By Katy Clune
This story was first published in the 2025 edition of Views.
The Eastern Shore, the peninsula that buffers the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, is predicted to experience some of the most acute effects of climate change in the next fifty years. By 2060, roughly fourteen percent of state-maintained roads on the Eastern Shore are expected to be under three feet of water. By 2100, a mean sea-level rise of 4.5−7 feet is predicted for the greater region.
Figures like this can instill fear. The change is hard to conceive and can feel impossible to address. What can we do? And how can the notion of “cultural sustainability” possibly fit in?
Photo by Katy Clune, Virginia Humanities
Yet, Eastern Shore residents know how to adapt to change—they’ve done it before. In 1884, the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad transformed the shore’s barrier islands into a vacation destination for wealthy northerners and enabled farmers to get delicate produce to northern markets fast. The Eastern Shore Produce Exchange was established in 1900 as a marketing cooperative for individual farmers. But twentieth-century advancements in industrial farming and the refrigerated truck changed the landscape once more, favoring large corporate producers. More recently, chefs, farmers, seafood and aquaculture workers, and small business owners have adapted to address sustainability—of both livelihoods and the environment. There is a small but growing movement to get back to the old ways of doing things.
As communities respond to changes in the years ahead, it might just be memories of the past that help people build resilience for what is next. That’s the motivation behind the Virginia Folklife Program’s oral history initiative, “Eastern Shore Foodways, Community & Climate.” Cultural documentation is one goal of this work, but the more pressing goal is to gather Shore residents together to build new connections over the livelihoods, foods, and commitment to place they have in common—no matter how long they have lived on the Shore.
The initiative launched in April 2023 in collaboration with Jessica Taylor, associate professor of oral and public history at Virginia Tech. It has resulted in two student field trips and thirty-six oral history interviews. This multi-institutional collaboration is ongoing, with a photo exhibit, interactive map, and With Good Reason radio features all to come.
We invite you to sample a few of these conversations and consider what life on the Shore was like fifty years ago and what that might teach us about the challenges of the future.
We grew up eating strawberries. Jam and stuff made out of them too. Strawberry pie, my grandmama used to do all that stuff. She used to can. You remember the old houses? They had pantries in them with shelves that you could put all your stuff up on. She used to raise hogs, chickens, ducks, all that stuff. My grandmama didn’t have to go to the store. All she went to the store and bought was sugar and flour because she made her own lard and stuff like that there. My grandmama knew how to survive.
I can cook everything, because Grandma, we were in the kitchen with her.
We had everything good to eat and cooked every day. When we got old enough, me and my sisters, we had to cook. The first time I made biscuits, they came out so hard my brother threw one up against the wall and put a dent in it. Grandma told me, “You mess that flour and stuff up again, you’re gonna get it.” The next batch of biscuits that I made came out perfect. I can still make sweet potato biscuits and all that stuff now. We have a family reunion in August, and they want me to cook sweet potato biscuits. I was about nine when I started cooking. I can cook everything, because Grandma, we were in the kitchen with her. I could cook anything. You name it, I can cook it.
Thelonius Cook
Restorative Farmer and Owner of Mighty
Thundercloud Edible Forest, Birdsnest
Thelonius Cook, seen here draped in wisteria that grew here when his father owned a flower shop on the same property, owns Mighty Thundercloud Edible Forest in Northampton County.
I look at farming from a holistic standpoint. I need to build something that’s going to be environmentally sustainable, socially, economically, all of those things. It’s building a system that’s going to be resilient to be able to respond to those extreme weather events. That’s how I look at it, as maintaining these seven acres as an oasis that will hopefully be able to withstand and survive.
I think people want to see this type of farming come back, farming a lot of different crops on a single farm for people to consume. Everybody wants more and I think they’re ready to support it. We have tours, have people come out here, allowing them to see the many different avenues. Not everybody has to plant and grow things. We need people that can dry herbs and sell herbs, or do value-added processing—like make fiber into clothing. Agriculture is that base, but it just requires imagination.
James “Ooker” W. Eskridge
Mayor and Waterman, Tangier Island
James “Ooker” Eskridge, the mayor of Tangier Island, Virginia
My father was a waterman. My grandfather, great grandfather, and my sons are watermen. Most every child, they start out crabbing with their father, doing some type of crabbing. They would have a small boat that they would use in the shallows and just start out and eventually work their way up to get in their own boat and business.
I remember going out with my father as a child. I would go out in the pound and catch eels and go back in the kitchen and have a little bit of lunch, maybe take a nap. It was a nice summer.
I started out with a small skiff, as we call them, that I would keep in the canals and just shovel around with a paddle, no motor. You would have four or five old crab pots that have been discarded, and we would use those. We’d put a float on it and just check them and do a little crabbing, maybe with bait on a string. Eventually, you move up. I got a little larger boat with a three horsepower motor on it. That was exciting to finally have a motor. Over the years, you just move up. Most guys, after helping their fathers, they get their own boats. They would get a Chesapeake Bay deadrise boat with a diesel motor in it and just get into the business full-time.
