I look like a cockatoo today - it's only 63 degrees, but the humidity is 100% here in Boulder, which is an extreme rarity. So I have my hair gathered into a ponytail, then twisted and turned up on the back of my head and clipped in place. My hair is finally long enough that I have a small up-standing brush at the crown of my head. It's quite funny looking! My kits have been behaving well - they leave Rodney's critters alone (Rodney and I share the north wall of my apartment), which makes both of us humans happy. At various times during the day, one can see a Belgium Giant rabbit playing on his patio, or ducklings, or a wide variety of birds on perches. My kits watch all of Rodney's pets, but they don't touch. Of course, in the last two days, the two of them have captured and brought five English sparrows inside the apartment and then turned them loose - so I've been chasing small, frightened birds, catching them. checking them for injuries, and then releasing them. I hope the kits slow down and the birds are faster on the wing!
Two weeks from today, the Saltwater Cowboys of Chincoteague will begin their seven days of work for Pony Penning. The Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company actually "works" - looking after the ponies - every single day of the year. There are about 15 members of the nuclear Pony Committee, whose main task is caring for the ponies' welfare - but just about any resident can get temporarily wrangled into helping out in a pinch. Since the ponies live on Assateague Island, which is owned by the U S government, and is run by three governmental agencies (the National Park Service, the U S Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Department of Natural Resources), the CVFC has a strict contract with the government regarding the care and treatment of the ponies. Each pony receives every vaccination a normal riding horse gets each year - rabies, tetanus, vaccines against influenza - and they have their blood collected and tested each and every year. A veterinarian is on call for the entire herd collection 24 hours a day, 7 days a week - and Charlie Cameron, DVM, is one of the best. The ponies are actually herded together three times a year, including the Pony Penning round-up. General health and hooves are checked, and needed shots are given. And 5 of the Pony Committee members go over to Assateague every day to look over each pony.
Two weeks from today, the Saltwater Cowboys will assemble on Assateague Island, starting off at the northern end of the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, along the fence-line that separates Maryland from Virginia. They will round-up all the ponies of the northern herds and place them in the north holding pen. Sunday, they will round-up the ponies on the south end of the island and take them to the south holding pen near Tom's Cove. Monday, at sunrise, the northern herds will be walked down the beach from the north to the south holding pen. As the two groups, and ten-plus herds combine, there will be some fireworks, as stallions challenge each other for space and protect their mares and foals. Tuesday is pretty much a rest day for the cowboys - but mares and foals are being matched, as well as which mare is in which stallion's herd. On Wednesday, the ponies will be walked down the paved road on Assateague to Black Duck Drain, where they will turn off and ford a creek, to approach Old Dominion Point. At slack tide, the US Coast Guard will fire a flare, and the cowboys will urge the ponies into the Assateague Channel to begin the one-eighth mile swim to Chincoteague. The cowboys and their horses are transported via a barge, following the ponies. After rest and visual health check, the ponies are herded down Pony Swim Lane, around Beebe Road and then north on Main Street to the Carnival Grounds. On Thursday, the foals and a few yearlings are auctioned, with all proceeds benefiting the CVFC and the EMT units. Friday, the adult ponies and unsold youngsters make the return swim back to Assateague, again at slack tide.
The veterinarian and the firemen check each and every pony - those considered too weak, too old, too young, or too pregnant, do not participate in the swim. They are loaded onto a trailer and taken in style to the holding pens at the Carnival Grounds, until their friends and relatives join them after the swim on Wednesday. The other thing that the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company works hard at is the annual Carnival. The Carnival is in it's 89th year in 2014 - Pony Penning has been occurring for more than a hundred years prior to the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company taking over the running of the event. That happened when there were two huge fires, one year and the next, that burned down almost every structure on the island. The Fire Company was formed, and the proceeds of the Carnival and the pony sales have gone directly for fire-fighting equipment and training ever since.
Pony Penning on Chincoteague and Assateague is definitely a unique experience.
Saturday, July 12, 2014
Friday, July 11, 2014
Life On Chincoteague (Part 4): From the New York Sun of 11 May 1890
(The New York Sun was a daily newspaper, published in New York City, New York, from 1933 until 1950. It was one of the most influential American newspapers through the early twentieth century; and was the first successful penny daily paper in the United States. It was known for it's witty, humorous treatment of news, a clear style of journalism, and the occasional sensational approach to scandals.)
**Please excuse any out-of-date or derogatory terms that are used. This is a true, uncorrected transcription of the original newspaper article. ** This account is signed by John R. Spears:
"The immigrants, or new Chincoteaguers, are not like the natives. Most of them are from New Jersey and Maryland and a few from Long Island. They were attracted here by the oysters, and they have come in such numbers that they dominate the community. And yet, although not to such manners born, they build little homes much like those the Chincoteaguers live in, and fall into Chincoteague habits of dress and food to a curious extent, and only when the oyster business has tonged and dredged out a fortune, and they have got too old to fully appreciate a different manner of life do they try to adopt anything better. That the immigrants come here expecting to make the island a temporary home, to be abandoned for the old home when enough money has been accumulated, is plain from the condition of Chincoteague village. The narrow and unkempt streets and the little ill-kept homes are those of the temporary sojourners. Yet, even if the home should be a temporary one, it is all but incredible that people should be so careless of the simplest sanitary laws. Not only are the kitchen slops and garbage thrown into the streets or on the sandy lots, as already told, but there is a cesspool in every yard and in half the yards wells for drinking water. These wells are nowhere to exceed ten feet deep, and many are but six. They are often less than two rods from cesspools. The deaths numbered 43 last year out of a population of 2,300. Parts of the town are too new to have as yet become very unhealthy.
There were 450 voters at the last election, of whom 80 were Mahone Republicans: of 55 colored men, 40 were Republicans. There are three schoolhouses, for which seven teachers are employed at an annual expense of $3,000. The money paid to Chincoteaguers who man the life-saving stations, the lighthouses, the lightship, the Custom House, and the Post Office amounts to over $22,000 a year.
The people live well in the village when they wish to do so. Roast beef of good quality sells for eight cents a pound, and most food products at equally low rates. There is no printed bill of fare at the Atlantic Hotel, but George the colored lad of 12, who is head waiter and staff in one, stacks up about each plate the following or an equivalent, for breakfast, which is the lightest meal: Ham and eggs, beefsteak, broiled yellow legs, fried oysters, fried shad, poached eggs, biscuit, light bread, cream toast, canned peaches, sweet milk, and coffee. Griddle cakes hot off the range are served at short intervals during the meal. The butter is good and yellow unlike Southern butter commonly. The guest who does not make a square meal cannot blame the hotel.
There is no jail on the island, nor is there much use for one. Not until August 1886 was anyone murdered on the island so far as anyone knows. Theft is unknown. During the summer of 1886 William Freeman, a young man of 25, was employed on the farm of Timothy Hill, formerly a Cape Cod man, and probably the wealthiest man on the island. Freeman fell in love with Jennie, the 18-year-old daughter of his employer. Jennie did not discourage the suit, but when the old folks learned of it they shut off his flow of sentiment harshly. Freeman grieved over this day and night, but was not the sort of fellow to carry his sweetheart into a flying bateau some windy night and sail for the mainland and a parson, as many a better man has done, but he grew desperate, and finally went hunting Bill Bunting of whom he was jealous. Failing to find him,he went to the home of the girl next day, and found her there with her mother. He carried a gun and a revolver, and without parley opened fire. The girl fell dead and the mother received two bullets in her body. At that a brother of the girl's came running from a neighbor's. Seeing him, young Freeman put the revolver to his own forehead and blew his life out with the last cartridge in the revolver. The mother recovered.
There was another homicide a year ago last summer. George Lewis, mate of the Winter Quarter Shoal lightship met William C Dryden, an oysterman in the village here, and got to arguing in the presence of others about the depth of water at a certain stage of the tide at a certain place of the beach. From argument they went to insults, then to blows, and then to weapons. Dryden was the quicker and stabbed Lewis so that he died. Dryden was arrested, had a hearing before the magistrate, and was sent to the county jail to await the course of the law. He escaped from the jail and is now at large. He is known to be living in Delaware the people say, but Lewis had no relatives to push the matter, and the State authorities never offered any reward, and so no effort has ever been made to bring him to justice.
The bay in which Chincoteague lies is one vast oyster bed. A part of the bay is a natural bed, but every available foot is now taken up and planted. Of the value of this industry to Chincoteague, some idea may be formed when it is known that up to April 1 this season 43,501 barrels of oysters and clams had been shipped by rail, via the Widgeon, to Northern cities, and that by the end of the season few short of 50,000 will have gone forward. They have roughly an average of $4 a barrel, or $200,000 cold cash, to a community of 450 voters. Besides these, many were shipped North by sloop and schooner in cold weather. The estimated number varies from 20,000 to 30,000 barrels. The lower estimate being made by the railroad men. It is fair to suppose that 20,000 barrels went by water. The heaviest shippers forwarded from 2,000 to 7,000, and took in from $20,000 to $28,000 each. It is asserted by the oystermen themselves that after allowing for every expense oysters cost the planters a dollar a barrel. Some three or four planters have therefore received incomes of $10,000 to $20,000 each bed the past season. The majority of men on the island, however, are laborers, and the few capitalists reap the harvest.
The beds are planted with seed oysters gathered from natural beds along North Hampton county, from James River and Chesapeake Bay, and from Albemarle Sound. The seed oysters cost from six to ten cents a bushel at the natural beds,and a regular fleet of sloops and schooners is now employed bringing them here and selling them at from twelve to sixteen cents a bushel. From 500 to 800 bushels are spread over an acre of land under water, and since the bay is for the most part shoal three to eight feet deep and the bottom good, a vast territory is covered. The oysters are left down until the second season to grow and so each planter tongs up the oysters on but half his area every year. The yield this year has been excellent. Thus a man who planted 1,800 bushels of seed on a three-acre patch tonged up 2,800 bushels, which he sold for $3,300 net, making a clear gain of $1,100 per acre. The produce from an acre of dry land on Chincoteague could, perhaps, be sold for $50 net, that being the profit made on sweet potatoes on like land on the peninsula.
The difference between tools used by men in the same occupation at different points along the Atlantic coast is interesting. On Long Island the oystermen use a round-nosed yawl rigged with a single sprit sail when gathering oysters. On Chincoteague they use a scow, and it is what might be called a cat yawl in rig. There is a sail forward that is of the shape of a catboat sail, though spread with boom and sprit, instead of boom and gaff. The mainsail is a leg of mutton. A fifty-foot boat in the seed oyster trade has the same rig with a rib added. The size of her sail is simply enormous, and the oystermen "carry on" like Captains of clipper ships. But the rig is very safe, for in the case of a squall down comes the big foresail, and there the boat lies with the leg o' mutton to keep her head to the wind. The Long Islander's yawl costs $100; the Chincoteaguer's scow $50.
