Railroad cars carried Northward increasing quantities
of Eastern Shore lumber, seafood, and farm produce and returned with all
manner of raw, processed, and manufactured goods as well as with emigrants
and tourists. A new infrastructure developed as towns grew up along the
tracks, roads radiated from the towns, and eventually telephone and power
lines followed the roads. Property values increased and population expanded.
The emerging optimism of the people of the Eastern Shore found expression
in the construction of wharves, warehouses, stores, houses, and public
buildings; their growing sophistication in more frequent travel, the provision
of better educational opportunities for their children, the adoption of
up-to-date styles of architecture, the installation of indoor plumbing,
and the purchase of automobiles, pianos, and other amenities. In general,
the railroad and accompanying technologies made possible an enormous wealth
in the countryside and brought sweeping changes in a remarkably short
period of time. These changes produced drastic and far-reaching direct
and indirect effects to the ecological systems of the Shore and, in turn,
to its human residents.
1
|
What we seek to accomplish here is a close
reading of the creation of a modern landscape to capture the interaction
of technologies, people, and environment. 2
The Eastern Shore of Virginia, according to geographer Wilbur
Zelinsky in a pioneering essay "Where the South Begins,"
was situated along the border of a settlement landscape that marked
the northern limit of the South. Zelinsky examined architectural
styles, town characteristics, and countryside |
features to determine a pattern in what defined or marked the Southern
landscape. He considered Virginia's Eastern Shore "decidedly Deep
Southern." Its landscape, structures, and their spatial arrangements
made the region more like Georgia or Tidewater Virginia than Pennsylvania
or even its neighbors, Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Other
characteristics Zelinsky examined confirmed for him its place in the South:
the lexical traits, the propensity to vote Democratic, the high proportion
of African Americans, and the high ratio of mules to horses. Although
he could not find "physiographic" reasons for the boundary,
Zelinsky drew his northern limit of the South at the Maryland-Virginia
state line on the Eastern Shore, "an emphatic interstate and cultural
boundary [that] match beautifully for unknown reasons."
3
Modernity came to the Eastern Shore of Virginia, as
it did elsewhere in the South, in the form of a radical shift in the use
of resources and labor relations, and in a transformation of the landscape.
4 The relationship between the railroad, market
integration, and the environment, moreover, stood at the heart of their
modernizing landscape: the reach of markets for both buying and selling
nearly everything produced in the world, the expanding and tightening
of worldwide communication, the fundamental alteration of widely-held
conceptions of space and time, and the visible and invisible reconfigurations
of the region's natural system. But there was no simple correlation among
these components. Eastern Shore residents had long felt the effects of
the market, participated in Atlantic trading, and maintained long-standing
shipping practices with major urban centers in the Eastern United States.
They responded to the changing market conditions even before the railroad
reached the peninsula. Indeed, the railroad's penetration elsewhere, especially
its linking of the Midwest with the major urban centers in the mid-Atlantic,
had substantial repercussions along the Shore, as it brought new competition
to established markets.
5The arrival of the railroad, though, marked an important
moment.
6 It altered the geography of the Eastern
Shore in fundamental ways and prompted unforeseen changes in the cultural
and natural worlds of its residents. The Pennsylvania Railroad, the federal
and state governments, alliances of local residents, and outsiders all
acted upon the Shore's natural and human resources. Each extended networks
across the landscape; each wanted to expose or exploit the landscape,
nature, and human connections; and each confronted limits to its vision.
On the geologically-stable mainland, the myriad changes in the landscape
(themselves intrinsically limited by nature) held steady for decades and
became organized around new crops and markets that propelled the Eastern
Shore for a time into the front ranks of agricultural success stories
in the United States. The confluence of forces and energies, moreover,
that sustained the enormous success of the region, did not last, and,
ironically, the vestiges of this transformation dominate the landscape
of the Shore today. Along the chain of ever-shifting barrier islands shielding
the peninsula from the Atlantic Ocean, alterations in the landscape proved
far less enduring. Human activity on the islands was one of advance and
retreat before the forces of tide, current, and storm.
7
Published: 31 July 2007
© 2007 William G. Thomas III, Brooks Miles Barnes, Tom Szuba and
Southern Spaces 
