The century-old two-story Victorian house on Holland Island in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay collapsed last week. It had been the last house left standing in the abandoned watermen's community. Now, it too, is gone.
The tale of the house illustrates the Chesapeake's problem with rising oceans and sinking land. It has already erased life on most of the bay's islands and now is threatening to erase the islands themselves. Once thriving communities are now abandoned. In fact, most of them are under water at high tide.
The last house standing on Holland Island was built around 1888 and was one of about 60 houses on an island more than three miles long. At that time, the bay was dotted with inhabited islands, where people farmed or watermen sailed out to dredge oysters.
Holland Island was one of the largest: historians say it had more than 360 people around 1910, with two stores, a school and a baseball team that traveled to other islands by boat.
Today, all the houses are gone and the islands disappear at high tide.
You can read more in an article by David A. Fahrenthold in the Washington Post at http://goo.gl/jEUp
My thanks to Harold Miller for telling me about this story.
