Mr. Cleveland's Quaint Old Shooting Resort
How the eyes of the six or eight families of Broadwater Island must have opened in curious surprise when they witnessed during the past week the stringing of wires for a telephone line that brought that far away place into speaking distance of the rest of America! It was a great day in the annals of Broadwater, but it is, however, unlikely that the greater portion of the community gave the matter so much attention as they did the fact that an ex and to be President was shooting snipe and ducks with members of their own families.
Mr. Cleveland could have scarcely have selected for his vacation a more secluded and picturesque spot than the possessions of the Broadwater Club, on the island of that name.
Yet it is not probable that he could ever again go there with the same certainty of escape from the wiles of office-seekers, for Broadwater is coming to be known, the country round about it is being opened up and the stringing of telephone lines is but a step in the process of civilization that has in very recent years changed the region so that its oldest inhabitant can hardly venture abroad without danger of getting lost.
The first innovation was the erection of a light-house on the island by the government, to warn mariners of their way in and out of the Chesapeake Bay, twenty miles south.
With all the changes wrought by the hand of progress it still retains much of its quaintness and all of the beauty and natural blessings that finally attracted northern men to its shores.
I obtained many interesting facts about it yesterday rom Mr. N. J. W. Le Cato, owner of the Aberdeen Hotel, who has just returned from an outing at Upshur's Neck, opposite which is Broadwater Island. Mr. Le Cato was brought up on the Neck.
Every one who has read in the HERALD the experiences of Mr. Cleveland and his party since they went down to Broadwater knows now that it is one of the chain of islands lying about ten miles off the Virginia coast. The nearest railroad station to it is Exmore, on the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad, and it has been largely due to the operation of this line that Broadwater Island and its neighbors have become known to Northerners.
KNOWN AS HOG ISLAND.
It will do you no good to look on a map for the island by its present name. Officially -- that is to the hydrographic engineers of the government -- it is known as Hog Island, and this name was considered good enough for it by everybody else until the pioneers of the Broadwater Club got hold of it and laid their plans for making it a shooting and fishing resort. Then the old name and a good many customs of its old fashioned natives had to go.
The island lies just off Machipungo Creek, that issues from the peninsula, forming a neck of land known as Upshur's Neck, from the fact that it has been in possession of the historical family since colonial times. The great Machipungo Inlet, south of Hog or Broadwater Island, is the outlet of this creek into the Atlantic.
The island itself is a beautiful place. Its modern name and that of the club which practically owns it, is taken from the stretch of comparatively smooth water between it and the mainland, known to the natives thereabouts as the "Broadwater." It is about five miles long. Formerly it was entirely covered with a heavy growth of pine; now the northern end is bare of woods and forms a large area of white sand. Storms and the encroachment of the tides have cleared off the trees and even washed out the graveyards of the natives. The southern end is well shaded with pine and cedar and myrtle bushes. There have never been more than sixty people on Broadwater, and intermarriages have brought their descendants into close relationship. The natives are primitive in habits and dress and occupation.
Some of their homes are frame, but the majority live in log cabins. So many wrecks have occurred in the vicinity that the community has made many rich hauls from the dismantled ships that during the last hundred years have drifted ashore here and upon neighboring islands.
MARINE ARCHITECTURE.
At almost every front door is the hatch covering of some unfortunate vessel now doing duty as a porch, and over the front doors are either figureheads or stempieces of luckless merchantmen cast up by the sea. Local habitations have come to be known by the names of the figureheads that adorn their fronts.
And there is Rum Hill, 100 feet high, one of the most conspicuous features of the island. Whether true or not, a curious tale is connected with the hill and its name. It is said that a hundred years or so ago a West Indian rum trader went ashore off Hog Island and was broken up during a violent storm. She was loaded with casks of liquor destined for New Bedford, and the Hog Island wreckers recovered the cargo as it came ashore.
There was no place of storage for the hogsheads and they were piled upon the island, well out of the way of the waves, but, as it transpired, not of the winds. A big storm came up. The light, white sand of the island was blown upon the pile of rum casks until they were concealed, and finally buried deep beneath a cone of salted grains of sand that drifted upon it until the islanders could not remove it.