Even though there’s a lot fewer crabbers now, the guys that are still doing it, they love what they do, and they’re good at it. My father-in-law, he crabbed until he was eighty-eight. If they’re able to, they just keep going. Working on the water, being a crabber, we get to see creation. We see the sun rise, the sunsets, the wildlife. It just opens your eyes to everything.
Wec Terry
Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at H.M.
Terry, Willis Wharf
Wec Terry poses for a portrait on the water in Willis Wharf.
Growing up on the Shore was an adventurous time. We had a lot of cottage industries all over the place, gas stations, drug stores. In the little town of Exmore a mile from here, there were five filling stations, two pharmacies, and three car dealerships. Kids rode their bikes everywhere. If you were fortunate enough to have a lawn care business like me and my brothers did at twelve or thirteen years old, you saved enough money, bought a riding lawnmower, and then you didn’t need that bicycle anymore. You just tooled all over the place.
I think the worst storm that ever hit here that I really knew anything about was the hurricane of 1933. It basically destroyed some of the barrier islands, there was a forty foot tidal wave that came across the barrier islands. I’ve heard stories about my dad being tied up to the back porch of his house in a rowboat, in the middle of the storm, singing “Stormy Weather” and picking up watermelons that were floating by. That storm destroyed a lot of the homes on Hog Island and caused a lot of the people to move off the island and back to the mainland.
George Maddox
Farmer, Hallwood
Sweet potato farmer George Maddox photographed near one of the Farmall tractors on his Hallwood property.
Sweet potatoes have been in the family for hundreds of years. It was never really a major crop until my grandfather and his brother owned a farm over here. And even before that, it was a little bit here and there. The thing of it was, when you lived here, it’s not like being in a city. If you wanted something you had to grow it. So, a lot of families around here had their own garden. They all grew something. Those that saw that they had a green thumb basically went off and did more and more and more. In my family, I know my great-great grandfather grew, and my grandfather, and my dad took it over from him. So, going back through the years that I know of, I would say probably that 125 to 150 years growing potatoes has been in our family.
In the wintertime, of course the trapping was another means to bring in some money and food. That far back, they did everything to make ends meet. It’s not like you could run to a grocery store. If you wanted to go shopping, you had to go hours out of your way just to provide for yourself. A lot of things that was done around here was done to survive, not to just have luxuries—but to be able to eat.
Tom Clark
Owner, Tom’s Cove Aquafarms, Chincoteague
Tom Clark photographed at a giant shell pile outside Tom’s Cove Aquafarms in Chincoteague.
People have no concept of what the power of water can do to something, but it looks pretty. That’s where everybody wants to be. You can’t beat the view, but you also have to keep in mind what the future ramifications can be. You have to expect weather and whether it’s getting more severe, less severe, whether the news media is trying to sell news. The Weather Channel is trying to sell weather.
I haven’t seen a whole lot of dramatic change in the weather other than when I was growing up, I could ice skate on Chincoteague Island. Now you don’t ice skate in the winter, we do not get a hard freeze. We still get our freezes, but not a hard freeze. We used to go over to Assateague Island. They had a big pond over there. We would bring tires and have outdoor bonfire and skate there at night. Now they wouldn’t allow you to burn a tire on an ice pond, and you can’t skate without a hard freeze—that probably cured itself in both aspects.
Maria Del Carmen Diaz Pineda
Owner, Carmelitas, Cape Charles
Carmen Diaz is the chef and owner of Carmelita’s in Cape Charles.
The environment here has changed. When I arrived [in 1991], there weren’t as many stores. We didn’t have a Food Lion and we didn’t have McDonald’s. We didn’t have many gas stations. That has changed. It used to be very difficult to find tortillas or chiles. There are more houses now. When I arrived, it was all wilderness, wilderness. There was more vegetation than now. More houses are being built, and a lot of people from other states are moving here.
Yes, a lot has changed here. More houses. There are more and more people now. There were almost none before. Few jobs. Now we don’t see cucumber fields, or pea fields, or bean fields. Tomatoes are now few. There used to be many, many. Watermelon, melon, squash, all that. We used to bring home little squashes, cabbage too. But that has decreased a bit. There aren’t any now. There are houses. Before, there were fields of vegetables. Now it’s all houses.
Credits
Interview excerpts have been condensed for brevity and clarity. Special thanks to Virginia Folklife Program intern Emma Bussard for selecting excerpts and to Emma, Charlotte Walden, and Philip DiMeglio for their transcription work and developing a forthcoming interactive map for the project. “Eastern Shore Foodways, Community & Climate” is a collaboration between Virginia Humanities’ Virginia Folklife Program, the Department of History at Virginia Tech, the University of Florida’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, the University of Virginia Eastern Shore of Virginia Climate Equity Project, and the Eastern Shore of Virginia Heritage Center. Photos by Pat Jarrett, Virginia Humanities, unless otherwise noted.
