My first visit to the last house on Holland Island was nearly half a century ago. I took time from a fishing trip with my dad to play baseball with some local kids in the yard, a modest swatch of green sandwiched between Chesapeake Bay on its western edge and washed by Hollands Strait on its east. As I recall, the house was set back comfortably from the water, perhaps a hundred feet or more. We could follow a path that ran north a few hundred feet from the yard through a small forest of big persimmon and hackberry trees.
Enjoy it while it lasts, my father told our hosts as we went back to our fishing boat that day. The erosion of the island he referred to meant little to a ten year old. But when I returned decades later, at age forty, it was to a scene so different that the old house on Holland was the only way I could be sure it was the same place. It was now perched on the merest sliver of ground, the waters of the main Chesapeake lapping close on its front, and Tangier Sound nearly touching its back door on a high tide. The forest to its north was reduced to a thin line of trees, the earth nearly carved away from their huge old root systems. From the water, they gleamed like bones in the late afternoon. Two old tombs had eroded from the bank, and their gravestones lay flat on the hard, clay-bottomed shoreline.
I had just moved to a home ten miles south of Holland, on Smith Island, Maryland’s only remaining offshore community. The very oldest Smith Islanders recalled for me when Holland was a thriving place, with dozens of big white-frame homes similar to this “last” house, which still stood—so close to the water now that spray from big blows on the Bay was beginning to flay its paint away. Settled at least as far back as the early 1700s, judging from the old gravestones now sinking into the marsh, Holland in its heyday had stores, a church, a community hall, and two ballfields. The Holland Island Eagles was a baseball team to be reckoned with in a league that included Smith, Deal, Crisfield, and other watermen’s villages around Tangier Sound. The harbor there held dozens of oyster bugeyes and skipjacks, smaller workboats, and large schooners. Rich upland soils grew fruit trees, wheat, corn, and sweet potatoes. Returning sailors remarked on the sweet smell of blossoms as they neared home after a voyage.
All that changed in just a few decades around the turn of the twentieth century as erosion, the product of a rising sea level, and fierce storms, accelerated. Islanders wrote of lying awake at night, hearing the “crack!” as chunks of their homeland literally broke off. By the 1920s, Holland as a year-round community ceased to exist. Many of its homes still stand today, but in towns like Crisfield and Cambridge and others around the Chesapeake where they were barged.
These days the people wandering its shores are those Smith Islanders and others skilled enough to boat the remote and shallow reaches of Tangier Sound, unmarked by navigation aids. Holland has become mainly a “progging” place—you go there
at low tide, particularly after storms have chewed at the shores, to wander the edges, turning up all manner of arrowheads, old coins, pottery, and bottles that date back as far as the American Revolution and the War of 1812, when they were likely cast away
by British sailors.
There is a sadder side. The gravestones eroding from the clay and marsh peat as Holland continues to shrink are a reminder to those Smith Islanders that someday this will likely be their fate. One in particular caught the eye of my daughter, Abigail:
“God needed one more angel child” inscribed the resting place of Carol Parks, eleven, the same age as Abby.
“I hate to even say it, but that’ll be our graves here on Smith Island, just washin’ away someday,” my neighbor Janice Marshall noted after a progging trip to Holland with her husband, Bobby. When I lived on Smith, spending three years as an environmental educator for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, I would take school kids to Holland to progue around and ponder the “mystery” of the remaining tombstones near the center of the island. The stones, most made of finely carved marble and granite and surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, were evidence that this was no fish camp, rather a solid, prosperous community of long duration.
But the Bay’s appetite for the island has been relentless. A picture taken in 1987, my first year leading school trips to Holland, shows my colleagues and I wading no more than knee deep, with seventh graders across a narrow channel that had recently cut the island in half. Five years later, I returned, along with a National Geographic photographer and I.T. Todd from Crisfield, one of the last babies born there (1917). He posed where I’d once played baseball, in front of the last house (it had been in his family) perched almost in the Bay as waves broke around him. It made a striking illustration for my June 1993 piece on the Chesapeake that ran in the magazine. The trees to the house’s north were gone, and the little cut-through I had waded across with the students was now wide and deep enough to run several workboats through at the same time. I expected that the old house, a landmark on the horizontality of marsh and waters for miles around, would not last more than a year or two, and silently said my goodbyes. We helped I.T. carry off a 250-pound headstone that had marked the grave of a relative, Missouri Parks—“like the Marines coming out from Inchon, bringing the dead and wounded with them,” laughed I.T., a veteran of the Pacific theater, as we struggled through the clingy marsh. The old homestead proved surprisingly tough.
In 2003, two days after Hurricane Isabel swept the Bay with devastating floods, I returned to Holland, expecting to see it houseless for the first time in three centuries. But the last house stood, erect and square, though Isabel had taken out its lower boards, and the Bay swirled freely beneath the dining room light. The place by now was owned by Stephen L. White, a local preacher and former waterman, who had started the Holland Island Preservation Foundation, dedicated to shoring up the banks to stop the erosion. It was a valiant effort, but a Washington Post writer had aptly characterized White’s situation as “batting with two outs and two strikes in the bottom of the ninth—and you’re not holding a bat.”
I admired White’s passion to preserve the place but thought that there are times and places where we must just bow to the inevitable. Or maybe White will yet hit an improbable home run. Just in the last few years, farther up the Bay, Maryland and
the federal government have begun rebuilding one badly eroded island, Poplar, which lies off the Talbot County mainland. James and Barren islands to Poplar’s south may also be resurrected. It’s hugely expensive but driven by the Port of Baltimore’s never-ending need to dispose of spoil dredged from its shipping channels. It’s too early to say whether Holland might be next in line after Barren Island. Well before any revitalization of Holland, the last house will be erased, and the only traces of humanity that will remain are the gravestones, nearly overgrown by the soft, green spartina grasses of the marsh.
But Holland Island is far from dead, anything but a ghost town. In the virtual absence of people and predators like raccoons and foxes, bird life abounds. In just the last few years, a pair of eagles has nested in a huge old hackberry tree that anchors the island’s middle. All manner of wading birds—three species of egrets and five or six species of herons—festoon the island’s forested hammocks of high ground. Hundreds of elegant brown pelicans have established one of their northernmost nesting beachheads in the United States on Holland. Along the island’s small sandy beaches, diamondback terrapins and horseshoe crabs crawl onto shore each summer to bury their eggs. But this timeless-looking scene will not last forever, either. Geologists project that at current rates of sea level rise, exacerbated now by global warming, most or all of the islands in Tangier Sound—Bloodsworth, South Marsh, Holland, Smith, Tangier—will have vanished within another century or so.
I visit them all regularly and frequently—fishing, hunting, progging, birdwatching, or just seeking solitude and the thrill of sunlight and seasons painting ever-changing portraits across their marshy canvas. I’m following my dad’s advice: Enjoy it while it lasts.
Longtime nature writer Tom Horton is author of An Island Out of Time: a Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake and Turning the Tide: Saving the Chesapeake.
