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Eastern Neck- a Chesapeake Island
Where the mouth of the Chester River yawns wide to connect with the main stem of the Chesapeake, a roughly heart-shaped island stanches the flow of water as it disgorges into the Bay proper. Located at the very tip of Kent County’s southernmost peninsula, Eastern Neck Island is disconnected from the rest of the land by a thin tidal stream that grows more and less substantial with the wax and wane of the moon. The island itself is edged with billowing skirts of marsh grasses that waver with the wind, and inland, loblollies and hardwoods shade the interior’s thick layer of leaf duff. It is a beautiful place, an empty-of-people place, although it wasn’t always so. Eastern Neck Island, today a refuge for wildlife, was once a center of intense human activity. Like the Chesapeake in sum, the island has seen many versions of itself, revised by use, by erosion, by human hands.
It is winter the best showcases the uniquely Chesapeake gorgeousness that Eastern Neck Island embodies. As the island’s hundreds of acres of meadows and marshes turn ginger and rust, an incredible influx of waterfowl arrive to seek shelter in the island’s depopulated coves. Teals and canvasbacks, tundra swans and Canada geese all collect in Eastern Neck’s protected waters and as the sun sets, their clustered numbers turn the quiet island into a thousand-count conversation between goose, duck, and swan contingents.
A walk across Eastern Neck makes it easy to believe the island has never been influenced by people. Its trees tower, eagles circle high above on warm wind currents. Small creatures burrow noisily in the pine mulch, salt meadow hay lies in golden whorls, and cloven hoof marks are clearly impressed into the black mud along buzzing inland ponds. All seems as it evolved to be.
But it is only through the intervention, management and artifice of humans that Eastern Neck Island has achieved such pristine wilderness. Several iterations before its rebirth as today’s Chesapeake eden, Eastern Neck Island was a highly trafficked outpost of the Ozinie Indians, an Algonquian-speaking people connected through trade with the Powhatans, the Nanticokes, and the Susquehannocks tribes of the Western, Lower, and Northern Bay. The island, standing sentinel at the mouth of the Chester, afforded a perfect location for a seasonal people who sought the sustenance of teeming flocks of migratory waterfowl and the bounty of the great oyster reefs just offshore that could be waded to and plundered.
Today, parts of the island reveal the white, flaking remains of thousands of years of oyster dinners known as middens. These great mounded oyster discards now form bisque-colored beaches where delicate wafers of shell slowly recede back into the estuary that bore them several thousand years ago. Indications of favored Indian oystering grounds, the midden beaches are visual clues to one chapter of Eastern Neck’s oyster-laden history that has vanished from the modern day Chester River.
Oyster midden beach on Eastern Neck’s Bogle’s Cove.
During colonization in the early part of the 17th century, Eastern Neck Island, like Kent Island, was a choice location for its fertile soil, access to fresh water and plentiful game, and ready proximity to harbors with water deep enough for the draught of transatlantic sailing vessels. Two men in particular, Col. Joseph Wickes and his partner Thomas Hynson, coveted the island and sought to own it in its entirety, steadily purchasing tract after tract of land over a period of 12 years. The island’s forests were partially cleared, and fields of tobacco and wheat were planted. Wickes and Hynson were able to export their crop in vessels constructed of Eastern Neck lumber, in shipyards located on their doorstep. Houses made of fine red brick boasted of Wickes and Hynson’s agricultural and trade successes- “Wickliffe” and “Ingleside” were constructed in the center and the northwest portion of the island, respectively, and over the next 150 years they grew higgledy-piggledy, as Chesapeake houses did, with additions and cat slide roofs and gables. Other houses soon joined them, as the population of the island expanded to include slaves, craftsmen, shipwrights, and merchants.
Wickliffe, early 20th century.
By the 19th century, there were a few small towns on the island, basing their livelihoods on agriculture and the water trade. Overton was the largest, and was located near the steamboat dock known as Bogles Wharf. There were schools and barn dances, an oyster packing house. The water, and the abundance of life harbored in the islands coves and points remained the backbone of the community, and winter oyster harvests, spring shad runs, summers of watermelons and peaches piled high on buyboats, and fall with the vast numbers of waterfowl provided sustenance, income and security. A few hunting lodges were built in 1902 and 1930 to house wealthy sportsmen who only stayed during hunting season. So time would pass for a hundred years, with little changing beyond the the seasons for the inhabitants of the heart-shaped high land in the embrace of the Chesapeake and Chester.
