapeake, 57-58; Stevens, Soil Survey, 25; John R. Wennersten, The Chesapeake: An Environmental Biography (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2001), 149. C. F. Cerco, et al., "Nutrient and Solid Controls in Virginia's Chesapeake Bay Tributaries", Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, 128 (2002), 179-189 report that cropland is the major source of nitrogen and phosphorous flow between the terrestrial and estuarine systems within the Chesapeake Bay watershed. For the frequent dredging of Onancock Creek see U.S. House of Representatives, 51st Congress, 1st Session, Document 83 (1889); 60th Congress, 1st Session, Document 652 (1908); 68th Congress, 1st Session, Document 219 (1924).
67. To underscore the complexity of the system processes that had been damaged, it is now understood that a positive feedback loop had been initiated by the increase in surface runoff and nutrient load-not only had it caused the oyster population to decline due to benthic anoxia, but by doing so it also eliminated one of the only natural remedies to a polluted water column because the dwindling number of oysters grew less and less capable of filtering Bay waters; for a more detailed explanation, see Boesch, D., et al., (2001) "Factors in the Decline of Coastal Ecosystems," Science, 293, 1589-1591; Newcombe, C. and W. Horn first documented findings from 1936 water sampling activities in the Bay in their groundbreaking publication, Oxygen-poor waters of the Chesapeake Bay, Science, 88(2273): 80-81 (1938). See also Tom Horton, Turning the Tide: Saving the Chesapeake Bay, rev. ed. (Washington: Island Press, 2003).
68. Steven G. Davidson, Jay G. Merwin, Jr., John Capper, Garrett Power, and Frank R. Shivers, Jr. Chesapeake Waters: Four Centuries of Controversy, Concern, and Legislation, 2nd ed. (Centreville, Md.: Tidewater Publishers, 1997) 85 (quotation), 96.
69. C. F. Adams, "The Kingdom of Accomac," Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 45 (1911-1912), 596-597. "Without [the railroad] today the Shore might be slowly succumbing to a lotus-diet of isolation and like many comparable sections of the Tidewater country . . . reflecting the loneliness of a vanishing era" (PE, August 8, 1936).
70. Brooks Miles Barnes and Barry R. Truitt, "A Short History of the Virginia Barrier Islands" in Seashore Chronicles: Three Centuries of the Virginia Barrier Islands, ed. Barnes and Truitt (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 6.
71. Ibid., 8.
72. Richard A. Pouliot and Julie J. Pouliot, Shipwrecks on the Virginia Coast and the Men of the United States Life-Saving Service (Centreville, Md.: Tidewater Publishers, 1986), 4; Mariner, Once Upon an Island, 38-39, 65; PE, November 21, 1885, May 13, July 15, 1893; Letter from the Secretary of War, Transmitting, Report and Recommendations Concerning Improvement of Chincoteague Inlet, Virginia, by a Breakwater, U.S. House of Representatives, 51st Congress, 1st Session, Executive Document 207.
73. Pouliot, Shipwrecks on the Virginia Coast, 50, 107, 156; Ralph T. Whitelaw, Virginia's Eastern Shore: A History of Northampton and Accomack Counties (Richmond: Virginia Historical Society, 1951), I, 370; Robert de Gast, The Lighthouses of the Chesapeake (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 143; Ron M. Kagawa and J. Richard Kellam, Cobb's Island, Virginia: The Last Sentinel (Virginia Beach: The Donning Company, 2003), 29 (quotes Sumner I. Kimball); PE, September 19, 1896, April 16, 1898.
74. Hayman, Rails Along the Chesapeake, 34, 38-39, 133; John E. Bradford to William Mahone, August 5, 1882, Mahone Papers, Duke; Mariner, Once Upon an Island, 42. For prominent seafood dealers of Willis Wharf see the obituaries of John C. Walker (b. Oriole, Md.), Marcus Clarence Ballard (b. Oriole, Md.), Henry Miller Terry (b. Sayville, N.Y.), and Wade H. Walker (b. Oriole, Md.) in PE, March 23, 1929, March 7, 1941, September 1, November 10, 1955.
75. Ingersoll, "The Oyster Industry," 183; PE, June 2, 1888, July 20, 1889, April 5, 1890, June 2, 1894; John R. Spears, "A Curious Virginia City," New York Sun, May 7, 1890 (quotation).
76. H.R., 48th Congress, 2nd Session, Executive Document 107; H.R., 51st Congress, 1st Session, Executive Document 207; Acts and Joint Resolutions (1881-1882), 164, (1885-1886), 17, 29-30, 156, 365, (Extra Session, 1887), 196, 263, (1887-1888), 97, 100, (1889-1890), 793, (1891-1892), 480-481, 481-482.
77. Annabel Lynch, "Chincoteague Island," AN, August 11, 1916; Mears, "The Eastern Shore of Virginia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," II, 615; Baltimore Sun, November 28, 1892; Nora Miller Turman, The Eastern Shore of Virginia, 1603-1964 (Onancock, Va.: Eastern Shore News, 1964), 204-205.
78. "Onancock: The Year One of Continued Prosperity on Eastern Shore," Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 1, 1906 (quotation); Virginia (1909), 81, 83; Oysterman and Fisherman IX (December, 1911), 9; ESH, August 1, 1913.
79.George Shiras 3rd, Hunting Wild Life with Camera and Flashlight: A Record of Sixty-five Years' Visits to the Woods and Waters of North America (Washington: National Geographic Society, 1935), II, 80 (quotation); Maude Radford Warren, "The Island of Chincoteague," Harper's Monthly Magazine 127 (October, 1931), 777; NL, September 17, 1902; AN, February 3, 1906; ESH, March 25, April 1, July 1, 15, 22, 1910; Report of State Board of Fisheries to the Governor of Virginia, from October 1, 1905, to October 1, 1906 (Richmond: Superintendent of Public Printing, 1906), 5; PE, August 8, 1936.
