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

The Countryside Transformed:
The Eastern Shore of Virginia, the Pennsylvania Railroad,
and the Creation of a Modern Landscape

William G. Thomas III, University of Nebraska
Brooks Miles Barnes, Eastern Shore Public Library
Tom Szuba, University of Virginia

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Abstract:

In 1884 the New York, Philadelphia, and Norfolk Railroad, a subsidiary of the powerful Pennsylvania system, extended its line south through the Eastern Shore of Virginia. For decades the Eastern Shore had remained disconnected from the rapidly advancing railroad network on the Atlantic coast, a region distinctly Southern in its cultural landscape and seemingly frozen in time. The arrival of the railroad altered the geography of the Eastern Shore in fundamental ways and prompted unforeseen changes in the peninsula's cultural and natural worlds. This essay examines what happened when one of the largest railroad companies in the nation came into a Southern community and connected it to the modern network of rail and commerce. We consider the Eastern Shore a test case or laboratory for understanding the development of a modern landscape in the South and the social, cultural, and environmental changes that came with the railroad.

Essay Sections:

Introduction:

When in 1884 the New York, Philadelphia, and Norfolk Railroad, a subsidiary of the powerful Pennsylvania system, extended its line south through the Eastern Shore of Virginia, it had been anticipated for over forty years. The coming of the Pennsylvania system’s railroad to the Eastern Shore was catalytic. Combined with other technologies, cultural practices, speculative capital, and environmental changes, the railroad channeled development across the landscape. Its effects were predicted and unexpected, anticipated and far-reaching. One of the largest corporations in the United States, the Pennsylvania Railroad linked the remote peninsula to the largest cities in the East, accelerating changes in the landscape already underway on the Shore and spawning hosts of others.

Map of Eastern Virginia, circa 1862

Railroad cars carried Northward increasing quantities of Eastern Shore lumber, seafood, and farm produce and returned with all manner of raw, processed, and manufactured goods as well as with emigrants and tourists. A new infrastructure developed as towns grew up along the tracks, roads radiated from the towns, and eventually telephone and power lines followed the roads. Property values increased and population expanded. The emerging optimism of the people of the Eastern Shore found expression in the construction of wharves, warehouses, stores, houses, and public buildings; their growing sophistication in more frequent travel, the provision of better educational opportunities for their children, the adoption of up-to-date styles of architecture, the installation of indoor plumbing, and the purchase of automobiles, pianos, and other amenities. In general, the railroad and accompanying technologies made possible an enormous wealth in the countryside and brought sweeping changes in a remarkably short period of time. These changes produced drastic and far-reaching direct and indirect effects to the ecological systems of the Shore and, in turn, to its human residents. 1

What we seek to accomplish here is a close reading of the creation of a modern landscape to capture the interaction of technologies, people, and environment. 2 The Eastern Shore of Virginia, according to geographer Wilbur Zelinsky in a pioneering essay "Where the South Begins," was situated along the border of a settlement landscape that marked the northern limit of the South. Zelinsky examined architectural styles, town characteristics, and countryside

features to determine a pattern in what defined or marked the Southern landscape. He considered Virginia's Eastern Shore "decidedly Deep Southern." Its landscape, structures, and their spatial arrangements made the region more like Georgia or Tidewater Virginia than Pennsylvania or even its neighbors, Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Other characteristics Zelinsky examined confirmed for him its place in the South: the lexical traits, the propensity to vote Democratic, the high proportion of African Americans, and the high ratio of mules to horses. Although he could not find "physiographic" reasons for the boundary, Zelinsky drew his northern limit of the South at the Maryland-Virginia state line on the Eastern Shore, "an emphatic interstate and cultural boundary [that] match beautifully for unknown reasons." 3

Although recognizably Southern in its settlement landscape, the Eastern Shore of Virginia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a highly complex and interdependent landscape. It was a liminal place, a zone of interpenetration, where the settlement patterns, speech, demography, and political outcomes defined its place in the South but its engagement with technology and rapid transformation of the landscape betrayed other allegiances, motives, forces, and effects. In this zone where the South "ends," we can understand more about the region's modern development because the contradictions at the heart of it stand in such stark relief.

Enlarged Eastern Shore Map

Modernity came to the Eastern Shore of Virginia, as it did elsewhere in the South, in the form of a radical shift in the use of resources and labor relations, and in a transformation of the landscape. 4 The relationship between the railroad, market integration, and the environment, moreover, stood at the heart of their modernizing landscape: the reach of markets for both buying and selling nearly everything produced in the world, the expanding and tightening of worldwide communication, the fundamental alteration of widely-held conceptions of space and time, and the visible and invisible reconfigurations of the region's natural system. But there was no simple correlation among these components. Eastern Shore residents had long felt the effects of the market, participated in Atlantic trading, and maintained long-standing shipping practices with major urban centers in the Eastern United States. They responded to the changing market conditions even before the railroad reached the peninsula. Indeed, the railroad's penetration elsewhere, especially its linking of the Midwest with the major urban centers in the mid-Atlantic, had substantial repercussions along the Shore, as it brought new competition to established markets. 5

The arrival of the railroad, though, marked an important moment. 6 It altered the geography of the Eastern Shore in fundamental ways and prompted unforeseen changes in the cultural and natural worlds of its residents. The Pennsylvania Railroad, the federal and state governments, alliances of local residents, and outsiders all acted upon the Shore's natural and human resources. Each extended networks across the landscape; each wanted to expose or exploit the landscape, nature, and human connections; and each confronted limits to its vision. On the geologically-stable mainland, the myriad changes in the landscape (themselves intrinsically limited by nature) held steady for decades and became organized around new crops and markets that propelled the Eastern Shore for a time into the front ranks of agricultural success stories in the United States. The confluence of forces and energies, moreover, that sustained the enormous success of the region, did not last, and, ironically, the vestiges of this transformation dominate the landscape of the Shore today. Along the chain of ever-shifting barrier islands shielding the peninsula from the Atlantic Ocean, alterations in the landscape proved far less enduring. Human activity on the islands was one of advance and retreat before the forces of tide, current, and storm. 7

Section I: On the Edge of Modernity

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