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

By the 1890s the effects of these layers were more clearly visible. Thomas Dixon, the prominent writer and Klan novelist, lived for several years in the mid-1890s in Cape Charles City, a bustling new town created around the railroad in lower Northampton County, but, like Pyle, he wished to ignore the activity of wharf and depot and their connections with the outside world. An avid outdoorsman, Dixon loved the barrier islands and the Broadwater, the expanse of marshes, bays, and channels that lay between the islands and the mainland. He hunted the Broadwater's waterfowl and shorebirds, dined on its oysters, and stood in the solitude of its vast marshes. "How far away the land world seems now," Dixon recalled of his trips out into the waters offshore, "fifteen miles from a post-office, telegraph line, or a railroad. We never see a newspaper, know nothing of what is going on in the big, steaming, festering cities and have ceased to care to know. Our world is now a beautiful bay, fed from the sea by two pulsing tides a day." Here, Dixon found "a world without railroad or mail." These symbols of modernity seemed corrupting to Dixon, but he deceived himself in dreaming of the Broadwater as a place where they had not yet reached. After all, the railroad had brought Dixon to Cape Charles City and mail boats traveled regularly from the mainland to post offices on Cobb’s, Hog, and Chincoteague islands.19

What Dixon cherished about the Shore was its deeply Southern cultural landscape that possibly obscured for him the rapid change all over the region. Dixon appreciated the hunting lodges and the shooting and yachting life in part because it echoed the plantation era's racial and class hierarchy. Here, he could survey the great marshes from a duck boat poled by a black man and feast on large dinners prepared and served by black hands. Dixon could be taken back in time, or at least stop time, by moving away from the railroads, the mail, and onto the Broadwater. His associates in these lodges were similarly inclined, and the Eastern Shore of Virginia, whatever its transitions and modern developments, was to them the closest piece of the Old South to New York City.20

The railroad's arrival on the Eastern Shore, however, offered a moment of particular consequence for the region.21 If the pattern of railroad development in the United States was, according to Wolfgang Schivelbusch, first and foremost to extend water navigation and open these territories to markets, then on the Eastern Shore it proceeded instead in direct competition with water transportation.22 If American railroads had been built generally with curves to engineer their way around obstacles and connect towns, the Eastern Shore line hewed like a broken compass needle to the spine of the peninsula, avoiding even the slightest curve. It was designed by the Pennsylvania Railroad to connect Philadelphia with the Deep South via Norfolk and to compete with steamboat companies for the freight. It bypassed every major town on the Eastern Shore, created its own private harbor and facilities, and developed no towns along its line. It was not meant to serve local interests at all, but the railroad's acceleration of time and reconfiguration of space had profound effects on the Eastern Shore's water-dominated landscape. However much the author Thomas Dixon might consider the Eastern Shore his own private "Peninsular Canaan," many of the local residents grasped the significance of the opportunities that the railroad made possible. They eagerly fashioned a remarkable new landscape around them, one that would last for generations.