80. Marinus James, "The Parson Goes Deep Sea Fishing," PE, September 29, 1928; Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, May 6, 1912; H.R., 62nd Congress, 3rd Session, Document 1094; Lynch, "Chincoteague Island," AN, August 11, 1916; Margaret Ellen Mears, "Chincoteague and the Seafood Industry", PE, August 13, 1932; James Egbert Mears, "The Eastern Shore of Virginia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," II, 615-616; NL, December 10, 1902; PE, August 8, 1936. In the early 1930s scallops "disappeared suddenly when a mysterious blight attacked the sea grass in which they propagated" (James Wharton, "Virginia's Drowned Village," Virginia Cavalcade VII [Winter, 1957], 8).
81. Alexander Hunter, The Huntsman in the South, Volume I: Virginia and North Carolina (New York: Neale Publishing Company, 1908), 313; Shiras, Hunting Wild Life with Camera and Flashlight, II, 67, 69, 80; ESH, February 2, 9, 1906; Harry M. Walsh, The Outlaw Gunner (Centreville, Md.: Tidewater Publishers, 1971), 25-27, 30 (quotation); L. C. Sanford, L. B. Bishop, and T. S. Van Dyke, The Water-Fowl Family (New York: Macmillan Company, 1903), 68-69; George Reiger, The Wings of Dawn: The Complete Book of North American Waterfowling (New York: Stein and Day, 1980), 68. For studies of market hunting elsewhere see Louis S. Warren, The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997) and Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2001).
82. T. Gilbert Pearson, Stories of Bird Life (Richmond: B. F. Johnson Publishing Company, 1901), 66-69; Frank M. Chapman, Camps and Cruises of an Ornithologist (New York: Appleton and Co., 1908), 63-64 (first quotation); A. C. Bent, "Report of A. C. Bent, on Condition of Bird Colonies on Cobb's Island, Virginia, in 1907," Bird-Lore 9 (1907), 317 (second quotation). On the destruction of the bison, see Andrew Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: Social and Ecological Changes in the Great Plains, 1750-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
83. Acts and Joint Resolutions (1893-1894), 794, (1899-1900), 552; Minutes, November 13, 1905, Eastern Shore Game Protective Association, Papers, 1896-1911, Eastern Shore of Virginia Historical Society, Onancock; William Dutcher, "Results of Special Protection to Gulls and Terns Obtained through the Thayer Fund," Auk 18 (1901), 77; Reiger, The Wings of Dawn, 71, 73; Shiras, Hunting Wild Life with Camera and Flashlight, II, 63-65, 96 (quotation).
84. Barnes and Truitt, "A Short History of the Virginia Barrier Islands," 10-11; Amine Kellam, "The Cobb's Island Story," Virginia Cavalcade XXIII (Spring, 1974), 23; Mariner, Once Upon an Island, 69. For middle-class vacationers see Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3-4.
85. PE, March 24, December 8, 1888, September 28, 1889, November 11, 1893, November 23, 1895, October 17, 1896, February 13, October 30, 1897, February 18, 25, March 4, 11, 1899; Richmond Dispatch, April 10, 11, 1889; Barnes and Truitt, "A Short History of the Virginia Barrier Islands," 12-13, 15; Brent, The Eastern Shore of Virginia, 8; Prospectus and Subscription List of the Cobb's Island Company, Special Collections, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Thomas Brown Robertson, "Historical Notes and Episodes of Northampton County" Ms. in Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, 386-389. For an early analysis of shoreline migration see J. R. Sturgis, "Cobb's Island," PE, November 13, 1897.
86. Northampton County 1920 Manuscript Census, 249-250; Wharton, "Virginia's Drowned Village," 10-11. For the advantages of the power boat see George Fortiss, "The Hunter and the Motorboat," Outing LV (March, 1910), 735-739.
87. T. B. Manney, "What Farmers Say About Marketing Eastern Shore Potatoes and What Farmers Suggest for Better Marketing," PE, December 15, 1928; Burton, "A Review of the Potato Industry of the Eastern Shore of Virginia," Chicago Potato World in PE, March 17, 1939; PE, June 23, 1928; The Role of Agriculture-Agribusiness in the Economic Development of Virginia's Eastern Shore, 6.
88. Mears, "The Eastern Shore of Virginia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," II, 582-583; PE, August 11, 1928, February 2, 1929.
2. Computing digital technologies give us unprecedented capability to explore spatial relationships of the past in new ways. Through historical GIS and animation sequences, we hope to represent faithfully and accurately the development of this landscape, understanding the limits that the technology imposes. We have been guided in our idea of "landscape" and in ways of seeing the past by D. W. Meinig, ed. The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); especially Pierce F. Lewis, "Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the American Scene," and D. W. Meinig, "The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene." We are interested here in the recent literature on regionalism, modernity, and human geography that stresses the "context" and "open multiplicity" in landscapes and the literature in crucial social theory that works to synthesize structural approaches with human agency. Of particular importance to this essay are the following works: J. Nicholas Entrikin, The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity.( New York: Macmillan, 1991; esp. 27-59); Allan Pred, Making Histories and Constructing Human Geographies: The Local Transformation of Practice, Power Relations, and Consciousness. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990; esp. 126-170); Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979) and The Consequences of Modernity. (Cambridge: Polity, 1990); Doreen Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labor, Social Structures, and the Geography of Production. (New York: Routledge, 1984); and Spaces, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
3. Zelinksy, Wilbur. "Where the South Begins: The Northern Limit of the Cis-Appalachian South in Terms of Settlement Landscape," in Exploring the Beloved Country: Geographic Forays into American Society and Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994), 186, originally published in Social Forces 30 (1951), 172-178. D. Western identifies common characteristics of human-modified ecosystems, many of which apply to Eastern Shore Virginia between 1880 and 1920 (and ongoing), including: (1) high natural resource extraction (e.g., harvesting and exporting nutrients in produce), (2) habitat homogeneity (e.g., tightly managing forested lands), (3) landscape homogeneity (e.g., conversion to cropland), (4) large importation of nutrient supplements (e.g., fertilizers), and (5) global mobility of people, goods, and services (e.g., linking local resources and interests to national markets). D. Western, "Human-modified ecosystems and future evolution," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98 (2001), 5458-5465.
4. The term "modernity" has been variously defined. Here, we mean social, technological, and economic changes that opened localities to fast, far-reaching, integrated communication and transportation. Our concern is with this process of transformation on the Eastern Shore and to understand the varied contexts for this process even in a relatively small, but environmentally-complex area. See especially Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity. (Cambridge: Polity, 1990, 18-19).