In this 1902 map of the island, the town of Overton and the wharf south of Bogle’s Cove is clearly marked.
During this era, William Dixon, a visitor in 1923, remarked, “…as far up the creek as one could see, was literally a mass of waterfowl, so thick, that it almost seemed one could walk upon them. I am not exaggerating in the least when I tell you-no history of the earliest records of the flight and congregation of waterfowl could have exceeded what we saw that day. There must have been hundreds of thousands-the very best of all our known varieties-Canvas, Red and Black Heads; intermingled also great quantities of geese and swan.”
Swans collect in an inlet.
But change was on the horizon, as the Bay Bridge opened up the Eastern Shore to development speculators in the years following World War II. The country was booming, the economy was flush, and thanks to the mass production of personal yachts and sailboats, there were more people yearning to make their leisurely sunset over the Chesapeake a permanent fixture of their day-to-day lives. Places like Kent Island were being divided up and sold off in lots to newcomers to the Eastern Shore, who sought a rural lifestyle with the convenience of an easy commute to the larger cities on the other side of the Bay. By the early 1950’s, the scrutinizing eye of suburban progress had its eye on Eastern Neck’s open fields and loblolly stands, superimposing a grid pattern of over 290 lots where meadows and shoreline existed.
A map of the island shows the proposed development on the island’s western shore.
A closeup of the “Cape Chester” development.
An outcry rose against the proposed development, as it has many times since then on the Eastern Shore. The local population objected to the transformation of their Chesapeake eden into the banal landscape of sameness constructed extensively throughout the counties on the other side of the Bay. In particular, the rich habitat of Eastern Neck’s shorelines and marshes was threatened by the construction, which would have consumed hundreds of acres of salt meadows under tidy lawns and asphalt curbs. It was at this point that the federal government stepped in, acknowledging the island’s increasingly rare waterfowl habitat and ultimately approving Eastern Neck Island as a game refuge in 1962. Ironically, much of the public opinion at this point was against the refuge (for fears about it negatively impacting the property tax base), although the development concept had also been reviled. On the Eastern Shore, many have observed, no change is a good change.
Today, Eastern Neck Island is a stunningly beautiful trompe l’oeil of a Chesapeake wilderness seemingly untouched by plow, axe, or mason. On warm days, visitors in search of a patch of isolation in the midst of a busy world arrive, cresting the little bridge that barely attaches the island to the rest of the county. They walk their dogs under the oaks and beeches, skip stones over the tickling waves at the water’s edge, and bask in the lovely idyll that this little lonely bit of Eastern Shore could be all theirs, if only for a moment. But while its quiet expanses of pine savannah and waving plumes of spartina patens may seem utterly natural, uncontrived and uninhabited, all is not as it seems. Below a crust of oyster shells as thin as a teacup lip are the remnants of the people, the community, and the commerce that once dwelled here, and the ghosts of a future that almost came to be. The crockery of the island’s departed people, their obscured foundations, and their memories form the foundations of today’s Eastern Neck Island, a place where today, to quote Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Sink, Sank, Sunk
It’s not unusual, this time of year, to wake up to a cool Chesapeake morning that is pealing with the cracks of gunshots. So routine as to be background noise and so seasonal as to be synonymous with heavy frosts and the crimson stars of sweet gum leaves, the gunshots represent one of the great feathered influxes of fall fauna- it’s waterfowl time. For thousands of years, winged visitors from the sloughs of Saskatchewan and even farther north have moved in great v-shaped drifts to the Chesapeake’s verdant waterways as the cold weather descended. And for at least that long, people in the Chesapeake have eagerly anticipated their arrival and the full cookpots and bellies that flying feast represented.
Initially, the populations of the waterfowl that wintered in the Chesapeake were so prodigious that it was almost inconceivable that humans could ever alter the strength of their numbers. Colonist Robert Evelyn, exploring near the head of the Bay in the mid-1600s, saw a flight of ducks and estimated it at a mile across and 7 miles long, with the “rushing and vibration” of their wings sounding like a storm coming through trees. Creative methods were employed by winter hunters for generations to harvest this bounty. In the days predating the Migratory Waterfowl Act of 1918, when limits and regulations were established, gunners could shoot as many waterfowl as they wished, and so many of the early techniques and tools focus on sheer quantity in a way that is foreign to most sport hunters today.
