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A Daily News Service of the North Carolina Coastal Federation

Our Coast’s History: Remembering 1930s Sneads Ferry

by

Young boy with a gill net, New River, 1938. Photo by Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

In recent years, I have been taking Charles Farrell’s photographs of the North Carolina coast back to the fishing villages where he took them in the 1930s.

One of the places that I have enjoyed going most is Sneads Ferry, which is located on the New River in Onslow County, a short ways from the river’s inlet into the Atlantic.

In Sneads Ferry, I have been blessed that many of the village’s oldest residents and most knowledgeable local historians have been willing to sit down with me and look at Farrell’s photographs. They identified people and places, shared stories and memories and recalled a bygone way of life on the edge of the sea.

I could not be more grateful to them and I feel privileged to share at least a little of what I Iearned from them with you.

* * *

Charles Farrell took this photograph of Annie Mills Norton Wiggins in Sneads Ferry sometime between 1936 and 1939. Net needle in hand, she is mending a gill net spread out on a net rack. Local historian Sherry Thurston told me that Ms. Wiggins was born on Valentine’s Day 1894, raised six children and lived to be 95 years old. She lived at Poverty Point, where she was not the only woman that mended nets to support her family. Photo by Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina

* * *

Sneads Ferry, 1938. History, the legendary archivist George Stevenson once told me, is in the particulars. I could not find anyone in Sneads Ferry that could identify these two lads. However, Freddie Midgette, an avid local historian, told me that they were most likely visitors. After all, he said, they were wearing black boots, not “Sneads Ferry sneakers”– white rubber fisherman’s boots. Photo by Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina

* * *

This is Jim Fulcher, who was often called “the patriarch of Fulcher’s Landing.” His father, Joseph Fulcher, was the first Fulcher at what became “Fulcher’s Landing,” which made up Sneads Ferry’s busiest commercial fishing waterfront in the 1930s. Joseph Fulcher first came to the area from Davis Shore, 60 miles to the east. That was sometime between 1870 and 1880. According to family lore, he and another Davis Shorer, Kenneth Davis, first put up a tent and fished out of a campsite. Jim Fulcher’s granddaughter, Rosetta Ward, told me that she always heard that Joseph eventually went back to Davis Shore and told his family that on the New River, “Fish were so plentiful that they were jumping in the boat and the fritters were growing in the fritter trees!” (Some of my favorite coastal dishes — oyster, scallop and clam fritters!) According to Ms. Ward, other Fulchers from Davis Shore and another nearby village, Stacy, eventually followed Joseph back to what became known as “Fulcher’s Landing.” Photo by Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina

* * *

Jim Fulcher next to a clutter of fish boxes at his fish house. We can see his brother Johnny’s store and home next door. Jim Fulcher’s granddaughter, Rosetta Ward, recalled him from when she was a very little girl. She said the villagers often called him “Old Man Fulcher.” He lived in a big house on a hill, had 5 children, the fish house and a store, a small farm and the only telephone in the village. Ms. Ward told me that she still remembered the bristliness of his mustache when she used to hug and kiss him. Photo by Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina

* * *

Jim Fulcher salting fish at his fish house. His granddaughter Rosetta Ward remembered that fishermen brought their catches into the fish house all week and he paid them off on Friday nights. Trucks usually picked up the fish first thing in the morning, when the fishermen came in from the river. Other times Fulcher iced down their catches and carried them to the train station in Folkstone. When he salted fish, it was probably for his family and neighbors, but he also pickled eels and sent them north by train. Ms. Ward also recalled that her grandmother had a “roe board,” where she dried the roe of striped (jumping) mullet in the fall. Local fishermen carried the sun-dried roe in their pockets for their lunches, and so did the duck hunters that took room and board in the bunkhouse behind her grandfather’s fish house. Photo by Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina

* * *

Virginia “Ginny” Richardson — poet, country music songwriter, one-time labor union activist and devoted fisherman’s daughte –– grew up in Sneads Ferry in the 1920s and 1930s. She was already in her 90s when I first visited her. At that time, she was still writing a poem a day and sharing them on Facebook. When Ms. Ginny was a girl, she told me, Sneads Ferry was so quiet at night that she could hear her father and the other fishermen far out on the river. They would hit the sides of the boats in order to drive striped mullet, like in this photo, and other fish toward their gill nets. “You could lay in bed and hear them out there in the water,” she said. When she told me that, I could still hear in her voice the reassurance that she felt all those years ago when she heard her father out there on the river at night. Photo by Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina
Ginny Richardson immediately recognized the fisherman on the far right in this photograph. It is her father, Lester “Son” Midgett. He and the other men are “boatin’ the net,” loading their gill net back on their skiffs after emptying it of fish next to Andrew Canady’s fish house. Ginny told me that her father never went to school, but he taught himself to read. He read widely, she told me, everything from the Bible to history books. He was a fisherman, but in hard times he and the family would “work around”– picking green beans, cropping tobacco, hoeing corn, etc., for local farmers. “We were poor as church mice,” Ginny recollected. “We never really went hungry,” she said, but she made it sound as if they got close plenty of times. She recalled, for instance, how, when her dad had pneumonia and couldn’t work, she and her four brothers would take his boat and harvest oysters so they’d have something to eat. Ginny also identified the two other men in this photograph: the man on the far left is Sol Ennett, and the fisherman at the other end of the net is Tobe, or Toby, Shephard. Photo by Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina

