Chesapeake Bay Week Film Festival: Resurrecting Poplar Island Screening & Discussion

Poplar Island, like so many other islands in the Chesapeake Bay, was vanishing, steadily sinking into ever-rising water. By the 1990s, all that remained were a few wispy bars of sand, no more than five acres in all. Once, it had thrummed with life: a haven for British warships, a home to more than 100 people, a hideout for bootleggers and moonshiners, and a hunting retreat that hosted the likes of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. But in time, Chesapeake Bay reclaimed the island, eroding its shores and swallowing its stories.  

Resurrecting Poplar Island salvages those stories from the sea, chronicling the small community that made Poplar its home and the frantic effort to save the graves of some of those inhabitants as the island slipped beneath the waves. Its eventual resurrection was–and continues to be–one of the most ambitious environmental engineering projects on the planet.  

Poplar Island’s ongoing restoration is the result of an extraordinary collaboration among state and federal agencies. Material dredged from nearby shipping channels is the foundation for what has become a stunning ecosystem, populated by an ever-growing list of species. Researchers monitor the environment year-round, studying the diamondback terrapins, endangered shorebirds, and striped bass that take shelter in the pristine wetlands.  

The film explores the island’s past and present–and what success here could mean for the future of the other disappearing islands in the Bay and beyond. Resurrecting Poplar Island was produced in cooperation with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.