Baltimore Sun Notices James Island

James Island in mirage behind sailboats

Before there's nothing left: James Island losing ground in the Chesapeake But I did find some interesting facts about the island that is the closest land I see when I look across the Bay from our home beach:

It likely rose fairly high above the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. It was probably full of trees, perhaps loblolly pines. It might even have been connected to nearby Taylors Island on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Even now, it has some pines; I presume they're Loblollies. It was certainly connected to Taylors Island at some point in the past. A mere 14,000 years ago, the whole bay was missing, and the Susquehanna River ran down the bottom of what is now the Bay, out over the continental shelf and into the Atlantic Ocean.

Maybe prehistoric people lived there; maybe they just visited. Maybe the Piscataway passed through. Or perhaps the centuries went by without a single human visitor, and James Island was simply a nesting ground for birds near the mouth of the Little Choptank River. I don't know. I can only imagine. A deserted, slowly sinking island will do that to you. There's something mystical about it, as if it were a floating piece of time itself.

James Island from nearby

I would bet that they used it. It's probably hard to find much evidence of that now, since so much of it has disappeared. I wouldn't be shocked if Indian artifacts have already been found there.

Mountford, an estuarine scientist who spent a good part of his career with the Chesapeake Bay Program, cobbled together some of the history of James Island in an article for the Chesapeake Bay Journal several years ago. He quoted historians and archaeologists, referenced old maps and drew on his experiences as a frequent visitor to the place. "Piecing together the vanishing island's history is a story told mainly through maps and memories," Mountford wrote.

English colonists named the island for St. James in the 17th century. The island went from more than 1,300 acres in the mid-18th century to about 550 acres by the late 1990s. Indeed, Mountford concluded, there were times when erosion and migrating sands affected James Island so much that there were periods when it was firmly connected, then not, to Taylors Island.

The north end of James Island was once a mile wide. (It is nowhere near that now.) There was once a settlement, too, Mountford discovered, with a store, a small schoolhouse and what might have been an oyster-shucking house. This happened during the mid-19th century and again in the early 20th, archaeologists concluded. But, if there was a village, it's gone now.

"A map from 1903 shows a road running down the west shore with lanes leading to four likely dwellings along the shoreline in a configuration that suggests they might have been farms," Mountford wrote. "There's archaeological evidence for some of this settlement scattered in shallows on the bay's bottom, and at least one partial foundation with a doorstep stone still survives on the island's marshy west side."

 Sounds like a good place to fish. . .

For a while, a lumber company took timber off the island, and there was once a large herd of sika deer there. The deer, along with a winter goose population in the Little Choptank, drew hunters, Mountford learned. In fact, a gun club formed in the 1960s and bought the island from Louis L. Goldstein, the legendary Southern Maryland politician who served nearly 40 years as Maryland comptroller until his death in 1998.

Who knew Louie once owned an island?

Louis Goldstein is the local legend who still has the roads down here paved regularly, almost 20 years after his death. He knew where all the bodies were buried. Local rumor has it that he owned land on both sides of the Bay, anticipating the construction of a second Bay Bridge, somewhere in Calvert County across because it is the second narrowest area after Annapolis, and expecting to make a killing. God Bless ya'll real good.

James Island on Google Earth (upper left)

The James Island Gun Club built a cabin 100 feet inland, according to Mountford, but by the late 1980s the cabin was 15 feet out in the bay, which gives you an idea about the rate at which the island is sinking.

There isn't much there now. In fact, James Island looks like three islands because large slices of it have sunk into the Chesapeake, in part because of sea-level rise. The vegetation on one of the pieces was apparently decimated by last winter's wind and ice.

James Island is one of several in the bay that has eroded with time. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says an estimated 10,500 acres have been lost over the last 150 years in the mid-Chesapeake.

 In 2000, I walked between two of those islets on a thin strip of peat. There was the remains of a house out on the northern islet. Long gone.

Still, there's a plan to restore James Island. The Corps of Engineers has James Island in its project lineup for the bay. The project is similar to the high-profile restoration of Poplar Island to the north, using massive quantities of dredging spoil from the Chesapeake's shipping channels and the port of Baltimore to build up the sinking island and turn it into a bird sanctuary. James Island is a major part of the next phase of mid-Chesapeake restoration projects, according to Chris Gardner, a spokesman for the corps.

They are currently rebuilding Poplar Island up the Bay, and when they run out of space, they're supposed to move south to James. But it won't be the same.

But it could be a decade before anything happens there, and that seems like a long time for an island that already has lost so much ground.