Here’s today’s building, outside the tiny town of Painter, Virginia, on that state’s Eastern Shore:

You can probably guess what this is/was, and about when it was built. That isn’t what’s interesting about it to me. (High school, early 1930s, art deco style, with an addition funded by the New Deal.) What’s interesting is where exactly it’s located:

Where did the money come from for a building like that in a place like this? Can you imagine the level of civic investment that it signifies happening here today?

There is a proximate explanation other than the New Deal. I posted about this school on Twitter, asking this question, and a professional planner who knew the area said, “Before the Bridge/tunnel [the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel] these were self reliant agricultural communities with great ports and a direct train line to Philadelphia.”

That was the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad, which at one time took you from Cape Charles, Virginia—almost 30 miles south of Painter—to Philadelphia. That is roughly this:

I really find this kind of astounding. This detail too: “The town of Cape Charles was planned and built as part of the construction of the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad.”

This all makes me think of something I wrote when I road-tripped down U.S. Route 11 in Virginia, from Winchester to Natural Bridge, and I could see that development here had begun and then abruptly stopped:

While mature sprawl would entail a densification of this pattern, neglect has thinned it out. It is really just the tunnel vision of the affluent urbanite that gives the impression that America’s land is being gobbled up and paved over. It is striking to consider that the roadside landscape here, in 1950, had more buildings than it does today.

You cannot believe in “overdevelopment” if you look at the trajectory of places like the Virginia Eastern Shore—today the state’s poorest region along with the far southwest.

And here’s a fascinating bit from a scholarly article about the Eastern Shore’s culture amid technological transformation:

Along with these changes came a form of modern confidence, a supreme conviction that the command of technology and the market gave these people unstoppable advantages. So it was that the general manager of the Eastern Shore Produce Exchange boasted that the little town of Onley had just as much advantage as Baltimore or even New York in the market.

Yet much remained beyond the control of locals and, even, the Pennsylvania Railroad. Information flow and demographic patterns only rendered these interconnections more complex and contingent. A wave of immigrants in Boston, fresh orders for the steel mills of the Mahoning Valley, or a spring drought in Florida might mean high prices for Eastern Shore potatoes while a bumper potato crop in the Kaw Valley, a textile strike in New York City, or floods on the Mississippi might depress the market. People working for the railroad or seafood dealers or agricultural commission houses continuously moved on and off the peninsula. Middle-class vacationers stopped at barrier island hotels or at bayside boarding houses. Wealthier visitors relaxed at shooting lodges or purchased second homes along the creeks. Other people settled permanently, especially in the railroad towns and seaside fishing villages.

That kind of plucky boosterism—remote small towns aspiring to compete with global cities—and that solid art deco public high school; they are today artifacts of a previous world.

Bonus: the school building, vacant for years, might be saved and repurposed!

Related Reading:

How Far to the City That’s Not on the Map?

Where Do They Shop?

Different Country

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