The string of narrow barrier islands protecting the Eastern
Shore mainland from the Atlantic Ocean is one of the most dynamic landforms
on earth. Under pressure of current and tide they are continuously on
the move, building on one end, diminishing on the other, all the while
migrating gradually westward. Some of the islands are mere sandbars; others
are heavily forested. Between the islands and the mainland lie the wide
expanse of marshes, bays, and channels known as the Broadwater. The islands
and adjacent marshes and waters teem with life and serve as a great nursery
for creatures of the air and water.
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Between the Eastern Shore mainland and the barrier islands
lay the Broadwater, a wide expanse of marshes, bays, and channels. The Broadwater
was nursery and way station for a myriad of animal life whose exploitation
the coming of the railroad facilitated. |
In 1870 humans resided on some of the islands. They made their livings
by farming, herding, and market hunting. They also fished, clammed, and
gathered oysters. Some gained temporary employment in "wrecking"
– salvaging beached vessels and cargo or gathering debris from the
wrack-strewn beach. The islanders sent their produce by steamboat and
sailboat to Philadelphia and New York. On Cobb’s and Assateague
islands, resort hotels catered to bathers in the summer and to gunners
and anglers the rest of the year.
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Beginning in the 1870s a tremendous increase in the volume of shipping
along the Virginia coast demanded improved maritime safety. The United
States Coast Survey mapping of the Eastern Shore coastline was a first
step, but the bars and shoals of the Atlantic took an ever-heavier toll
in life and property. The federal government responded by improving the
existing lighthouses on Assateague, Hog, and Smith’s islands,
by anchoring a lightship off
Assateague,
by erecting a lighthouse on
Killick
Shoals in
Chincoteague
Bay,
by establishing a quarantine station on Fisherman’s Island, and
by surveying
Chincoteague
Inlet
as a possible harbor of refuge.
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More important, in the 1870s and 1880s, the federal government established
life-saving service stations on most of the barrier islands. Over the
years the keepers and surfmen of the stations saved countless lives and
millions of dollars in property. While the men of the life-saving and
lighthouse services fought storms and shoals on behalf of mariners and
their vessels, they fought a quieter battle against the insidious effects
of current, tide, and shoreline migration. They had continuously to replace
buoys and channel markers, to move or even abandon lighthouses and life-saving
service stations. "The station buildings upon the coast are all constructed
with a view to withstand the severest tempests," boasted the superintendent
of the life-saving service in 1904. "This substantial construction
also enables them to be easily and cheaply moved when threatened by the
gradual encroachment of the sea, which upon many sections of the coast,
effects in the course of years great changes in the configuration of the
coast line." So rapid was shoreline migration on Cobb's Island in
the late nineteenth century that the life-saving station had to be moved
in 1896 and again in 1898.
73 Published: 31 July 2007
© 2007 William G. Thomas III, Brooks Miles Barnes, Tom Szuba and
Southern Spaces 
