When Gil Pruitt was growing up on the shrinking island of Tangier, winters were much colder than today, with ice sometimes covering the bay. Children on the West Ridge, a slightly elevated filament of land on the island’s western side, would walk to school together in packs to make the cold easier to bear. Gil would wait until the kids who lived a bit farther down the road walked by , and then rush out to shelter among them.
“As a smaller kid, you’d walk behind the tall kids, to let them block the wind, because the school was on the other end of the island,” recalled Pruitt, who traces his ancestry back to some of Tangier’s early settlers in the early 1800s.
In 1960, the year Pruitt was born, the Census counted 876 people living on Tangier, an isolated offshore island known for its devout religiosity and, more recently, its flooding, sinking land. In 2017, President Trump called the town’s mayor and promised that, contrary to scientific predictions , Tangier Island would be around for hundreds of years to come . But the vulnerable island has eroded substantially since the 1960s, according to federal maps, especially on the western side, where Pruitt grew up. And its population today is only around a third the size it was back then — with an apparent rapid decline of more than 100 people in the last 5 years alone, due to both deaths and migration away.
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There has been no big solution for this environmentally embattled town; things have not gotten better, and it has become apparent that the most urgent threat may not be from the shrinking coast, but from the dynamics of an already small and aging population that is not replacing itself. Residents attribute the population decline to a lack of jobs, itself triggered by stringent regulations on blue crabbing imposed by Virginia in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But regular flooding, and an ever-shrinking island, surely don’t help.
One early member of the growing Tangier diaspora is Pruitt himself. He left at age 18 to go to maritime school and, a few years later, purchased a home on the mainland. He now lives in Onancock, Virginia, a roughly 15-mile ferry ride away. “I knew it would give me better opportunities going and coming from work,” Gil Pruitt recalled.
“And I knew, I didn’t know it, but I predicted, that Tangier wasn’t going to stay the same.”
Tangier is a charming tangle of small houses connected by narrow roads traversed by golf carts , and exceedingly few cars. Everyone stops to wave as you motor by. Houses and buildings line three “ridges,” strips of high ground , connected by bridges. The harbor is a gauntlet of crab houses on stilts, although locals say most are now unused , and some sit in obvious disrepair. A “Trump 2028” flag flies off one dock.
Just a little over a square mile in area, the tiny island came to broad national attention in 2017. That’s when the town’s mediagenic mayor for more than two decades, James “Ooker” Eskridge, received a call from President Trump, pledging his support. Trump had seen a prior CNN story on the island’s struggles with sea level rise, which also mentioned how popular Trump was with the people living here.
Immediately, how you felt about Tangier got tightly wrapped up with how you felt about climate change. Eskridge, who acknowledges Tangier is eroding but has been skeptical about the role of sea level rise, promptly went on to debate Al Gore about climate change in a CNN town hall .
The truth is that climate change is a problem for Tangier — but it’s not the only problem. Population loss may be moving even faster than land loss. That said, coastal erosion and rising seas put the island at ever greater risk. The island’s ridges — the high ground, but still very low — are slowly sinking and converting into marshland , as the ocean gets ever higher relative to the town’s existing structures. This helps explain standing water seen on lawns even on calm days, and increasingly, high tides that make their way right up onto the island’s narrow roads, and swirl beneath the school.
“At its heart, it’s a low elevation island that is relatively flat, and water comes up and stays up,” said Matthew Kirwan, a coastal scientist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, who has studied the island’s elevation and land conversion.
The Pruitt surname is one of several strongly associated with the island. The western shore, where Gil Pruitt grew up, faces the widest and deepest stretch of open water before you reach mainland Virginia , and thus , gets the strongest waves. It was on the southwestern end of the island that Joshua Thomas , the “parson of the islands” who helped to bring Methodism to the still highly devout Tangier, convened large camp meetings in the early 1800s. One of Gil Pruitt’s ancestors was part of Thomas’s generation and later purchased land on the next island to the north, in an area that would be abandoned by the 1930s.
When the British arrived in 1814 and occupied Tangier, they built a fort on the far southwestern shore and used the island as their central base for launching attacks that included the burning of Washington, DC, and the failed assault on Baltimore that inspired the writing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The British also used the island to house and train freed slaves , some of whom were redeployed in raids on the young United States. But with the rapid erosion of the coastline, the location of their base, Fort Albion, is now below the waves, well offshore.