5. The concept of "transformation" in the countryside is one that William Cronon pioneered in Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. Rather than seeing the Shore as an outpost brought into the orbit of a major city for its natural resource advantages, we see instead a process that was directed both from within the region and without and that reconfigured the physical landscape, obliterated old commercial hierarchies, and spawned sweeping environmental changes. William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991). See also Cronon's "Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History," Journal of American History, 76, no. 4 (March 1990), 1122-1131. Cronon calls for greater specificity in defining stability and instability; not all capitalist or modern forces can be considered destabilizing and not all traditional forces stabilizing. Market integration, and the railroad's role in it, has been a longstanding debate in Southern history. See Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) for an interpretation that stresses the shift from self-sustaining agriculture to dependency and monoculture in the upcountry cotton regions. See also, Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, ed., The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
6. For another recent work of regional study in which the railroad's arrival figures prominently, see Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 27-37. For Johnson the railroad penetrated the isolated region along the Texas-Mexico border and disrupted the "distinctive racial order" bringing with it segregation and drastic changes in the labor and land markets that were disastrous for Tejanos.
7. On high modernist ideology and how governmental institutions have tried to "see" the landscape and its residents, see James C. Scott's innovative and excellent study Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Contemporary science stresses the complex and interdependent character of human and natural systems. Technological advances and economic forces are recognized as principal factors driving modern environmental change (see, for example, Veldkamp and Fresco, "CLUE: A Conceptual Model to Study the Conversion of Land Use and its Effects," Ecological Modelling, 85 (1996), 253-270). The "new ecology" focuses on "people in places" as a way of framing the environment as both the setting and the product of human activities (see, for example, Scoones, "New Ecology and the Social Science," Annual Review of Anthropology, 28 (1999), 479-507; and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment www.millenniumassessment.org sponsored by the United Nations.
8. The Role of Agriculture-Agribusiness in the Economic Development of Virginia's Eastern Shore (Blacksburg: Virginia Polytechnic and State University, 1971), 2, correctly divides the Eastern Shore into three main physiographic divisions: (1) the Mainland, (2) the Coastal Islands, and (3) the Marshes. The Mainland contains practically all cultivable, productive soils of the region; the Coastal Islands, low and sandy, occur as a chain along the Atlantic Ocean; and the Marshes are present in extensive tracts on both sides of the peninsula.
9. Discovering the Chesapeake: The History of an Ecosystem, eds. Philip D. Curtin, Grace S. Brush, and George W. Fisher (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) argues convincingly that the basic geography of the Eastern Shore was established about 2,000 to 4,000 years ago when sea level rise slowed after the end of the last Ice Age.
10. The Virginia Coast Reserve Long Term Ecological Research station has been funded by the National Science Foundation for the past 19 years to study the mosaic of transitions and steady-state systems that comprise the barrier-island/lagoon/mainland landscape of the Eastern Shore (see http://www.vcrlter.virginia.edu/). The fourteen coastal barrier islands of Eastern Shore Virginia, with their associated beaches, intervening inlets, marsh islands, mud flats, salt marshes, shallow bays and channels, are the only undeveloped barrier system on the eastern seaboard. For an explanation of sea level-marsh-barrier island dynamics, see J. Stevenson. and M. Kearney, "Shoreline Dynamics on the Windward and Leeward Shores of a Large Temperate Estuary," in Estuarine Shores: Evolution, Environments and Human Alterations (John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 1996); For a broad overview of environmental change on the Eastern Shore, see B. P. Hayden and J. Hayden, "The Land Must Change to Stay the Same," and P. Holleran "Islands on the Go," Virginia Explorer (Fall, 1994).
11. E. H. Stevens, Soil Survey of Accomac and Northampton Counties, Virginia (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1920), 6-7, 9, 10, 12, 23, 36, 59, 60 (third quotation); "The Eastern Shore," New York Evening Post, April 25, 1885; "Our Peninsula," Wilmington Morning News in Accomac Court House Peninsula Enterprise (hereafter cited as PE), November 22, 1884 (first quotation); Orris A. Browne, "The Eastern Shore, American Agriculturist in PE, April 11, 1885; ); A Handbook of Virginia (Richmond: Superintendent of Public Printing, 1879) (second quotation).
12. Stevens, Soil Survey, 5, 9; Annual Statements of the Chief of the Bureau of Statistics on the Commerce and Navigation of the United States, June 30, 1880 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880), 847.
13. The Statistics of the Population of the United States . . . Compiled from the Original Returns of the Ninth Census (June 1, 1870) (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872), 637; The Statistics of the Wealth and Industry of the United States . . . Compiled from the Original Returns of the Ninth Census (June 1, 1870) (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872), 266, 270; Stevens, Soil Survey, 16-17; Claude H. Hall, Abel Parker Upshur: Conservative Virginian (Madison: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1965), 28 (quotes Upshur); Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 170. For antebellum Eastern Shore agriculture see "Sketch of a Hasty View of the Soil and Agriculture of the County of Northampton," Farmers' Register 3 (1835), 233-240 and "Quantity and Value of the Exports of the County of Accomac," Ibid. 8 (1840), 255.
14. "Onancock and Accomack County," Richmond Times-Dispatch in Onancock Accomack News (hereafter cited as AN), October 30, 1909; "The Eastern Shore," Richmond State, July 24, 1883 (quotation).
15. Howard Pyle, "A Peninsular Canaan," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 58 (May, 1879), 801-817. On Pyle, see Lucien L. Agosta, Howard Pyle (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), and Elizabeth Nesbitt, Howard Pyle (London: The Bodley Head, 1966).
16. T. Abel and J. R. Stepp, "A New Ecosystems Ecology For Anthropology," Conservation Ecology 7 (2003), 12, and S. R. Cooper, "Chesapeake Bay Watershed Historical Land Use: Impact On Water Quality And Diatom Communities," Ecological Applications, 5 (1995), 703-723, are indicative of contemporary agreement of the generalization that "the landscape was in large part the product of an earlier time."