The men who work on the beds as laborers are paid from 10 cents a bushel when tonging on unworked beds in September, to 40 cents a bushel when scraping the gleanings off in May. They make all the way from $2 to $4 a day. With the wintery wind howling over the bay, and the salt water skimming over with ice in the bottom of the boat, they earn all they get. It is a hard life, but a man with energy and ambition can become a capitalist and get into business for himself more readily than in any occupation where so little training is necessary to acquire skill needed as in this.
The readers of THE SUN who are interested in forest and stream, and so read the reports from game resorts, have very often seen the name of Chincoteague. In the seasons Chincoteague furnishes rare sport for the few who come to it. The bay, the glades, and the marshes afford feeding and nesting land for untold millions of wild fowl while the flight of shore birds and snipe are at times wonderful. The yellow legs have been flying for two weeks, and the English snipe for over a week. By the time this article is in print the season for shore birds will be fairly open. On a cloudy day, with a good stiff southwest wind the Chincoteague gunner digs a hole in a sand hill over on Assateague or at the southern end of Chincoteague, and, setting up his decoys, sits down and whistles. His tune is not from an opera either comic or serious though it is the prelude to tragedy. He mimics the cry of the willett and the curlew, and the neighborly flocks above, seeing a flock on the sand, are deceived by the cry and down they swing and flutter til bunched just above the decoys. Then the gunner turns loose the blasts of powder and shot right and left, killing sometimes dozens with a single charge, while the rest go screaming away.
After June, when the shore bird flight is over - indeed, before it is over, the weakfish begin to bite in the bay, and later, the bluefish off shore, and later still, a few striped bass may be had in the natural ditches through the marshes. But the chief fish is the weakfish, and they are taken on hook and line by the hundred an hour.
But the glory of Chincoteague as a sportsman's resort begins in November. The storms of fall have by that time driven the wild fowl thus far on their journey south. Then the Chincoteaguer scours up his old rusty shotgun, daubs fresh paint on his home-made decoys, draws on double flannels, and rowing out on the shoals where the water is 24 to 30 inches deep, sticks s lot of fresh-cut brush up in the mud so that a little grove large enough to conceal him and his skiff is made. Then he spreads out his decoys, goes back to his blind, and lies down and waits. It is a warm, bright day when all wild fowl does not come to him who waits. Redheads, black ducks, mallards - all sorts of ducks and geese and brant as well - come to the decoys, though canvasbacks are very scarce. Sink boxes or batteries are also used. W D Sharpley, Jack Snead, and Capt. Pruitt of the Widgeon stand at the head of the local gunners. Although a few men come here from Philadelphia and Wilmington, there is no such thing as a club house on the bay, and few sportsmen seem to realize what a resort this is for wild fowl.
Wallop's Island, below Chincoteague, has recently been purchased by a club of gentlemen at Pottsville, Pa., of which O Beecher of Pine Grove, Pa. and W K Woodbury of Pottsville are leading members. They gave $8,000 for the island, which is about seven miles long and nearly a mile wide. They have built a pier and wharf at an expense of $5,000 and William Conant of Chincoteague has a contract for building an $8,000 club house this summer. The island is a delightful place. The surf does not roll on a finer beach anywhere than at Wallop's Island. The presence of this club will serve to quicken the game constables to a sense of duty and stop the unlawful practice now prevalent of shooting wild fowl at night by jack light.
An interesting feature of Chincoteague is the presence of great numbers of tamed wild geese. When the Chincoteaguer wings a wild goose he saves it alive if he can. His flock is very often added to in another way. Seeing and hearing the tamed geese the wild fellows often come down to them and make friends as well as to enter coops where feed is provided generously when such visitors are expected. The wild goose thinks that is the greatest luck he ever did see, and concludes he will stay there all night. Before morning his wings have been clipped and he stays longer. Meantime the food has been so good he does not care very much about going away anyhow, and so there he stays till old age or a Christmas dinner carries him off. Flocks of from thirty to fifty exist here. The wild ones cross with the tame. The hybrids are called mungrums by the natives and are highly valued because a mungrum yields three times the weight of feathers that a tame goose does and twice the weight of a wild one. The hybrids lay eggs, but the eggs will not hatch.
When the Chincoteaguer grows lugubrious and the world seems turned against him, and he has but one friend who is a stranger willing to listen, the tale of the great storm is told. It was long ago in 1821 - when the houses were few and small, that the storm came on. The clouds off to southward gathered thick and black one morning, the wind fell, the air grew oppressive, and as the day wore away the silence and the gloom and the sky off to the sea became terrifying. The gulls and the wild fowl took alarm and fled to the glades, where all night long their cries were heard; but when day broke every sound died out. Then the people with ghastly fear saw that the sea had receded for miles off shore. They were not kept long in suspense. While they stood looking a vast cloud of water and wind was hurled in from the sea. The pines of Assateague, the water in the marshes, and everything in its path on Chincoteague were swept up and carried away to who knows where. Then a roar as of thunder was heard seaward by those who remained, and the sea, in a wave higher than the sand hills and higher than the trees that had covered them, came foaming in over its bed,over the beach, over the hills, over the marshes, across the bay and far up on the sloping ground of the mainland miles away. How many were lost and where the bones of the dead found resting place no one knows but the story of two marvelous escapes is told by those whose houses stood at the north end of the island out of the track of tornado and wave. Old man Hickman gathered his little grandson in his arms as the wind storm came. The walls and roof of the house fled away with the wind, leaving the two unharmed. Then came the deluge and unconsciousness, and when the wind resumed its sway the old man, with the boy still in his arms and safe, was lying in the brush on King's Bush Marsh on the mainland a mile inshore from the bay. A man named Andreas, with his family of a wife and eight or nine children, was carried off by the wave. The neighbors found Andreas some hours later hanging by his belt in a tree 20 feet above the ground half a mile from where he started. His family were never heard from. Chincoteague lies just awash. When another such storm comes more than 2,000 people will be found in the path of the tidal wave.
The aged Chincoteaguer is proud of the fact that he is spry. Uncle Ken Jester, who celebrated his 75th birthday in the lively manner already described, is a fair sample of a number of others. He will break the wildest pony, scull a bateau when a common man would fear the sea and dance at an oyster roast with a vigor that takes the shine off of many a younger blood. Martin G Connor is another young man of the same age. The Birch family has four boys in it whose ages are 62, 67, 76, and 79. They have no notion of giving up the oyster business for twenty years yet, anyhow. Their sister, Mrs. Eliza Thornton, at 72, is as spry as they are. Another sister, Mrs. Mary Watson, met an untimely death recently at the age of 83. David and Isaac Daisey are, at 75 and 78 respectively, able to do a good day's work, as a day's work is counted in this easy-going climate. People will be surprised if the two do not live to be as old as their mother, who died at 93. More than a score of people on the island are nearer 70 than 60, though not yet 70. And all this in a community of 450 voters. Nor is account taken of three or four colored people whose ages are uncertain.
Life on Chincoteague, Part 2
**Please excuse any out-of-date or derogatory terms that are used. This is a true, uncorrected transcription of the original newspaper article. ** This account is signed by John R. Spears:
"The immigrants, or new Chincoteaguers, are not like the natives. Most of them are from New Jersey and Maryland and a few from Long Island. They were attracted here by the oysters, and they have come in such numbers that they dominate the community. And yet, although not to such manners born, they build little homes much like those the Chincoteaguers live in, and fall into Chincoteague habits of dress and food to a curious extent, and only when the oyster business has tonged and dredged out a fortune, and they have got too old to fully appreciate a different manner of life do they try to adopt anything better. That the immigrants come here expecting to make the island a temporary home, to be abandoned for the old home when enough money has been accumulated, is plain from the condition of Chincoteague village. The narrow and unkempt streets and the little ill-kept homes are those of the temporary sojourners. Yet, even if the home should be a temporary one, it is all but incredible that people should be so careless of the simplest sanitary laws. Not only are the kitchen slops and garbage thrown into the streets or on the sandy lots, as already told, but there is a cesspool in every yard and in half the yards wells for drinking water. These wells are nowhere to exceed ten feet deep, and many are but six. They are often less than two rods from cesspools. The deaths numbered 43 last year out of a population of 2,300. Parts of the town are too new to have as yet become very unhealthy.
There were 450 voters at the last election, of whom 80 were Mahone Republicans: of 55 colored men, 40 were Republicans. There are three schoolhouses, for which seven teachers are employed at an annual expense of $3,000. The money paid to Chincoteaguers who man the life-saving stations, the lighthouses, the lightship, the Custom House, and the Post Office amounts to over $22,000 a year.
The people live well in the village when they wish to do so. Roast beef of good quality sells for eight cents a pound, and most food products at equally low rates. There is no printed bill of fare at the Atlantic Hotel, but George the colored lad of 12, who is head waiter and staff in one, stacks up about each plate the following or an equivalent, for breakfast, which is the lightest meal: Ham and eggs, beefsteak, broiled yellow legs, fried oysters, fried shad, poached eggs, biscuit, light bread, cream toast, canned peaches, sweet milk, and coffee. Griddle cakes hot off the range are served at short intervals during the meal. The butter is good and yellow unlike Southern butter commonly. The guest who does not make a square meal cannot blame the hotel.
There is no jail on the island, nor is there much use for one. Not until August 1886 was anyone murdered on the island so far as anyone knows. Theft is unknown. During the summer of 1886 William Freeman, a young man of 25, was employed on the farm of Timothy Hill, formerly a Cape Cod man, and probably the wealthiest man on the island. Freeman fell in love with Jennie, the 18-year-old daughter of his employer. Jennie did not discourage the suit, but when the old folks learned of it they shut off his flow of sentiment harshly. Freeman grieved over this day and night, but was not the sort of fellow to carry his sweetheart into a flying bateau some windy night and sail for the mainland and a parson, as many a better man has done, but he grew desperate, and finally went hunting Bill Bunting of whom he was jealous. Failing to find him,he went to the home of the girl next day, and found her there with her mother. He carried a gun and a revolver, and without parley opened fire. The girl fell dead and the mother received two bullets in her body. At that a brother of the girl's came running from a neighbor's. Seeing him, young Freeman put the revolver to his own forehead and blew his life out with the last cartridge in the revolver. The mother recovered.
There was another homicide a year ago last summer. George Lewis, mate of the Winter Quarter Shoal lightship met William C Dryden, an oysterman in the village here, and got to arguing in the presence of others about the depth of water at a certain stage of the tide at a certain place of the beach. From argument they went to insults, then to blows, and then to weapons. Dryden was the quicker and stabbed Lewis so that he died. Dryden was arrested, had a hearing before the magistrate, and was sent to the county jail to await the course of the law. He escaped from the jail and is now at large. He is known to be living in Delaware the people say, but Lewis had no relatives to push the matter, and the State authorities never offered any reward, and so no effort has ever been made to bring him to justice.