* * *

Ginny told me that her father, Lester “Son” Midgett, right, was funny, warm hearted, gentle and humble. She was a “daddy’s girl,” she told me, and loved him fiercely. Her dad often worked all night on the river. He mostly fished gill nets, but also did some floundering. When he went floundering, he hung a wire basket filled with lightwood knots on the side of his skiff’s stern and burned them to light the bottom. “Next morning they’d look like raccoons because of the smoke,” she told me, laughing at the memory. She said her dad usually sold his catch to Jim Fulcher or Andrew Canady, who both had fish houses at Fulcher’s Landing. In the fall, she remembered her father chasing roe mullet up the New River. He’d stay a week, camping on the bank, and sold his catch in Jacksonville, a small town that was the seat of Onslow County. Photo by Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina

* * *

Melba Marines McKeever was born across the river from Sneads Ferry, in the village of Marines, in 1925, but used to visit Sneads Ferry with her father. Melba, who just recently passed away, had a stunningly good memory of life on the New River when she was a child. I met her by a stroke of luck: my friend Dennis Chadwick used to be captain of one of the state ferries that runs between Cedar Island and Ocracoke Island and Melba was one of his passengers. They got to talking and Dennis later put me in touch with her. When I showed her this photograph, she thought that this young man might be the son of a woman named Bessie Riggs. She remembered Riggs as a widow who lived at Poverty Point and scratched out a living as a net mender. On the back of this photograph, Charles Farrell noted that the village boys this age were frequently already working on fishing boats with their fathers. Up to that time, most would have followed in their fathers’ footsteps and become fishermen. That was changing on the eve of World War II, however. By the time of Farrell’s last visit to Sneads Ferry early in 1941, the village’s boys were already joining the U.S. Armed Forces (especially the Navy). In addition, the construction of Camp Davis 10 miles west and Camp Lejeune just across the river would transform the local economy for generations to come. Fishing would be far from the only job available to the next generation of boys from Sneads Ferry, and most of those jobs paid a lot better than fishing. Photo by Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina

* * *

A father and son gill net fishing from a pair of skiffs on the New River, 1937-41. The Atlantic Ocean was hardly more than a stone’s throw downriver, but in Sneads Ferry the estuarine waters of the New River were home. In the early 1930s, Ginny Richardson told me, “just about everybody” worked on the river. She said that her family did go out to the ocean inlet on occasion though, such as in the early spring when they gathered a mustardy wild green that she called “sea kale” (I know it as “sea rocket”) among the dunes. Photo by Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina

* * *

Unidentified man, Fulcher’s Landing, 1938. All I know about this gentleman is from a note that Charles Farrell wrote on the back of the original print: “He does odd jobs about Fulcher’s.” Photo by Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina

* * *

Ginny’s “Pappy,” her grandfather Louis L. Midgett, left, at Moore Landing in Sneads Ferry, late 1930s. “One of the best men of all the good men I have known and still know in my long life on this earth,” Ginny once wrote me. Her grandfather and the other two, unidentified men are carrying bags of cornmeal on their shoulders. According to Ginny, they have just come across the river from the village of Marines, where they had taken their corn to a grist mill. At that time, Marines had a grist mill, but Sneads Ferry did not. Photo by Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina

* * *

Ms. Ginny believed this was a side view of one of the local fish houses, probably Andrew Canady’s. Her father is in the center of the group of men with his back to us. Her grandfather, Louis Midgett, stands just to the right of him. To the left, we can see gill nets drying on net racks beneath a large live oak tree. Note that there are ash oarlocks on all the skiffs, not motors. “If you were from Slab Town, that’s what you had,” Ron Brown, another Sneads Ferry old timer, told me. He meant that the fishermen in Slabtown, a neighborhood just on the other side of Fulcher’s Landing, were too poor to pay for motors and gasoline during the Great Depression. Photo by Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina

* * *

Ginny told me that Ramp Jones used to make social rounds of the village every day when she was a child and always stopped by her home. “He was impatient with children,” she said. Several people told me that Jones had been a Coastguardsman in his younger days. Some thought he had also served on merchant ships and/or in the U.S. Navy. In his later years, he apparently spent many an hour contemplating the world from this porch and smoking his pipe. Photo by Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina

