‘No babies, no toddlers’: The Virginia island where land and people are disappearing

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. 🌊 Get your local forecast in the CNN Weather app. 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