"They" say the rum is still beneath the sand -- that the salt in their covering must have preserved the casks from disintegration. Who knows? Perhaps it is.
At any rate, say the natives, if you don't believe this story, why there's the proof -- there's the hill.
"Rum Hill" is as large around at its base as Union Square. So white and sparkling is it in the sunlight that seafarers catch sight of it from a long distance.
The remainder of the island is not very high, and there are upon it around the borders levels with six to twelve inches of water, in which the fowl abound in their season. There are lots of ducks, brant, snipe and geese and salt water birds, brown backs, curlew, &c., awaiting the crack of the sportsman's rifle. And in the fishing season the waters thereabouts swarm with gamy specimens of the finny tribe. Sharking is one of the sports of the fishers, and seeking the sea trout another, but so many fatal accidents have occurred to parties after the latter that the sport is not a popular one.
NATIVE CHARACTERS.
There are several characters among the islanders with whom Mr. Cleveland has more than likely grown familiar. One of them is the "Sammy" Kelly whose words with the President elect have been telegraphed over the country. He is a man seventy years old, six feet six inches tall and has a voice like a woman. "Sammy" is the one merchant of Broadwater. He runs the general store and supplies the community with its few necessaries and fewer luxuries.
The George Doughty mentioned as Mr. Cleveland's assistant in his duck shooting expeditions is of the family in which were two twin brothers, Ishmail and Edmund, who, until they were ninety-five years old, had slept in the same bed without the intermission of a single night. One day a practical joker took Edmund to the mainland, filled him up on rum and kept him away all night. Ishmail, it is said, never closed his eyes. In the morning Edmund was taken back to Hog Island and laid upon the sand to recover from his spree, and Ishmail with a thankful heart trotted slowly down to where his erring brother was stretched out, oblivious of his surroundings.
"What do you think of him?" some one asked the feeble old man.
"Certainly I wish I felt like Brother Edmund," was the patriarch's reply.
Edmund and Ishmail are dead now.
Upon Hog Island the British in Revolutionary days rendezvoused and made raids upon the mainland. Upon one of these trips across the "Broadwater" they burned the old house at Warwick [plantation], the main settlement on Upshur's Neck. Some of its ruins now compose a part of the present mansion on the neck.
It was upon this quaint old place that Joseph L. Ferrell fixed for a shooting resort while he was engaged in government engineering in the vicinity about ten years ago. From a small beginning in his hands the Broadwater Club has grown until its members own nearly the entire island, have erected several cottages upon favored spots and together have built a fine club house that stands near Cove Point at the south end. The air here is soft and the winters very mild. A little steamer conveys people to it from the mainland, but none can land without permission from the club so that its members are, when they so desire, completely shut off from the outside world.
WHERE MR. CLEVELAND SHOT QUAIL.
Brownsville [plantation], where Mr. Cleveland hunted for quail on the mainland, is famous for its fowl. The name is the title given to the plantation of Colonel Thomas T. Upshur, whose uncle built the house upon it. The original settlement of the Upshurs was upon Upshur's Neck. Recently Thomas T. Upshur presented to Upshur B. Quinby, who now owns the Neck, the original yellow, moth eaten parchment upon which is inscribed the grant to the family by Alexander Spottswood, Colonial Governor of Virginia, in the seventeenth century.
They tell interesting stories of the present Upshur house at Brownsville. It is said to have been haunted during the time of William Brown Upshur. Loud rappings were heard at dead of night upon its front door. The old man was not one to be frightened by ghosts. He stood it as long as possible, but finally becoming wearied at the nocturnal disturbances he sat at night in the hallway and with bullets from a navy revolver shot the door full of holes in efforts to kill the ghost. But the rappings still continued, and it is not known to this day what was the cause of them.
The house is a large, roomy one, in the colonial style of architecture, finely finished with arched and wainscoted halls. Its interior must have struck Mr. Cleveland, as it does every other visitor, as decidedly imposing.
Colonel Upshur does a good deal of shooting himself and entertains largely during the season. His five hundred acre place is well stocked with what Northerners know as quail, but which are called in the South partridges.