17. Howard Pyle, "Chincoteague: The Island of Ponies," Scribner's Monthly Magazine XIII (April, 1877), 737-745.
18. Frederick Law Olmstead, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States with Remarks on their Economy (Samson Low and Son: London, 1857), 17.
19. Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Life Worth Living: A Personal Experience (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1905). Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832-September 30, 1871, Microfilm Publication M841 (Washington: National Archives, 1973).
20. The plantation analogy should not be pushed too far. Both blacks and whites worked as guides and cooks, and out on the labyrinthian Broadwater even the wealthiest sportsman soon learned that the guide was master. For a recent assessment of Dixon, see Michele K. Gillespie and Randal L. Hall, Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), especially Fitzhugh Brundage's assessment that Dixon was eager to use the technology of the day, especially film and railroads (29-30).
21. Historians of the South, as well as of the U.S. generally, have long determined that the railroads were widely significant and nearly every history of the region deals with railroads. For critical works that examine the railroads in the South, see Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), Maury Klein, History of The Louisville and Nashville Railroad (New York: MacMillan, 1972), William G. Thomas, III, Lawyering for the Railroad: Business, Law, and Power in the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), Kenneth Noe, Southwest Virginia's Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), Allen Trelease, The North Carolina Railroad, 1849-1871, and the Modernization of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), and the classic John F. Stover, History of the Railroads of the South, 1865-1900: A Study in Finance and Control (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955). There has not been a recent scholarly treatment of the Pennsylvania Railroad's history, see George H. Burgess, Centennial History of the Pennsylvania Railroad, 1846-1946 (Pennsylvania Railroad Co., 1949). See also, Richard T. Wallis, The Pennsylvania Railroad at Bay: William Riley McKeen and the Terre Haute & Indianapolis Railroad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
22. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space (University of California Press, 1987). "The American railroad's original and fundamental task was to create transportation where no natural waterways existed" (111).
23. PE, September 10, 1887, April 30, 1887, and October 15, 1887. The U.S.C.S. had undertaken a less intensive mapping of the Eastern Shore coastline in the 1850s.
24. A. Hughlett Mason, History of Steam Navigation to the Eastern Shore of Virginia (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1973), 1, 12; Brooks Miles Barnes, "Triumph of the New South: Independent Movements in Post-Reconstruction Politics," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Virginia, 1991, 14; John R. Waddy to William Mahone, January 23, 1882, William Mahone Papers, Manuscript Department, William R. Perkins Library, Duke University.
25. Barnes, "Triumph of the New South," 213; Stevens Soil Survey, 12. On the concept of "reach" and for an excellent overview of the history of the Gilded Age, see Edwards, New Spirits. See chapter 2, especially p. 55 on the postal service, as well as p. 19 for the LSS. For the effect of the railroad on postal service see G. Terry Sharrer, A Kind of Fate: Agricultural Change in Virginia, 1861-1920 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2000), 92. See Richard John, Spreading the News: The American Postal Service and Distorder in American History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). Rural free delivery, which began on the Eastern Shore in 1905, eventually reduced the number of post offices (James Egbert Mears, "The Eastern Shore of Virginia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries" in The Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia, ed. Charles B. Clark (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1950), II, 596.)
26. PE, March 29, August 30, November 29, 1884, and for the loss of service and its implications see May 16, 1885.
27. U.S. Post Office Department, Reports of Site Locations, 1837-1950, Microfilm Publication M1126 (Washington: National Archives, 1980).
28. Report of the Commissioners of the Eastern Shore Railroad to the Governor of Maryland, January 24, 1837, p. 7, in Report and Estimate in Reference to the Survey of the Eastern Shore Railroad, U. S. Senate, 24th Congress, 2nd Session, Document 218 (1837). See also James Kearney, "Report of the Engineer of the Eastern Shore Railroad," Farmers' Register 4 (1836), 552-554; G. L. Champion, "Eastern Shore Railroad," Ibid. 6 (1838), 246-247; Charles W. Turner, "The Early Railroad Movement in Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 55 (October, 1947), 367.
29. U. S. Senate, 24th Congress, 2nd Session, Document 218 (1837).
30. Better than three-fifths of Northampton's registered voters participated in the referendum. Registered black voters outnumbered white by nearly two to one (Norfolk Landmark, January 31, September 24 [quotation], 1874). In the 1850s and early 1860s several abortive attempts were made to build a railroad down the peninsula. William Mahone surveyed the line in 1854 (Nelson Morehouse Blake, William Mahone of Virginia: Soldier and Political Insurgent [Richmond: Garrett & Massie, 1935], 33-34; December 13, 1859, Accomack County Legislative Petitions, 1776-1862, microfilm, Library of Virginia, Richmond; Mears, "The Eastern Shore of Virginia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," II, 589). The route was surveyed a final time in 1881 and 1882 (John C. Hayman, Rails Along the Chesapeake: A History of Railroading on the Delmarva Peninsula, 1827-1978 [n.p.: Marvadel Publishers, 1879], 71).
31. PE, January 19 (first quotation), February 23 (second quotation), 1882.
32. Peninsula Enterprise, April 19, 1884; Hayman, Rails Along the Chesapeake, 70-72; "Our Peninsula - As the Hon. Wm. L. Scott See It," Philadelphia Times, April 18, in PE, April 25, 1885. The Pennsylvania Railroad did not purchase the capital stock of the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk until 1908 (H. W. Schotter, The Growth and Development of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company: A Review of the Charter and Annual Reports of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 1846 to 1926, Inclusive [Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 1927], 309-310).
33. "Our Peninsula - As the Hon. Wm. L. Scott Sees It" Philadelphia Times, April 18, in PE, April 25, 1885; Letter from the Secretary of War, Transmitting Reports on the Survey and Preliminary Examination of the Harbor and Approaches of Cape Charles City, Va., U.S. House of Representatives, 51st Congress, 1st Session, Document 29.
34. "The Eastern Shore," New York Evening Post, April 25, 1885 (quotation); Howard Douglas Dozier, A History of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920), 124-125; James L. McCorkle Jr., "Moving Perishables to Market: Southern Railroads and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of Southern Truck Farming," Agricultural History 66 (Winter, 1992), 54; H.R. (51-1) Doc. 29; Letter from the Secretary of War, Transmitting, With a Letter from the Acting Chief of Engineers, Report on Examination of Chesapeake Bay, with a View to Straightening the North Side of the Channel at the Entrance of the Harbor at Cape Charles City, Va., and to Increasing the Width of the Channel 200 Feet, U.S. House of Representatives, 62nd Congress, 3rd Session, Document No. 1112.
