Our Island Home: Barrier Islands Film

by Fran Severn

It’s hard to believe that people once lived on the fragile strips of sand and reeds sitting tenuously above the waves along the Atlantic coast. But that was the case along the Eastern Shore of Virginia. For several decades, small towns of watermen and their families stubbornly survived the isolation and hardships that defined the challenge of “Island Life” – one the doesn’t involve Caribbean breezes but nor’easter gales and one where if you forgot to pick up milk when you were on the mainland, it might be a week or more before you get another chance.
 
Hog Island was once home to one of those communities. Nowadays, it is owned and protected b The Nature Conservancy, but in the early 1900’s, there was a thriving waterman’s community, Broadwater, a town of about 300 people with houses, school, a church, and cemetery.
 
But the Atlantic is not kind to barrier islands. They’re Mother Nature’s first line of defense for the mainland, so they take the brunt of the ocean’s power. Erosion was already doing a number on the oversized sand bar when the 1933 hurricane – the same one that created the Ocean City inlet – inundated the island. When the waters receded, it was clear that living on Hog Island was no longer possible. With the ingenuity of watermen, they hoisted many of the houses onto barges and floated them to the mainland. Some people set up in Willis Wharf, VA, others in Oyster, VA. Rising water and erosion quickly drowned whatever was left of Broadwater. The island is now a popular stopover for migrating waterfowl.
 
Two years ago, the Barrier Islands Center in Machipongo commissioned filmmaker James Spione to make a documentary about Broadwater and life on Hog Island. Our Island Home is the fascinating, touching, and often humbling story of Hog Island, told in part by the few surviving residents of the town. If you have any interest at all in the history of Virginia’s Shore and its people, this is a don’t-miss evening. It’s being shown at Ker Place in Onancock at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 17. Jerry Doughty, a descendent of Hog Islanders and the historian at the Barrier Islands Center is hosting the showing. He’ll be bringing along archival photos and his own collection of stories. Admission is free. Call 757-787-8012 for more information.