Generations of Urbanna men and women made their livings working the water. In June 1680, Virginia's Colonial Assembly approved "An Act for cohabitation and encouragement of trade and manufacture" and established Urbanna as one of 20 official towns in the colony. With Virginia's tobacco-based economy depressed, the act sought to create jobs and encourage a local economy, and Urbanna's access to the fertile oyster grounds of the Rappahannock River became a significant asset. Since the mid-1700s, as the New England oyster industry declined and demand for oysters grew in northern cities, Chesapeake Bay oysters supplied that market, and for more than 150 years Urbanna's economy centered on planting, harvesting, shucking, and packing oysters. From 1800 to the mid-1900s, hundreds of tongers and suhuckers came to town on the first day of October for the opening of oyster season and remained until it closed. As seafood markets expanded to fish and crabs, Urbanna became a year-round seafood town. In the late 1940s, croakers filled the Rappahannock River and haul-seine net fishermen prospered. After the August Storm of 1933 flooded Tangier Island, island families moved to Urbanna and helped spur the growth of the town's crab fishery through their knowledge of the soft-shell crab market and life on the water. Today the town celebrates that seafood heritage on the first weekend in November with the official state of Virginia Urbanna Oyster Festival. After the Civil War, oyster beds on the Rappahannock River and Urbanna Creek provided economic relief for former slaves, as oysters brought cash income and a means to improve quality of life for people in the business. Hand oyster tongs were introduced on the Chesapeake Bay about the time Urbanna was officially founded in 1704, and during oyster season Urbanna Creek served as home port to hundreds of regional oystermen who came each year to work the fertile oyster beds of the Rappahannock River. Descendants of Tangier Island families who moved to town after 1933 still live there and work the water.