35. Eastville Eastern Shore Herald (hereafter cited as ESH), June 1, 1906, March 29, 1912; Hayman, Rails Along the Chesapeake, 84; Kirk Mariner, "Remembering the Old Cape Charles Railroad," Tasley Eastern Shore News, April 19, 2006; PE, January 27, 1923; Frederic H. Abenschein, "Pennsy's Perimeter of Plenty," The Keystone 31 (Summer, 1998), 28.
36. "Our Peninsula," Wilmington Morning News in PE, November 22, 1884 (first quotation); "New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad," London Times, October 11, 1887, in PE, January 7, 1888 (second quotation); Mears, "The Eastern Shore of Virginia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," II, 592-593.
37. PE, December 6, 1902; Jim Lewis, Cape Charles: A Railroad Town (Eastville, Va.: Hickory House, 2004), 9-11; J. B. H. Carter, C. W. Holland Jr., W. E. Johnson, and C. L. Miller, "An Economic and Social Survey of Accomac County," University of Virginia Record Extension Series XIII (March, 1929), 5-6 (quotes H. R. Bennett).
38. PE, June 25, October 15, 1898; Emma LeCato Eichelberger, "The Little Old Town of Quinby," PE, May 7, 1953; H. Chandlee Forman, The Virginia Eastern Shore and its British Origins: History, Gardens and Antiquities (Easton, Md.: Eastern Shore Publishers' Association, 1975), 5.
39. Clarence Poe, How Farmers Cooperate and Double Profits (New York: Orange Judd Company, 1915), 113-122; PE, November 22, 1902; "Big Dividends for Farmers: How Agriculturists of the Eastern Shore Combined for Self-Protection and How Their Combination Works," Baltimore Sun, December 7, 1902. For the best, recent examination of a farmer's cooperative, see Victoria Saker Woeste, The Farmer's Benevolent Trust: Law and Agricultural Cooperation in Industrial America, 1865-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
40. Twelfth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1900: Agriculture, Part II, Crops and Irrigation (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902), 311; Sharrer,Terry. A Kind of Fate: Agricultural Change in Virginia, 1861-1920 (Ames: Iowa State University Press), 147; McCorkle, "Moving Perishables to Market," 42-43; James L. McCorkle Jr., "Southern Truck Growers' Associations." Agricultural History 72 (Winter, 1998), 79-80; William Harper Dean, "Potatoes - F.O.B. Eastern Shore: What Their Exchange Did For the Virginia Growers," Country Gentleman, July 5, 1919, in PE, August 2, 1919 (quotation); Benjamin T. Gunter, "Farm Group Activities," PE, August 10, 1929; Acts and Joint Resolutions Passed by the General Assembly of the State of Virginia, during the Session of 1899-1900 (Richmond: Superintendent of Public Printing, 1900), 194-195.
41. Poe, How Farmers Cooperate and Double Profits, 113-122; Gunter, "Farm Group Activities," PE, August 10, 1929; W. A. Burton, "A Review of the Potato Industry of the Eastern Shore of Virginia," Chicago Potato World in PE, March 17, 1939; William Gordy, "The Organization and Development of the Eastern Shore of Virginia Produce Exchange," PE, August 1, 1931; PE, August 9, 1902 (quotation); "Onancock: The Year One of Continued Prosperity on Eastern Shore," Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 1, 1906. For an example of pumpkins packed in barrels of sweet potatoes, see PE, September 25, 1897.
42. Poe, How Farmers Cooperate and Double Profits, 113-122; "The Chesapeake Bay Trade," Baltimore Sun, July 30, 1907 (quotes William A. Burton).
43. Dean, "Potatoes - F.O.B. Eastern Shore," Country Gentleman, July 5, 1919, in PE, August 2, 1919 (quotation); Charles H. Barnard and John Jones, Farm Real Estate Values in the United States by Counties, 1850-1982 (Washington: United States Department of Agriculture, 1987), 3, 100, 102, 104; Sharrer, A Kind of Fate, 184; PE, January 7, 1922; Gunter, "Farm Group Activities," PE, August 10, 1929; Richmond News-Leader, March 15, 1922, in PE, March 25, 1922; Dun's Mercantile Agency Reference Book, July 1880, July 1928; M. E. Bristow, "Banking on the Eastern Shore of Virginia," PE, December 26, 1925.
44. Richmond News-Leader, March 15, 1922, in PE, March 25, 1922; ESH, August 10, 1906 (quotation); Baltimore Sun in AN, October 24, 1908.
45. Onancock Eastern Shore News (hereafter cited as ESN), October 11, 1940; AN, October 27, 1906 (first quotation); Norfolk Landmark (hereafter cited as NL), October 30, 1901 (second quotation).
46. Stevens, Soil Survey, 31; PE, May 17, 1884, May 22, 1886, May 28, 1887; Etta Bundick Oberseider, So Fair a Home: An Eastern Shore Childhood (n.p.: Author, c1986), 5, 22-23.
47. PE, February 9, 1884, March 16, 1895; Brooks Miles Barnes, "The Onancock Race Riot of 1907," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 92 (July, 1984), 336-351; Oberseider, So Fair a Home, 21 (quotation). The Bundick farm "was more than one man could take care of, and we always had one tenant, and sometimes two" (Ibid., 5). Further research has shown that Barnes's analysis of the labor situation was far too facile. For migrant labor see Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 (Chapel Hill and London: University to North Carolina Press, 1997).
48. "Onancock: The Year One of Continued Prosperity on Eastern Shore," Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 1, 1906; Frank P. Brent, The Eastern Shore of Virginia: A Description of Its Soil, Climate, Industries, Development, and Future Prospects (Baltimore: Harlem Paper Company, 1891), 4-5 (first quotation); Carter, "An Economic and Social Survey of Accomac County," 54; C. W. Holland Jr., N. L. Holland, and W. W. Taylor, "An Economic and Social Survey of Northampton County," University of Virginia Extension Service Series XII (November, 1927), 35, 37 (quotes Wilbur O'Byrne), 38; Wilbur O'Byrne, "More and Better Pines on the Eastern Shore," ESN, October 23, 1936. For the necessarily more intensive cultivation of small farms see John Fraser Hart, The Rural Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 279.
