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

At first glance the Eastern Shore of Virginia in the late nineteenth century might have appeared a small and isolated peninsula on the edge of a huge country, yet any Rand McNally map of the Pennsylvania Railroad system gave clues to a different story. The most remote farm on the Eastern Shore was intimately connected to a vast economic and social web that extended well beyond the borders of the United States. Agents of the Eastern Shore Produce Exchange marketed potatoes grown near Eastville to buyers in Boston, Cleveland, Toronto, and Havana. Farmers at Makemie Park purchased at neighborhood general stores beef slaughtered in Chicago. Ventilated cars carried Parksley strawberries to Pittsburgh and livestock cars brought in mules from St. Joseph, Missouri. Mine props shipped from Hallwood went to the coal fields of Pennsylvania and anthracite from Pennsylvania filled bins in Hallwood. Eastern Shore schooners carried white potatoes to New York in the summer and oysters to Baltimore in the winter. They returned with hardware founded in Bethlehem, grain grown in Nebraska, or shotguns manufactured in Ithaca.

Along with these changes came a form of modern confidence, a supreme conviction that the command of technology and the market gave these people unstoppable advantages. So it was that the general manager of the Eastern Shore Produce Exchange boasted that the little town of Onley had just as much advantage as Baltimore or even New York in the market.

Yet much remained beyond the control of locals and, even, the Pennsylvania Railroad. Information flow and demographic patterns only rendered these interconnections more complex and contingent. A wave of immigrants in Boston, fresh orders for the steel mills of the Mahoning Valley, or a spring drought in Florida might mean high prices for Eastern Shore potatoes while a bumper potato crop in the Kaw Valley, a textile strike in New York City, or floods on the Mississippi might depress the market. People working for the railroad or seafood dealers or agricultural commission houses continuously moved on and off the peninsula. Middle-class vacationers stopped at barrier island hotels or at bayside boarding houses. Wealthier visitors relaxed at shooting lodges or purchased second homes along the creeks. Other people settled permanently, especially in the railroad towns and seaside fishing villages.

These residents participated in a great compression of space and time on their landscape. The federal government, private capital, and huge corporations aided and abetted this process. The changes in the landscape were as rapid as they were far-reaching. In little more than a decade coastal surveys, lighthouses, life-saving stations, railroads, mail routes, roads, and post offices punctuated the Shore and coursed with the information and products of distant markets. Remarkably, some farmers on the Eastern Shore combined in the Eastern Shore Produce Exchange to harness these dynamic effects, however temporarily. Although divided by racial exclusion, Eastern Shore farmers managed to vault their counties into the top rank of agricultural wealth in the nation. Their agricultural technologies caused unanticipated runoff and changed the nutrient balances in the ecosystem. Benthic anoxia set in, itself a product of recursive changes in land use that the railroads made possible and profitable. At the same time, extractive industries, such as oystering and market hunting, opened in unprecedented ways with the confluence of technologies, markets, and natural systems. These boomed and collapsed in over-harvesting and exploitation, in a chaotic market and against natural obstacles.

This mobility, this interconnection with the modern world, even on such a remote place as the Eastern Shore of Virginia in the American South, came in complex layers upon the local landscape. No matter how much nostalgia Thomas Dixon might cherish for an Eastern Shore cut off from the modern world of railroads, mail, and its attendant business, the place was abuzz from its dark marshes to its bright fields and new towns.