Of Rare Material Will Show How Railroad Brought Change To The Eastern
April 24, 2003 --
In the late 19th century, the coming of the railroad
to the remote Eastern Shore of Virginia profoundly changed the culture
and environment of the Chesapeake Bay region, opening faraway markets
for watermen and farmers and boosting a new industry: tourism.
an extensive archive of historical material about that era, collected
over the years by the rural Eastern Shore Public Library, will be
published on the World Wide Web through a collaborative project
with the University of Virginia.
“Chesapeake Bay Environmental History: The Eastern Shore of
Virginia and the Railroad” will benefit research into environmental
and public-policy issues and is thought to be the first online archive
documenting a railroad’s effect on an American community.
Virginia Center for Digital History at U.Va., a national leader
in providing historical material for the Web, will develop the project
with the public library in Accomac. The project is supported by
an $85,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“It will make valuable material from a small, relatively inaccessible
library available to anyone with access to the Web, on a subject
of great interest,” said historian William G. Thomas III,
director of the U.Va. center and author of "Lawyering for the
Railroad: Business, Law and Power in the New South.”
Eastern Shore Library’s broad collection includes historic
maps, manuscripts, photographs, newspaper archives, promotional
pamphlets, travelers accounts and other documents. The digital project
will add other material from the Library of Virginia and the Virginia
Coast Reserve Long-Term Environmental Research project, another
M. Barnes, the librarian who manages the collection at the Eastern
Shore Library, has collected much of it himself for more than 25
years. A native of the area who holds a Ph.D.
in history from U.Va., he is co-editor of the book, “Seashore
Chronicles: Three Centuries of the Virginia Barrier Islands.”
library’s archive is well known to people interested in the
region’s history, Barnes said. Making it available electronically
will promote easier searching, better preservation and much wider
access, he said. The material will be useful to everyone from historians
to elementary school students.
the railroad came down the Eastern Shore peninsula, the traditional
industries of fishing, oystering and farming suddenly boomed, along
with population. The entire landscape changed as whole new towns
and roads sprang up, telephone and power lines spread, hunting and
fishing lodges and tourism grew. Although historians have documented
the changes brought by the railroads in America, few case studies
have looked at how local communities themselves experienced change,
Virginia Center for Digital History plans to use the project as
a model for future collaborations with Chesapeake Bay area historical
societies and libraries. The railroad project will be the first
phase of an ongoing effort to study the bay and its history over
the past 400 years.
“Chesapeake Bay Environmental History” project will
begin in stages soon on the Virginia Center for Digital History
Web site at www.vcdh.virginia.edu/research.html
Eastern Shore Public Library’s Web site, which contains a
wide range of Eastern Shore historical and current information,
is at www.espl.org
Bob Brickhouse, (434) 924-6856