The bay in which Chincoteague lies is one vast oyster bed. A part of the bay is a natural bed, but every available foot is now taken up and planted. Of the value of this industry to Chincoteague, some idea may be formed when it is known that up to April 1 this season 43,501 barrels of oysters and clams had been shipped by rail, via the Widgeon, to Northern cities, and that by the end of the season few short of 50,000 will have gone forward. They have roughly an average of $4 a barrel, or $200,000 cold cash, to a community of 450 voters. Besides these, many were shipped North by sloop and schooner in cold weather. The estimated number varies from 20,000 to 30,000 barrels. The lower estimate being made by the railroad men. It is fair to suppose that 20,000 barrels went by water. The heaviest shippers forwarded from 2,000 to 7,000, and took in from $20,000 to $28,000 each. It is asserted by the oystermen themselves that after allowing for every expense oysters cost the planters a dollar a barrel. Some three or four planters have therefore received incomes of $10,000 to $20,000 each bed the past season. The majority of men on the island, however, are laborers, and the few capitalists reap the harvest.
The beds are planted with seed oysters gathered from natural beds along North Hampton county, from James River and Chesapeake Bay, and from Albemarle Sound. The seed oysters cost from six to ten cents a bushel at the natural beds,and a regular fleet of sloops and schooners is now employed bringing them here and selling them at from twelve to sixteen cents a bushel. From 500 to 800 bushels are spread over an acre of land under water, and since the bay is for the most part shoal three to eight feet deep and the bottom good, a vast territory is covered. The oysters are left down until the second season to grow and so each planter tongs up the oysters on but half his area every year. The yield this year has been excellent. Thus a man who planted 1,800 bushels of seed on a three-acre patch tonged up 2,800 bushels, which he sold for $3,300 net, making a clear gain of $1,100 per acre. The produce from an acre of dry land on Chincoteague could, perhaps, be sold for $50 net, that being the profit made on sweet potatoes on like land on the peninsula.
The difference between tools used by men in the same occupation at different points along the Atlantic coast is interesting. On Long Island the oystermen use a round-nosed yawl rigged with a single sprit sail when gathering oysters. On Chincoteague they use a scow, and it is what might be called a cat yawl in rig. There is a sail forward that is of the shape of a catboat sail, though spread with boom and sprit, instead of boom and gaff. The mainsail is a leg of mutton. A fifty-foot boat in the seed oyster trade has the same rig with a rib added. The size of her sail is simply enormous, and the oystermen "carry on" like Captains of clipper ships. But the rig is very safe, for in the case of a squall down comes the big foresail, and there the boat lies with the leg o' mutton to keep her head to the wind. The Long Islander's yawl costs $100; the Chincoteaguer's scow $50.
The men who work on the beds as laborers are paid from 10 cents a bushel when tonging on unworked beds in September, to 40 cents a bushel when scraping the gleanings off in May. They make all the way from $2 to $4 a day. With the wintery wind howling over the bay, and the salt water skimming over with ice in the bottom of the boat, they earn all they get. It is a hard life, but a man with energy and ambition can become a capitalist and get into business for himself more readily than in any occupation where so little training is necessary to acquire skill needed as in this.
The readers of THE SUN who are interested in forest and stream, and so read the reports from game resorts, have very often seen the name of Chincoteague. In the seasons Chincoteague furnishes rare sport for the few who come to it. The bay, the glades, and the marshes afford feeding and nesting land for untold millions of wild fowl while the flight of shore birds and snipe are at times wonderful. The yellow legs have been flying for two weeks, and the English snipe for over a week. By the time this article is in print the season for shore birds will be fairly open. On a cloudy day, with a good stiff southwest wind the Chincoteague gunner digs a hole in a sand hill over on Assateague or at the southern end of Chincoteague, and, setting up his decoys, sits down and whistles. His tune is not from an opera either comic or serious though it is the prelude to tragedy. He mimics the cry of the willett and the curlew, and the neighborly flocks above, seeing a flock on the sand, are deceived by the cry and down they swing and flutter til bunched just above the decoys. Then the gunner turns loose the blasts of powder and shot right and left, killing sometimes dozens with a single charge, while the rest go screaming away.
After June, when the shore bird flight is over - indeed, before it is over, the weakfish begin to bite in the bay, and later, the bluefish off shore, and later still, a few striped bass may be had in the natural ditches through the marshes. But the chief fish is the weakfish, and they are taken on hook and line by the hundred an hour.
But the glory of Chincoteague as a sportsman's resort begins in November. The storms of fall have by that time driven the wild fowl thus far on their journey south. Then the Chincoteaguer scours up his old rusty shotgun, daubs fresh paint on his home-made decoys, draws on double flannels, and rowing out on the shoals where the water is 24 to 30 inches deep, sticks s lot of fresh-cut brush up in the mud so that a little grove large enough to conceal him and his skiff is made. Then he spreads out his decoys, goes back to his blind, and lies down and waits. It is a warm, bright day when all wild fowl does not come to him who waits. Redheads, black ducks, mallards - all sorts of ducks and geese and brant as well - come to the decoys, though canvasbacks are very scarce. Sink boxes or batteries are also used. W D Sharpley, Jack Snead, and Capt. Pruitt of the Widgeon stand at the head of the local gunners. Although a few men come here from Philadelphia and Wilmington, there is no such thing as a club house on the bay, and few sportsmen seem to realize what a resort this is for wild fowl.
Wallop's Island, below Chincoteague, has recently been purchased by a club of gentlemen at Pottsville, Pa., of which O Beecher of Pine Grove, Pa. and W K Woodbury of Pottsville are leading members. They gave $8,000 for the island, which is about seven miles long and nearly a mile wide. They have built a pier and wharf at an expense of $5,000 and William Conant of Chincoteague has a contract for building an $8,000 club house this summer. The island is a delightful place. The surf does not roll on a finer beach anywhere than at Wallop's Island. The presence of this club will serve to quicken the game constables to a sense of duty and stop the unlawful practice now prevalent of shooting wild fowl at night by jack light.
An interesting feature of Chincoteague is the presence of great numbers of tamed wild geese. When the Chincoteaguer wings a wild goose he saves it alive if he can. His flock is very often added to in another way. Seeing and hearing the tamed geese the wild fellows often come down to them and make friends as well as to enter coops where feed is provided generously when such visitors are expected. The wild goose thinks that is the greatest luck he ever did see, and concludes he will stay there all night. Before morning his wings have been clipped and he stays longer. Meantime the food has been so good he does not care very much about going away anyhow, and so there he stays till old age or a Christmas dinner carries him off. Flocks of from thirty to fifty exist here. The wild ones cross with the tame. The hybrids are called mungrums by the natives and are highly valued because a mungrum yields three times the weight of feathers that a tame goose does and twice the weight of a wild one. The hybrids lay eggs, but the eggs will not hatch.
When the Chincoteaguer grows lugubrious and the world seems turned against him, and he has but one friend who is a stranger willing to listen, the tale of the great storm is told. It was long ago in 1821 - when the houses were few and small, that the storm came on. The clouds off to southward gathered thick and black one morning, the wind fell, the air grew oppressive, and as the day wore away the silence and the gloom and the sky off to the sea became terrifying. The gulls and the wild fowl took alarm and fled to the glades, where all night long their cries were heard; but when day broke every sound died out. Then the people with ghastly fear saw that the sea had receded for miles off shore. They were not kept long in suspense. While they stood looking a vast cloud of water and wind was hurled in from the sea. The pines of Assateague, the water in the marshes, and everything in its path on Chincoteague were swept up and carried away to who knows where. Then a roar as of thunder was heard seaward by those who remained, and the sea, in a wave higher than the sand hills and higher than the trees that had covered them, came foaming in over its bed,over the beach, over the hills, over the marshes, across the bay and far up on the sloping ground of the mainland miles away. How many were lost and where the bones of the dead found resting place no one knows but the story of two marvelous escapes is told by those whose houses stood at the north end of the island out of the track of tornado and wave. Old man Hickman gathered his little grandson in his arms as the wind storm came. The walls and roof of the house fled away with the wind, leaving the two unharmed. Then came the deluge and unconsciousness, and when the wind resumed its sway the old man, with the boy still in his arms and safe, was lying in the brush on King's Bush Marsh on the mainland a mile inshore from the bay. A man named Andreas, with his family of a wife and eight or nine children, was carried off by the wave. The neighbors found Andreas some hours later hanging by his belt in a tree 20 feet above the ground half a mile from where he started. His family were never heard from. Chincoteague lies just awash. When another such storm comes more than 2,000 people will be found in the path of the tidal wave.
The aged Chincoteaguer is proud of the fact that he is spry. Uncle Ken Jester, who celebrated his 75th birthday in the lively manner already described, is a fair sample of a number of others. He will break the wildest pony, scull a bateau when a common man would fear the sea and dance at an oyster roast with a vigor that takes the shine off of many a younger blood. Martin G Connor is another young man of the same age. The Birch family has four boys in it whose ages are 62, 67, 76, and 79. They have no notion of giving up the oyster business for twenty years yet, anyhow. Their sister, Mrs. Eliza Thornton, at 72, is as spry as they are. Another sister, Mrs. Mary Watson, met an untimely death recently at the age of 83. David and Isaac Daisey are, at 75 and 78 respectively, able to do a good day's work, as a day's work is counted in this easy-going climate. People will be surprised if the two do not live to be as old as their mother, who died at 93. More than a score of people on the island are nearer 70 than 60, though not yet 70. And all this in a community of 450 voters. Nor is account taken of three or four colored people whose ages are uncertain.
Life on Chincoteague, Part 2
Spears
John R.
Sun
New York
May 11, 1890"
** Again, this is a word for word transcript of a newspaper report written and printed in 1890. Please do not hold the use of the common word for African-Americans at that time against me, personally. **
This is the last of four parts of the article. I hope you enjoy reading it.
This is the last of four parts of the article. I hope you enjoy reading it.
(And, just for fun, Martin G Connor, mentioned in the article, was my mother's great uncle.)
Assateague Island Views
Maryland (northern) end of Assateague
The Assateague Lighthouse on the Virginia (southern) end of the island
Panoramic view from top of Assateague Lighthouse, looking west at Chincoteague
Snow geese
Sunrise over Black Duck Pond
Life on Chincoteague (Part 3): From the New York Sun of 2 & 11 May 1890
(The New York Sun was a daily newspaper, published in New York City, New York, from 1933 until 1950. It was one of the most influential American newspapers through the early twentieth century; and was the first successful penny daily paper in the United States. It was known for it's witty, humorous treatment of news, a clear style of journalism, and the occasional sensational approach to scandals.)
**Please excuse any out-of-date or derogatory terms that are used. This is a true, uncorrected transcription of the original newspaper article. ** This account is signed by John R. Spears:
"Old Randle Mason kept the first hotel on the island. The house, which faced the bay, did not differ in size or appearance from the other dwellings, but in 1855 Randle hung up a sign and made people who came from the main land welcome for a consideration. His place speedily became popular, far and near, because of the frolics held there under the name of oyster roasts. There are features about an oyster roast that are exceedingly attractive to the wilder sorts of the Virginia peninsula even to this day.
