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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We were ready to take them on, Franktown-Nassawadox coach Joe Gibb told the paper.

But first, some major-league feasting.

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.

The boys who came over just gorged themselves on the goodies. No one noticed that the island boys held back.

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Barrier Islands Center hails old times on Hog Island