Independence and the Island Spirit

 —By Tiffany Amber Stockton

If you haven't snagged your FREE e-book copy of Magic of the Swan, join the FanTAStic Reader community and receive the book today.

And now, on with this month's post.

When I think about Independence Day, I think about flags and fireworks and parades. But the deeper I dig into the history of these coastal communities, the more I realize these barrier islands didn't treat independence as a holiday. It was a way of life, and sometimes it was a choice that cost something.

Cut Off From the Rest of the World

For most of their history, the barrier islands of Virginia's Eastern Shore were genuinely isolated. They were part of a small sliver at the very bottom of the Delmarva Peninsula. Before the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel opened in 1964, getting to or from the mainland was a long ferry ride at best. The island communities that built up here — Chincoteague especially — developed a satisfying self-reliance simply because they had no other choice. Geography shaped the character the same way it always does when people are left to solve their own problems without much outside help.

You can still see it. These communities were defined by fishing, oystering, boat-building, and the practical ingenuity that comes from living at the edge of things. They knew how to read the weather, manage the tides, and handle whatever the season brought without waiting for someone else to fix it.

The July Fourth That Meant Something

In July of 1861, the country was coming apart. Virginia had just voted to secede from the Union, which put the island communities of the Eastern Shore in an extremely uncomfortable position. Their whole economy depended on selling seafood to markets in Philadelphia and New York. Siding with the Confederacy would have cut off everything.

On July 4th of that year (the 85th anniversary of American independence), 418 men from the barrier islands of Maryland and Virginia gathered on Chincoteague and signed a document pledging their loyalty to the United States. A War of 1812 veteran named Captain Edward Whaley stood up and declared he would defend the old flag to his last drop of blood. Not long after, Chincoteague voted to remain in the Union by 138 votes to 2, becoming the only part of Virginia to do so.

John A.M. Whealton, a merchant and oyster entrepreneur, was the man who organized that loyalty and made sure Washington knew about it. He later explained the decision plainly: "We sold nearly all the oysters we raised in Philadelphia. It would have meant starvation to us to have seceded." When Confederate sympathizers on the mainland tried to force the issue, Whealton's men took to flatboats and turned them back without losing a single islander.

Practical men, making a principled stand. That is the very essence of the Eastern Shore. And it's often found in smaller communities anywhere you go.

The Island Spirit

Interesting that these men chose to celebrate Independence Day in 1861 by signing a loyalty pledge. With the country fracturing around them, they gathered on their island and recommitted to the idea that freedom was worth defending. That some things don't bend.

That instinct runs all the way through the history of these communities. The barrier islands shaped people who were stubbornly self-reliant but also fiercely tied to one another. Islands by their nature draw people together. You take care of your neighbor because your neighbor is the only neighbor you have.

What happened on Chincoteague that Fourth of July didn't make the history books the way bigger battles did. Confederate Virginia barely noticed. As one account put it, Richmond simply didn't care about a small island choosing to go its own way. But Chincoteague didn't need Richmond to notice. They knew what they'd decided and why, and they went back to catching oysters.

This is just one of the many quiet decisions, made by ordinary people in ordinary places, that don't get monuments or headlines but shape everything that follows. I've been writing historical fiction long enough to know that the best stories are usually hiding in the footnotes. Chincoteague's July Fourth of 1861 was one of those footnotes. But it carried a lot of what independence actually means.

Phantom Ships of the Chesapeake

—By Tiffany Amber Stockton

There's something about open water and a dark sky that invites stories. Just think about all the sea shanties that have been written or the rich maritime folklore full of tales. And on a coastline with as many shipwrecks, storms, and hard histories as this one, there's no shortage of gaps to fill.

The Coast That Swallowed Ships

The waters off Assateague Island and along the Virginia Eastern Shore were among the most treacherous on the entire Atlantic coastline. Shallow shoals, sudden storms, and tricky inlets meant that ships met grief here regularly. There are dozens upon dozens of documented wrecks in this stretch of coast alone.

One of the most famous involves a Spanish warship called the La Galga. In September of 1750, she was driven ashore in shallow water at Assateague by a hurricane that rerouted her voyage from Havana back to Spain. The crew made it to shore, but the ship didn't. And according to local legend, not everyone who went down with her stayed quietly beneath the waves. It is said the spirits of those who died in the wreck still comb the beach near the Assateague Lighthouse to this day.

