Earth & places

Two fires gave the volunteer firemen a pony business

Chincoteague, a barrier island on Virginia's Eastern Shore, was originally used by Native Americans only for gathering shellfish, since its sandy soil couldn't support farming; Europeans didn't settle it until 1680, and a tangled land dispute over conflicting patents wasn't resolved by the courts until 1691. Once ownership was settled, the island became mainly pastureland where livestock roamed unfenced, which likely explains the origin of the famous feral Chincoteague ponies, though a rival legend traces them to a shipwrecked Spanish vessel. During the Revolutionary War islanders backed independence and their harbor was used to dodge the British blockade, and by the early 1800s they had shifted from farming toward harvesting the surrounding waters for a growing seafood trade.

When Virginia seceded in 1861, Chincoteague's residents voted overwhelmingly to stay loyal to the Union, largely to protect their access to Northern seafood markets, and a Union gunboat's arrival secured the area with little violence. The postwar decades brought an oyster boom that made "Chincoteague salt oysters" nationally known, aided by a rail and steamship connection reaching nearby Franklin City in 1876. The town incorporated in 1908, and a 1922 causeway finally linked the island to the mainland by road, though two major downtown fires in the 1920s led to the founding of a volunteer fire department, which took over the pony penning as a fundraiser and introduced the now-famous pony swim from Assateague. Through the early twentieth century the economy diversified into poultry farming alongside seafood, while Assateague Island itself was gradually depopulated after a landowner blocked access, its remaining land eventually passing to the federal government.

The island's modern identity took shape after author Marguerite Henry visited in 1946 and turned a local horse and the Beebe family's ranch into the bestselling children's book Misty of Chincoteague, later a film, which drew national attention and tourists. A devastating 1962 storm flooded the island, killed roughly a quarter of a million poultry birds and around a hundred ponies, and effectively ended the poultry industry, even as it produced the widely publicized birth of Misty's foal Stormy. Tourism subsequently replaced seafood and poultry as the island's economic mainstay, spurred by easy access to Assateague's beaches and by motels and souvenir shops built along Maddox Boulevard, with visitor spending reaching over $100 million a year by the 1990s. Rising real estate prices pushed many longtime residents to the mainland, oyster-shucking houses closed by the 1990s, and even the old Beebe Ranch was sold for development, leaving the annual carnival, pony swim, and auction as the clearest surviving link to the island's working past.

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