Hog Island is a barrier island located in Northampton County, Virginia, and is a part of the Virginia Coast Reserve of The Nature Conservancy. Starting in the mid-19th century the town of Broadwater, Virginia was located on the southern end of the island, but had to be abandoned in the 1930s when rapid beach erosion made its continued existence untenable. However, many of the houses and other buildings were floated by barge to the mainland and can be found in Willis Wharf, Virginia and Oyster, Virginia.
In 2008, in conjunction with the Barrier Islands Center in Machipongo, Virginia, filmmaker James Spione directed a documentary, Our Island Home, which featured three of the last surviving people to be born on Hog Island. The film grew out of an ongoing oral history project at the Center designed to record survivors' memories of a bygone way of life on the island.
Since 1987 it has served as a major ecological research location for the Virginia Coast Reserve Long-Term Ecological Research (VCR/LTER) project [1]. Hog Island is one of three primary ecological research stations used by faculty and students at the University of Virginia.