by Earl Swift
As luck would have it, Lonnie Moore, though born in Meat Soup, spent most of his youth as a King Streeter; he lived the equivalent of a city block away, behind a famed inn and restaurant, Hilda Crockett’s Chesapeake House, that was started by his grandmother in 1939. He was eight years older than Carol—“And trust me,” she’s said, “that man had sowed his wild oats. He’d not been passing out Bible tracts.” Even so, they started dating the summer after she graduated from high school, in 1980. He was more distantly related to her than many island men—they shared fifth great-grandparents—and “he was fun to be with, to hang around with.” He proposed that August. They married the following April.
As we approach Swain from the south we pass Hilda Crockett’s, consisting of two big, deep-porched houses that face each other across the road, and several other King Street landmarks: a couple more gift shops, a summer-only ice cream and pizza parlor, and a fascinating museum of island history manned by volunteers four months of the year. The northernmost structure in the neighborhood is a surprisingly big and opulent health center, staffed by a physician’s assistant on the days a doctor hasn’t flown in from the mainland. It replaced the cluttered old building in which the Situation Room convenes. Its Wi-Fi is powerful enough that on many evenings, Tangiermen who lack wireless access of their own can be found sitting on its porch steps, reading their cell phones.
At the bend where King Street gives way to Meat Soup, the main road widens to accommodate cart parking outside the church and post office, and a narrow lane branches off to a small cluster of houses tucked behind those facing the road. Built on dredge spoils in the sixties, the enclave is known as Ponderosa, after the ranch in the old Bonanza TV series—to which it bears zero resemblance.
The tour boats have disgorged their passengers during our exploration of the island, and we weave among them as they wander Meat Soup. Customers are turning up at Lorraine’s, the island’s year-round eatery, and at Fisherman’s Corner, just across the street, and at Four Brothers, the outdoor café and cart-rental place, which is festooned with TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT placards. Golf carts are bunched at odd angles outside the grocery. A few tour buggies—golf carts stretched to accommodate several rows of seats—are loading up with passengers, who spend five dollars each for a brisk tour of the island’s roads, with running commentary from the native at the wheel. Meat Soup, all but deserted in the morning, is glutted with humanity. The throngs will vanish as quickly as they materialized, because the vast majority of the visitors are day-trippers whose boats leave Crisfield, Reedville, or Onancock at ten, arrive at Tangier in time for lunch, and head back to the mainland by midafternoon.
The hordes might, on a good day, consist of two hundred people—not an overwhelming number on its face, but at nearly half the resident population, a test of the narrow roads, the shops, and the restaurants. Many islanders take their arrival as a signal to retreat out of sight, as they feel some visitors study them a bit too closely; many have stories of being photographed performing such mundane chores as taking out the trash. Carol is among them. Years ago, she managed a now-shuttered restaurant here in Meat Soup, and found that while strangers were drawn to her quick mind, sly humor, and striking looks—she is fashion-model tall, with high cheekbones and full lips—she didn’t much enjoy their company. “I don’t really like people, and I had to pretend I liked people,” she’s told me. She drove a tour buggy for two years, too, which was even worse, “the absolute worst job I’ve ever had,” again because it forced her to make nice. Her near-daily summertime trips to wind-scoured, barren Uppards often coincide with the presence of tourists outside her house.
We negotiate the clotted road, having counted on our tour fifty-two houses and twelve trailers that stand empty, most belonging to islanders who’ve died or can no longer care for themselves, and whose families have been unable or unwilling to part with them. That’s about 20 percent of the total housing stock. And as Carol worries, the number is bound to rise. Of Tangier’s 210 occupied homes, sixty-six shelter just one person, and the vast majority of those islanders are elderly.
BUSY AS MEAT SOUP becomes on a summer day, one might assume that it’s always been the island’s port, as well as its cultural and commercial center. But time was that the focus of island life was at Canton, for it was there, on what’s now the smallest and most remote of the ridges, that Tangier’s first intrepid pioneers built their homes.