In 1850, the U.S. Coast Survey , the predecessor of today’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, created the first reliable map of the island group that includes Tangier. It showed a western shoreline that stretched almost continually from southern Tangier Island itself up to northern Goose Island, linking much of the island chain together. Today, Goose is separated from the rest of the group by nearly a mile of water.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Tangier’s population began to grow rapidly, peaking at over 1,100 in the 1930 Census. Ironically, this growth occurred even as the island’s land area shrank, as documented in 1905 and 1942 U.S. maps.
This was hardly unique to Tangier. Erosion led people to retreat from multiple occupied Chesapeake islands in the early 1900s. By the time of Gil Pruitt’s birth in 1960, nearly every Chesapeake island — at least those not connected to the mainland by bridges — had been abandoned.
Growing up on Tangier was all about the future of being a waterman. As early as 7 or 8 years old, Gil recalled, he and other boys were busily preparing their first boats. They tended to be little skiffs, left over from their fathers, and perhaps also passed down through their older brothers first.
By the time you were a teenager, you’d get to work on the crabbing boats. Like his father and grandfather, Gil worked four years as a winter crabber, using a dredge to bring in the catch — an approach that would later be superseded by the more popular crab “potting” techniques of today. But both styles required a grueling lifestyle of waking up at 4 in the morning (and sometimes earlier) to head out onto the water for a day of work, and getting back in the afternoon, utterly exhausted.
After a long day on the water, Gil knew well that he should go straight to bed. But in the exuberance of youth, he often didn’t do it. Instead, he’d pull out his runabout, an open-air speedboat, and head back out on the water yet again with friends. “You’re a youngster, you know? So, we’d water ski, I mean, get in and water ski until we couldn’t stand it,” he said.
While Gil and his friends fished and partied, another Pruitt relation, Asbury Pruitt, was closely studying the coastline on the western shore. He had anchored an iron pipe in the nearby marshes and regularly measured the distance from there to the sea. And so he began to record large losses, over 10 feet per year and even worse in some eras. In 1978, Pruitt recorded a loss of 31 feet, a change so big it drew Washington Post coverage at the time.
The measurements helped set in motion action of a sort that Tangier arguably has not seen since. In 1990, the Corps of Engineers erected a $4 million seawall, just over a mile long, along the western shore. It directly protected the island’s airport runway, but also Tangier more generally.
The wall stopped the erosion in its tracks, at least for the area that it covered.
The problem is defending everywhere else. Much of the island could be submerged during a hurricane, although those have fortunately been rare in the Chesapeake region. But subsidence and sea level rise only add to the problem.
Indeed, Tangier’s current sinking and the very existence of the Chesapeake Bay are part of the same geophysical mega-phenomenon — a result of a period of warming beginning some 18,000 years ago that gradually melted a colossal ice sheet covering much of North America. Meltwater from this ice sheet , and other global ice that melted during that period flowed into the ocean. The rising sea filled what had once been an enormous river valley, creating the bay and turning high points into islands like Tangier.
North of the Chesapeake, the Earth’s crust had been compressed by the weight of the ice, while the ice-free area around Tangier bulged upward. When the ice retreated, the previously crushed land rebounded — while the Mid-Atlantic began to sink, a process that continues today.
On top of that, more recent global warming has accelerated the pace of sea level rise. Subsidence and sea level rise, in combination, thus lead to a very fast rate of change. At nearby Norfolk, Virginia, seas are rising by nearly a quarter of an inch yearly, or a foot every 50 years. With most of Tangier only about 3 feet above sea level, you see the problem.
Mayor Eskridge — the man Trump called up in 2017 — is well known for attributing the island’s challenges to erosion but not sea level rise. But like his fellow islanders, he’s very conscious of the dramatic change that has occurred, and has seen it in his own backyard, which is also on Tangier’s West Ridge.
“When I first moved over here on this property, I had a huge weeping willow tree in the front yard,” he said. “Poplar trees growing down both sides of the yard, and they won’t grow here anymore.”
Meanwhile, the town faces hard times.
The state of Virginia recently labeled Tangier a “fiscally distressed” community, due to failure to pay a variety of debts and properly maintain its financial records. A study by the Berkley Group, a consulting firm working for the state, went deeper, finding the town had not had a financial audit since 2012 or a budget since 2018 (one was finally adopted in 2026). The report refers to “misappropriation” of funds from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality for improving the crucial harborside fuel dock, and states that Tangier did not report properly to the Treasury Department on its receipt of coronavirus relief funding, among other fiscal issues.
