Historically, African-American neighborhoods were tucked away from the waterfront, so if you want to look for traces of the Downings’ life on Chincoteague, you might go farther inland to higher ground where the Union Baptist and Christ United Methodist churches are. A local podcast series called The Bivalve Trail further describes Thomas Downing’s story on Chincoteague, following his journey all the way to New York.
Years after Downing learned to tong oysters on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, the wider Chesapeake region became one of the largest producers of oysters in North America. That changed in the 1970s and ’80s when the annual harvest sharply declined from the more than 25 million pounds that Virginia and Maryland had been producing just a decade or so before. A combination of overharvesting as well as a surge of waterborne disease led to the depletion of the region’s oyster reefs, which, despite ongoing efforts to revitalize them, are still far from their peak. Both…
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