Now, I'm not here to argue for or against ghost stories. But when you walk that beach at dusk and the light shifts the way it does over open water, the stories don't exactly feel unreasonable.

Fire on the Water

Ghost ship legends tend to follow a pattern along the Atlantic coast. The image that shows up again and again is a ship on fire, visible from shore, impossible to approach, there one moment and gone the next.

The most famous version of this legend along the northeastern coast belongs to a ship called the Palatine, said to appear as a burning phantom off Block Island in Rhode Island. Benjamin Congdon, born around 1788, gave what he called a typical explanation for the apparition. He said the burning ship was sent by an Almighty Power to punish wicked men who had wronged her passengers. The people didn't just tell ghost stories for entertainment. They used them to make moral sense of tragedy.

That same impulse shows up all along the coast. When something terrible happened at sea and no good explanation came with it, the story that filled the space often came with answers. Greed was punished, cruelty was answered, and the innocent were remembered. The ghost ship wasn't used just to scare people. It was a form of justice that the law couldn't always provide.

What the Stories Were Really Doing

The part that interests me most as a fiction author is what the stories meant to the people who told them.

The Chesapeake region had the ideal conditions for this kind of folklore. Isolated coves, historic battle sites, and centuries of storms and shipwrecks all set the stage. These weren't just idle campfire tales. They were community memories, shaped into compelling narratives. A phantom ship burning on the water could be a warning to stay away from a dangerous stretch of shoals, a reminder of a tragedy the community hadn't finished grieving, or a way of saying that some things don't go unanswered even when no one is watching.

And there's a thread of faith underneath all of it. The watermen and island communities were deeply rooted in their churches. They didn't read ghost ship sightings as random. They read them as meaning something. In their understanding, things had consequences. Those who observed the burning Palatine shortly after the original wreck believed it to be a warning from an Almighty Power. That's not so far from a worldview shaped by Scripture.

I think about Pop-Pop's stories again here. He never told ghost stories exactly. His tales were always adventure, always rescue, always triumph. But he understood the dangers of the water. History happened out there. People died out there. And he didn't dismiss any of that reality. He simply chose to reframe the stories in a way that meant something to my brother and me.

The Light You Can Explain and the Light You Can't

Before the Assateague Lighthouse was operational, ships navigated this coastline by whatever lights they could find, and sometimes they found none at all. The lighthouse was built precisely because too many ships were lost in darkness. A real light saved lives. A false light, in some of those darker legends, lured ships to destruction.

That tension of true light versus false light runs all the way through Scripture. "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." Psalm 119:105. The people who lived along these shores and watched for burning ships in the dark knew firsthand exactly what it meant to need a reliable light.

The phantom ships still show up in Eastern Shore stories. Some of them probably have explanations like bioluminescence, fog, or distant burning debris. Some of them are just stories that got better with each retelling. Either way, they tell you what the people who lived here feared, and what they believed. 

The Songs the Watermen Sang

  By Tiffany Amber Stockton

I didn't go looking for this story. I went looking for something else entirely and stumbled right into it.

While digging into the broader history of Chesapeake Bay watermen for the series I'm currently writing, I kept running across references to singing as something central to the work itself. That sent me down a whole rabbit trail. Here's just a snippet of what I found.

Music That Moved With the Work

Most people have a passing familiarity with sea shanties. Those rollicking call-and-response songs that have had something of a revival in recent years online. But the music sung by watermen along the Virginia coast and the Chesapeake Bay had its own distinct character, separate from the classic sailor songs of transatlantic ships.

The crews hauling menhaden nets were predominantly African American men, and they drew on a deeply-rooted work song tradition to accompany the backbreaking labor of pulling in those massive nets. The chanteys provided energy, camaraderie, distraction, and spiritual encouragement all at once.

Picture the scene: as many as 40 men in long rowboats, hauling a purse seine net filled with thousands of pounds of fish. To coordinate those movements, they sang. The rhythm of the song literally kept the men pulling together at the same moment. Without it, the work fell apart.

Where the Songs Came From

The roots of these chanteys trace back through African American work song traditions that stretch all the way to the Middle Passage. They carried meanings that went far deeper than keeping time with the nets.

Some chanteys were newly written while others were adapted from religious music, other land-based work songs, and folk songs from various communities. Spirituals blended into work songs and back again. The line between a hymn sung in church on Sunday and a chantey sung on the water Monday morning wasn't always a clear one.

