Hog Island is one of the Virginia Barrier Islands located southeast of Exmore in Northampton County, Virginia, and is a part of the Virginia Coast Reserve of The Nature Conservancy. The island, then known as Machipongo Island was first settled in 1672 by a group of 22 English colonists. The island was later abandoned and remained uninhabited until around the time of the American Revolution when it was resettled. In the late 1800s, at least five lavish hunting and fishing clubs that primarily catered to wealthy sportsmen from the Northeast were established on Virginia's barrier islands; one of the largest and most lavish of these clubs was in the town of Broadwater, Virginia, on Hog Island.
After defeating incumbent Benjamin Harrison in the 1892 U.S. presidential election to reclaim the White House thus becoming the first person elected to two non-consecutive terms as President of the United States, Grover Cleveland accepted an invitation to visit the Broadwater Club for 10 days of waterfowl hunting on Hog Island. President Cleveland returned to the Broadwater Club the following summer to go fishing. While on the island Cleveland visited lighthouse keeper George Doughty and inspected the 1853 Hog Island Light that was by then threatened by shoreline erosion. Construction began on a new lighthouse a year later and was completed in 1895. [1]
Founded in the mid-19th century the town of Broadwater was located in a clearing in the pine forest two miles from the ocean in the center of the island. In the 1930s when rapid beach erosion caused by several hurricanes that flooded the entire island made its continued existence untenable, many of the houses and other buildings in the town of Broadwater were floated by barge to the mainland and still stand in the towns of Willis Wharf and Oyster today.
The Hog Island Light, a coastal beacon that was once the second tallest lighthouse in the United States stood for half a century on the southern end of Hog Island near Broadwater. It was decommissioned and demolished in 1948 when shoreline erosion threatened to bring it down. A Coast Guard station on Hog Island was later closed. The site where the lighthouse once stood is now nearly a mile out to sea.
In 2008, in conjunction with the Barrier Islands Center in Machipongo, Virginia, filmmaker James Spione directed a documentary, Our Island Home, which featured three of the last surviving people to be born on Hog Island. The film grew out of an ongoing oral history project at the Center designed to record survivors' memories of a bygone way of life on the island.
Since 1987 Hog Island has served as a major ecological research location for the Virginia Coast Reserve Long-Term Ecological Research (VCR/LTER) project . Hog Island is one of three primary ecological research stations used by faculty and students at the University of Virginia.
Lake Michigan is one of the five Great Lakes of North America. It is the second-largest of the Great Lakes by volume and the third-largest by surface area, after Lake Superior and Lake Huron. To the east, its basin is conjoined with that of Lake Huron through the wide and deep Straits of Mackinac, giving it the same surface elevation as its easterly counterpart; geologically, the two bodies are a single lake that is, by area, the largest freshwater lake in the world.
Corolla is an unincorporated community located in Poplar Branch township, Currituck County, North Carolina, United States, along the northern Outer Banks. It has a permanent population of approximately 500 people; during the summer vacation season, the population surges into the thousands. Corolla is home to the Currituck Beach Lighthouse, one of the seven North Carolina coastal lighthouses.
The Eastern Shore of Virginia is the easternmost region of the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. It consists of two counties on the Atlantic coast. It is detached from the mainland of Virginia by the Chesapeake Bay. The 70-mile-long (110 km) region is part of the Delmarva Peninsula. Its population was 45,695 as of 2020.
The Apostle Islands National Lakeshore is a U.S. national lakeshore consisting of 21 islands and shoreline encompassing 69,540 acres (28,140 ha) on the northern tip of Wisconsin on the shore of Lake Superior. It is known for its collection of historic lighthouses, sandstone sea caves, a few old-growth remnant forests, and natural animal habitats. It is featured on the America the Beautiful Quarters series.