Old Randle would announce a roast some weeks in advance, generally naming some such holiday as Washington's birthday, for in this climate the weather can ordinarily be depended on save in January. When the day and the people came many bushels more of oysters than could be eaten were to be found beside the Mason house, and a huge stack of pine chunks as well, in the old-fashioned fireplace within, and over a broad hearth made of stones without, big fires were made with the chunks, and then the roasting began. Oysters fresh from the sea water cooked in the corner of a big fireplace, or on red-hot rocks out of doors have a flavor found nowhere else, but the oysters were not the chief attraction for old Randle's family consisted entirely of girls, and it was a large, good-looking, harum-scarum family. Moreover there were the choicest products of Virginia and West India stills, the latter smuggled in by the sloops that then traded to Jamaica and other ports down that way.
As the oysters began to sizzle and sputter under the heat the old man brought out the jugs and stood them on a table with tin cups and tea cups in bountiful array. With every oyster a drink was the hilarious custom, and here was no exclusion of the gentler sex from the ring about the liquor table.
Finally, inspired by the flavor of the oysters, the fiddlers drew their instruments from blue cotton bags, screwed and scraped at keys and strings for a while in discordant notes, and then, with a musical twang and a thump of cowhide boots, called for he opening dance! Oh, the reel and the quadrilles. Oh, the jigs and breakdowns! Such grace when bowing "Honors to yer pardners." Such vigor and enthusiasm when told to "Balance all." Such hearty embracing at the call of "Swing." And when each dance ended the young man always led out his palpitating partner, first of all to the jug-burdened table and then to a seat. Everywhere present, to smooth rustled tempers and keep the fun going, was old Randle. Every where present, to see that no young man sulked for lack of a sweetheart, were Randle's buxom daughters. Without let, break, or hindrance, the afternoon and the night wore away until even Chincoteague muscles and brains could stand up no longer under the influences of fatigue and liquor, and then down the young folks dropped wherever the end of the last dance left them, indoors or on the dooryard green, and went fast to sleep.
**Please excuse any out-of-date or derogatory terms that are used. This is a true, uncorrected transcription of the original newspaper article. ** This account is signed by John R. Spears:
"Old Randle Mason kept the first hotel on the island. The house, which faced the bay, did not differ in size or appearance from the other dwellings, but in 1855 Randle hung up a sign and made people who came from the main land welcome for a consideration. His place speedily became popular, far and near, because of the frolics held there under the name of oyster roasts. There are features about an oyster roast that are exceedingly attractive to the wilder sorts of the Virginia peninsula even to this day.
Old Randle would announce a roast some weeks in advance, generally naming some such holiday as Washington's birthday, for in this climate the weather can ordinarily be depended on save in January. When the day and the people came many bushels more of oysters than could be eaten were to be found beside the Mason house, and a huge stack of pine chunks as well, in the old-fashioned fireplace within, and over a broad hearth made of stones without, big fires were made with the chunks, and then the roasting began. Oysters fresh from the sea water cooked in the corner of a big fireplace, or on red-hot rocks out of doors have a flavor found nowhere else, but the oysters were not the chief attraction for old Randle's family consisted entirely of girls, and it was a large, good-looking, harum-scarum family. Moreover there were the choicest products of Virginia and West India stills, the latter smuggled in by the sloops that then traded to Jamaica and other ports down that way.
As the oysters began to sizzle and sputter under the heat the old man brought out the jugs and stood them on a table with tin cups and tea cups in bountiful array. With every oyster a drink was the hilarious custom, and here was no exclusion of the gentler sex from the ring about the liquor table.
Finally, inspired by the flavor of the oysters, the fiddlers drew their instruments from blue cotton bags, screwed and scraped at keys and strings for a while in discordant notes, and then, with a musical twang and a thump of cowhide boots, called for he opening dance! Oh, the reel and the quadrilles. Oh, the jigs and breakdowns! Such grace when bowing "Honors to yer pardners." Such vigor and enthusiasm when told to "Balance all." Such hearty embracing at the call of "Swing." And when each dance ended the young man always led out his palpitating partner, first of all to the jug-burdened table and then to a seat. Everywhere present, to smooth rustled tempers and keep the fun going, was old Randle. Every where present, to see that no young man sulked for lack of a sweetheart, were Randle's buxom daughters. Without let, break, or hindrance, the afternoon and the night wore away until even Chincoteague muscles and brains could stand up no longer under the influences of fatigue and liquor, and then down the young folks dropped wherever the end of the last dance left them, indoors or on the dooryard green, and went fast to sleep.
Life on Chincoteague, Part 1
Spears
John R.
Sun
New York
May 11, 1890
Life on Chincoteague, Part 1
Spears
John R.
Sun
New York
May 11, 1890
Life on Chincoteague, Part 2
It is scarce necessary to say that the Chincoteaguer of the present day would not smuggle -- at least nothing worse than a few sloop and schooner loads of seed oysters from North Carolina water, contrary to the law in such case made and provided. Besides, he couldn't if he wanted to,for the reason that there is a Custom House on the island, and the Collector would seize the smuggling craft if he knew anything about it. But in the old days long ago the Custom House was over on the Chesapeake side of the peninsula, and things were different. The Chincoteaguer was not rich enough to own a whole sloop, but he had an interest in one now and then, and commanded her. He knew every inch of water along this much indented coast,and in handling sloops he had no superior. Besides, no sharper, swifter sloops were ever built for merchant service than those launched on the Chesapeake Bay. Loading his craft with hoop poles, staves and shingles, the Chincoteague skipper sailed away for Matansas, or Santiago, or Jamaica, and after a while came back, and running into some inlet, tarried there for a night or two or three, and then came up in the bay here, and anchoring near the mainland went off to the Custom House and reported his return "in ballast." The collector always came over and examined the sloop, poked his cane into the sand ballast, which to any other eyes might have looked suspiciously fresh, drank freely from a bottle of superior rum, smoked excellent cigars, and went away. Then the Chincoteague skipper went back to his inlet for a night or two or three after which he loaded oysters in bulk for New York or Philadelphia. Oysters in those days covered a multitude of rum barrels and the old Chincoteaguer chuckles to this day as he tells of outwitted customs officials.
When the stranger comes to Chincoteague and makes the acquaintance of such typical old natives as J. A. M. Whealton, Martin G Connor, and Uncle Ken Jester, the first thing they will say to hime is that their ancestors lived on the island before the independence of the United States, and fought in the war of the Revolution for American freedom. J A M Whealton's father, Joshua, and his Uncle Daniel were wounded in battle then; Connor's father was taken from his sloop by a British press gang, served three years on a British man-o-war, and then escaped to fight for Washington. Uncle Ken's father, John, was in a Virginia regiment. In all a dozen or in battle then more men, about half the voting population of the island at the time, were in the American service. The traditions of their deeds, told over and over, made the Chincoteaguers revere the old flag as few others in the South did. Then, too, the Chincoteaguers were oystermen and coasting sailors rather than farmers, and traded to New York and Philadelphia for their merchandise, which they bought with oysters. Their only business interest with the State of which they were a part was through the sale of ponies, while of sentimental interest there was little or none.
When the ordinance of secession passed at Richmond, was sent to the people for ratification, Chincoteague turned out to the man to vote, and every man save one, Joseph Hill by name, voted against the ordinance. J A M Whealton, as Justice of the Peace, kept the registry of the votes, and was right glad he had preserved them before three months had passed.
Having voted to stay in the Union, the Chincoteaguers hoisted the American flag to a pole 110 feet high that had been erected in honor of Bell and Everett. The peninsula was overwhelmingly rebel, the flag was seen from the mainland, and a committee came over and warned the Chincoteaguers that the "Yankee flag" must come down or the terrors of war would burst over the island. Justice of the Peace Whealton, as the leading citizen, heard the spokesman of the committee with gravity, and then, stroking his long beard, said: "Gentlemen, Jinkatig did not secede. We hoisted that flag and it don't come down 'less we go with it, but so long as we have a dram of powder and an ounce of lead and are able to use them that flag stays." And there it did stay, and there was never an hour when the American flag could not be seen there until after Lee surrendered.
Meantime forty-eight men from the island fought for Uncle Sam - a larger proportion of the male population than any other Northern state sent to the war. The islanders had a deal of trouble about supplies at first for they were beset by the rebels on shore and the Federal cruisers at sea, but Justice of the Peace Whealton, as the capitalist of the island, sent George W P Smith with the registry of votes on the secession ordinance to Washington, and he brought back permits signed by A. Lincoln for fourteen Chincoteague vessels to trade to New York and Philadelphia. Then the steamer Louisiana came and anchored in the bay to keep off the rebels, and Gen. Lockwood came down and occupied the peninsula with Union forces,and thereafter peace reigned, high prices for oysters prevailed, and the Chincoteaguers drank whiskey and danced with a vigor and frequency unknown before.
It should not be supposed that because the Chincoteaguer got hilarious at the oyster roasts he was irreligious. From time out of mind the Methodists and Baptists have counted many Chincoteaguers among their numbers, and every year the presiding elder of the Methodist district came over with two or three evangelists and a host of mainland citizens and held a camp meeting. No better place for a camp meeting than a pine-covered ridge on Chincoteague could be asked for. The sand, carpeted with pine needles, made a perfect woodland floor. The boughs of the trees interlacing over head made such domes and archways as no cathedral ever boasted, and shut out the sun and softened its rays till twilight prevailed at noonday. The wind sighed through the forest in dirges, At night the dark vaults were lighted up by huge fires of pitchy pine.
Standing there while the lurid flames dared up till the ghostly limbs above appeared and then died away till all was dim and uncertain, only to blaze again, the evangelist in solemn voice, portrayed the terrors of hell until, wrought up by their superstitions, the audience swayed to and fro and wept and shrieked in a wild delirium. Then, when the excitement rose to a dangerous point, the skillful preacher, to change the mood, started some old chorus like "No man shall hindah me,for I love Jesus," or "We are goin' home to die no moah," and thereupon with shouts of "Glory" the whole throng rose and sang til the arches rang to their voices. There was no doubting the Chincoteaguer's religious enthusiasm while it lasted.
Three years ago the influx of mainland church people had become so great that the natives were far out-numbered, and then a wave of prohibition sentiment swept from the shore out across the bay. The church people united, speakers were brought over from the mainland, meetings were held by night in the churches, and parades by day n the streets. Numbers of oystermen who had squandered their money in liquor repented, and told over and over again how mean and wicked they had been and how good they had become since they stopped drinking, and thanked God amid a chorus of amens that they were not as bad as some other folks. Then an election was held under the local option law of the State and Chincoteague cast 38 votes in favor of licensing liquor dealers to about 300 against it.
A most interesting old native is Kendal Jester. For no one knows how many years Uncle Ken has met the stranger who visits the island with one set of expressions. He introduced himself to me as he has done to every other visitor: "My name's Kennaljester."
"Glad to meet you, sir."
"I drinks a little whiskey, sometimes."
"Indeed! Will you have some now?"
"Reckon. Doctor says gots drink quart'er days keep away bilious - drink quarter in pint - never have bilious."
