As Islands Submerge in Bay, Residents Refuse To Desert Homes, Heritage

"The Chesapeake Bay was once home to more than a dozen offshore island communities — tight-knit villages with enough land for baseball diamonds and with marshes thick with crabs and fish.

James, Barren, Punch, Holland. One by one, they faded away. Erosion battered their shorelines. Rising waters submerged the marshes. Islanders with means packed up their bags and tore down their homes, barged them to the mainland, and reconstructed them on higher ground in Crisfield and around Cambridge. The structures too battered to make the trip stayed, along with the gravestones, and eventually slipped into the sea.

But 400 years after the first English settlers arrived, two offshore islands with villages remain. Smith Island, a marshy expanse of three towns 12 miles into the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, is home to about 250 residents. Tangier Island, just a few miles south in Virginia, has more people — about 450 — but less land, with all of its inhabitants concentrated in a central area."

Rona Kobell reports for the Bay Journal October 26, 2014.