One of the most ingenious watercraft designed for market gunning is the sinkbox- a coffin-shaped depression in the water surrounded by a low platform, weighted with lead decoys to float at level with the waterline. Meant to provide camouflage in the wide open waters of the Susquehanna flats, the sinkbox was almost imperceptible from above. Ringed with canvasback and redhead decoys, the sinkbox, with reclining market hunter inside, merged seamlessly with silver water, wispy fog, and grey sky to paint a perfectly Chesapeake (and perfectly deadly) trompe l’oeil. Recounting his days market hunting the Flats in 1878, Bennett Keen recalled, “Our kill out of a sinkbox often ran to well over 100 ducks in a morning… We’d get maybe as much as $1.25 for a pair of canvas and as little as 25 cents for a pair of blackheads.”
Hunting transitioned in the late 19th century to include the first generations of recreational gunners. A trend that mirrored the larger national craze for all things outdoors (the Boy Scouts, bicycles, and national parks all had their origins at the tail end of the 1800’s, too), hunting was a way for prosperous, middle and upper-class residents of Philadelphia and Baltimore to spend time along the Chesapeake connecting to their latent survival skills. Under the direction of a skilled guide, weekday office workers in natty new tweeds and stiff oiled canvas would track the canvasbacks waffling in with their shotguns poised, ready to reestablish their position on the top of the food chain with a single shot.
Towns with access to the Susquehanna Flat’s superior gunning grounds, like Havre de Grace, swelled with city folk anxious to bag some birds come the opening of hunting season. Sinkboxes were favored above all other methods for their efficiency and success rate- although the sport gunners from out of town were a little soft to stay in them too long, recalled Keen: ” For many years I capitalized on the desire of sportmen to shoot the celebrated flats in a sinkbox… I remember once my brother took out Grover Cleveland, and another time J. Pierpont Morgan. The hunters on the boat took turns in the box. If it was very cold they could only take an hour or so of it at a time; then they’d hold up their gun, a signal that they ‘wanted out,’ and to bring another hunter.”
The downfall of the sinkbox was the Migratory Waterfowl Act of 1918, which limited hunters to a sustainable, population-protecting rate of a few birds per day- far below the records of 200 to 300 canvasbacks or redheads a day during the height of the market hunting boom. Sinkboxes were notoriously cumbersome to set up- with rigs including hundreds of lead and floating decoys, corn and other bait, and sometimes even live birds to add an element of realism- and for only three or four ducks per day, it was a lot of work for a little reward. By the time they were outlawed in 1935, sinkboxes had already become a rare sight on the wide open water of the Flats- almost as rare as the canvasbacks themselves, which suffered a precipitous decline as their main food, aquatic Bay grasses, were buried under layers of silt as agriculture expanded in the 20th century Chesapeake.
Sinkboxes in the collections of the Upper Bay Museum.
Today, the only sinkboxes that remain are housed in private collections or museums like ours, where they represent the by-gone hunting traditions of the Chesapeake. But on a cold October morning, when the sun slips just over the edge of the horizon and the Chesapeake comes aflame with light, the fusillade of shotgun reports remind us that although the sinkboxes are gone forever, the hunting experience continues as fresh and timely as the day is young.
The Bay’s Own Breed
The moment before release is the most magnificent. Their entire body trembles with intent and purpose, thick muscles vibrate with contained energy crawling down the barrel chest to wet, muddy hocks shivering with instinct. Each quick breath a steamy dragon waft, puffing out in white bursts that linger in the frigid morning air. Their blonde eyes pulse from owner to bird and back again, watching, waiting in delicious and terrible anticipation. They were made for this. They are Chesapeake Bay retrievers.
Bred as a ‘gunning dog’ for use in market hunting in the 19th century, Chesapeake Bay retrievers, or “chessies” as they are commonly called, are thick-coated, strong swimmers with stamina, drive, and soft mouths. They will retrieve tirelessly and with the singular purpose that only a working dog, developed for its particular task, will do. Loyal companions, joyful in their job, and fiercely intelligent, chessies have become as essential to a gunner’s rig as his shotgun, his call, or his waders.
