Qualla: Mockhorn Island Wildlife Management Area

Mockhorn Island Wildlife Management Area: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Larimer A. Cushman, who had made his fortune selling bread in New York City, bought Mockhorn Island in 1902 and called it his Kingdom. He built a concrete sea wall four feet high around the perimeter of his low-lying farm to keep the Atlantic from poisoning his alfalfa fields at high tide. He raised Angus cattle that, in the warm months, stood up to their backs in the bay to escape the mosquitos and biting flies. The Kingdom failed. Storm surges punched through the wall. The fields turned salt. Cushman died in 1948, and his widow sold the island, and the marsh has been working it back ever since.

Mockhorn Island Wildlife Management Area: Seven Thousand Acres of Marsh

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Mockhorn Island Wildlife Management Area: Saltworks and Decoys

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Yo...

Mockhorn Island Wildlife Management Area: Cushman's Kingdom

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Mockhorn Island Wildlife Management Area: What the Sea Keeps

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 i...