Isn't that fascinating? These men didn't compartmentalize their faith. It traveled with them onto the boats, into the nets, into the songs they sang to get through hard days on the water. Whatever sustained them in the pews sustained them on the bay too.

A Tradition Nearly Lost

By the mid-twentieth century, hydraulic power blocks began replacing the hand-hauling work that had made the chanteys necessary. When the labor changed, the singing faded. There was simply no longer a practical reason to keep time that way.

What saved this particular piece of history was a group of retired fishermen in Virginia's Northern Neck region who kept performing the old songs long after the nets were put away. As young men they had worked those boats, and as old men they kept the tradition alive for audiences who had no idea such music had ever existed.

What Music Does That Nothing Else Can

The songs ranged from hymns to work songs and everything between. People who sing like that are processing life. Grief, homesickness, faith, humor, solidarity. All of it found its way into the music. Colossians 3:16 talks about singing with gratitude in your heart. The watermen of the Chesapeake may or may not have been thinking about that verse while they hauled nets in the rain. But I do think they they knew something important. Music carries what words alone cannot hold. And for the men living those hard lives far from home with unpredictable water and weather, the music they had made a world of difference.

My Pop-Pop never sang shanties in his barbershop stories. But he had his own version of this with the way certain phrases and rhythms would slip into his storytelling whenever the tale got particularly dramatic. Now I wonder if that habit came from somewhere older than just him.

The Ice Flood of 1918: When the Bay Inlets Froze

    _By Tiffany Amber Stockton

Here's a look back at the winter of 1917-1918, when parts of the Chesapeake Bay and coastal inlets froze so completely that people and carts crossed on ice. Can you believe it?

The Winter the Coast Stood Still

The tide had stopped breathing. From Chincoteague to Crisfield, the sea lay silent under a crust of ice so thick you could drive a wagon across it. Steamboats and other waterway vessels sat stuck for nearly a month due to the frigid temperatures and blizzard that brought uncharacteristic cold further south than it had ever remained for this long.

For people who depended on the water for travel and livelihood, it brought things to a halt. That freeze rearranged priorities overnight. Mothers stretched meals, and churches drew people together for warmth and survival.

The freeze affected nearly everything. Watermen couldn’t get to their oysters and crabs. Small towns that relied on regular marine deliveries had to deal with delayed supplies or no deliveries at all. Even the mail struggled to get through when boats were stuck and roads weren’t much better.

They Must Survive

People adapted, as they always do. Sometimes, you simply don't have a choice. And sometimes, you get the opportunity to tackle things that got pushed aside for more important needs. Like how men spent the downtime repairing boats and gear that normally never stopped long enough to get a thorough overhaul. And children did exactly what you’d expect. They tested the ice, ignored stern instructions, and had adventures they’d retell for decades afterward. :)

Now, I'm sure a little bit of tall tale snuck in there during the retelling at some of my family gatherings, but the details still tracked with real events. And no one challenged the report of a few men on their bellies pulling a wide sleigh across the ice to get much-needed supplies to island residents.

Thankfully, that blizzard and winter didn't end in disaster. But when I read about that experience, I'm reminded that my great-grandparents dealt with that surprise weather without modern forecasts, heated trucks, or social media updates. They had to rely on their common sense, neighbors, and a lot of layers of clothing. One of many good things came out of it, though.

They left us the stories!

NOW IT'S YOUR TURN:

* Have you ever heard an older family member talk about extreme weather conditions they endured?

* Do you know of any famous weather stories from your own hometown?

* If you lived in a coastal community back then, which part do you think would have been hardest: food, work, or travel shutting down?

Leave answers to these questions or any comments on the post below.

** This note is for our email readers. Please do not reply via email with any comments. View the blog online and scroll down to the comments section.

Come back on the 9th of each month for my next foray into historical tidbits to share.

---

BIO

Tiffany Amber Stockton has embellished stories since childhood, thanks to a very active imagination and notations of talking entirely too much. Honing those skills led her to careers as an award-winning and best-selling author and speaker, while also working as a professional copywriter/copyeditor. She loves to share life-changing products and ideas with others to help them get rooted in truth and live a life of purpose.

Currently, she lives with her husband and fellow author, Stuart Vaughn Stockton, along with their two children, two dogs, and five cats in southeastern Kentucky. In her 20+ years as a professional writer, she has sold twenty-six (26) books so far and has agent representation with Tamela Murray of the Steve Laube Agency. You can find her on Facebook and GoodReads.