Seashore Chronicles: Three Centuries of the Virginia Barrier Island

"Seashore Chronicles offers an introduction to the Virginia Barrier Islands in the best tradition -- through stories, narratives that offer insights into the nature of a landscape and the human community that arises within it. The blend of history, personal accounts, and natural history, and the range and diversity of voices make this book a pleasure to read". -- Jennifer Ackerman

For hundreds of years, settlers, sailors, and visitors of all kinds have been seduced by the mystique of Virginia's isolated Barrier Islands: Assateague, Chincoteague, Parramore, Smith's, Hog, Wallop's. Located along its Eastern Shore from the Maryland line to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, these slender islands are some of the most dynamic landforms on earth and have long been mythologized by the people who have walked their shores.

In Seashore Chronicles, Brooks Miles Barnes and Barry R. Truitt have gathered nearly two dozen travelers' accounts and a wealth of illustrations to create a lively portrait of the Barrier Islands and their inhabitants. The writings of novelists, journalists, naturalists, hunters, the wealthy at play, and ordinary tourists capture the history of the islands from the 1650s to the 1990s. Today, the Chincoteague pony penning attracts 40,000 visitors each year. Contributors range from a seventeenth-century visitor marooned hla Robinson Crusoe to George Washington Parke Custis and Robert E. Lee; from a young Howard Pyle, not yet famous, to noted contemporary writer Tom Horton. Readers learn of the fishermen and herdsmen who settled the islands; the lucrative salvage operations that soon flourished; the seaside mosquitoes that plagued Civil War soldiers: the resort hotels thatgraced the beaches during the nineteenth-century heyday, the overhunting and fishing that killed the tourist trade as surely as the storms of the 1890s that washed away Cobb's Island.

The story of the Virginia Barrier Islands is a curiously circular one of change over time -- change on the ever-shifting barriers themselves and in our relation to them. Barnes and Truitt have created a fascinating cultural and ecological history that will be nostalgic reading for anyone who has explored the islands and a welcome introduction for new visitors.