Faith in the Tempest: When the Storm Comes

—By Tiffany Amber Stockton

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August always makes me think about storms. There's something about this time of year — the heavy air, the way the light changes before a weather system moves in — that feels charged with possibility, and not always the good kind. For the communities along Virginia's Eastern Shore, August has historically been the month when everything could change overnight.

The Storm That Changed Everything

On August 23, 1933, a hurricane hit the Eastern Shore and continued battering the coast for two days. By the time it moved off, the town of Broadwater on Hog Island was practically destroyed, as were houses on Assateague. The resort on Cobb Island was totally destroyed.

Locals still call it simply "the '33 storm," and older families along the Shore speak of it the way people speak of a turning point. A before and after that reshaped everything. The storm ended what historians call the Golden Age of Virginia's barrier islands. Prior to that August, people actually lived year-round on several of these islands. After it, most never came back.

The storm produced 100-year flooding from its surge, setting records that stood for 70 years, and caused at least 47 deaths across the region. In Virginia alone, storm surge reached nearly ten feet above normal water levels in Norfolk, destroying boats in harbors and washing out roads and bridges.

A Town That Refused to Simply Disappear

Broadwater was a thriving waterman's community of about 300 people. Houses, a school, a church, a cemetery. The 1933 hurricane inundated the entire island. The pine forest that had sheltered the town for generations was killed by saltwater. The lighthouse was eventually swallowed by the sea.

But the people didn't simply walk away and leave everything behind. Many of the houses and other buildings were loaded onto barges and moved to the mainland, where they still stand today in the towns of Willis Wharf and Oyster, Virginia.

Read that again. They put their houses on barges.

These weren't people who gave up easily. They took what they had built, loaded it onto the water that had just tried to destroy them, and carried it somewhere safer. The community didn't disappear. It relocated. Schools closed. Churches emptied. Stores vanished. What had once been functioning island communities slowly became ghost landscapes of marsh grass, cedar trees, and collapsing pilings. But the people themselves, and the things they had made? Those survived.

What You Do When the Waters Rise

So, what sustained these communities through that kind of loss?

They weren't strangers to hardship. Life on a barrier island was never easy. Isolation, unpredictable weather, work that was physically grueling and economically uncertain. The storms of 1896 and then 1933 weren't the first time the sea had tested them. But the faith tradition that ran through these communities was the thing underneath everything else.

After the hurricane, immediate emergency relief was organized through local Red Cross chapters. Materials to rebuild homes, furniture, household goods, issued family by family according to need. That kind of mutual aid only happens in communities held together by something more than geography.

Psalm 46 says God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble, and then immediately: "Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea." The people who wrote those words knew exactly what it felt like to watch the ground beneath them literally shift and give way. So did the watermen of Hog Island who floated their houses to safety on barges.

The Shore Remembers

One of the things that strikes me most about researching this stretch of coastline is how long the memory runs here. Along the Eastern Shore, older families still speak of the storm in ways that sound like a turning point in local history.

Formative events become part of how a community understands itself. The '33 storm is in the Eastern Shore's bones. A shared reference point for what it means to face something enormous and find a way through it anyway.

Most of us aren't going to face a hurricane that washes away our town. But we all face seasons that feel like the ground is giving way. Circumstances that seem designed to take everything we've built. When the waters rise, what do you put on the barge? What is worth carrying to the other side?

Those island folks chose their homes, their community, their faith. They started again on the mainland with the bones of the old life still intact around them. I don't know about you, but I find that more than a little inspiring.

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.