“Sure, that’s Juke Marshall,” he said. “Lives in Crisfield. Want his number?”
When John Woodland Crisfield brought the railroad to the sleepy Maryland village of Somers Cove in 1867, it sparked an economic boom so massive that the town simply had to change its name. Situated on the bay side of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, roughly two hours north of Norfolk, Crisfield occupies an enviable perch: nestled between two of the richest oyster and blue crab grounds in the Chesapeake Bay — the Tangier and Pocomoke sounds. It is for this reason that the town of 2,800 souls still receives little challenge to its boast as the “Crab Capital of the World.” But after decades of declining bay health and lackluster harvests, the town is a shadow of its former self.
Crisfield’s other, perhaps less glamorous, claim to fame is being the port of call to the historic fishing village of Tangier Island, which lies just 12 miles off its harbor, across the Tangier Sound. From Crisfield, Tangier receives its mail, its groceries, its prescriptions, its lumber and the bulk of its summer-season tourists. With no industry, no crops, no cattle and no timber to speak of, only what it can wrest from the unpredictable bay, Tangier and its 604 inhabitants depend on Crisfield for just about everything. And for some, that includes a little nip.
“Don’t let ’em tell you they don’t drink,” said Trish, the bartender at the Waterman’s Inn, a local restaurant and watering hole on Crisfield’s main drag. “Yeah, I’ve served most of ‘em.” Tangier, it should be noted, has been dry since its much-storied conversion to Methodism in the early 1800s. This fact, Trish pointed out, only means that the men have to hide their liquor on their boats or slip over to Crisfield undetected.
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