“As best I can find, this town has been running in the red for many years,” said Normand St-Pierre, a retired professor of agricultural sciences at the Ohio State University who moved here because of his love of sailing, and currently serves on the Town Council. St-Pierre guesses at least $ 300,000 was “sucked out” of the town, although he hesitates to allege fraud, suggesting more simple mismanagement may explain what occurred. But with some 200 households, and a median family income a little over $ 35,000, the people of Tangier can’t afford to pay it back, he said.
“We were expecting some form of bailout or financial assistance, and nothing’s been offered yet,” he said.
Recently, Tangier has seen the closure of its only true grocery store, and there are fears too about the shrinking enrollment at its only school.
The grocery, Daley & Son, sat in one of the larger buildings on the island, with a dramatic rectangular façade far wider and taller than the interior of the store itself. A tourist plaque says multiple stores stood at this location for decades, but the cost to buy food on the mainland and transport it to the island made the business challenging, several locals said, and the declining population didn’t help. The store has been closed for around a year but is now listed for sale. Irene Lewin, a realtor with Lewin & Carr, Inc. who sells many properties on the island, said she believes it will be bought and re-opened. “I’ll have it sold, I’m quite sure it will be open by spring,” Lewin said. “It’ll be up and going.”
Tangier used to have multiple grocery stores, Gil Pruitt remembered. His grandparents on each side operated two separate ones. Before the proliferation of golf-cart transportation, he recalled, the stores used to be handily placed along the paths the islanders walked between the three populated ridges.
Tangier still has a store that sells necessities and some groceries, right at the dock where the daily mail boat arrives. And groceries can be delivered by that boat, from Crisfield, Maryland, if island residents place an order at Food Lion. Nonetheless, residents acknowledged the loss of the grocery has been a major blow.
“It’s sad, that grocery store has been there since way before I was born,” said Tangier vice-mayor Beth Thomas, who operates the dock store. “Every business we lose, it’s sad.”
The closure of a grocery is one thing. But there are also concerns about the Tangier Combined School, which serves grades K through 12. It sits several feet off the ground close to one of the canals that cut between Tangier’s islands, and water sneaks beneath it at even modest high tides.
Today, the school has just 34 students, according to Accomack County Public Schools, the local school district. Two grades have no children at all in them. For grades 6-12, some subjects, such as science, are being taught remotely via screens, with the instructor on the mainland. In a statement, Accomack County Public Schools praised the local school as a place with “an extraordinary sense of community, where the unique character of Tangier Island is woven into every student’s educational experience.” But the statement added that “given its small enrollment, ( [ the school) ] is not adding additional staff at this time.”
On a Friday in May, the school held prom. It included anyone in eighth grade or higher, which helped fill out the affair. Still, fewer than 20 attended, some with dates from the mainland. Future proms are likely to be even smaller, as at present, there are no very young children on the island waiting to start school.
“No babies, no toddlers,” said Eskridge. “And I think that’s the first time since our early beginnings that we’ve had that.”
When Gil Pruitt departed , the island still had more than 700 residents, according to the 1980 census. By 2020, the census formally counted only 436 people here, and that was before the COVID-19 pandemic triggered multiple fatalities among the elderly. More recent census figures , and the views of residents put the number closer to 300 or even lower. According to US Census data, the median age of island residents has also been steadily rising over the last 20 years and is now estimated at more than 60, more than 20 years above the US median.
“The challenge is, what is life like, what happens, when you’ve got a lot of older people, and hardly any young people,” said David P. Baker, a demographer at Penn State University who examined the Tangier population data for this story. “All of our social institutions are based on growth, or at least, a somewhat stable population.”
A number of Tangier homes now stand abandoned; some are even being slowly overgrown by plants and vines. The state of the houses is a sore point. Some on Tangier were roused by a recent Facebook post in a group called “Abandoned in Virginia,” showing photos of some of the island homes that are in worse condition. Tangier residents objected that the island is not “abandoned” and plenty of other attractive and picturesque houses remain.
“Only pictures of the rough looking places!” replied one poster. “Did you see all the beautiful homes and sites while you were here? Or our beach? Or our views?”
Still, some homes are being repaired and sold. “In the last year and a half, I have brought 15 new owners to the island,” said Lewin, the realtor, who lives on Tangier part of the time. She notes that many new owners are, like herself, part-time residents, perhaps using their island properties as second homes, something that population figures may not take into account. A number of Airbnb’s have also emerged on the island, signaling a possible shift to a more tourism-focused future, one with fewer full-time residents but many part-time ones and visitors. “Tourism is going to be what makes the place grow,” Lewin said.
