1942 Smith Island Waterfront Cottage, Furnished, Water Front and Rear — $75,000

Smith Island sits about 12 miles offshore in the Chesapeake Bay, and you can only get there by boat. There are no bridges. The island has been inhabited since the 1600s and the population has been shrinking for decades. Ewell is one of its three small villages. This cottage is in Rhodes Point, another of those villages, and it has open water on both sides of it.

The house is 984 square feet. Two bedrooms, one bath, built in 1942. The hardwood floors are original and the standing seam metal roof appears to be in good shape. It comes furnished, which on an island you can only reach by ferry means something, since getting anything out there takes real effort.

There is structural damage in the dining room. The listing does not say how bad it is or what caused it, so you would need to see it in person and get a contractor's eyes on it before you could know what you are dealing with. The water has been shut off and the house has been winterized. It is being sold as-is.

At $75,000 for a waterfront property on a place this remote and historically significant, the price reflects the condition and the circumstances. The water is visible from the front of the house and from the back. You can launch a kayak or fish from the shoreline on foot.

Smith Island is the kind of place that shows up in history books about the Chesapeake. The watermen who still work there harvest blue crabs. The community is small, the island is low, and the future of a place this exposed to sea level rise is a real question. Buying here is buying into all of that. The appeal is the isolation, the water, and the piece of something that does not exist anywhere else on the bay. The ask is taking on a structurally compromised 80-year-old cottage in a place where every repair costs more because of where it is.