Graveyards by the Sea

  —By Tiffany Amber Stockton

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October often invites us to think about the people who came before. The leaves let go, the days shorten, and the autumn air can make the past feel closer than usual. For me, that pull toward remembrance gets especially strong when I'm deep in research, and I found a great little tidbit for this month's feature.

It involves a cemetery. A small one, mostly unmarked. On an island most people have only ever visited for the ponies.

The Village That Disappeared

photo courtesy of Fishing & Wildlife

Most visitors to Assateague Island today see wildlife, wild ponies, and beach. What they don't see is the ghost of a village that once stood near the base of the Assateague Lighthouse bluff.

Assateague Village was established around 1794. At its height it was home to roughly 250 people. A real community, with a Baptist church, a schoolhouse, a dry goods store, and families who had lived there for generations. The residents harvested the sea, hunted waterfowl, grazed livestock, and built their lives on predictable rhythms.

Then, in the early 1900s, a Baltimore businessman named Samuel Fields purchased most of the Virginia portion of Assateague Island and fenced off the land. Suddenly the villagers couldn't reach Tom's Cove or the fish factories that sustained them. Cut off from their livelihood, they did what Eastern Shore people have always done when the water or circumstance forces their hand. They adapted. Gradually, they floated their houses on barges and moved them across the channel to Chincoteague. The church went too. The schoolhouse went. By 1932, the last residents had left.

Today, all that remains of Assateague Village is a handful of building foundations, a historical marker, and a small cemetery.

What the Cemetery Holds

The Assateague Village Cemetery sits on a rise near where the church once stood. It's not much to look at now. The grave markers are mostly gone. Small stone corner markers outline where the churchyard was, and a simple metal plaque marks the location of unidentified human remains located in 2010.

A few names have been pieced together from historical records: Henry Birch's wife and three of their children. Jesse McGhee. George Elliott. Roxilla Birch Scott.

There's also a remote graveyard about half a mile north of the village site. Separate and set apart. Those who remembered the village said it might be connected to a smallpox outbreak around 1900. No one is entirely sure. The records either didn't survive or were never made.

These were people with names and stories and families and faith. They built a church. They gathered on Sundays. They buried their dead with care and marked the graves. And then the community moved on, and the markers weathered away. Now, a metal plaque testifies that someone is here.

The Ones the Sea Is Still Claiming

The sea level along Virginia's Eastern Shore is rising at roughly three times the global average. Old family cemeteries scattered across the barrier islands (some dating back to the 1700s) are now sitting at the edge of tidal wetlands that didn't used to be there. Some have already been partly lost. Holland Island in the Chesapeake, whose last residents left in the 1920s, has a cemetery that has largely fallen into the bay.

The Eastern Shore's coastal cemeteries are, as one conservation writer put it, "long-forgotten cultural markers now threatened by erosion." The people buried there likely never imagined it. They chose high ground, built to last. And now the ground itself is moving.

Why Remembrance Matters

Every one of those names that's been lost belonged to someone whose life mattered. Someone who loved their children, weathered storms, sang hymns, worked their hands raw, and hoped for something beyond what they could see.

That belief is what has sustained coastal communities through loss after loss. They built cemeteries because they believed the dead deserved to be remembered. They marked graves because names mattered. And when the markers wore away or the water rose, the faith that had shaped those communities said this is not the end of the story.

Eula Dukes, the last person born on Assateague Island, returned to the village site in the early 1990s after more than sixty years away. She had lived just two miles from her birthplace her whole life and had never gone back. When she finally did, she went with her sister, her brother, and a cousin. All of them, the last people alive who remembered what had been there.

I don't have family names on the markers on Assateague, but there are family members buried on Chincoteague, and I've paid my respects many times during visits to that little island. The stories of those from the past make the lives of the present possible.

The Midwives and Miracles of the Marsh

 By Tiffany Amber Stockton

There was no hospital on the island and no doctor within easy reach. Just a woman who knew what to do.

She Knew What Grew in the Marsh

When I started digging into the history of isolated coastal communities for this series, I learned a bit about midwives. When someone got sick, or a baby was on the way, they called on a woman. Usually older. Trusted by everyone within a day's travel. And she was the closest thing to a doctor most of those communities ever had.

Midwives along the Eastern Shore weren't trained in any formal school. They learned from the woman who came before them, who learned from the woman before her. They knew which plants to gather from the marsh and the kitchen garden. Mullein for coughs, plantain leaf for wounds, bayberry bark when a fever climbed too high.

A lot of that knowledge had roots in the traditions of the region's original peoples—the Powhatan and Accomack—passed along through generations of living side by side.

And they weren't just called for births. They mixed tonics, dressed wounds, sat with the dying, and managed the everyday medical crises that had no other solution when the nearest doctor was miles away across open water.

More Than Herbs and Remedies

Here's the part I find most interesting. Faith was woven directly into how these women worked.

Prayer wasn't something separate from the remedies. It was part of the care. A midwife might pray over a laboring woman, gather neighbors from the local church to stand in prayer when a fever refused to break, or whisper Scripture over a child in the night. There was no hard line between what she knew how to do and what she trusted God to do. She worked right up to the edge of her knowledge, and then she handed it over.

That resonates with me. Psalm 139 says God knit each of us together in our mother's womb. The women who spent their lives welcoming new life into those salt-air rooms knew that better than most. They had too much experience of what lay beyond human hands to believe they were ever truly in charge of an outcome. They were instruments. And they showed up anyway.

The Ones Who Went Unrecorded

The hard part of researching this topic is learning most of these women were never written down.

As professional medicine became more formal through the 1800s, midwives and folk healers got pushed out of the official record. Their knowledge was dismissed, their contributions went undocumented, and what they knew often died with them or survived only in family memory that eventually faded too. Finding their specific names and stories takes real digging, and sometimes you come up empty.

What I did find is they were trusted by their neighbors in the most vulnerable moments a person experiences. They carried knowledge no book recorded. And they were faithful, showing up in the middle of the night when someone needed them.