The island remains undeniably quaint. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources has documented as much in several reports. The history is not just tied to physical structures or events but language itself. Living on an island for multiple centuries, the people here maintained a unique dialect, as the writer Earl Swift explains in his book on Tangier, Chesapeake Requiem . That includes the practice of talking “over the left,” or, in essence, saying the opposite of what is meant, but with emphasis that gives it away — at least to fellow islanders.
That doesn’t make Tangier any less threatened — it merely underscores how much there is to lose.
On the mainland , Gil Pruitt keeps up with the challenges Tangier has recently faced. He has one brother who still lives here, and another who moved away like Gil himself did, then moved back to Tangier to work on the water later in life but recently passed away. He holds powerful memories of how it was.
But at 18, he left for the maritime school at Piney Point, Maryland. Before long he was working for Steuart Transportation, supplying heating fuels to Washington, DC, by ship. His maritime career eventually took him to the West Coast, through the Panama Canal, up the Mississippi and into many other US waters. Much of the time, he served as captain of a variety of tugboats as they helped ferry larger vessels into port.
After 46 years working at sea, Pruitt retired last year to Onancock, just a short skip across the water from Tangier.
In his retirement, Gil met with CNN along with his Tangier-born cousin, Guy Pruitt. Guy joked that when the two of them get together, they start “speaking in tongues,” referring to Tangier’s strong accent and unique pronunciations.
“I lived over there at a unique time, growing up,” said Gil Pruitt. “I would not trade my youth for anything. It was a better time back then.”
On a Sunday morning in May, 25 mph winds from the northwest assailed the Tangier coast, driving waves that busily excavated the brick and cinderblock remnants of an old structure, possibly a house. An old cement cistern sat alongside the bricks, breaking the waves into columns of spray.
Not far from the ruins sat the 1990 seawall, the rock embankment that protects some of Tangier. But just past it, the waves cut deeply into the beach, defining foot-high sand cliffs and wrapping around tree stumps that once would have been far inland.
Tangier is threatened by the sea on multiple sides, but this is one of the most exposed locations. The question persists: What could possibly be done to better defend this small but historic island?
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has been trying to help residents formulate plans. But while they have won some initial funding to design a shoreline “adaptation” plan for Tangier, these protections remain in the design stage and require additional funding for permitting and implementation. “We need to get started now,” said Tom Ackerman, the group’s vice president for environmental education. “Every major storm, every nor’easter takes another chunk out of the shoreline. But … we believe that losing Tangier is not an option.”
One breakthrough comes in the form of a recent project by nearby Northampton County, in partnership with the town, to dump 32,000 cubic yards of dredge material from a coastal creek onto the eroding area of the beach south of the seawall. That’s a project that could start as soon as late this fall or in the winter. Many other US localities facing erosion use this type of beach renourishment as an option, but Tangier has largely not had that benefit until now.
Residents frequently complain that Maryland has invested much more in protecting nearby Smith Island and letting it maintain a vibrant community than Virginia has in Tangier. The remaining population on Smith is smaller and similarly elderly, but it has remained more stable. The median income there is also nearly three times that of Tangier.
Cameron Evans, Tangier’s former vice-mayor and a photographer and ecotour guide on the island, believes the route to federal funding lies in highlighting the island’s natural resources and calling for their protection. “We’re one-third the size we were since 1850, but year after year, the birds continue to come back, to try nesting,” he says. “They want to stay here and we want to stay here.”
Still, unless something changes, the dominant story may sound like Gil Pruitt’s: A story not of homecoming, but of moving away. The Tangier diaspora is already well known on the eastern shore of Virginia and in coastal Maryland. There are Pruitts, as well as Crocketts and Parks (two other prevalent Tangier surnames), all over the region, especially in and around Onancock, Virginia and Crisfield, Maryland, both sites of ferry departures to Tangier.
On a Virginia peninsula, rather than a Virginia island, Guy and Gil Pruitt looked back over photos of their fathers on their boats and batted around the names of crabbing vessels and buy boats. As they talked, it became clear that physically leaving Tangier hardly meant leaving the island’s influence behind. They were still watermen. They were the export of the island’s two centuries of seafaring expertise, a body of knowledge that will continue to shape the country long after whatever comes next for Tangier itself.