Hunting Island is a 5,000-acre (20 km2) secluded semitropical barrier island located 15 miles (24 km) east of Beaufort, South Carolina, United States in between Harbor Island and Fripp Island. Since 1935, it has been classified as a state park. It is the most-visited state park facility in South Carolina and is a part of the ACE Basin estuarine reserve area. Known for its natural environment, the island remains one of the few remaining undeveloped Sea Islands in the Lowcountry. The park is known for its 19th century lighthouse which bears its name. The park's beach has been featured in several travel publications and was listed in 2013 as a Top 25 beach in the United States by TripAdvisor.
Sapelo Island is a state-protected barrier island located in McIntosh County, Georgia. The island is accessible only by boat; the primary ferry comes from the Sapelo Island Visitors Center in McIntosh County, Georgia, a seven-mile (11 km), twenty-minute trip. It is the site of Hog Hammock, the last known Gullah community. Access to the island is restricted to residents, landowners, or guests thereof. Public access must be obtained by getting a permit issued by state tourism authorities.
Assateague Island is a 37-mile (60 km) long barrier island located off the eastern coast of the Delmarva Peninsula facing the Atlantic Ocean. The northern two-thirds of the island are in Maryland, and the southern third is in Virginia.
The Outer Banks are a 200 mi (320 km) string of barrier islands and spits off the coast of North Carolina and southeastern Virginia, on the east coast of the United States. They line most of the North Carolina coastline, separating Currituck Sound, Albemarle Sound, and Pamlico Sound from the Atlantic Ocean. A major tourist destination, the Outer Banks are known for their wide expanse of open beachfront and the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. The seashore and surrounding ecosystem are important biodiversity zones, including beach grasses and shrubland that help maintain the form of the land.
Presque Isle State Park is a 3,112-acre (1,259 ha) Pennsylvania State Park on an arching, sandy peninsula jutting into Lake Erie, 4 miles (6 km) west of the city of Erie, in Millcreek Township, Erie County, Pennsylvania, in the United States. The peninsula sweeps northeastward, surrounding Presque Isle Bay along the park's southern coast. It has 13 miles (21 km) of roads, 21 miles (34 km) of recreational trails, 13 beaches for swimming, and a marina. Popular activities at the park include swimming, boating, hiking, biking, and birdwatching.
Cape St. George Island is an uninhabited barrier island situated on Florida's North Gulf Coast, south-southeast of St. Vincent Island, west of St. George Island and 8–10 miles south-southwest of the town of Apalachicola in Franklin County, Florida. It was formerly part of St. George Island, but was separated from the main island in 1954, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed the ship channel known as Bob Sikes Cut.
Smith Island is one of the Virginia Barrier Islands located adjacent to the southern end of the Eastern Shore of Virginia in Northampton County near Cape Charles.
Cape Charles Lighthouse is an octagonal cast iron skeleton tower lighthouse at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay on Smith Island which was officially removed from service in 2019. It is the tallest lighthouse in Virginia and the second tallest in the United States. This particular tower is the third lighthouse at this location. The first lighthouse at Cape Charles was a 55-foot (17 m) masonry tower completed in 1828. It was quickly deemed inadequate for its important seacoast location due to its low height and poor visibility at sea. It was soon threatened by erosion so in 1864 it was replaced by a 150-foot (46 m) masonry tower built further inland. Located a little more than a mile southwest of the old tower and 600 feet from the shoreline, the impressive 150-foot-tall conical brick tower was similar in appearance to the 1857 Cape May Lighthouse, painted white and topped with a dark brown lantern room. In 1892, a twenty-five-foot red band was painted around the white tower's midsection, about sixty feet up from the base, to make it more visible during the day. By the 1890s, it too was threatened by beach erosion which jetties built to protect it failed to halt, and with the lighthouse now only 300 feet from the ocean and the shoreline eroding at a rate of 37 feet per year it was decided that a third lighthouse needed to be built three quarters of a mile inland.