The truth about those days, and much of the island’s early history, has been clouded by legend and rather shaky oral tradition. What’s certain is that long before Europeans turned up in the Chesapeake, the island was well known to the Native Americans who inhabited the Eastern Shore and lands to the west. Most historians figure tribes used the place as a hunting and fishing ground, rather than residence, but they evidently spent a fair amount of time here. Carol Moore and other “proggers”—island speak for beachcombers—have found hundreds of arrowheads stranded by the tides at Uppards.
The first Englishmen to lay eyes on Tangier did so in early June 1608. Captain John Smith, fabled hero of the Jamestown colony, was sailing up the Eastern Shore on an exploration of the bay when he and his fourteen men sighted islands off to port. When they turned that way, they encountered an afternoon squall packing “such an extreame gust of wind, raine, thunder, and lightning” that it was only “with great daunger, we escaped the unmercifull raging of that ocean-like water.” Forced to the mainland, the party again made for the “Iles” the next day and searched the spongy ground for fresh water. Finding none, they sailed on to what’s now Maryland.
So it is that John Smith is usually credited with having “discovered” Tangier. In fact, there’s no evidence he actually set foot there; he offered too little description in his memoirs to clarify which “Iles” the expedition visited. Tradition holds that he named the island, too. He did, but he lumped Tangier and its neighbors together as “Russels Isles,” named for a doctor in his party. “Tangier” didn’t come into use until decades later, for reasons unexplained.
In 1666, it’s said, an Eastern Shoreman traded two overcoats to get the island from the Natives—more dubious legend—and twenty years later sold a big piece of it to one John Crockett, “a gentleman of English descent” who moved to Canton with his wife and child and who went on to have seven more children while farming the uplands. Again, not the way it happened.
The earliest published account of these traditions is an 1891 book called Facts and Fun: The Historical Outlines of Tangier Island, by Thomas “Sugar Tom” Crockett, an oysterman and eventually the principal of Tangier’s school. “The reader may want to know who told me these things,” Sugar Tom wrote in the book’s opening passage. “I answer by saying my grandmother told me so, and she lived to be one hundred and five years old, and had good recollection to the day of her death; and what she was not an eyewitness to, her mother told her.” That was evidently good enough for the islanders, along with a long procession of authors and journalists, who repeated Sugar Tom’s version of Tangier’s early days in newspaper stories, magazine features, and books into the late 1990s. Even the state historical marker erected outside Swain Memorial testifies that Captain Smith named the island and that John Crockett and family settled it in the seventeenth century.
But with all due respect to Sugar Tom, his granny, and the Commonwealth of Virginia, the first documented white settlers didn’t arrive until 1778, when Joseph Crockett (not John), the father of ten children (rather than eight), bought 450 acres of what was then a much larger island and built a house on a patch of high ground in Canton. A native of Maryland’s Somerset County and a longtime resident of Smith Island, Crockett was in his midfifties when he made the move, likely with an eye to farming the uplands and grazing livestock in the marshes.
It must have been a lonely and unforgiving existence. The shoals offshore prevented all but small boats from visiting. As John Smith had discovered, fresh water was elusive—far into the twentieth century, Tangiermen used cisterns
to capture rainwater from their roofs—and summer brought fierce afternoon storms. Ravenous insects rose from the wetlands like mist. Winters were windswept and frigid, and the surrounding waters often froze solid.
In fact, the island had been viewed as a bit of a hellhole since early in England’s Virginia experiment. When colonial leaders sought a place to exile participants in a 1644 Indian uprising, Tangier struck them as ideal. The marooned Indians likely didn’t last long. It may have been their remains that Sugar Tom would report seeing more than two hundred years later. “I have had many of their relics in my hand,” he wrote, “and they had grave-yards there, for I have seen the bones and had their teeth in my hand.”
MEAN THOUGH ISLAND LIVING WAS, over time Joseph Crockett was joined by new settlers who married into the family. Among these come-heres was a stammering, barely literate waterman named Joshua Thomas, who roundabout 1799 bought seventy acres of upland on the West Ridge. His wife of two years, Rachel Evans, was Joseph Crockett’s granddaughter.