And he does it. He has no trouble getting it. He came down the other day to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday. By noon he had taken his daily allowance and concluded to carry a bottle home to his wife so she could help celebrate. But he was driving a half-wit pony, and in his exuberance of youthful spirits Uncle Ken dropped the reins as he started away, that he might drink the health of a friend who happened along. There upon the pony ran away up the street, with Uncle Ken sitting bolt upright, whooping like a boy at a baseball match, and having almost as much fun as he did at oyster roasts in his youth. People expected to see him tipped out and killed, but when the pony had kicked the thills and dashboard to pieces it got away, was captured again, and Uncle Ken mounted and rode home bareback in triumph. If there is any place where prohibition does not prohibit it is on Chincoteague, the overwhelming vote in its favor to the contrary notwithstanding.
In many rural communities the dead are buried in sequestered spots on the farms on which they have died. In Chincoteague a public cemetery was provided. Winding along between two spacious glades is the backbone of the island, known to the natives as Rattlesnake Ridge. It terminates at the lower end in a sandy bluff that is perhaps the highest land of either Assateague or Chincoteague. Barren of trees and covered only with sparse wiry grass, it is about as desolate a spot as ever overlooked the sea. Here for 200 years the dead of Chincoteague were buried. Figureheads and other carved timbers from the wreckage that sometimes washed ashore often served in place of tombstones, but at other times plain boards or uncarved stones were used. A more appropriate burial place for the rude and uncouth old native of Chincoteague could scarcely be found. But the wind and the ceaseless roll of the sea have well nigh obliterated the old graveyard, laying bare many an old skeleton as they tore the sand away, while the influx of new peoples, who have brought new ideas and new wealth, will soon,with time's aid, obliterate the native Chincoteaguer."
** Again, this is a word for word transcript of a newspaper report written and printed in 1890. Please do not hold the use of the common word for African-Americans at that time against me, personally. **
This is the third of four parts of the article. I hope you enjoy reading it.
Thursday, July 10, 2014
Life On Chincoteague (Part 2): From the New York Sun of 2 May 1890
(The New York Sun was a daily newspaper, published in New York City, New York, from 1933 until 1950. It was one of the most influential American newspapers through the early twentieth century; and was the first successful penny daily paper in the United States. It was known for it's witty, humorous treatment of news, a clear style of journalism, and the occasional sensational approach to scandals.)
**Please excuse any out-of-date or derogatory terms that are used. This is a true, uncorrected transcription of the original newspaper article. ** This account is signed by John R. Spears:
"A line of railroad controlled by the Pennsylvania Company runs down the eastern shore of the peninsula and terminates on a pier in a queer little community called Franklin City, on the shores of the bay in which Chincoteague lies. The train, for there is but one a day,reaches Franklin City early in the afternoon. It finds there a little tug of a steamer called the Widgeon, waiting to ferry the wayfarer over the water to Chincoteague. The steamer has a low hull, with a narrow engine house amidships, and a hurricane deck propped upon stilts about six feet above the main deck. On the upper deck is a seven-by-ten cabin and a pilot house, and a bench running around the outside for use in fair weather. Sitting up here, the traveller watches the roustabouts, who are white, and Capt. Pruitt himself,trundle the merchandise from the car to the steamer, and then, after a few toots to call in the passengers who may be loitering in Franklin City stores, away she goes like a great fat duck - and not much faster. It is said to be a seven-mile run across the bay, and it takes the Widgeon just an hour to swim it.
As the steamer approaches the island the distinctive characteristics of the people appear. Dozens and scores of the kind of little shanties in which colored people live in the rural districts of Long Island and New Jersey are to be seen, and it is not without a mental shock that the New Yorker notices that the occupants are almost in variably white. Scattered about among these shanties are perhaps a dozen or more houses of a style of architecture and finish that would be creditable in any village near the metropolis. Surprising as this mixture appears, the wonder of the visitor at the sight becomes little if any short of amazement on landing. The main street literally follows the coast of the bay, winding along about 100 feet from the water's edge and following the crooks and turns very faithfully. From this street at intervals side streets run at various angles. The main street varies from 30 to 60 feet in width, apparently at the whim of the property owners facing it. The side streets are from 10 to 10 feet wide. The streets have never been either paved or graded. They are the universal dumping ground for house sweepings and refuse, save only where a vacant lot adjoins a dwelling; in that case the refuse goes on the vacant lot because it is handier to the kitchen. Tin cans, torn paper, old rags, odds and bits of bones, bottles, and oyster shells, especially oyster shells, appear everywhere, but the bones are invariably dry and clean of meat or muscle, for the pigs that run the street have a watchful eye for such things. It is along such lanes as these that the handsome residences seen from the steamer are to be found.
Both sides of the main street are pretty well lined with stores, and these vary in size and style more than the dwellings do. Some of these buildings are so old that the moss-grown shingles are dropping to pieces rotten. Some are so new that only the first coat of paint has been applied, and the shingles are bright with the color of the original cedar.
Standing around, singly and in groups in front of these stores, or straggling along the streets, or sitting in chairs tilted back against the front of the big hotel, can be seen fair specimens of the present population of Chincoteague. The population can be divided on one line into two classes - the native and the imported. It is greatly to the sorrow of the native class that the immigrants have become so numerous in recent years as to crowd the natives very hard in more respects than one. By another division of the population there are the producers and the non-producers, the producers being without exception oystermen, while a majority of the non-producers, so-called, being capitalists, have their money invested in some way in the oyster business, and so those who are strictly non-producers are very few in numbers. Chincoteague is founded on oysters; it lives, moves and grows rich on oysters; it even gets fat on them; but this assertion must be limited to the immigrant class. The native Chincoteaguer does not get fat, though now and then one, like old Uncle Ken Jester, becomes rotund on abundant whiskey.
The native Chincoteaguer has long, bony legs, a gaunt body, long,dangling arms, long, skinny fingers, a long, wrinkled neck that sprouts out from between his shoulders like a tangent from a curve; a head of long, wriggly hair, and cheeks that are as hollow as his chest is concave. The hair under his chin grows undisturbed. On his upper lips, chin, and cheeks it is chopped off by the wife with scissors, ordinarily, but on state occasions, such as election days and at pony round-ups, he shaves himself, and it is a shave that is so close in spots as to draw the blood and so far away in others that the hair is left in broad patches undisturbed. His eyes are watery, his teeth scattered and worn, his breath redolent of strong drink and tobacco. How in the world it happens that the daughters of such men should be sweet-faced and of rounded forms, often voluptous and how these girls who are so charming at 18 or 20, should be shriveled and cadaverous at 30, is one of the things not fully understood, but these are the facts.
The Chincoteague man was raised on homespun trousers cut high in the waist and short in the leg, a shirt that was short in the arm and opened as low in front as the evening dress of a society woman, a soft hat that rose to a peak on top of the head. He would be glad to wear that sort of a dress now, but he cannot afford it. It takes so long to raise the flax, and hackle, spin, and weave the product that the time can be devoted to oysters much more profitably. He now buys store clothes of such ample widths and folds as to the body and scantiness as to length of arm and leg, and of such diversity of colors, checks and stripes that either Solomon or Joseph in all their glory could hold a candle to him. But it is in his footwear that he takes a special pride. In the season, and that means while oysters can be shipped, the feet of the Chincoteaguer are encased in rubber boots that may be drawn up to his hips. But though they may be, they seldom are. The pliable tops are turned down half way below the knee, and then turned and drawn part way up again, and there they hang in such wide folds that the Chincoteaguer must needs straddle. Just imagine a man six feet tall, stooped and gangling, with boots whose rolling tops measure a foot across, straddling along the street, with his arms swinging in unison with his legs; then you have the native Chincoteaguer in all his pride.
The wife of the old native is to be seen about the streets on every pleasant day. She comes to town riding in a cart. The cart has wheels 5 feet in diameter, with tires 3 1/2 inches wide. It has thills or shafts like those of the garbage carts of New York, only they are longer. Between these thills stands the team, a cow or an ox or a pony or a mule, just as the owner happens to own one or the other. If it is a cow, it has to keep its neck stretched to prevent the ends of the thills chafing its horns. Seated on a board laid across the box of this cart is the woman, dressed in a calico gown and a sun bonnet, while sitting about her feet are four or five of the younger children - say from a third to a half the number of the family. The wife is gaunt and worn; the children are fat and good looking.
The homes of the Chincoteaguers are built on one model; it is that of the dry goods box. They were originally of logs, but for the last thirty years or so are made of lumber. They have a single room with a low attic above, reached by a cross between a ladder and a stairway. A doorless cupboard in one corner holds a few dishes. A pot, a frying pan, a coffee pot, and a few basins and pie tins are piled behind a rusty stove. In one corner stands the bed. No such bed as that, probably, can be found in the metropolis. The bedposts are as thick as a common stovepipe. Huge timbers serve as rails, and the bedding rests on a rope that is stretched criscross around pegs in the rail. But the most noticeable feature of all is the stock of feather beds. They swell up like hay in a New England mow. Winter and summer the Chincoteaguer must have a soft bed, and his idea of softness is in no way so well met as by abundant feathers. The thought of such a bed in such a climate as this is in August is enough to make a Northern man gasp, but there the Chincoteaguer sleeps content. The children sleep on the trundle bed and on feather beds on the floor in the attic.
The Chincoteaguer is exceedingly hospitable. He will share his well-feathered nest and his pork, corn bread, and coffee for such is his diet, with a stranger at any time, and be heartily glad of the opportunity. If the stranger will only take a drink from the ever-present whiskey bottle and then sit down and chew tobacco and spit in the stove hearth while the old woman sits by in the old wooden rocking chair and smokes a stone wall pipe with a fish pole stem, the comfort and pleasure of that family is complete. But it takes a stranger with iron nerve and stomach to stand the ordeal.
Living in an isolated hut on an isolated patch of land, with no books, no newspapers, and no schools or teachers, the tendency of the Chincoteaguer's mind was inevitably toward a belief in the supernatural. The wind sighing through the pine, strange voices from the sea, strange calls from across the meadows, strange lights that danced above the stagnant water in the glades - all came to him as manifestations and tokens of the spirit world. Old Elisha Bloxom, living a mile below the village, went one day down the beach to help discharge the cargo of a beached vessel - wrack the ship, as they say here. Coming ashore the yawl was capsized, and Elisha was struck on the head by the boat, stunned, and drowned. Some thought his mates should have saved him. In a short time they were sure of it, for the soul of the old man, they said, could not rest in the grave they dug for him in the sand hill overlooking the sea. Sounds that were unaccountable were heard in the old house. The widow and her children moved out and a family of immigrants, who knew not Elisha, moved in. Before the year of their lease was up they moved out, unable to stand the nightly visitations. That was eight years ago, but no tenant has lived there since, while the belated wayfarer on the old road that leads by the house runs by it with hastening step and bated breath, fearful lest the old man appear to seek vengeance for his untimely death.
