Smith Island, the largest Maryland island in Chesapeake Bay, remains one of the most interesting communities on the Atlantic coast. Smith Islanders speak a sort of Tidewater English, are devoted to the Methodist faith, and maintain an intense relationship with the waters of the bay. For generations, they have relied on fishing, oystering, and crabbing for their livelihood and have developed workboats that reflect the conditions - both natural and cultural - of local waters. In The Workboats of Smith Island, Paula J. Johnson looks extensively at the remarkable variety of boats - documenting in fascinating detail their design, construction, and use - and the watermen who depend on them. Johnson identifies the three vessel types most common on Smith Island today: crab-scraping boats, deadrise workboats, and skiffs. Every Smith Islander, she notes, owns at least one workboat, and many have two or even three, requiring each for a different purpose - harvesting "peelers" (blue crabs in various stages of molting), oystering or crab potting, and providing basic transportation. Johnson talks with Smith Island's watermen and boatbuilders, as well as their families and neighbors, about the history and future of the island and about the boats that dominate the island's cultural landscape. She includes dozens of photographs and drawings of Smith Island's distinctive watercraft. The result is a singular portrait of a community inextricably linked to the water.

Smith Island, Chesapeake Bay is the account of an uncommon place and the uncommon people who choose to live in its isolated environment. It is the history of the islanders' struggle to survive the ravages of nature and the depredations of enemy forces as well as a study of island tradition and the possibilities for the future of the islanders' unique culture.

Along the wide waters of eastern North Carolina, the people of many scattered villages separated by creeks, marshes, and rivers depend on shallow-water boats, both for their livelihoods as fishermen and to maintain connections with one another and with the rest of the world. As Lawrence S. Earley discovered, each workboat has stories to tell, of boatbuilders and fishermen, and of family members and past events associated with these boats. The rich history of these hand-built wooden fishing boats, the people who work them, and the communities they serve lies at the heart of Earley's evocative new book of essays, interviews, and photographs. In conversations with the region's fishermen and boatbuilders, the author finds webs of decades-old social history and realizes that workboats are critical in maintaining a community's memories and its very sense of identity. Including nearly 100 of Earley's own striking duotones, this richly illustrated book brings to life the world of a fishing culture threatened by local and global forces.

Smith Island, Chesapeake Bay is the account of an uncommon place and the uncommon people who choose to live in its isolated environment. It is the history of the islanders' struggle to survive the ravages of nature and the depredations of enemy forces as well as a study of island tradition and the possibilities for the future of the islanders' unique culture.

"This work illustrates how people like Smith Islanders claim their lives in an ecologically changing unstable place"--

A classic of Chesapeake Bay literature, Tom Horton's An Island Out of Time chronicles the three years Horton and his family spent on Smith Island, a marshy archipelago in the middle of Maryland's famous estuary. The result is an intimate portrait of a deeply traditional community that lived much as their ancestors did three hundred years before, attuned to the habits of blue crab, oyster, and waterfowl. In a new afterword for this edition, Horton brings the story of Smith Island, and its people, up to the present.