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

The New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad immediately became the main artery of Eastern Shore trade, but the new towns that sprang up along its length did not prosper at the expense of older wharf and crossroad communities. The directors of the steamboat companies serving the peninsula early and correctly realized that the N.Y., P. & N. posed a threat to their business. The railroad soon forced them to curtail steamboat service on the seaside and abandon it altogether on the lower bayside. Still, the Baltimore steamers continued to call at numerous wharves on the upper bayside from which they annually carried away thousands of tons of seafood and farm produce. In 1929, although in the waning days of the steamboat era, the commerce of the eight wharves on Occohannock, Nandua, and Pungoteague creeks amounted to more than 20,000 tons.54

Saxis, Sanford, Marsh Market, Messongo, and Belinda – villages adjacent to Pocomoke and Tangier sounds – thrived on the Chesapeake Bay crab and oyster industries. In 1907 Sanford boasted of “nine stores, three saw-mills, one Town Hall, three churches and a barrel factory building and several new dwellings.” Farther down the bayside on Pungoteague Creek, Harborton enjoyed the benefits of its large wharf and of a factory that rendered fish into oil and fertilizer. A newly-developed section of the town aptly took the name Menhaden Park. Onancock, the busiest of the bayside ports, grew by leaps and bounds. Confined since its founding in the seventeenth century between two branches of Onancock Creek, beginning in the mid-1880s the town expanded eastward and south-eastward and even sprawled across the creek into what became its Mount Prospect neighborhood. On the seaside the seafood industry fueled the growth of Franklin City, Greenbackville, Wachapreague, and Willis Wharf and encouraged the founding of Quinby, Oyster, and Brighton.55

The hamlets at the crossroads and the heads of the creeks also prospered. Numerous new post offices, schools, and churches – all established to accommodate expanding business and population – made the hamlets attractive to the people living in the surrounding countryside. Their stores, easily and abundantly stocked from nearby depots and wharves, served by day as emporia and by night as social centers where men gathered to discuss the local passions of hunting, horse racing, and baseball. In 1920, forty-six places in Accomack and Northampton counties counted populations of 100 or more. They were home to nearly forty per cent of the peninsula’s people. Within two or three miles of each other, the railroad and wharf towns and the crossroad hamlets embodied an “archipelago of villages” across the Eastern Shore countryside.56

People moved into the larger towns to find work and to enjoy the amenities and novelties of town life. In 1907 an Onancock editor directed the attention of his readers "to the great number of homes erected here, more probably than in any year in its history." Prosperous farm families, the editor continued, "have moved into our town where their children can be educated and the social features of an up-to-date town can be enjoyed." Townspeople built their homes close to the street on deep, narrow lots. (Conversely, out in the countryside, farmers built their houses set back from the road behind spacious lawns.) Many of the towns laid sidewalks, erected street lamps, and provided water and sewage (which was flushed raw into the creeks). Power plants supplied electricity to the towns and extended the grid into the country. Telephone switchboards linked the towns to nearby farmsteads and to the greater world. Beginning in the early 1890s, large public cemeteries appeared on the edge of several of the towns. In numerous instances, ancestors, long the denizens of secluded family plots, were re-interred in the new cemeteries. Even the dead were coming to town.57

The landscape, town and country, was dotted with new homes and businesses. The traditional string style of local architecture was superseded by modern styles – the four-square and its varieties, the bungalow, even Sears, Roebuck manufactured houses shipped to the Eastern Shore by rail. "The dwelling houses a few years ago were unattractive, and many of them uncomfortable," a traveling salesman remarked in 1887. "To day they are not only comfortable but tasty." In 1920 a farmer left his six-room house in the crossroad hamlet of Nelsonia for a new home in the nearby railroad town of Bloxom. "This house had thirteen rooms, a sleeping porch upstairs, and a downstairs porch that ran three-quarters of the way round the house, plus a small porch in back," the farmer’s daughter later recalled. "The house had a real bathroom and electric lights in every room." Frame structures predominated but brick and concrete houses and stores were not uncommon.

When fire destroyed the business sections of Parksley and Onancock at the turn of the century, both were rebuilt almost entirely in brick. The new homes and businesses were fitted with modern heating and plumbing. On the farms modern windmills stood tall and angular among new barns, smokehouses, potato houses, and other outbuildings. So much construction left the domesticated landscape, particularly that of the new railroad towns, with a raw, unfinished look.58