For many years Widow Zippie Tulle lives in a little hut near Jamestown, on the mainland. Old Nigger Dave Blake lives alone in the swamp near Horntown, also on the main. Neither priest nor secular ruler ever exercised a stronger sway over parish and subject than these ignorant old conjurors over the minds of the old Chincoteaguers. Did husband suspect his wife or wife her husband of loving another, they believed, good souls, that the erring one was bewitched. Did the husband become petulant or the wife peevish unexpectedly, so that quarrels followed, the evil eye had fallen upon that household. Did aches and pains or distress of any sort come; did the cholera affect the pigs, or murrain the cow or some other disease the ponies, or green gill the oysters, the powers of the evil spirits were at the bottom of it all. There was but one hope for relief. Widow Zippie or Nigger Dave must be consulted. The Chincoteaguers went over the bay in their dugouts by the dozen at times to see thee two conjurors. The widow held the hands of those that applied to her, examined the skull of a drowned sailor found on the beach, mumbled over the dried heart of a frog, and made the sign of the cross again and again with a wand made of a serpent's skeleton bound together with human hair plucked, she said, by unseen spirits from the heads of those who had offended her. This done, she gave to the applicant a powder wrapped in black paper, and with that for a charm the distressed one went away comforted.
Old Nigger Dave's process was more mysterious still. The visitor found the old man in the hut in the swamp rolling a ball of unknown composition on a shaky table. To and fro, round and round, the old darky sent the ball, while he bent his whitening head above it and whispered words which no one understood. Not infrequently the visitor would not be allowed to either explain the cause of the visit or ask a question; he must stand in silence while that ball rumbled about on the table till the old colored man was ready to stop it. Then, to the amazement of the Chincoteaguer, the old conjurer would tell in a solemn voice all about the trouble that had brought his visitor to the hut in the swamp. Surely, the powers of darkness must have told him about it, and impressed with that belief the Chincoteaguer paid the price, took the proffered charm and went away to obey the injunctions of the conjurer to the letter.
The fame of old Dave as a healer of domestic woes became wider than the confines of Chincoteague or Accomack county. In the plenitude of his power he brought the one complained of before him when the complainant was absent, and by his mysterious knowledge of facts and his awful threat extorted the truth, and then said such commands on both husband and wife as invariably healed the difficulty; for faithfulness and kindliness, one toward the other, followed on the commands of the old negro. Though he practiced the black arts he did for the Chincoteaguers what neither judges nor juries nor religion could do. There was a deal of hearty sorrow in many homes that he had made happy when one morning a visitor in distress went to the little old hut in the swamp and found old Dave sitting by the table with his face down on one arm, and the conjuring ball in his hand. He did not move when the visitor entered, nor answer when spoken to, nor was he ever able to again set the ball rolling in the interests of either health or peace for he was dead. The widow Zippie had died before him, and no one has arisen to take their places. The preachers came to the island of Chincoteague with their prayers and sermons, but while the old Chincoteaguer will attend, and listen, and believe, he will not be wholly comforted."
** Again, this is a word for word transcript of a newspaper report written and printed in 1890. Please do not hold the use of the common word for African-Americans at that time against me, personally. **
This is the second of three or four parts of the article. I hope you enjoy reading it.
**Please excuse any out-of-date or derogatory terms that are used. This is a true, uncorrected transcription of the original newspaper article. ** This account is signed by John R. Spears:
"A line of railroad controlled by the Pennsylvania Company runs down the eastern shore of the peninsula and terminates on a pier in a queer little community called Franklin City, on the shores of the bay in which Chincoteague lies. The train, for there is but one a day,reaches Franklin City early in the afternoon. It finds there a little tug of a steamer called the Widgeon, waiting to ferry the wayfarer over the water to Chincoteague. The steamer has a low hull, with a narrow engine house amidships, and a hurricane deck propped upon stilts about six feet above the main deck. On the upper deck is a seven-by-ten cabin and a pilot house, and a bench running around the outside for use in fair weather. Sitting up here, the traveller watches the roustabouts, who are white, and Capt. Pruitt himself,trundle the merchandise from the car to the steamer, and then, after a few toots to call in the passengers who may be loitering in Franklin City stores, away she goes like a great fat duck - and not much faster. It is said to be a seven-mile run across the bay, and it takes the Widgeon just an hour to swim it.
As the steamer approaches the island the distinctive characteristics of the people appear. Dozens and scores of the kind of little shanties in which colored people live in the rural districts of Long Island and New Jersey are to be seen, and it is not without a mental shock that the New Yorker notices that the occupants are almost in variably white. Scattered about among these shanties are perhaps a dozen or more houses of a style of architecture and finish that would be creditable in any village near the metropolis. Surprising as this mixture appears, the wonder of the visitor at the sight becomes little if any short of amazement on landing. The main street literally follows the coast of the bay, winding along about 100 feet from the water's edge and following the crooks and turns very faithfully. From this street at intervals side streets run at various angles. The main street varies from 30 to 60 feet in width, apparently at the whim of the property owners facing it. The side streets are from 10 to 10 feet wide. The streets have never been either paved or graded. They are the universal dumping ground for house sweepings and refuse, save only where a vacant lot adjoins a dwelling; in that case the refuse goes on the vacant lot because it is handier to the kitchen. Tin cans, torn paper, old rags, odds and bits of bones, bottles, and oyster shells, especially oyster shells, appear everywhere, but the bones are invariably dry and clean of meat or muscle, for the pigs that run the street have a watchful eye for such things. It is along such lanes as these that the handsome residences seen from the steamer are to be found.
Both sides of the main street are pretty well lined with stores, and these vary in size and style more than the dwellings do. Some of these buildings are so old that the moss-grown shingles are dropping to pieces rotten. Some are so new that only the first coat of paint has been applied, and the shingles are bright with the color of the original cedar.
Standing around, singly and in groups in front of these stores, or straggling along the streets, or sitting in chairs tilted back against the front of the big hotel, can be seen fair specimens of the present population of Chincoteague. The population can be divided on one line into two classes - the native and the imported. It is greatly to the sorrow of the native class that the immigrants have become so numerous in recent years as to crowd the natives very hard in more respects than one. By another division of the population there are the producers and the non-producers, the producers being without exception oystermen, while a majority of the non-producers, so-called, being capitalists, have their money invested in some way in the oyster business, and so those who are strictly non-producers are very few in numbers. Chincoteague is founded on oysters; it lives, moves and grows rich on oysters; it even gets fat on them; but this assertion must be limited to the immigrant class. The native Chincoteaguer does not get fat, though now and then one, like old Uncle Ken Jester, becomes rotund on abundant whiskey.
The native Chincoteaguer has long, bony legs, a gaunt body, long,dangling arms, long, skinny fingers, a long, wrinkled neck that sprouts out from between his shoulders like a tangent from a curve; a head of long, wriggly hair, and cheeks that are as hollow as his chest is concave. The hair under his chin grows undisturbed. On his upper lips, chin, and cheeks it is chopped off by the wife with scissors, ordinarily, but on state occasions, such as election days and at pony round-ups, he shaves himself, and it is a shave that is so close in spots as to draw the blood and so far away in others that the hair is left in broad patches undisturbed. His eyes are watery, his teeth scattered and worn, his breath redolent of strong drink and tobacco. How in the world it happens that the daughters of such men should be sweet-faced and of rounded forms, often voluptous and how these girls who are so charming at 18 or 20, should be shriveled and cadaverous at 30, is one of the things not fully understood, but these are the facts.
The Chincoteague man was raised on homespun trousers cut high in the waist and short in the leg, a shirt that was short in the arm and opened as low in front as the evening dress of a society woman, a soft hat that rose to a peak on top of the head. He would be glad to wear that sort of a dress now, but he cannot afford it. It takes so long to raise the flax, and hackle, spin, and weave the product that the time can be devoted to oysters much more profitably. He now buys store clothes of such ample widths and folds as to the body and scantiness as to length of arm and leg, and of such diversity of colors, checks and stripes that either Solomon or Joseph in all their glory could hold a candle to him. But it is in his footwear that he takes a special pride. In the season, and that means while oysters can be shipped, the feet of the Chincoteaguer are encased in rubber boots that may be drawn up to his hips. But though they may be, they seldom are. The pliable tops are turned down half way below the knee, and then turned and drawn part way up again, and there they hang in such wide folds that the Chincoteaguer must needs straddle. Just imagine a man six feet tall, stooped and gangling, with boots whose rolling tops measure a foot across, straddling along the street, with his arms swinging in unison with his legs; then you have the native Chincoteaguer in all his pride.
The wife of the old native is to be seen about the streets on every pleasant day. She comes to town riding in a cart. The cart has wheels 5 feet in diameter, with tires 3 1/2 inches wide. It has thills or shafts like those of the garbage carts of New York, only they are longer. Between these thills stands the team, a cow or an ox or a pony or a mule, just as the owner happens to own one or the other. If it is a cow, it has to keep its neck stretched to prevent the ends of the thills chafing its horns. Seated on a board laid across the box of this cart is the woman, dressed in a calico gown and a sun bonnet, while sitting about her feet are four or five of the younger children - say from a third to a half the number of the family. The wife is gaunt and worn; the children are fat and good looking.
The homes of the Chincoteaguers are built on one model; it is that of the dry goods box. They were originally of logs, but for the last thirty years or so are made of lumber. They have a single room with a low attic above, reached by a cross between a ladder and a stairway. A doorless cupboard in one corner holds a few dishes. A pot, a frying pan, a coffee pot, and a few basins and pie tins are piled behind a rusty stove. In one corner stands the bed. No such bed as that, probably, can be found in the metropolis. The bedposts are as thick as a common stovepipe. Huge timbers serve as rails, and the bedding rests on a rope that is stretched criscross around pegs in the rail. But the most noticeable feature of all is the stock of feather beds. They swell up like hay in a New England mow. Winter and summer the Chincoteaguer must have a soft bed, and his idea of softness is in no way so well met as by abundant feathers. The thought of such a bed in such a climate as this is in August is enough to make a Northern man gasp, but there the Chincoteaguer sleeps content. The children sleep on the trundle bed and on feather beds on the floor in the attic.
The Chincoteaguer is exceedingly hospitable. He will share his well-feathered nest and his pork, corn bread, and coffee for such is his diet, with a stranger at any time, and be heartily glad of the opportunity. If the stranger will only take a drink from the ever-present whiskey bottle and then sit down and chew tobacco and spit in the stove hearth while the old woman sits by in the old wooden rocking chair and smokes a stone wall pipe with a fish pole stem, the comfort and pleasure of that family is complete. But it takes a stranger with iron nerve and stomach to stand the ordeal.
