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

The railroad came to the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay after decades of planning. First proposed in the mid-1830s, a line was surveyed in 1837 by the War Department at the behest of a Senate resolution. Independently, the state of Maryland commissioned a study to explore the prospects for a line along the Eastern Shore 118 miles from near Wilmington, Delaware, to Tangier Sound on the Chesapeake Bay. The Maryland commissioners found that the region was full of marshes and "deficient of good roads," and as a consequence cut off from communication with the rest of the state. These "natural obstacles" led them to see the peninsula of Maryland and Virginia as uniquely suited to the railroad. The watercourses were so variable and "deeply indented" that the railroad's straight course might offer more efficient and "natural" means of transportation. With the extraordinarily flat landscape and abundant lumber for ties, the Eastern Shore appeared to be made for rails.28

Image:

The N.Y., P. & N. was built down the high, dry, and sparsely populated spine of the peninsula. Seeing little evidence of human activity, early travelers felt "walled in" by the pines. Notice the oyster-shell ballast.

To these advantages the commissioners added others. The lands of the Eastern Shore's interior, so far removed from water-born commerce, were ripe for planting. Their state of natural "manure" meant that these marginal lands needed only the railroad to unlock their great potential. The railroad, furthermore, would place the region at the crossroads of American geography on the eastern seaboard. They were confident that the rush to build railroads "cannot fail to convey toward the seaboard." Indeed, they expected the Eastern Shore line to profit less from local traffic than from “the business which the railroads of the South will bring towards the Eastern cities."29

Little came of the commissioners' plans for an Eastern Shore line until well after the Civil War. Surveying for the line into Virginia began in 1874, as building proceeded through Delaware and Maryland. In September the white and newly-enfranchised black citizens of Northampton County voted across racial lines to raise $10,000 for purchasing the right-of-way for the new railroad. The vote was 1,014 for the appropriation and just 35 against it. "Our people are delighted with the result," a Northampton man proclaimed, "and now we want to hear the whistle blow to put down brakes, and cry out, 'All aboard!'"30

The new sounds of the industrial age, however, took much longer to arrive than anyone thought possible. The depression of the mid-1870s slowed the railroad's progress to a crawl. In 1878 the Virginia legislature chartered the Peninsula Railroad Company to build a line along the Eastern Shore, but four years later local promoters were still waiting for the line to extend down the peninsula and erase "the doubts of those who have been most persistent in saying that the 'railroad would never come.'" When finally it seemed as if the railroad would be built on the Eastern Shore, a local attorney pointed out that its origins were forty-six years old. Few residents could contain their excitement at the prospect. The railroad "will bring to light our undeveloped resources, improve our lands in productiveness and value," one predicted. "In a word, it will force us from the groove in which we have spun for two centuries and a half and put us upon a level with this progressive age."31