By Lorraine Eaton The Virginian-Pilot July 4, 2012 <\/p>\n
Perhaps the good women of Hog Island sensed they were staging a food fight that day. Perhaps they did not. <\/p>\n
But on July 4, 1925, following days of kneading, frying, roasting, steaming, beating, baking and boiling, residents of the remote barrier island greeted a flotilla of Eastern Shore mainlanders for their Fourth of July picnic and baseball game, a church fundraiser and one of the areas biggest events of the year. <\/p>\n
Awaiting the visitors were fried chicken and shorebirds. Roast mutton and beef. Clam fritters and crabcakes. Collards and corn cakes. All manner of garden vegetables. <\/p>\n
And for dessert, each Hog Island woman made the cake or pie that she was most famous for, recalled Yvonne Widgeon, who lived on the rapidly eroding island as a child. <\/p>\n
Among the 1925 visitors: the Franktown-Nassawadox baseball team, composed of the mainlands best high school players. One of them, according to an account published years later in the Eastern Shore News, would become a pitcher for the College of William and Mary. <\/p>\n
We were ready to take them on, Franktown-Nassawadox coach Joe Gibb told the paper. <\/p>\n
But first, some major-league feasting. <\/p>\n
Hog Island women were famous for their cooking, said Laura Vaughan, executive director of the Barrier Islands Center museum, located in Machipongo on the Eastern Shore mainland. <\/p>\n
The boys who came over just gorged themselves on the goodies. No one noticed that the island boys held back. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Read more here: <\/p>\n
Barrier Islands Center hails old times on Hog Island<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Lorraine Eaton The Virginian-Pilot July 4, 2012 Perhaps the good women of Hog Island sensed they were staging a food fight that day. Perhaps they did not Continue reading