* * *

This is either John Henry Fulcher (Jim Fulcher’s brother) at his store in Fulcher’s Landing or Jim Fulcher behind the counter at John Henry Fulcher’s store. The store was in big, two-story house next to Jim’s fish house. In a reminiscence written in the 1980s, John Henry’s daughter Edna Fisher recalled her father: “Papa would get up and go out ‘in the midnight’ to fish. He would return home early in the morning, in time to prepare breakfast for the children. (His wife Edna had died around 1910 and he was raising 5 children on his own)…. After he grew older and no longer able to fish, he opened a store at the Landing.” All five of his children eventually built homes within sight of the store. “Every evening we would all get together at ‘Papa’s store’ and just sit around the little stove and share the happenings of the day.” Ms. Fisher recalled: “Every day after Papa ate his lunch, which usually consisted of fried fish and homemade biscuits, prepared by one of his daughters, he would lie down in the sunshine on the side porch of the house. One of the grandchildren would come and gently rub his head until he went to sleep.” Photo by Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina. Excerpt from The Heritage of Onslow County, N.C. (Jacksonville, N.C.: Onslow Co. Historical Society, 1983)

* * *

Andrew Canady’s store at Fulcher’s Landing in Sneads Ferry 1938. Ginny recognized all three of the young ladies in this photograph from her younger days: Canady’s daughter Clara Mae on the left, Mabel Riggs on the right, and the little girl is Geraldine Willis. Mabel’s nickname was “Specks” because of her freckles. People called Clara Mae “Sister.” Photo by Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina

* * *

Places mean different things to different people. When Melba Marines McKeever was a little girl in the 1920s and ’30s, her father used to take her across the river on his boat to visit Sneads Ferry. On those trips, Melba told me, she was afraid to get out of the boat because she had heard so many stories about the village being “a tough place”– hard drinking, clannish and none too friendly to outsiders. Rosetta Ward, Jim Fulcher’s granddaughter, on the other hand, saw Sneads Ferry in a different light. “People were friendly and people looked after one another,” she reminisced when I talked to her. “Everybody knew everybody– nobody was afraid like they are now,” she said. She didn’t pretend it wasn’t a rough place though. “Used to be times it seemed like they used to have fights on a Saturday night just for entertainment,” she told me. Photo by Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina

-End-

Note from the author

Poet, songwriter and fisherman’s daughter Virginia “Ginny” Richardson at the community meeting in Sneads Ferry. I did a slide presentation of Farrell’s local photographs and the people in attendance shared stories about the people and places in them. Photo by David Cecelski

A thousand thanks to Ron Brown, Dennis Chadwick, Dolly Fulcher, Jim Fulcher, Joe Fulcher, Michael Fulcher, Melba Marines McKeever, Freddie Midgette, Ginny Midgett Richardson, Betsy Taylor Sergomassov, Sheri Thurston, Rosetta Ward and David Yopp for sharing so much of their time, knowledge and wisdom with me. I cannot tell you how much it means to me.

Special thanks also to all the people who came out to the community meeting in Sneads Ferry. I learned so much from you all. For a historian like me, there’s just nothing more fun!

I’d also like to extend a very special thanks to Kim Andersen, the long-time head of photographic collections (now retired) at the State Archives of North Carolina, for so patiently assisting me in finding and copying Farrell’s photographs. Thanks to Kim and her colleagues, the entire Charles A. Farrell Photographic Collection is now available on the State Archives’ flickr site.

I would also like to thank to my old high school friend Peggy Garner, without whom I don’t think the community meeting in Sneads Ferry would have been possible. And for many different kinds of help, I want to thank Amelia Dees-Killette at the Swansboro Area Heritage Center Museum and Lisa Whitman-Grice and Patricia Hughey at the Onslow County Museum in Richlands.

To learn more about Sneads Ferry’s history, by the way, I highly recommend Ginny Richardson’s lovely, lyrical memoir, “Memory as a River: Recollections of the People and Places in the Small Fishing Village of Sneads Ferry, North Carolina.“

Taking Charles Farrell’s photographs back to Sneads Ferry, discovering these stories and getting to know you all has been such a joy — thank you, thank you, thank you.

About David Cecelski

Historian David Cecelski shares his time between Durham and his family's homeplace in Carteret County. He has written several award-winning books and hundreds of articles about history, culture and politics on the North Carolina coast. His writing focuses on telling stories from his little corner of the world that illuminate American history more broadly. Dr. Cecelski was recently the co-recipient of the N.C. Literary and Historical Association’s Crittenten Award for lifetime achievement.

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