The Lower Eastern Shore, 1608
"From Wighcocomoco to this place all the coast is low broken isles of morap ed. Marsh) grown a mile or two in breadth and ten or twelve in length, good to cut for hay in summer and to catch fish and fowl in winter. But the land beyond them is all covered over with wood, as is the rest of the country. .. This river (ed. Nanticoke), but only at the entrance, is very narrow and the people of small stature as them of Wighcocomoco, the land but low, yet it may prove very commodious because it is but a ridge of land betwixt the bay and the main ocean. "
- Captain John Smith, 1612
The most extensive salt marsh in the Bay tidewater extends, as first noted by Smith, from the Pocomoke to the Nanticoke along the Tangier Sound. The mile wide salt marshes contain wooded hammocks and even larger islands of uplands covered by trees. The uplands within the marsh were used in the 17th and 18th centuries for domestic animals and in the 19th century, were cleared of forest and farmed. But today, most of the smaller hammocks have reverted to pine forest.
As sea level has risen, salt water kills the upland trees, and eventually salt marsh forms over their stumps, diminishing the uplands. The marsh edge in turn is eroded and the open waters expand. This is the constant dance of uplands turned to marsh, marsh eroded by the tide, and the open tidal waters expanding over the former uplands and marsh. The shoreline of today is not the same shoreline Smith sailed along. Smith’s shoreline is under the open waters of today’s Nanticoke, although his map suggests that the shoreline has kept its general layout as it has retreated over the past 400 years.