The Volgenau Virginia Coast Reserve is a biosphere reserve created by The Nature Conservancy in the early 1970s. It consists of 40,000 acres across 14 of the Virginia Barrier Islands along the Atlantic coast of the Virginia portion of the Delmarva Peninsula, including Parramore Island, Hog Island, Virginia, Smith Island, Virginia, Assawoman Island, and Metompkin Island. These barrier islands play an important role in sheltering the mainland portions of the Eastern Shore of Virginia from the impact of coastal storms and are important for breeding and migrating beach nesting and colonial waterbirds, including piping plovers. It also serves as the research location for the Virginia Coast Reserve Long-Term Ecological Research project.
The Virginia Coast Reserve Long-Term Ecological Research (VCR/LTER) project is funded by the National Science Foundation. The VCR/LTER project's research activities focus on the mosaic of transitions and steady-state systems that comprise the barrier-island/lagoon/mainland landscape of the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Research is conducted in mainland marshes, the lagoon system behind the barrier islands, and on the islands themselves, particularly Hog Island. The VCR/LTER began operation in 1987. It initially focused on geophysical controls on coastal ecosystems. In 1992-1994 it broadened that focus to address the concept of ecological state change, which was linked in 1994-2000 to relationships between free surfaces. More recent work (2000-2006), added a hypsometric perspective, which provides an alternate way of examining ecological patterns on the coastal landscape. It makes extensive use of the Virginia Coast Reserve of The Nature Conservancy.
The Hog Island Light was a lighthouse roughly marking its eponymous island, and thus the north side of the Great Machipongo Inlet on the Virginia coast. Originally, no light existed between Cape Henlopen, Delaware and Cape Charles. In 1830 the United States Congress appropriated money for a coastal beacon in the general vicinity of Chincoteague Island. The following year, the Collector of Customs in Norfolk selected Assateague Island.
Broadwater is a former town and unincorporated community located on Hog Island, one of the Virginia Barrier Islands, in Northampton County, Virginia, United States. The town is the origin of the Hog Island Sheep. After several hurricanes that caused severe shoreline erosion the town was abandoned in the 1930s and many of the houses and other buildings were loaded onto barges and moved to the mainland, where they still stand in Willis Wharf, and Oyster.
Machipongo is an unincorporated community in Northampton County, Virginia, United States.
Coast Guard Station Cobb Island is a former United States Coast Guard Station that was built on the southern end of Cobb Island, Virginia, one of Virginia's Barrier Islands, on Virginia's Eastern Shore, in 1936, to replace an earlier c. 1877 Coast Guard Station that had been damaged by a hurricane. The Coast Guard decommissioned Station Cobb Island in 1964. The Nature Conservancy (TNC) acquired the abandoned former Station Cobb Island in 1973. TNC moved the buildings comprising the former Station Cobb Island, by barge, eight miles across Cobb Island Bay, to a newly prepared site in Oyster, Northampton County, Virginia, on Virginia's Eastern Shore, in May 1998. TNC subsequently restored the former Station Cobb Island as a nature education center/lodge/conference center through adaptive reuse. The property is currently listed for sale.
The Virginia Barrier Islands are a continuous chain of long, narrow, low-lying, sand and scrub barrier islands separated from one another by narrow inlets and from the mainland by a series of shallow marshy tidal bays along the entire coast of the Virginia end of the Delmarva Peninsula. Several of these islands were once significantly larger, covered with pine forests, and inhabited. After the completion of the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad in the late 19th Century, at least five lavish hunting and fishing clubs were established on Virginia's barrier islands and they became a playground for wealthy sportsmen from Northeastern cities who would arrive by train. US President Grover Cleveland visited Hog Island to hunt waterfowl and go fishing in the early 1890s.
Brazos Santiago Pass is a natural coastal landform located in the Lower Laguna Madre and Lower Rio Grande Valley on the furthest southern beach terrain of the Texas Gulf Coast. The seacoast passage is interpolated by barrier islands encompassing the southern Brazos Island and the northern South Padre Island.