Mockhorn Island Wildlife Management Area covers 7,356 acres in Northampton County on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Most of that area is the island itself, 7,000 acres separated from the mainland and the outer barrier islands by shallow bays, and most of the island is salt marsh that submerges at high tide. What stands above the water at all hours are hummocks, scattered humps of slightly higher ground where loblolly pine, eastern redcedar, southern wax myrtle, greenbriar, honeysuckle, and poison ivy take hold. The Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries owns and manages the area for waterfowl hunting, fishing, hiking, and primitive camping. The island is reachable only by boat. A smaller 356-acre tract of marsh and upland sits on the mainland, where additional species may be hunted in season.

Europeans first settled Mockhorn in the seventeenth century for a single purpose: boiling sea water to make salt. The saltworks did not last, and by the early nineteenth century the island had been broken into tracts and turned over to cattle. After the Civil War, when the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad finished its line down the Delmarva Peninsula, the Virginia barrier islands became playgrounds for wealthy northern sportsmen who arrived by train and crossed by boat. Mockhorn's waterfowl hunting club was founded in the mid-1800s by Nathan Cobb, Jr., a market hunter and one of the great American decoy carvers. His father Nathan Cobb, Sr., had established a similar sportsman's resort on Cobb Island just to the north. Decoys carved by the Cobbs are now museum pieces; the marshes the family hunted remain marshes.

In 1902 Larimer A. Cushman, who owned the Cushman Bakeries of New York City, bought the island and went further than the hunters before him had gone. He expanded the existing hunting lodge into a comfortable home. He built a barn and a smoke house. He cleared pastures for cattle and broke fields for alfalfa. The concrete sea wall, four feet tall, was meant to hold back the Atlantic at high water; when Cushman retired from the bakery business he and his wife moved south and lived on Mockhorn year-round. But the farm was off-grid, accessible only by boat. The mosquitos drove the cattle into the bay every summer. Nor'easters and hurricanes pushed storm surges over the wall and poisoned the alfalfa with salt. After Cushman's death in 1948 his widow sold the island to T.A.D. Jones, the Yale football coach turned businessman, who used the compound for nearly a decade to entertain military and political guests flown in by helicopter for duck hunting. Jones died in 1957. The Commonwealth of Virginia acquired the island in 1959.

The Cushman house still stands on Mockhorn, or what is left of it. The barn collapsed in 2019. A second outbuilding fell in 2021. Of the World War II fire control towers that the Army built on Mockhorn to direct the coastal artillery at Fort John Custis and Fort Story, just one is still upright, a steel skeleton visible above the cordgrass at low tide. Everything else the marsh has reclaimed at its own pace. The Kingdom Cushman ringed with concrete is now a place where cordgrass grows over salt-poisoned alfalfa fields, where pine hummocks scatter across a flooded landscape, and where the only year-round residents are the birds the hunters once came north to find.