This is the first in a six-part, yearlong series called Disappearing Virginia in Distinction Magazine. This story originally appeared in the February issue.

Pamunkey tribe member Kathryn MacCormick. Photo by Keith Lanpher.

Tangier Island may be secluded, but it’s hardly alone.

The remote enclave is a gem of Chesapeake culture, accessible only by boat or aircraft. Its geographical isolation has cultivated a rolling dialect found nowhere else and a way of life that moves with the slow rhythm of the bay.

But the same dull-emerald waters that are the lifeblood of Tangiermen take the ground beneath them. The bay’s stormy moods claim whole swaths. In a hundred years, most of it will likely be gone.

The same forces grasping at this vanishing island promise similar ruin to shoreline communities all around the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. Though not as visible as Tangier, they are nevertheless remarkable – a tangible connection to the past, irreplaceable once they’re gone.

Deep in rural Tidewater is a quiet expanse with an ancient legacy. The 1,200-acre Pamunkey Indian Reservation is a diamond-shaped tract surrounded almost entirely by the Pamunkey River.

“The reservation is the last remaining piece of our ancestral homelands that date back thousands of years,” says Pamunkey Chief Robert Gray, a retired chief master sergeant in the Air Force.

The Pamunkey Indian Tribe once held a leading role in the alliance of Powhatan tribes, a paramount chiefdom that encompassed diverse groups inhabiting what’s now the lower Chesapeake. Iconic Native American figures were Pamunkey, among them Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas, whose interactions with John Smith and John Rolfe are the stuff of legend.

Powhatan’s grave on the Pamunkey Indian Reservation. Photo by Keith Lanpher.

Today the Pamunkey people are the only Virginia Indian tribe recognized by the federal government, though efforts have continued to try to change that. Sixty of its 370 members live on the reservation, a community that traces its written history to a 17th century treaty with England. The land is priceless, one-of-a-kind, part of an identity and heritage of which the tribe is extraordinarily proud.

The reservation is also pancake-flat, 9 feet above sea level at its peak, and the water surrounding the reservation inches closer without pause.

Kathryn MacCormick, a member of the tribe, leads an effort to buffer the reservation’s shorelines against the encroaching water. MacCormick, a biology instructor at Rappahannock Community College, moved to the reservation in 2011 and earned a graduate degree from the College of William & Mary.

Inside her tidy home, she looks over digital maps generated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projecting the effects that sea level rise will have on the reservation. The outlook is distressing. It’s not too long before the thin neck of land connecting the reservation to King William County is inundated. In 50 years, much of the ground is gone.

At a remote edge of the reservation called “the Pocket,” MacCormick stands at water’s edge and gestures to the arcing shoreline that looks more roughly carved than gently eroded. “When I moved here, this was a straight line,” she says. “It’s lost at least 3 feet.”

On the opposite side of the reservation stretch a row of riverfront shanties and a fish hatchery where the Pamunkey breed and release millions of American shad every year. The shoreline there, too, is retreating. There’s a healthy edge community, with wild rice, arrow arum and cardinal flower, but MacCormick says that ecosystem, too, is vulnerable.

Twenty-five miles southeast lies another historic tract dealing with rising water. Jamestown Island is the site of the first permanent English settlement in North America, a place where crude prototypes of democracy and ethnic diversity played out in what would be the United States.

Two stewards share a claim to Jamestown Island: the National Park Service and Preservation Virginia – the latter controlling only a 22.5-acre plot that includes the site of the original James Fort and the historic church where prominent English settlers were buried.

Danny Schmidt, an archaeologist for Preservation Virginia’s Jamestown Rediscovery project, began volunteering at Historic Jamestowne as a teenager 24 years ago. In that time he watched the landscape change; parts of the island once high enough to support upland species such as pines and grasses have been reclaimed by high-tide bush, bayberry and bald cypress. A grassy field where he once played soccer with other staff during breaks is now being saturated by rising water that never seems to ebb. “You shouldn’t see these rapid changes in a human lifetime,” he says, “and certainly not in 24 years.”

Jamestown Island. Photo by Keith Lanpher.

Unlike the Pamunkey Indian Reservation, Jamestown Island hosts a quarter million visitors a year. Some come to stand on historic ground, others to see the ongoing archaeological excavations. Displayed onsite are 4,000 of the 2.5 million artifacts recovered from the island.

Jamestown Church on Jamestown Island. Photo by Keith Lanpher.

At least that many are left in the ground, says Hayden Bassett, an archaeologist who led a survey of the entire island for Preservation Virginia. That effort identified 59 historically significant locations, such as the site where the first African whom Englishmen documented by name, “Angela,” labored. Twenty-four of those sites are actively eroding. Two have already been lost.

“In the past this was always framed as a coming threat in the future tense,” Bassett says. “Now, this is present tense. It is happening. The threat is not 20 years down the road.”