Historically speaking, the origin of the breed is unique in that primary documentation exists to verify the actual catastrophe that precipitated their arrival in the watershed. In 1807, two Newfoundland pups were being transported on an English brig, bound for the British coast, that foundered in a gale. Loaded with codfish and sailors (that were also loaded, but not with codfish), the vessel began to sink, when it was serendipitously intercepted by the ship Canton. From the 1845 account of George Law, who wrote of witnessing the event:
“In the fall of 1807 I was on board of the ship Canton, belonging to my uncle, the late Hugh Thompson, of Baltimore, when we fell in, at sea, near the termination of a very heavy equinoctial gale, with an English brig in a sinking condition, and took off the crew. …I boarded her, in command of a boat from the Canton, which was sent to take off the English crew, the brig’s own boats having been all swept away. …I found onboard of her two Newfoundland pups, male and female, which I saved, and subsequently, on our landing the English crew at Norfolk, our own destination being Baltimore, I purchased these two pups of the English captain for a guinea apiece. Being bound again to sea, I gave the (male) pup, which was called Sailor, to Mr. John Mercer, of West River; and (the female) pup, which was called Canton, to Doctor James Stewart, of Sparrow’s Point.
Both attained great reputation as water-dogs. They were most sagacious in every thing, particularly so in all duties connected with duck-shooting. The (female) remained at Sparrows Point till her death, and her progeny were and are still well known, through Patapsco Neck, on the Gunpowder, and up the bay, amongst the duck-shooters, as unsurpassed for their purposes.”
Two cast-iron statues of Canton and Sailor flanking the entrance to Koppers Co. in Baltimore in the late 19th century. A version of this statue now resides at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.
It is the rare myth whose roots are supported by good documentation. And so we know that in 1807, the ancestor of the classic Bay water dog was introduced to its new hunting grounds. Of course, the 19th century Chesapeake retriever would have served a very different purpose than today’s web-footed companion. Prior to the Migratory Waterfowl Act of 1918, market hunting was legal, which meant that the amount of downed birds a chessie would need to retrieve could be multiplied four-fold or more as compared to today’s limits. (To learn more about this legislation and how it changed watefowling, click through here: http://bit.ly/w22sVn) When hunting ducks and geese was an endeavor of bulk efficiency and there were no restrictions on the amount of birds bagged in a day, 30 to 40 canvasbacks, swans, or mallards were considered a good haul.
Sold to steamboats and restaurants that would serve the wild birds in savory brandy and cream sauce on porcelain plates, wildfowl were not a sport; rather, a way to make a living come winter. Chesapeake Bay retrievers were an essential element to this occupation. With one blast from the great punt guns, sleeping fowl would be scattered like dropped jacks across the creek or inlet by the shot. Gathering up all the dead and wounded birds was time-consuming work, especially in places where the water was so low or the mud so thick that making your way by boat or foot was tricky. Enter the Chesapeake Bay retriever, whose physiognomy couldn’t be more perfectly suited for the task. Wide webbed feet push water aside efficiently, and provide stable maneuverability through the marsh tumps. Thick, oily fur to repels the cold water, even on the most ice-glazed winter days. A powerful physique lends athleticism, and a wide, jowly ‘soft’ mouth means no teeth marks in your market-ready wood duck. Their ability and comfort in the Bay environment is clear to anyone who has ever watched a chessie retrieve, and their exuberance in the water is so effusive it can be hard to get them out of it.
A chessie and water go together like scrapple and eggs.
Even as the regulations for hunting have changed to manage the population of waterfowl, and therefore changed gunning itself to a sport of finesse and skill, Chesapeake Bay retrievers are one element that has remained consistently valued. You might even say that waterfowlers are as loyal to the breed as their individual companions are to them. In their two hundred years of buoyant, barking service, Chessies have become an iconic figure in the history and heritage of the Bay. They also have the distinction of being the only Chesapeake icon that can sleep comfortably the foot of your bed, legs akimbo and twitching with dreams of the next morning’s tidewater adventures.
The author’s father and his Chesapeake Bay retriever, Boozer.
It’s all just camouflage
It’s the Waterfowl Festival in Easton, Maryland this weekend, and it’s got me thinking about sport hunting. For many of our visitors at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, it’s not only a foreign topic, it’s one that is often perceived as controversial or troubling. Simply put, newcomers to this pastime tend to think of it as ‘killing for fun.’ When compared to the other reasons for hunting (for food and to sell, known as ‘market’ hunting), it can be hard to see the point behind sport hunting, in an age of conveniently pre-packaged, pre-cleaned, and pre-cut chicken parts at available every supermarket. We don’t “need” to hunt now. So why do we still do it?
