Tangier Island: Crabbers, Crocketts and a Shrinking Shore

A century before this piece was written, the Harper's Magazine writer J.W. Church set out to visit Tangier Island. He carried a letter to an oysterman in Crisfield asking for passage, and the oysterman sent one of his captains to take Church and his photographer to Capt. Peter Crockett's store on the island — with a warning that Tangier's people were an odd bunch.

The island charmed them at once. It reminded them of Holland: tidy cottages along narrow lanes and a broad harbor. They liked Crockett's store, puzzled happily over the islanders' accent — something like Cornish English with a Southern drawl — and talked with children taught in a one-room school. They were struck that the land was so low that most families buried their dead in the front yard, among the toys and the garden.

A fragile place

Getting there is easier now, and the island is just as charming — the more so for being so fragile. It lies 12 miles from Crisfield, Maryland, and 14 from Reedville, Virginia, and it has lost both land and people since Church's day:

Tangier is one mile wide and three miles long. Marsh breaks up its few open fields, and yards flood at high tide.

Life on the water

Church found the island licensing 91 oyster tongers, 62 dredgers, 3 patent tongers, 75 crab netters and 40 crab scrapers. By 2007 the crab fleet was down to 35 boats and the oyster fleet to 20. Young men often leave for mainland jobs; some captain tugboats and spend weeks away from their families. Tighter limits on commercial crabbing and rising prices for fuel, bait and gear are making a living on the water harder.

Tourism will not replace crabbing any time soon, but Tangier welcomes visitors and knows it needs them: islanders wave, offer tips, and keep the ice cream shops open late.

Who settled it

American Indians lived on Tangier for centuries before John Smith came upon the cluster of islands in 1608 and named them the Russell Isles, after the doctor aboard his shallop. In 1707 a man named Post traded two overcoats to a local Indian chief for the islands and brought over three families and their livestock from England. The animals are long gone; the families' descendants are not. It is hard to find an islander not named Crockett, Pruitt or Parks, and there are many Eskridges, who came a little later, along with Dises (or Dizes), Marshalls and Charnocks.

A War of 1812 prophecy

In the War of 1812 the British kept a base on Tangier, with a camp for 12,000 troops. As they set out for Baltimore, the island's Methodist minister Joshua Thomas, known as the "parson of the islands," told them they would lose there and leave their wives widowed and their children orphaned. He was right, and the survivors came back through Tangier to tell him so.

Holding back the sea

A hurricane in 1821 destroyed the fort where the British had camped, and later storms have taken other parts of the island. A seawall built in 1989 has protected it since, and residents have been promised another.

Church left calling the islanders a sturdy, old-fashioned people who took life seriously and eyed the wider world with suspicion, and he praised their dignity and the simplicity of their homes. Nobody on Tangier is vague about the outside world now, with a Wal-Mart 90 minutes away. But the dignity of their hard work, the appeal of their way of life and the pleasure of a visit are as real as ever.

Sources

Rewritten from an abridged Bay Journal article reprinted by the National Park Service as "Exploring Tangier Island" (Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail), in hubnx's own words; the article's quotations of J.W. Church are paraphrased. Its uncredited photograph is not reproduced.

• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.