Exploring Mathews County, Virginia: Water Trails, Shipyards and Lighthouses

Mathews County sits on Virginia's Middle Peninsula, between the Piankatank River and Mobjack Bay, with water on three sides. About 30 miles up from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, where only 12 miles of water separate the Bay's Eastern and Western shores, the county has some 200 miles of shoreline laced with coves, inlets and rivers. It has always lived by the water.

Wolf Trap and Stingray Point

Off the county's shore, even though the main channel runs more than 50 feet deep, the Wolf Trap Shoals spread out from the western shore. They take their name from HMS Wolf, an English naval ship hunting pirates in the Bay for the Crown, which ran aground there in 1691. Local people helped float it free — and the ship's master refused to pay them.

Up the Piankatank, which winds inland to Dragon Run, lies Gwynn's Island. Chief Powhatan is said to have made the Piankatank people its guardians, keeping it for hunting and for honoring the "Great Spirit." In 1608 Captain John Smith explored the river, but first he was stung by a stingray off what is still called Stingray Point. Sure the agonizing wound would kill him, he had his grave dug on Gwynn's Island. He survived and went on exploring the Chesapeake — the voyages now honored by the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail.

A paddler's county

Mathews has 15 public kayak launch sites and more than 100 miles of water trails through backwaters and marshes, past old wharves, and between sheltered harbors and broader rivers. The Mathews Blueways Water Trails, among the first trails recognized by the National Park Service's Chesapeake Gateways, are six separate routes, each with its own character.

One of the launches nearest the open Bay is White's Creek Landing, sheltered by Rigby Island — a low sandbar home only to nesting ospreys, and a remnant of a chain of barrier islands that once lined this stretch of coast. Other launches sit on the many creeks and inlets that drain the county.

Ships and sailors

Mathews split off from Gloucester County in 1791 and was named — with its unusual spelling — for Brigadier General Thomas Mathews, a Revolutionary War veteran and speaker of Virginia's House of Delegates. Settlers cleared land for farms but leaned from the start on the fish and shellfish offshore.

Shipbuilding was a mainstay from colonial times. In the 1700s and 1800s, more than 2,000 seagoing vessels were launched from Mathews shipyards, and nearly every harbor and creek had at least one yard. From 1802 to 1844 the East River, running north from Mobjack Bay into the lower county, was an official port of entry for registering ships, and more than 10,000 vessels reported there in that period.

The Mathews Maritime Foundation keeps that history in a small house near the center of town, displaying ship models, binnacles, spyglasses and merchant marine papers donated by local families. It runs family boatbuilding weekends and a winter speaker series and collects residents' oral histories. As local industries declined, many watermen joined the merchant marine, working on seagoing tugs and commercial lines — and World War II hit the county hard. According to the foundation's president, Nancy Lindgren, Mathews lost more men at sea per capita in that war than any other county in the country.

Around town

The small town center of Mathews Courthouse has no traffic lights — the whole county has none — and no hotels, though there are campgrounds, bed-and-breakfasts and many rental cottages and homes. The visitor center occupies the former Sibley's General Store, dating from 1898. Across the street, the old Halcyon department store now holds offices, meeting space and a film society's theater, and its three-story brick front carries a mural of a boat on the waves made from mirrors, local tiles and shells — created as a community project by Kat Sharp, who describes Mathews as a place where a good idea is easy to make happen. Restaurants, a bakery, antique shops and an art center fill out the downtown.

On the East River stands Poplar Grove, an 18th-century mansion with a portico, birthplace of Sally Tompkins, the only woman commissioned as an officer in the Confederate Army. John Lennon and Yoko Ono owned it briefly. Its current owner is restoring the estate, including its waterfront tide mill — once the area's grist mill and one of only five tide mills left in the United States. The online Mathews Maritime Heritage Trail maps the county's historic wharves, shipyards, plantations and fish- and crab-packing houses.

On land

You don't need a boat. With a high point of about 42 feet above sea level, the county is flat and easy for cycling, and each May the Tour de Chesapeake brings hundreds of riders through forest and marsh on roads that end at landings, wharves and beaches.

• Bethel Beach Natural Area, protected by Virginia for its endangered tiger beetles and piping plovers, is edged with peat from decayed marsh grass and dotted with loblolly pine stumps from a stand of trees that once grew at the water's edge.
• New Point Comfort Lighthouse Preserve, owned by The Nature Conservancy, has a raised walkway and observation deck over sweeping marsh and maritime forest. The lighthouse, one of the first built to guide ships up the Bay, is dark now after two centuries of service. Whimbrels probe the mudflats at low tide, and swallows hunt insects over the walkway at dusk.

Mathews isn't on the way to anywhere except the water. Visitors have to choose to go there — and the county welcomes them.

Sources

• National Park Service, Chesapeake Bay: "Exploring Mathews County, Virginia," an abridged version of an article first published in the Bay Journal. The source's "wimbrels" is corrected here to whimbrels.