The area’s original Born Heres, the Accomac, Accohannock, and Mattawames tribes of American Indians, had been gone a long time, forced to sell their land to the ships full of Englishmen who began arriving in 1603. Over the next two hundred years the land was cultivated—potatoes and tomatoes—by farmers and also by slaves who, at the time of the first federal census in 1790, comprised a third of Accomack’s population. The county went Confederate during the Civil War, but was occupied by Union troops without much resistance shortly after fighting began.
In the late nineteenth century, executives with the Pennsylvania Railroad were looking for ways to connect customers in northeastern industrial cities to southern farm goods, and they began to notice that the easiest, straightest route was through the Eastern Shore. Shore residents received this news with a mix of excitement and trepidation over the effect of such a modern intrusion. But a straight line was drawn between Norfolk and New York, and in 1884 the railroad opened, bifurcating the peninsula straight up the middle.
The impact on the county was immediate. The arrival of the railroad meant the arrival of railroad towns, planned communities laid out on grids. These towns were followed by the arrival of electricity and then telephone lines. Both were symptoms of the larger economic boom that had arrived to the area. Things that northeasterners wanted—seafood, strawberries, the versatile potato—the Eastern Shore had, and the railroad provided a way to move the goods out of state quickly. The Eastern Shore became a participant in the National Produce Exchange. In this exchange, agents assessed which cities needed which agricultural goods and then immediately put the crops on a train to send them in that direction. Now, instead of supplying just a few regional cities, the Eastern Shore was shipping goods as far west as Kansas City and as far north as Toronto. In the first year of the Produce Exchange, sales on the Eastern Shore were around $750,000. Twenty years later, the sum had grown to $19,269,890. In fact, by this time, in the 1900s and 1910s, Accomack and neighboring Northampton County had the highest valued crops of anywhere in the United States, the third county being Los Angeles. Potato production catapulted from 160,000 bushels a year in 1870 to 1.3 million in 1900. By the time of the 1910 census, those two counties were the wealthiest rural counties in all of America.
Presidents came to see its majesty: Grover Cleveland hunted ducks on the barrier islands off the coast; Benjamin Harrison hunted quail near the town of New Church. One time Harrison visited and ended up having dinner with a local family that had named their youngest son after Cleveland, Harrison’s bitter political rival. But Harrison was a good sport about it and gave the boy a ten-dollar bill, at least according to the generations of Eastern Shore storytellers who adopted this anecdote as a favorite.
Wealthy people needed buildings. The farmers who had been living in humble two-room cottages began to use their new fortunes to build houses: A-frames, Cape Cods, colonials. Some of them built smaller houses, and then built bigger houses right next door as soon as they could afford to, and then bigger houses after that. They connected each of the buildings with passageways, producing a maze of rooms that became the shore’s most defining architectural silhouette: “big house, little house, colonnade, kitchen.”
The Eastern Shore residents built barns and feed stores and restaurants and sheds. To accommodate the tourists who were now coming in on the trains to hunt and take in the scenery, the residents of the Eastern Shore built hotels. In 1931, they built Whispering Pines, a resort complex with a manicured lawn of azaleas, and a restaurant that served oyster stew, chicken salad, cooked tomatoes, pickled beets. It had ninety-five bedrooms, each with a private bath. People came to visit Whispering Pines from all up and down the Eastern Seaboard. They swam in the pristine pool. They admired the grounds. Color fliers were made: “The showplace of the Eastern Shore.”
THE ECONOMIC BOOM of Accomack County was like the economic boom of farming communities all over the United States, with some measures of uniqueness. And when the economy shifted again, the long, slow bust would be like the one in farming communities all over the United States, with some measures of uniqueness: the railroad had made the Eastern Shore. And, as Eastern Shore historian Brooks Miles Barnes put it, “The internal combustion engine unmade us.”
When the railroad had been responsible for shipping out produce, the collective crops of multiple farmers could be held, in freight cars, until prices reached a favorable exchange. But then came the era of the personal automobile. Originally, paved roadways had been seen as a godsend; farmers no longer had to pay a portion of their profits to the railroad in transportation fees. But there were also unintended effects. When farmers began acquiring their own trucks, they began making their own deals, undercutting one another’s prices and driving the crop value down. An early bellwether of trouble was in 1928: Farmers that year couldn’t get nearly what they once could for a bushel of produce; they couldn’t even recoup the cost of production. Those who were accustomed to financing their crops’ planting through loans—a typical practice, to be repaid at harvest—found themselves underwater. One year later the Depression began.
As decades crawled on there were other issues, some real and some magnified in the perception of hardworking farmers. Saline levels dropped in the bay, disrupting the marine-life balance that supported the crabbing and fishing industries. Chain grocery stores replaced independent operations; they bought in bulk but paid less for what they bought. Potatoes, once the shore’s specialty crop, were now being grown all over the country, with growers nationwide racing one another to the bottom of prices that were difficult to sustain. Consumers began buying crazy new snacks, like the innovative and modern Dorito. “Shit chips,” one descendant of potato farmers remembered his father calling these snack foods in the 1950s and 1960s, because it wasn’t clear exactly what was in these Doritos and Fritos and Tostitos. Certainly nothing as wholesome as a potato. Farmers were sure it was partially these snacks’ fault that their businesses were struggling.
Eventually, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, people left. They went north into Maryland or Delaware, in search of jobs. Or they left for college—the so-called brain drain experienced all over the country—and didn’t come back, and the remaining population aged and the shore gradually emptied. In 1958 the passenger railroad left, too: when businesses turned to trucks for their shipping needs and families turned to cars for their vacation needs, there wasn’t as much use for a railroad.