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

The Eastern Shore’s economic boom came to an end in the late 1920s. The success of the peninsula’s white potato industry encouraged new competition from Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, North Carolina, and other states. An increasingly glutted market brought lower prices and reduced profit margins, which, despite the admonitions of the officers of the Eastern Shore Produce Exchange, encouraged local overproduction. Meanwhile, the rise of the motor truck weakened the Exchange’s ability to control supply by making it convenient for farmers to ship directly to urban commission merchants. In 1928, the cost of production of a barrel of white potatoes exceeded its market price. Farmers, who for years had routinely borrowed to pay for land, machinery, seed, and fertilizer and who just as routinely had retired the debts with money to spare, now found themselves unable to meet their obligations. The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 precluded chance of recovery. Between 1925 and 1940, the number of farms in Accomack and Northampton declined from 4,856 to 2,960.87

Concurrently, the seafood industry continued to suffer from over-fishing and, increasingly, from pollution. The planting of barren bottom, so controversial at its inception in the 1890s, helped sustain the oyster industry in the face of the ruthless looting of the common grounds. The lumber industry also declined. The barrel houses closed as farmers and oyster dealers switched from barrels to less expensive burlap bags. Happily, the move to burlap combined with the rapid regeneration of stands of loblolly pine to prevent the oft-predicted deforestation of the peninsula.88

The declining economy forced people off the Eastern Shore. From a high of 53,000 in 1910, population of the two counties fell to its twentieth-century low of 43,500 in 1970. The once bustling landscape now was haunted by ghosts – empty stores, abandoned houses, and boats rotting in the marsh.