According to Data USA as of 2022, Tangier Island, part of Accomack County, Virginia, was home to 345 citizens with a median age of 57.3 years. Located 19 sea miles from Reedville, Tangier sits nearly in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, an isolated oasis in the midst of the ocean-like Chesapeake Bay. It is a place that can only be accessed by boat, ferry or airplane.
Since 1850, it is estimated that the island’s land mass has been reduced by 67 percent. Opinions swirl about coastal erosion versus climate change regarding what is responsible for Tangier’s shrinking land mass. In the midst of all the statistics, an older population demographic and even dire predictions from some regarding the island’s future viability, island native Cameron Evans, 24, Tangier’s vice-mayor, remains committed to his island home and its way of life.

Cameron Evans
“I graduated in 2018 with only six people in my class,” Evans remembers. “I went to college at Virginia Wesleyan University in Virginia Beach and graduated as a business major with minors in political science and art.”
Evans grew up on Tangier and worked in his dad’s crabhouse, adding that he watched over his dad’s crabs when he was ten years old. People today who visit the island will immediately notice such crabhouses or shanties, colorful clapboard structures with docks raised up on stilts in the water. Watermen use these buildings as they work on their boats and also utilize them to store crabbing gear. The structures also can house tanks or shallow tables filled with water and “peelers,” hard-shell crabs that show signs of molting. Peelers are kept here, where they are checked on until they are fully shed. It is an intricate dance of sorts, as watermen only have a small portion of time to harvest the crabs as soft-shell crabs before shells harden again, leaving “green crabs” that cannot be sold as soft-shells.

Tangier Aerial
Evans’ dad Norwood is originally from nearby Smith Island and his mom Hope is a Tangier native. For the past dozen years, Evans’ father has worked an electrical lineman job on the island. After a few years working in crabhouses, Cameron Evans worked as a young teenager as a mate aboard crabbing boats in the Chesapeake Bay. An epiphany of sorts happened when he was 16 and got his first camera, a Canon Rebel 35mm, later “upgrading” to a Canon D and 5D Mark 4. As he started snapping photos around his island home, Evans began to believe it was important to document the island and the waterman’s way of life that he experienced growing up.
“I learned from my mistakes,” Evans says about his photography. “I believe living in this area gives me plenty of areas to focus on, with watermen, nature, boats, sunrises. As a teenager I decided to try to print some pictures I had taken, and I started making money with that. I quit working on the water and focused on my photography.”
He adds, “I realize now at this point in time I may be seeing the last generation of watermen. I am in the fire department and the EMS and see people age. I watched a lot of people pass away. I realized with the loss of land, an aging population and wildlife maybe finding nesting grounds elsewhere, I wanted to capture that.”
He carried his passion for photography with him into college and became, he says, the main photographer for Virginia Wesleyan’s marketing and communications department as well as their sports department. By his sophomore year of college, he had also received his captain’s license via Tidewater Community College. After college, he returned to Tangier and began Cameron Evans Photography. He combines his photography business with another venture called Tangier Island Outfitters, a business which offers boat tours around Tangier, seaglass and artifact hunting excursions, crabhouse tours, birding tours, fishing tours and kayak rentals. In addition to selling his own photography work via prints, he also produces and sell an annual Tangier calendar.
“I am certified to take six people out on my boat, and I do tours and excursions. In the winter I am hunting—duck hunting,” he explains. “I don’t rent boats, but I do rent kayaks. My dad and I are the last [duck hunting] guides left on the island.”
The island had no inhabitants when John Smith first visited it in 1608. By 1670, a tavern owner named Ambrose White received a patent for the island, later transferred to others who used the island to graze livestock. John Crockett was the first permanent Anglo-American settler in the late eighteenth century. Common island surnames include Crockett, Pruitt, Evans and Parks. By 1900, the population had climbed to 1,064 people, and at one time in the early twentieth century, the population topped out at 1,500 people.
There is a strong tradition of Christianity on the island, with a local ordinance prohibiting the sale of alcohol and a history that includes 1800s revival meetings. Because of ties to the Northern Methodist Church, Tangier residents did not support slavery and did not join Virginia in seceding from the Union during the Civil War.
Many islanders still speak a distinctive English dialect that harkens back to original English underpinnings. This local accent has been compared to the “hoi toiders” of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, but the dialects are distinct.
Tangier and nearby islands provide valuable tidal salt marsh habitat for waterfowl. Tangier and its marshes are home to many birds, including blue herons, pelicans, osprey and many varieties of ducks and geese. The area is one of the few remaining population strongholds for American Black Ducks in Virginia.
Some smaller uninhabited islands surround Tangier. The largest, Uppards, just north of the main island, was once called Canaan and was home to 40 families before its 1928 abandonment when the channel separating it from Tangier was enlarged.
Today Tangier residents get around via golf carts, scooters, bikes or walking. There is one school, the Tangier Combined School, the sole comprehensive K-12 public school, and one medical clinic, the Nichols Health Center. Internet access, phone and cable TV are available. There is a museum, restaurants and gift shops. Several scattered B&Bs and short term rentals dot Tangier for those who want to spend more than a day on the island, as well as establishments like The Brigadune Inn and The Bay View Inn. Island industries include educational services, warehousing and transportation and retail trade.