Living in an isolated hut on an isolated patch of land, with no books, no newspapers, and no schools or teachers, the tendency of the Chincoteaguer's mind was inevitably toward a belief in the supernatural. The wind sighing through the pine, strange voices from the sea, strange calls from across the meadows, strange lights that danced above the stagnant water in the glades - all came to him as manifestations and tokens of the spirit world. Old Elisha Bloxom, living a mile below the village, went one day down the beach to help discharge the cargo of a beached vessel - wrack the ship, as they say here. Coming ashore the yawl was capsized, and Elisha was struck on the head by the boat, stunned, and drowned. Some thought his mates should have saved him. In a short time they were sure of it, for the soul of the old man, they said, could not rest in the grave they dug for him in the sand hill overlooking the sea. Sounds that were unaccountable were heard in the old house. The widow and her children moved out and a family of immigrants, who knew not Elisha, moved in. Before the year of their lease was up they moved out, unable to stand the nightly visitations. That was eight years ago, but no tenant has lived there since, while the belated wayfarer on the old road that leads by the house runs by it with hastening step and bated breath, fearful lest the old man appear to seek vengeance for his untimely death.
For many years Widow Zippie Tulle lives in a little hut near Jamestown, on the mainland. Old Nigger Dave Blake lives alone in the swamp near Horntown, also on the main. Neither priest nor secular ruler ever exercised a stronger sway over parish and subject than these ignorant old conjurors over the minds of the old Chincoteaguers. Did husband suspect his wife or wife her husband of loving another, they believed, good souls, that the erring one was bewitched. Did the husband become petulant or the wife peevish unexpectedly, so that quarrels followed, the evil eye had fallen upon that household. Did aches and pains or distress of any sort come; did the cholera affect the pigs, or murrain the cow or some other disease the ponies, or green gill the oysters, the powers of the evil spirits were at the bottom of it all. There was but one hope for relief. Widow Zippie or Nigger Dave must be consulted. The Chincoteaguers went over the bay in their dugouts by the dozen at times to see thee two conjurors. The widow held the hands of those that applied to her, examined the skull of a drowned sailor found on the beach, mumbled over the dried heart of a frog, and made the sign of the cross again and again with a wand made of a serpent's skeleton bound together with human hair plucked, she said, by unseen spirits from the heads of those who had offended her. This done, she gave to the applicant a powder wrapped in black paper, and with that for a charm the distressed one went away comforted.
Old Nigger Dave's process was more mysterious still. The visitor found the old man in the hut in the swamp rolling a ball of unknown composition on a shaky table. To and fro, round and round, the old darky sent the ball, while he bent his whitening head above it and whispered words which no one understood. Not infrequently the visitor would not be allowed to either explain the cause of the visit or ask a question; he must stand in silence while that ball rumbled about on the table till the old colored man was ready to stop it. Then, to the amazement of the Chincoteaguer, the old conjurer would tell in a solemn voice all about the trouble that had brought his visitor to the hut in the swamp. Surely, the powers of darkness must have told him about it, and impressed with that belief the Chincoteaguer paid the price, took the proffered charm and went away to obey the injunctions of the conjurer to the letter.
The fame of old Dave as a healer of domestic woes became wider than the confines of Chincoteague or Accomack county. In the plenitude of his power he brought the one complained of before him when the complainant was absent, and by his mysterious knowledge of facts and his awful threat extorted the truth, and then said such commands on both husband and wife as invariably healed the difficulty; for faithfulness and kindliness, one toward the other, followed on the commands of the old negro. Though he practiced the black arts he did for the Chincoteaguers what neither judges nor juries nor religion could do. There was a deal of hearty sorrow in many homes that he had made happy when one morning a visitor in distress went to the little old hut in the swamp and found old Dave sitting by the table with his face down on one arm, and the conjuring ball in his hand. He did not move when the visitor entered, nor answer when spoken to, nor was he ever able to again set the ball rolling in the interests of either health or peace for he was dead. The widow Zippie had died before him, and no one has arisen to take their places. The preachers came to the island of Chincoteague with their prayers and sermons, but while the old Chincoteaguer will attend, and listen, and believe, he will not be wholly comforted."
** Again, this is a word for word transcript of a newspaper report written and printed in 1890. Please do not hold the use of the common word for African-Americans at that time against me, personally. **
This is the second of three or four parts of the article. I hope you enjoy reading it.
Life On Chincoteague (Part 1): From the New York Sun of 2 May 1890
(The New York Sun was a daily newspaper, published in New York City, New York, from 1933 until 1950. It was one of the most influential American newspapers through the early twentieth century; and was the first successful penny daily paper in the United States. It was known for it's witty, humorous treatment of news, a clear style of journalism, and the occasional sensational approach to scandals.)
**Please excuse any out-of-date or derogatory terms that are used. This is a true, uncorrected transcription of the original newspaper article. ** This account is signed by John R. Spears:
"CHINCOTEAGUE, Va., May 2 (1890) - In a shallow, unnamed arm of the Atlantic, and six miles off the northern end of the Virginian peninsula, lies the island of Chincoteague. Though nine miles long by one in width,more than half of its area is just awash at every tide, and half the remainder is under water at all but the dryest seasons. A wide belt of salt marshes, a succession of low pine covered ridges that look like stranded sand waves, with broad sweet water glades between,grown full of pond lilies and rank water grasses - such is Chincoteague as nature made her. It is as if a section of Florida had been picked up and dropped down on this coast, with a narrow sea wall of sandy hills stretching for fifty miles up and down the coast, just off to seaward, to protect it. Cut off from the mainland by six miles of water, protected from the waves of the sea by the natural breakwater, its sands and waters the resorts of numberless birds and wild fowl in their seasons, and its shoals covered with clams and oysters of unsurpassed quality, a sunnier, sleepier, happier combination of land and water for the home of a lazy man would be hard to find.
Not only is Chincoteague isolated: it is unique. No other section of the East is able to boast, as Chincoteague is, of being the home of a herd of ponies almost as wild as those the people run down and lasso on the plains of No Man's Land. No other district of equal extent in old Virginia can boast that its whole people, save one man, was loyal to Uncle Sam when the state voted to secede from the Union. In few, if in any other portions of the country,is the land under water worth so much more than the dry land as it is in Chincoteague. Rarely can a community be found in such excellent health when so utterly regardless of sanitary laws, while a more curious combination of the old and the new, the conservative and the progressive, the lazy and the thrifty, than the people of Chincoteague, must be sought for long if found elsewhere.
Chincoteague has no historical society; indeed, until within recent years, it had very few people who could read. The earliest exploration and settlement of the island are therefore located only by inference and tradition. It is probable, however, that the island was explored not long after the year of 1600, for old records in the peninsula show that the first land grant there was made to William Eppes, on 3 February 1626, and the second to "Nicholas Hoskins of Accomac, yeoman," two days later. The peninsula was therefore already settled at that time, and doubtless the island was visited by the first settlers.
The early settlers had only such horses as they brought from the old country, and the existence here at an early day of an isolated herd, the only one in the county so far as any one knew at the time, was a matter that must have brought many horse hunters to the island.
The ponies were well worth coming for. Tough, strong, and wiry, they were easily domesticated, and, once broken to saddle or harness, gave excellent service to their owners by day and "rustled for their feed at night," as a Western man might say. Where they came from originally is a mystery. The guessers of the country say they think a ship in the days of Queen Elizabeth must have sailed from some of Sir Walter Raleigh's settlements with a cargo of horses, and, failing to make landfall at the capes, stranded on Assateague Island, as the long sandbar outside of Chincoteague is called. They guess that the crew and passengers escaped and were carried to the settlements by the tribe of Pocahontas, and that the horses jumped overboard and made themselves as comfortable as the circumstances would permit on Assateague beach and Chincoteague Island. Then, because those circumstances were not always suited to horse nature, because northeasters laden with snow and sleet would sweep down upon the island,and because the glades froze over and snow covered the grass in the winter, so that feed was scarce, the horse of the days of Queen Elizabeth shrunk into the pony of which there is a tolerable trustworthy tradition as far back as 1750. But, if his manner of life made the pony small, it also made him hardy, and that was all anybody in the ancient days cared to know about him. He could endure all the work and ill usage his captors chose to bestow upon him, and that was enough.
Naturally, in their trips to Chincoteague for ponies, the early Virginians noted that it was a goodly land for a pioneer. The sea lay just beyond to temper the cold of winter and the heat of summer. There were no forest of pine here then as now, it is said, but only prairies and bushes around the glades. No clearing of land had to be done. The soil was sandy, but excellent for such crops as the early Virginians cultivated. The fish, the shellfish, and the game, as already mentioned, were abundant. And yet because it was isolated and the pioneers had to live gregariously for protection from the Indians, Chincoteague remained unsettled for a considerable time after permanent settlements were made in Virginia. But when danger from the Indians was over a few settlers came across and having obtained grants of land, erected homes and appropriated the ponies to the extent that if any one on the mainland thereafter wanted a pony it had to be purchased of the Chincoteaguers. But no one thought of collecting the herd into an enclosure. The ponies roamed about over the unfenced meadows and glades as before.
In the course of time, however, the natives began to assert a private ownership as against one another, and then to distinguish the different members of the herd every pony was caught and branded. Out of this grew a custom that has made Chincoteague famous all over the peninsula between the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays, and still further inland, the custom of having an annual round-up and market day. Month in and month out, hot or cold, storm or shine, the ponies are unmolested in their wanderings about the island. Fences, save where corn and potato patches exist about the cabins, have been practically unknown until recently. The meadows furnished the ponies with grass, the brush with browse, the glades with water and the pine forest which spread to the island from the mainland a little over a hundred years ago, with shelter. But in August comes the round-up. The annual product of colts must be captured, apportioned, and branded. The whole herd must therefore be corralled.
The natives begin the work by building a pen of rails large enough to hold all the ponies on the island, and more, too. It was always in former days built on a level place of ground on the beach near where the steamer wharf now stands, but now near Ragged Point, at the north end, or on Assateague. The fence is generally from ten to twelve rails high, and a wide opening guarded by two posts is left on one side, to eventually be closed by large gates. Then on the day set the entire population turns out and dozens of men and boys mounted on tame ponies ride off to gather the herd. In August, when the round-up takes place, such clouds of mosquitoes as can be found nowhere else rise over the glades, and the ponies take to the hills, as the little twelve foot elevations are called, because there the sea breezes partly protect them from insects. With whoop and yell the horsemen spread out in lines and sweep along the ridges, driving the wild ponies at a tearing pace before them, until at last all are gathered on the beach, and then they go, snorting and squealing toward the pen. A double line of horsemen await them, and by skillful riding head the herd into the enclosure and shut the gates.
Meantime the bateaus and the sloops, and in later years, a little steamer, have been bringing over such throngs of sightseers and buyers from the mainland as to create a degree of activity and excitement among the natives that it is marvelous to behold. A howling mob gathers about the pen, and, as if awed by their surroundings the ponies huddle in corners, and stand trembling. Thereupon the most experienced natives clamber over the fence, each carrying a long pole and a lasso of new manila rope. Each is followed by a squad of darkies. Carefully hanging the noose on the end of the pole the native approaches the herd, and if lucky drops the noose over the neck of a colt or of some pony which a buyer has called for. Up rises the pony on its hind legs and the away it goes; the darkies grab the rope and sink their heels into the sand to restrain it; the herd surges around the pen, snorting and throwing sand in the air; other ponies are lassoed by other owners; some of the darkies holding the ropes stumble and fall and are kicked and trodden on by the frightened herd; the spectators climb on the fence and swing their arms about and yell; and at the last the excitement and confusion reach a climax when the darkies with a heroic charge followed by hasty retreat grab a captive pony by the legs,hit him off his feet and tumble him, kicking and squealing over on to the sand, where one grabs it by the forelock and sits on its head. The discordant yells become a roar of cheers at that, and a well-earned glass of grog each is the portion of the first victorious squad of darkies.