49. Dean, "Potatoes - F.O.B. Eastern Shore," Country Gentleman, July 5, 1919, in PE, August 2, 1919 (quotation); PE, January 19, 1929; Stevens, Soil Survey, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25; Sharrer, A Kind of Fate, 56; ESH, March 24, 1905. For the use of fertilizer in the South see Douglas Helms, "Soil and Southern History," Agricultural History 74 (Fall, 2000), 751-752.
50. Acts and Joint Resolutions Passed by the General Assembly of the State of Virginia, during the Session of 1895-1896 (Richmond: Superintendent of Public Printing, 1896), 144; Acts, 1901-1902, 441-442; PE, September 6, 1890; Sharrer, A Kind of Fate, 111.
51. Stevens, Soil Survey, 23; Holland, "An Economic and Social Survey of Northampton County," 37; Sharrer, A Kind of Fate, 84; PE, November 15, 1902, March 15, 1931, March 29, May 3, 1956.
52. Virginia: A Handbook Giving its History, Climate, and Mineral Wealth; Its Educational, Agricultural and Industrial Advantages (Richmond: Everett Waddey Company, 1893), 193; Ibid. (1909), 83; Ibid. (1926), 131; PE, May 10, 1902; AN, May 4, 1907, January 11, 1908; ESH, May 10, 1907; Letter from the Secretary of War, Transmitting, with a Letter from the Chief of Engineers, Report on Examination of Chincoteague Inlet, Va., with Plan and Estimate of Cost of Improvement, with a View to Obtaining a Channel Depth of 15 Feet, U.S. House of Representatives, 62nd Congress, 3rd Session, Document No. 1094; Stevens, Soil Survey, 23; Holland, "An Economic and Social Survey of Northampton County," 37 (quotes Wilbur O'Bryne).
53. "The Eastern Shore," Richmond State, July 24, 1883 (quotation); Stevens, Soil Survey, 11; AN, April 27, 1907; Virginia (1923), 103; ESH, December 3, 1909; PE, June 17, 1922, November 17, 1923. The closing of the open range early in the century hastened communication by eliminating the need for livestock gates across the public roads (Forman, The Virginia Eastern Shore and Its British Origins, 206).
54. John L. Lochhead, "The Boat Trains," National Railway Historical Society Bulletin 43 (1978), 19; Letter from the Secretary of War, Transmitting, Report from the Chief of Engineers on Preliminary Examinations and Surveys of Pungoteague, Nandua and Occohannock Creeks, Va., U.S. House of Representatives, 71st Congress, 2nd Session, Document 165. In 1894 the Pennsylvania Railroad gained control of the Baltimore steamboats (Abenschein, "Pennsy's Perimeter of Plenty," 40).
55. Drummer, "Pocomoke Neck and Sykes," PE, July 23, 1887; AN, April 27, 1907 (quotation); PE, May 9, June 13, 1885, October 29, 1898, March 3, 1900, September 20, 1902; "Onancock: The Year One of Continued Prosperity on the Eastern Shore," Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 1, 1906; John R. Spears, "A Curious Virginia City," New York Sun, May 7, 1890; Kirk Mariner, Wachapreague, Virginia: Then and Now (New Church, Va.: Miona Publications, 1995), 9-14; Ernest Ingersoll, "The Oyster Industry," in The History and Present Condition of the Fishery Industries, ed. G. Brown Goode (Washington: Department of the Interior, 1881), 183; Letter from the Secretary of War, Transmitting, with a Letter from the Chief of Engineers, Report of Examination of Oyster Harbor, Virginia, U.S. House of Representatives, 58th Congress, 2nd Session, Document 202; U.S. Post Office Department, Report of Site Locations.
56. Brent, The Eastern Shore of Virginia, 6, 8; Virginia (1919), 84; Carter, "An Economic and Social Survey of Accomac County," 31; Holland, "An Economic and Social Survey of Northampton County," 51. For the feverish building of churches after the coming of the railroad see Kirk Mariner, Revival's Children: A Religious History of Virginia's Eastern Shore (Salisbury, Md.: Peninsula Press, 1979), 240-637. The term "archipelago of villages" is Joel Kotkin's. See his The New Suburbanism: A Realist's Guide to the American Future (n.p.: The Planning Center, 2005) at www.joelkotkin.com (pdf). For a somewhat dissimilar process of layering and town development in a rural region, see Joseph Walden Baumli, "Prairie Trails, iron rails, and tall tales: the settling, town building, and people of Nodaway County, Missouri, 1839-1910," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2004. Baumli charted the development of infrastructure in this northwestern Missouri border county, from schools to churches, rural mail delivery routes, roads, and railroads. He argued that the development pattern of the county in the nineteenth century emerged around the railroad between 1869 and the late 1880s. In this period town development centered on railroads, and earlier settlement towns went dormant while new towns exploded. Most of these new towns grew steadily but none of them "acquired any semblance of an urban landscape." (358) Baumli argued that the county remained overwhelmingly rural despite the new railroads, and that the towns were successively rearranged as the railroads arrived.
57. AN, January 5, 1907 (quotation); Stevens, Soil Survey, 24; PE, May 7, 1892, September 11, 1897, September 10, 1898, November 22, 1902; NL, November 9, 1902; Mears, "The Eastern Shore of Virginia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," II, 599; "History of Growth of the Telephone on E.S. of Virginia," PE, August 18, 1928.
58. Kirk Mariner, Once Upon an Island: The History of Chincoteague (New Church, Va.: Miona Publications, 1996), 87; PE, December 16, 1899, November 22, 1902, June 22, 1907; Drummer, "Pocomoke Neck and Sykes," PE, July 23, 1887 (first quotation); Oberseider, So Fair a Home, p. 118 (second quotation); ESH, Janurary 12, 1906, April 19, 1907; Stevens, Soil Survey, 24. For emerging styles of Eastern Shore architecture see Gabrielle M. Lanier and Bernard L. Herman, Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic: Looking at Buildings and Landscapes (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
59. Mariner, Revival's Children, 135-144; PE, September 14, 1882, April 18, 1885, October 4, 18, 25, 1902; NL, August 21, 1903; ESN, June 24, 1949 (quotation). On Virginia's segregation and disenfranchisement, see Ayers, The Promise of the New South; Michael Perman, The Struggle for Mastery: Disenfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Charles E. Wynes, Race Relations in Virginia, 1870-1912 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1971).