As the daughter of an avid Eastern Shore sportsman, I feel particularly well informed to discuss sport hunting and its tradition as the Chesapeake’s newest iteration of a long and respected relationship with migrating birds of all kinds. I grew up in a household where venison or goose was a much more frequent feature on my plate than beef or chicken. My father loved to hunt, but for him, it was never really about the kill- it was about the friendship and camaraderie of the guys in the blind, it was about watching the sun rise over a frigid, frost-furred marsh, it was about the subtle art of arranging a decoy rig just so, or a plaintive intonation on a goose call. We ate what he brought home, but for him, that was just a bonus of the entire process.
As I teach it here at CBMM, so much of the appeal of sport hunting lies in that delicate art of camouflage- whether visual, aural, or locational. Before sport hunting was developed in response to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, market hunting was the traditional approach towards harvesting waterfowl in the Chesapeake. Since there was no regulation up until that point, hunters were free to bag as many birds as they cared to shoot- and then profit by subsequently selling the birds to restaurants, steamboats, and individual consumers. Shooting was done with the birds on the water, rather than in the air, and used tools like punt guns or battery guns, which were developed to allow a hunter to dispatch the maximum number of waterfowl as quickly as possible. Often the gunning was done at night, while the geese, ducks, and swans slept in the water. This was not a method of finesse, rather one of efficiency and mass harvest.
We have several of these guns at the Museum, and they are almost fascinatingly ogre-scaled. The sixth grade boys particularly love them.
One thing to keep in mind regarding market hunting is that the Chesapeake’s waterfowling population was certainly not the only place where this attitude prevailed. The New World from the time of European first contact had seemed a place of endless bounty. For many of these settlers, especially those with a Christian mindset, it was understood that these wide open spaces, clear rivers, and forests were abounding with life for them. Now, we call it ‘manifest destiny’. Then, it was just the birds, fish and animals god provided for sustenance. And what a bounty it was - early accounts from colonists are brimming with breathless descriptions of birds and beasts in populations never seen or even imagined. William Strachey described the Bay in 1610 as “covered with flocks of waterfowl…in such abundance as are not in all the world to be equalled.” George Alsop estimated in the mid-17th century that one flock of ducks at the head of the Bay was a mile wide and seven miles long.
Frankly put, no one could imagine any type of hunting could really make a dent.
But by the early 20th century, it was clear through the plummeting numbers of migratory geese, ducks and swans, that yes, indeed, overharvesting could have a seriously negative impact. The need for regulation was clear. The following Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, dramatically changed the approach towards hunting in the Chesapeake. With the sale of migratory birds outlawed, and subsequent legislation limiting the amount of birds each hunter could harvest and also mandating that birds could only be shot on the wing, hunters had to radically alter how and why they waterfowled. Now gunners had to create a setting, complete with sound, bird replicas, and a hiding spot, that birds had to be lured into. Hunters were challenged to familiarize themselves with the habits, calls, and preferences of the individual birds they sought. For example, in the wide-open, shallow waters of the Susquehanna Flats, where millions of migrating canvasbacks descended to plunder the verdant underwater meadows that grow there, hunters had to develop a way of concealing themselves in the middle of a wide open Bay. The response? Sinkboxes: partially submerged floating vessels, with wide rims for supporting canvasback decoys, often painted the color of the water. (See the sinkbox on the left in the photo below.)
Along with canvasback calls and box weighted and floating decoys, the ‘rig’ of a canvasback hunter mimicked the sounds, sights and location that the ducks preferred. To hunt successfully, this was now the challenge- every hunter had to know the subtle art of camouflage, and through that, also had to intimately acquaint themselves with the birds they hunted. The birds and the style of hunting depended on the natural inclinations of the waterfowl- whether canvasbacks, mergansers, geese, or wood ducks. Hunters can now be found in blinds, in pits in farm fields, on boats, and in corn fields, each hunting a particular bird with a certain call, decoy rig, and schedule.
This merganser decoy, photo courtesy of Dave Harp, represents the local, species-specific kind of tool hunters developed after 1918.
The habitat, life cycle, food preferences, calls, and movement of individual species has become part of the learning process. Through this appreciative observation, along with strategy and the development of bird-specific skill, sport hunting became the activity it is now- one that often creates ardent hunters that consider themselves passionate conservationists. Ducks Unlimited, for example, founded by sportsmen, is the leader in wetland and waterfowl conservation with a simple premise: you protect the birds and their habit, you have more birds to hunt without negatively impacting the population.
So, when I’ve got those visitors at the Museum who say, “But isn’t sport hunting all about killing for fun?” I say, “The fun isn’t in the kill. For most sport hunters, it’s all in the camouflage.”