Tangier Sunrise
Tourism is a major component of Tangier’s economy, with spring, summer and early fall attracting cruise boats who transport tourists for island day trips; such trips generally run May-October each year. Dubbed “the softshell crab capital of the world,” Tangier’s ebb and flow of life still is dictated by crabbing and fishing in summer and oystering and fishing in winter, even as changes in these industries continue to occur.
Evans says the whole western side of Tangier is protected by a jetty system, one implemented in 1990 and another in 2020. For years, he says, people have focused on the northern part of the area but says he has shifted his focus to the east “where the population is.”
“With land loss, it’s getting less and less marshland, which is the barrier between the water and peoples’ property,” he explains. “I want to see land restoration. I think we need to use dredged material to build back the land…in an area where we continue to lose land, it would be nice to build it back.”
He adds, “We have always had our channels dredged—now Virginia is more lenient as to where the sediment goes so it could be used rather than dumping it back into the Chesapeake Bay.”
Evans, who admits his parents are happy that he is “back home,” has pieced together a livelihood and a lifestyle from many disparate but related parts.
“I made a business around everything I enjoy doing,” he notes. “Right now, I have been selling [photography] prints and also have an online shop. I also travel to different shows, mainly waterfowl shows [to sell my work], and I also do photography workshops. The photography workshops usually last two and half days and include room and board, transportation on the island and it covers all of Tangier and nesting bird sites. I can put photographers in a different place [than they would see on an island day trip].”
He adds, “Most people who visit Tangier, maybe 80 percent only come for two or three hours. We have a lot of nature here. I feel like this is one of the last places that is not greatly commercialized.”

Morning Light Crab Pots and Crab House
Recently he bought a house on Tangier and is remodeling it himself. He plans to live there but also use it for business, including hosting visitors who come for his workshops or hunting trips.
Last year he went to Africa and traveled to Alaska the year before. The Africa jaunt came about after a hunting client who could not come hunting with him on Tangier asked if he could accompany them on their African trip and take pictures.
“That was the longest time I did not see a body of water,” he remembers. “We were about three hours from the coast. They did some big game hunting and bird hunting.”
Evans says once remodeling on his house is completed, he hopes to travel maybe two or three weeks at a time. He adds, “I want to see my photography business grow more. I want to do more workshops and more tours. I want to see Tangier get bigger with land restoration… coastal erosion won’t go away, but we can fight against it.”
For more information: www.cameronevansphotography.com. Cameron Evans Photography/Gallery and Tangier Island Outfitters (boat excursions, kayak rentals-link on website) is located where tour boats dock (open 11:30 -4:00). If not open, please reach out to him: waterfowlti@gmail.com/1-757-710-8162 or his website.