60. Brooks Miles Barnes, The Gallows on the Marsh: Crime and Punishment on the Chesapeake, 1906 (Eastville, Va.: Hickory House, forthcoming).
61. Mariner, Revival's Children, 239-637; Frances Bibbins Latimer, Landmarks: Black Historic Sites on the Eastern Shore of Virginia (Eastville, Va.: Hickory House, forthcoming). For black migration to the Eastern Shore see above page 32.
62. PE, December 20, 1930; Carter, "An Economic and Social Survey of Accomac County," 89; Holland, "An Economic and Social Survey of Northampton County," 140. On relative black tenancy and landownership, see the Historical Census Browser, University of Virginia for 1900 census data at:
63. PE, February 23, 1882; Winthrop A. Roberts, "The Crab Industry of Maryland," Forest and Stream 65 (September 30, 1905), 275-276. See PE, November 21, 1891, on the employment of African Americans from Delaware.
64. PE, March 23, 1882.
65. PE, February 9, 1882. For the Readjuster Movement see Barnes, "Triumph of the New South," 1-265.
66. "The Eastern Shore," Richmond State, July 24, 1883; Grace S. Brush, "Forests before and after the Colonial Encounter" in Discovering the Chesapeake, 57-58; Stevens, Soil Survey, 25; John R. Wennersten, The Chesapeake: An Environmental Biography (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2001), 149. C. F. Cerco, et al., "Nutrient and Solid Controls in Virginia's Chesapeake Bay Tributaries", Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, 128 (2002), 179-189 report that cropland is the major source of nitrogen and phosphorous flow between the terrestrial and estuarine systems within the Chesapeake Bay watershed. For the frequent dredging of Onancock Creek see U.S. House of Representatives, 51st Congress, 1st Session, Document 83 (1889); 60th Congress, 1st Session, Document 652 (1908); 68th Congress, 1st Session, Document 219 (1924).
67. To underscore the complexity of the system processes that had been damaged, it is now understood that a positive feedback loop had been initiated by the increase in surface runoff and nutrient load-not only had it caused the oyster population to decline due to benthic anoxia, but by doing so it also eliminated one of the only natural remedies to a polluted water column because the dwindling number of oysters grew less and less capable of filtering Bay waters; for a more detailed explanation, see Boesch, D., et al., (2001) "Factors in the Decline of Coastal Ecosystems," Science, 293, 1589-1591; Newcombe, C. and W. Horn first documented findings from 1936 water sampling activities in the Bay in their groundbreaking publication, Oxygen-poor waters of the Chesapeake Bay, Science, 88(2273): 80-81 (1938). See also Tom Horton, Turning the Tide: Saving the Chesapeake Bay, rev. ed. (Washington: Island Press, 2003).
68. Steven G. Davidson, Jay G. Merwin, Jr., John Capper, Garrett Power, and Frank R. Shivers, Jr. Chesapeake Waters: Four Centuries of Controversy, Concern, and Legislation, 2nd ed. (Centreville, Md.: Tidewater Publishers, 1997) 85 (quotation), 96.
69. C. F. Adams, "The Kingdom of Accomac," Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 45 (1911-1912), 596-597. "Without [the railroad] today the Shore might be slowly succumbing to a lotus-diet of isolation and like many comparable sections of the Tidewater country . . . reflecting the loneliness of a vanishing era" (PE, August 8, 1936).
70. Brooks Miles Barnes and Barry R. Truitt, "A Short History of the Virginia Barrier Islands" in Seashore Chronicles: Three Centuries of the Virginia Barrier Islands, ed. Barnes and Truitt (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 6.
71. Ibid., 8.
72. Richard A. Pouliot and Julie J. Pouliot, Shipwrecks on the Virginia Coast and the Men of the United States Life-Saving Service (Centreville, Md.: Tidewater Publishers, 1986), 4; Mariner, Once Upon an Island, 38-39, 65; PE, November 21, 1885, May 13, July 15, 1893; Letter from the Secretary of War, Transmitting, Report and Recommendations Concerning Improvement of Chincoteague Inlet, Virginia, by a Breakwater, U.S. House of Representatives, 51st Congress, 1st Session, Executive Document 207.
73. Pouliot, Shipwrecks on the Virginia Coast, 50, 107, 156; Ralph T. Whitelaw, Virginia's Eastern Shore: A History of Northampton and Accomack Counties (Richmond: Virginia Historical Society, 1951), I, 370; Robert de Gast, The Lighthouses of the Chesapeake (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 143; Ron M. Kagawa and J. Richard Kellam, Cobb's Island, Virginia: The Last Sentinel (Virginia Beach: The Donning Company, 2003), 29 (quotes Sumner I. Kimball); PE, September 19, 1896, April 16, 1898.
74. Hayman, Rails Along the Chesapeake, 34, 38-39, 133; John E. Bradford to William Mahone, August 5, 1882, Mahone Papers, Duke; Mariner, Once Upon an Island, 42. For prominent seafood dealers of Willis Wharf see the obituaries of John C. Walker (b. Oriole, Md.), Marcus Clarence Ballard (b. Oriole, Md.), Henry Miller Terry (b. Sayville, N.Y.), and Wade H. Walker (b. Oriole, Md.) in PE, March 23, 1929, March 7, 1941, September 1, November 10, 1955.
75. Ingersoll, "The Oyster Industry," 183; PE, June 2, 1888, July 20, 1889, April 5, 1890, June 2, 1894; John R. Spears, "A Curious Virginia City," New York Sun, May 7, 1890 (quotation).