The cost of inaction is not a matter of speculation. For the 400-plus years of known, recorded history in the Chesapeake region, land has been slipping beneath the waves.

In his book The Disappearing Islands of the Chesapeake, historian William B. Cronin identified more than 500 instances of such loss. Some were little more than islets where hardy homesteaders eked out a living. Little Watts Island, situated in the mid-reaches of the bay near Tangier Island, was once home to an isolated lighthouse marking a dangerous shoal. A hermit lived on Little Watts for more than 20 years, content with the solitude the remote speck afforded. Little Watts, and its lighthouse, washed into the Chesapeake in the 1940s.

Holland Island, in Maryland’s portion of the Chesapeake, was once home to a thriving village of more than 360 residents. They all left by 1920, but the island became an icon of disappearing Chesapeake communities in 2010 when the last remaining house, a two-story Victorian photographed many times with the bay lapping at its foundation, finally collapsed into the waves.

Scientists understand what causes land to vanish but on a human scale can do little about it. Sea level rise is a threat to many low-lying areas on the East Coast. A 2012 study by researchers at Virginia Institute of Marine Science analyzed more than 40 years of data from 23 tide stations and found that north of Cape Hatteras, not only is the sea level rising but the rate of change has been accelerating sharply since 1987. If that increase remains constant, average sea level will be 2 feet higher at Norfolk by 2050.

Compounding the issue of rising water is sinking land, a phenomenon called land subsidence. The bedrock beneath the Chesapeake is flexing down toward the Earth’s core like half of a seesaw as North America adjusts to glaciers no longer weighing down its northern reaches because they have melted.

The main cause of land subsidence is water withdrawal. When humans remove large amounts of groundwater, the clay that’s interspersed throughout the bedrock permanently compacts and the ground sinks. Subsidence does not occur uniformly around the region, but the Pamunkey reservation and Jamestown Island both happen to be sinking at about 3 millimeters per year.

A final force that’s consuming land is the energy in the waves that batter unprotected shores. When weather is violent, whole chunks of land slough off at the incessant pounding. Humans already account for much of the destructive wave energy. Recreational boaters motor past the reservation constantly, their wakes striking the fragile shoreline. Until the seawall went up in 1901, steamboat traffic around Jamestown accounted for 1 foot of shoreline loss per year.

So at Jamestown Island, and countless stretches of the Chesapeake, shores are retreating and experts find themselves asking what’s worth saving and what will be surrendered. Of course, saving land is no easy task. Loss is practically unstoppable. Still, many believe it’s worth a shot.

At the Pamunkey reservation, that effort involves beefing up exposed shorelines with living buffers. Kathryn MacCormick, the biologist, is project manager for the Pamunkey Living Shoreline Project, an attempt to put a shield between the eroding land and the water looking to take it.

In the two spots where the reservation is most visibly eroding, she and scientists from Virginia Institute of Marine Science will coordinate the construction of a living shoreline consisting of two parts: a rock breakwater, parallel to the riverbank and partially submerged, and a near-shore zone that’s filled with sand and planted in native marsh plants. Construction, which is funded by a grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, will be completed by the end of the fall, with plantings and monitoring continuing through much of 2019.

MacCormick expects many native organisms to take up residence in this protected space. Life begets life, and that near-shore zone should thrive. The whole setup should muster the river’s ecology against its own wave energy, dramatically slowing erosion.

On Jamestown Island, the site of the old fort and historic church happen to sit on the highest ground, which has bought them a few decades. Yet even there, rising water is a threat. Cellars and wells dug by colonists provide a wealth of archaeological information, and will be directly affected by sea level rise before Danny Schmidt, the archaeologist, and his colleagues can fully study the ground and retrieve its treasures.

While the surface features might be dry, groundwater will constantly move up and down through those subterranean layers, making excavation especially tricky and destroying artifacts. “Wet-dry, wet-dry is not good for preservation of metals and organics,” Schmidt says.

Even though the relative high ground remains intact, it could be entirely surrounded by water soon, which presents planners with a challenge when designing access to the site.

Elsewhere on the island, all the low-lying sites where Englishmen, Africans and Indians struggled toward what’s now American nationhood will be lost. So officials are now considering a scenario few historians like to contemplate: phased retreat.

Prioritizing the disappearing sites, excavating them completely, then surrendering them to a burial at sea may be the least-worst option. But the effort would require manpower and money that’s not currently in place. Where would these artifacts be catalogued and securely stored? That’s to say nothing of the millions of artifacts already on hand.

For the Pamunkey people there’s little talk of retreating. They are free to come and go as they please, but this land, to them, is more than some temporary way station.

It’s an inheritance that links the Pamunkey to their ancestors who were here thousands of years before Europeans arrived. And when it’s gone, so too is that physical vestige of an exceptional American story. “This is an ecological issue,” says MacCormick, “but it’s also a social and cultural issue as well.”