Qualla: Smith Island, Virginia

Smith Island, Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Blackbeard hauled his sloops onto Smith Island to scrape barnacles from their hulls. A creek and a cove on the island still bear his name. In September 1717, off the cape just to the south, he and Captain Benjamin Hornigold captured a sloop called the Betty and plundered her cargo of Madeira wine before scuttling her. A century later, Robert E. Lee rode out to inspect this same low island on behalf of his wife's family, counted the cattle, and wrote that Smith Island was "nearer the level of the sea than I expected to find it."

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Smith Island, Virginia: Captain Smith's Salt

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Captain John Smith, the Jamestown explorer, mapped the island in 1608, and his name stuck. In 1614 Governor Thomas Dale sent twenty men under Lieutenant William Craddock to set up a saltworks here, boiling Atlantic seawater down to crystal for the struggling Virginia colony. The ...

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Smith Island, Virginia: A Family Holding

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

John Custis received Smith Island as a colonial grant in 1691, and his descendants held it for the next two and a quarter centuries. Among them was Martha Custis, the young widow of Daniel Parke Custis who later married George Washington; she carried the island into her second ma...

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Smith Island, Virginia: Blackbeard's Creek

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Edward Teach, the pirate Blackbeard, found the area off the Virginia Capes fertile pirating ground in the early eighteenth century, and Smith Island made a convenient stopover. The careening was practical: hauling a sloop onto a soft beach, tipping her over, scraping the barnacle...

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Smith Island, Virginia: Empty Island

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cattle grazed Smith Island into the 1920s. In the mid-twentieth century a waterfowl hunting club moved in for the seasonal trade. Three steel skeleton watchtowers went up on the island during World War II, built by the Army for coastal observation; they still stand. The Cape Char...

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