76. H.R., 48th Congress, 2nd Session, Executive Document 107; H.R., 51st Congress, 1st Session, Executive Document 207; Acts and Joint Resolutions (1881-1882), 164, (1885-1886), 17, 29-30, 156, 365, (Extra Session, 1887), 196, 263, (1887-1888), 97, 100, (1889-1890), 793, (1891-1892), 480-481, 481-482.
77. Annabel Lynch, "Chincoteague Island," AN, August 11, 1916; Mears, "The Eastern Shore of Virginia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," II, 615; Baltimore Sun, November 28, 1892; Nora Miller Turman, The Eastern Shore of Virginia, 1603-1964 (Onancock, Va.: Eastern Shore News, 1964), 204-205.
78. "Onancock: The Year One of Continued Prosperity on Eastern Shore," Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 1, 1906 (quotation); Virginia (1909), 81, 83; Oysterman and Fisherman IX (December, 1911), 9; ESH, August 1, 1913.
79.George Shiras 3rd, Hunting Wild Life with Camera and Flashlight: A Record of Sixty-five Years' Visits to the Woods and Waters of North America (Washington: National Geographic Society, 1935), II, 80 (quotation); Maude Radford Warren, "The Island of Chincoteague," Harper's Monthly Magazine 127 (October, 1931), 777; NL, September 17, 1902; AN, February 3, 1906; ESH, March 25, April 1, July 1, 15, 22, 1910; Report of State Board of Fisheries to the Governor of Virginia, from October 1, 1905, to October 1, 1906 (Richmond: Superintendent of Public Printing, 1906), 5; PE, August 8, 1936.
80. Marinus James, "The Parson Goes Deep Sea Fishing," PE, September 29, 1928; Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, May 6, 1912; H.R., 62nd Congress, 3rd Session, Document 1094; Lynch, "Chincoteague Island," AN, August 11, 1916; Margaret Ellen Mears, "Chincoteague and the Seafood Industry", PE, August 13, 1932; James Egbert Mears, "The Eastern Shore of Virginia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," II, 615-616; NL, December 10, 1902; PE, August 8, 1936. In the early 1930s scallops "disappeared suddenly when a mysterious blight attacked the sea grass in which they propagated" (James Wharton, "Virginia's Drowned Village," Virginia Cavalcade VII [Winter, 1957], 8).
81. Alexander Hunter, The Huntsman in the South, Volume I: Virginia and North Carolina (New York: Neale Publishing Company, 1908), 313; Shiras, Hunting Wild Life with Camera and Flashlight, II, 67, 69, 80; ESH, February 2, 9, 1906; Harry M. Walsh, The Outlaw Gunner (Centreville, Md.: Tidewater Publishers, 1971), 25-27, 30 (quotation); L. C. Sanford, L. B. Bishop, and T. S. Van Dyke, The Water-Fowl Family (New York: Macmillan Company, 1903), 68-69; George Reiger, The Wings of Dawn: The Complete Book of North American Waterfowling (New York: Stein and Day, 1980), 68. For studies of market hunting elsewhere see Louis S. Warren, The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997) and Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2001).
82. T. Gilbert Pearson, Stories of Bird Life (Richmond: B. F. Johnson Publishing Company, 1901), 66-69; Frank M. Chapman, Camps and Cruises of an Ornithologist (New York: Appleton and Co., 1908), 63-64 (first quotation); A. C. Bent, "Report of A. C. Bent, on Condition of Bird Colonies on Cobb's Island, Virginia, in 1907," Bird-Lore 9 (1907), 317 (second quotation). On the destruction of the bison, see Andrew Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: Social and Ecological Changes in the Great Plains, 1750-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
83. Acts and Joint Resolutions (1893-1894), 794, (1899-1900), 552; Minutes, November 13, 1905, Eastern Shore Game Protective Association, Papers, 1896-1911, Eastern Shore of Virginia Historical Society, Onancock; William Dutcher, "Results of Special Protection to Gulls and Terns Obtained through the Thayer Fund," Auk 18 (1901), 77; Reiger, The Wings of Dawn, 71, 73; Shiras, Hunting Wild Life with Camera and Flashlight, II, 63-65, 96 (quotation).
84. Barnes and Truitt, "A Short History of the Virginia Barrier Islands," 10-11; Amine Kellam, "The Cobb's Island Story," Virginia Cavalcade XXIII (Spring, 1974), 23; Mariner, Once Upon an Island, 69. For middle-class vacationers see Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3-4.
85. PE, March 24, December 8, 1888, September 28, 1889, November 11, 1893, November 23, 1895, October 17, 1896, February 13, October 30, 1897, February 18, 25, March 4, 11, 1899; Richmond Dispatch, April 10, 11, 1889; Barnes and Truitt, "A Short History of the Virginia Barrier Islands," 12-13, 15; Brent, The Eastern Shore of Virginia, 8; Prospectus and Subscription List of the Cobb's Island Company, Special Collections, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Thomas Brown Robertson, "Historical Notes and Episodes of Northampton County" Ms. in Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, 386-389. For an early analysis of shoreline migration see J. R. Sturgis, "Cobb's Island," PE, November 13, 1897.
86. Northampton County 1920 Manuscript Census, 249-250; Wharton, "Virginia's Drowned Village," 10-11. For the advantages of the power boat see George Fortiss, "The Hunter and the Motorboat," Outing LV (March, 1910), 735-739.
87. T. B. Manney, "What Farmers Say About Marketing Eastern Shore Potatoes and What Farmers Suggest for Better Marketing," PE, December 15, 1928; Burton, "A Review of the Potato Industry of the Eastern Shore of Virginia," Chicago Potato World in PE, March 17, 1939; PE, June 23, 1928; The Role of Agriculture-Agribusiness in the Economic Development of Virginia's Eastern Shore, 6.
88. Mears, "The Eastern Shore of Virginia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," II, 582-583; PE, August 11, 1928, February 2, 1929.
Essay Sections:
Introduction | On
The Edge of Modernity | The Railroad and the Modern
Landscape | The Railroad's Direct and Indirect Effects
| Nature's Limits | Conclusion
| Notes | Recommended Resources
Published: 31 July 2007
© 2007 William G. Thomas III, Brooks Miles Barnes, Tom Szuba and Southern Spaces
© 2007 William G. Thomas III, Brooks Miles Barnes, Tom Szuba and Southern Spaces