Thomas had been born on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in August 1776. He was a toddler when his father died of complications from a dog bite, and his mother married a Smith Islander named George Pruitt. The American Revolution was raging at the time, and the Chesapeake’s islands were frequently used as hideouts by Loyalist picaroons, or pirates, and when Joshua was five or six a band of these marauders burned down the family’s house. The loss apparently broke his stepfather’s spirits: George Pruitt spent the next several years in a drunken haze before falling from his boat and drowning when Joshua was in his teens.
The young Thomas apprenticed himself to a Smith Island waterman to learn the trade, and by the time he moved to Tangier he was an expert fisherman and boat handler. He found the island less a community than a scattering of small farms, its few dozen inhabitants separated by wide expanses of roadless marsh. At about a mile from Canton, the Thomas homestead must have seemed at the edge of the world. “Our entire stock of provisions consisted of three bushels of meal, and two little pigs,” he’d recall. “Of furniture we had barely enough to make out with.”
One summer’s day in 1807, Thomas was fishing offshore when he was approached by three boats crowded with passengers. They were pilgrims bound for an outdoor Methodist camp meeting on the Eastern Shore, and they hired him to pilot them there. The next morning he and John Crockett, Joseph’s youngest son, skippered the party through a maze of boats parked in Pungoteague Creek and stepped ashore into a gathering of thousands. Thomas was intrigued by the Methodists’ noisy style of worship, though he didn’t fully understand it. While a bearded, wild-haired traveling evangelist named Lorenzo Dow “was preachin’ very powerful,” he said years later, “a woman in the audience begun to shout. Dow stopped and cried out: ‘The Lord is here! The Lord is here!’ Immediately I jumped to my feet, and stretched my neck every way to try to see the Lord, but I could not see him.”
John Crockett, Thomas said, “appeared to be in such distress and alarm about the shouting, and singing, and people falling all around us, that I consented to go.” But Thomas left with much on his mind. Founded as a lay ministry to reinvigorate the Church of England, Methodism stressed a personal relationship with God over stuffy liturgy, and its plainspoken, unrestrained spirit appealed especially to the rural and unschooled—which is to say, people like Joshua Thomas.
Later in the summer, Thomas was drawn to a second camp meeting near present-day Crisfield, and while listening to a sermon “felt something drawing me right to the feet of Jesus,” and “went to the altar, and kneeled down and began to lift up my voice in earnest prayer.” He returned to Tangier eager to organize a prayer meeting there, and not long after the island saw its first Methodist service. It lasted six hours.
From then on, singing, praying, and shouting became a Sunday staple, the services rotating among island homes, neighbors joining the flock one by one. The following summer a pair of traveling lay preachers visited the island and set up a tent. Preaching under the canvas brought more islanders to Jesus, so the year after that—1809—Tangier hosted its first homegrown camp meeting. The gatherings became annual events down on the spit, attracting more mainlanders from one year to the next, and Joshua Thomas, whose stammer vanished at the pulpit, became an exhorter of growing renown.
So it was that Methodism took root on Tangier and captured the hearts and minds of its people. And as they grew in number, they found themselves ever more dependent on Providence, for over time they not only farmed but turned to the water for sustenance, and much of what was essential for survival lay beyond their control. They prayed for fish in their nets, and protection from the Chesapeake’s fast-shifting and inscrutable moods, and courage in the face of freezes and floods. They prayed for fair winds to bring them home and for nourishing rains to feed their corn, potatoes, and greens. They prayed most of all for salvation, and an afterlife free of their island’s hardships.