If the pony is for sale it is secured by stout lines tied around its nose, and it is hobbled and led out. If it is a colt it is taken to a barn or shed near by, and kept there till all the colts have been captured. Then, since no one can tell which mares the colts belong to, a disinterested committee divide the colts among the owners, in proportion as near as may be to the number of mares owned by each, and they are then thrown and branded, and all odd colts are sold and the money divided in a like manner.
Years ago the herd numbered from 300 to 400, but now there are less than 200 adrift among the meadows and glades. To see the Chincoteague pony at his best approach him cautiously as he stands on a sand hill where the wind blows fresh from the Atlantic. He will be feeding away very quietly until disturbed by the presence of the spectator. Then up goes his head, his tail curves, one fore foot is slightly raised, and there he stands for a moment with the wind shivering his rough coat and blowing his shaggy mane about his head, a perfect picture of animation and apprehension. The next moment he goes scampering away in a terrible hurry to get out of sight.
As captured in the pen the pony stands not far from 12 hands high, and weighs, perhaps, 450 pounds. He is too big bellied to be handsome, but his legs, neck, and head are never ungraceful. They are of various colors, generally red, brown, or brownish gray. They are wicked looking little rascals, but, when properly broken, become perfectly safe for women and children to use, and on the mainland are very popular for dog carts and for saddle ponies for young people. The average price of the unbroken pony is $40."
** Again, this is a word for word transcript of a newspaper report written and printed in 1890. Please do not hold the use of the common word for African-Americans at that time against me, personally. **
This is the first of three or four parts of the article. I hope you enjoy reading it.
**Please excuse any out-of-date or derogatory terms that are used. This is a true, uncorrected transcription of the original newspaper article. ** This account is signed by John R. Spears:
"CHINCOTEAGUE, Va., May 2 (1890) - In a shallow, unnamed arm of the Atlantic, and six miles off the northern end of the Virginian peninsula, lies the island of Chincoteague. Though nine miles long by one in width,more than half of its area is just awash at every tide, and half the remainder is under water at all but the dryest seasons. A wide belt of salt marshes, a succession of low pine covered ridges that look like stranded sand waves, with broad sweet water glades between,grown full of pond lilies and rank water grasses - such is Chincoteague as nature made her. It is as if a section of Florida had been picked up and dropped down on this coast, with a narrow sea wall of sandy hills stretching for fifty miles up and down the coast, just off to seaward, to protect it. Cut off from the mainland by six miles of water, protected from the waves of the sea by the natural breakwater, its sands and waters the resorts of numberless birds and wild fowl in their seasons, and its shoals covered with clams and oysters of unsurpassed quality, a sunnier, sleepier, happier combination of land and water for the home of a lazy man would be hard to find.
Not only is Chincoteague isolated: it is unique. No other section of the East is able to boast, as Chincoteague is, of being the home of a herd of ponies almost as wild as those the people run down and lasso on the plains of No Man's Land. No other district of equal extent in old Virginia can boast that its whole people, save one man, was loyal to Uncle Sam when the state voted to secede from the Union. In few, if in any other portions of the country,is the land under water worth so much more than the dry land as it is in Chincoteague. Rarely can a community be found in such excellent health when so utterly regardless of sanitary laws, while a more curious combination of the old and the new, the conservative and the progressive, the lazy and the thrifty, than the people of Chincoteague, must be sought for long if found elsewhere.
Chincoteague has no historical society; indeed, until within recent years, it had very few people who could read. The earliest exploration and settlement of the island are therefore located only by inference and tradition. It is probable, however, that the island was explored not long after the year of 1600, for old records in the peninsula show that the first land grant there was made to William Eppes, on 3 February 1626, and the second to "Nicholas Hoskins of Accomac, yeoman," two days later. The peninsula was therefore already settled at that time, and doubtless the island was visited by the first settlers.
The early settlers had only such horses as they brought from the old country, and the existence here at an early day of an isolated herd, the only one in the county so far as any one knew at the time, was a matter that must have brought many horse hunters to the island.
The ponies were well worth coming for. Tough, strong, and wiry, they were easily domesticated, and, once broken to saddle or harness, gave excellent service to their owners by day and "rustled for their feed at night," as a Western man might say. Where they came from originally is a mystery. The guessers of the country say they think a ship in the days of Queen Elizabeth must have sailed from some of Sir Walter Raleigh's settlements with a cargo of horses, and, failing to make landfall at the capes, stranded on Assateague Island, as the long sandbar outside of Chincoteague is called. They guess that the crew and passengers escaped and were carried to the settlements by the tribe of Pocahontas, and that the horses jumped overboard and made themselves as comfortable as the circumstances would permit on Assateague beach and Chincoteague Island. Then, because those circumstances were not always suited to horse nature, because northeasters laden with snow and sleet would sweep down upon the island,and because the glades froze over and snow covered the grass in the winter, so that feed was scarce, the horse of the days of Queen Elizabeth shrunk into the pony of which there is a tolerable trustworthy tradition as far back as 1750. But, if his manner of life made the pony small, it also made him hardy, and that was all anybody in the ancient days cared to know about him. He could endure all the work and ill usage his captors chose to bestow upon him, and that was enough.
Naturally, in their trips to Chincoteague for ponies, the early Virginians noted that it was a goodly land for a pioneer. The sea lay just beyond to temper the cold of winter and the heat of summer. There were no forest of pine here then as now, it is said, but only prairies and bushes around the glades. No clearing of land had to be done. The soil was sandy, but excellent for such crops as the early Virginians cultivated. The fish, the shellfish, and the game, as already mentioned, were abundant. And yet because it was isolated and the pioneers had to live gregariously for protection from the Indians, Chincoteague remained unsettled for a considerable time after permanent settlements were made in Virginia. But when danger from the Indians was over a few settlers came across and having obtained grants of land, erected homes and appropriated the ponies to the extent that if any one on the mainland thereafter wanted a pony it had to be purchased of the Chincoteaguers. But no one thought of collecting the herd into an enclosure. The ponies roamed about over the unfenced meadows and glades as before.
In the course of time, however, the natives began to assert a private ownership as against one another, and then to distinguish the different members of the herd every pony was caught and branded. Out of this grew a custom that has made Chincoteague famous all over the peninsula between the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays, and still further inland, the custom of having an annual round-up and market day. Month in and month out, hot or cold, storm or shine, the ponies are unmolested in their wanderings about the island. Fences, save where corn and potato patches exist about the cabins, have been practically unknown until recently. The meadows furnished the ponies with grass, the brush with browse, the glades with water and the pine forest which spread to the island from the mainland a little over a hundred years ago, with shelter. But in August comes the round-up. The annual product of colts must be captured, apportioned, and branded. The whole herd must therefore be corralled.
The natives begin the work by building a pen of rails large enough to hold all the ponies on the island, and more, too. It was always in former days built on a level place of ground on the beach near where the steamer wharf now stands, but now near Ragged Point, at the north end, or on Assateague. The fence is generally from ten to twelve rails high, and a wide opening guarded by two posts is left on one side, to eventually be closed by large gates. Then on the day set the entire population turns out and dozens of men and boys mounted on tame ponies ride off to gather the herd. In August, when the round-up takes place, such clouds of mosquitoes as can be found nowhere else rise over the glades, and the ponies take to the hills, as the little twelve foot elevations are called, because there the sea breezes partly protect them from insects. With whoop and yell the horsemen spread out in lines and sweep along the ridges, driving the wild ponies at a tearing pace before them, until at last all are gathered on the beach, and then they go, snorting and squealing toward the pen. A double line of horsemen await them, and by skillful riding head the herd into the enclosure and shut the gates.
Meantime the bateaus and the sloops, and in later years, a little steamer, have been bringing over such throngs of sightseers and buyers from the mainland as to create a degree of activity and excitement among the natives that it is marvelous to behold. A howling mob gathers about the pen, and, as if awed by their surroundings the ponies huddle in corners, and stand trembling. Thereupon the most experienced natives clamber over the fence, each carrying a long pole and a lasso of new manila rope. Each is followed by a squad of darkies. Carefully hanging the noose on the end of the pole the native approaches the herd, and if lucky drops the noose over the neck of a colt or of some pony which a buyer has called for. Up rises the pony on its hind legs and the away it goes; the darkies grab the rope and sink their heels into the sand to restrain it; the herd surges around the pen, snorting and throwing sand in the air; other ponies are lassoed by other owners; some of the darkies holding the ropes stumble and fall and are kicked and trodden on by the frightened herd; the spectators climb on the fence and swing their arms about and yell; and at the last the excitement and confusion reach a climax when the darkies with a heroic charge followed by hasty retreat grab a captive pony by the legs,hit him off his feet and tumble him, kicking and squealing over on to the sand, where one grabs it by the forelock and sits on its head. The discordant yells become a roar of cheers at that, and a well-earned glass of grog each is the portion of the first victorious squad of darkies.
If the pony is for sale it is secured by stout lines tied around its nose, and it is hobbled and led out. If it is a colt it is taken to a barn or shed near by, and kept there till all the colts have been captured. Then, since no one can tell which mares the colts belong to, a disinterested committee divide the colts among the owners, in proportion as near as may be to the number of mares owned by each, and they are then thrown and branded, and all odd colts are sold and the money divided in a like manner.
Years ago the herd numbered from 300 to 400, but now there are less than 200 adrift among the meadows and glades. To see the Chincoteague pony at his best approach him cautiously as he stands on a sand hill where the wind blows fresh from the Atlantic. He will be feeding away very quietly until disturbed by the presence of the spectator. Then up goes his head, his tail curves, one fore foot is slightly raised, and there he stands for a moment with the wind shivering his rough coat and blowing his shaggy mane about his head, a perfect picture of animation and apprehension. The next moment he goes scampering away in a terrible hurry to get out of sight.
As captured in the pen the pony stands not far from 12 hands high, and weighs, perhaps, 450 pounds. He is too big bellied to be handsome, but his legs, neck, and head are never ungraceful. They are of various colors, generally red, brown, or brownish gray. They are wicked looking little rascals, but, when properly broken, become perfectly safe for women and children to use, and on the mainland are very popular for dog carts and for saddle ponies for young people. The average price of the unbroken pony is $40."
** Again, this is a word for word transcript of a newspaper report written and printed in 1890. Please do not hold the use of the common word for African-Americans at that time against me, personally. **
This is the first of three or four parts of the article. I hope you enjoy reading it.
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