A History of Disappeared Grounds
Tangier Island, Virginia
A view from the Parson of The Islands Cemetery toward the Island’s iconic water tower. (Isabella Frontado, Tangier Island, Virginia. November 2019)
In the Chesapeake Bay, where the ground is rapidly eroding and subsiding, the rate of sea level rise is twice the global average. Throughout the 20th century, residents of the Chesapeake Bay witnessed the disappearance of a number of islands and communities; from James Island in the early 1900s, to Sharps Island in the mid 1900s and Holland Island in 2010. These islands were abandoned and have since disappeared, absorbed by the bay.
In many instances, photographs, letters, maps and personal accounts were collected after the residents had moved away and the islands had disappeared. Former island inhabitants or their children formed groups such as the Grace Foundation of James’ and Taylor’s Island and collected and digitized photographs, letters, and essays, as a way to memorialize the ghosts of these places. Today, these ghostly 19th century photographs from James’ Island are all that remain of these people, their homes, and their practice of everyday life. Some of the photographs show a young man in a suit standing in a corn field, a chicken in the distance; a group of men, women and children, standing on the front steps of a house which is framed by two young trees; a pair of young women sitting on a bench under a willow, and a group of men of varying ages gathered in a front yard framed by hip-length grasses. The young trees, cut grass, clipped shrubs, painted fences, and well kept homes, define this island as an inhabited, maintained place. Looking at these photographs, it seems unimaginable that today, in that same place, is open water.
J.B. Jackson’s essay, The Necessity for Ruins (1980), describes how cherished ‘things’ such as these images, serve as, “mementos of a bygone daily existence without a definite date” (Jackson, 89). If you look at the remaining shoal or open water where these communities once stood, these images allow for, “an echo from the remote past to suddenly become present and actual” (Jackson, 91). This cartographic essay considers the disappearing ground of the Chesapeake Bay, and explores how through maps, photographs, contextual audio, and interviews we might begin to echo traces of these lost grounds into the present. Tangier Island, Virginia, home to native Americans and watermen over the centuries, is one of a few islands in the Chesapeake which, in the coming century will likely disappear. The island serves as a test site to consider how, in the face of impending erasure, we will consider the the collection, documentation, and communication of our histories and memories of place.