The Methodism here was, in those early years, much like that practiced elsewhere in the Mid-Atlantic. But as the mainland church evolved over the subsequent decades, Tangier’s isolation preserved its style of worship, so that today, elements of the island’s Methodism seem trapped in amber, throwbacks to a Victorian version of the faith. It is not an uncommon occurrence, for example, for Pastor John Flood to seek a heavenly cure for one of Swain Memorial’s flock. At an evening service early in my stay, I watched as he called the congregation to the altar and urged its members to lay hands on an ailing woman. “Most gracious Heavenly Father, we come before your throne this night,” Flood said, his soft country drawl amplified throughout the high-ceilinged sanctuary as he anointed the woman’s forehead with oil. “We ask your blessings on this oil, Lord, that it would become an oil of blessing and an oil of healing, and as [she] receives this on her forehead, Lord, that you touch her and you touch the body, that you work through this body.”
Eyes closed, heads bowed, the congregation formed a tight circle around the sick woman, those unable to reach her from its edge instead grasping the shoulders of those closer in. “We pray now that as you touch [her], that she is receiving that touch from the great physician, the great healer,” the bearlike, crew-cutted Flood intoned. “She can feel the power of the Holy Spirit going through her body, from the top of her head to the bottoms of her feet, touching every part, and as it’s touching her she is being healed, Lord. And when [she] goes to have those tests this week they won’t find anything, Lord, because she is healed here and now.”
Likewise, it’s not unusual for a service down at the New Testament Church, a more literalist splinter of Tangier’s already conservative faith, to evoke the exhortations led by Joshua Thomas two centuries past, as was the case when I heard schoolteacher and church elder Duane Crockett preach one Sunday morning in late May. “An unsaved person may not forgive, but if it’s Christians who do not forgive, that is an entirely different matter altogether,” the balding, fair-haired Duane told us. “Oh, sometimes we can be slick. Sometimes we say, ‘I love them, I just don’t like ’em.’ I wish one time somebody would open the Scripture and tell me where that’s said in the Bible.
“It’s not in there,” he said. “Or: ‘I forgive them, but let me tell you what they did to me.’ No. If you’re going to tell fifty people what someone’s done to you, you haven’t forgiven them at all.” Thirty-eight years old and bespectacled, he has an accent that ranks among the island’s strongest. “Twelve” is tway-elve. “Me” comes out may.
“We’re supposed to make things right with our brothers and our sisters,” he said. “We get afraid that people will get mad at us, and on Tangier it’s very easy to fear that because we know everybody. It is a lot different being on Tangier than it is being anywhere else. And I want to say that it is a normal thing, to want people to like us. If you don’t care that people like you, or if I don’t care that people like me, then there’s something wrong there.
“But that doesn’t mean you turn your head to everything because you’re afraid it’
s going to offend somebody. You have to address them.” He peered at the congregation. “We have an obligation to the world. We have an obligation to God. If there are things that are not right, you shouldn’t make them right; you have to make them right.”
Tangier proper, as seen from the northwest. At upper left is Canton, below it the Main Ridge, and nearest the camera, the West Ridge. The building at far right is the sewage treatment plant. (EARL SWIFT)
Four
IN JUNE 1812, WAR AGAIN BROKE OUT BETWEEN THE UNITED States and Great Britain. Two springs later, a British fleet advanced into the Chesapeake. Finding Tangier strategically located and easy to defend, the invaders sent troops ashore to the spit—to the very grove of tall pines that had shaded the Methodist campers—and built a fort, a command post for a planned campaign against the region’s big targets. The islanders became prisoners: Redcoats requisitioned their livestock and crops, drew water from their wells, and expected their help navigating the shoals offshore.
As such things go, the occupation was civil—thanks in large part to Joshua Thomas, who served as the island’s chief negotiator with Rear Admiral George Cockburn and his officers. Thomas walked out to meet the Redcoats on their first march up the island, and persuaded them to detour around his neighbors’ crops instead of flattening them. When he learned the soldiers were felling trees on the Methodist campground, he told the admiral that those were the Lord’s trees, that a great many souls had been saved in their shade and that others would be in the years to come. Cockburn spared the trees. Thomas and the admiral got along so well that when Rachel Thomas fell ill, the British commander gave her husband medicine from his own stores. He had the rough islander as a regular guest on his flagship.