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The history of the Tangier Sound area is the
history of America. Situated in the center of the mid-Atlantic
region of the United States, the Chesapeake Bay offered a land of
bounty to the earliest European settlers seeking their fortunes or
merely a new and better life. Jamestown, the first surviving English
settlement on the North American continent, was situated near the
mouth of the Bay on the James River, but the colonists were not
content to stay close at home. Within fifteen years, settlers were
farming Accomack and Northampton Counties on the lower part of the
Delmarva Peninsula, and in many cases also oystering in the Bay and
its tributaries.
As the population grew, and the small
farms became depleted or incapable of supplying enough food,
settlers took advantage of land grants in Somerset County. At
the same time, those early Americans following the water built homes
on the mainland and on Smith, Tangier, and Deal Islands, surrounding
the Tangier Sound.
It was there that these hardy men and
women created the breed that has changed little in over three
hundred years: industrious, hard working, self-reliant, and fiercely
independent.
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