Second in a series
In January 1972, Earl Slick purchased the Pine Island Hunt Club for $2.75 million.
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It was in some ways a steal. The nearly 3,000-acre tract ran from the Atlantic Ocean to the Currituck Sound and included miles of oceanfront, pristine marsh, wooded uplands and interior ponds. A two-story white clapboard lodge straddled a sprawling grass field and freshwater pond built for migrating waterfowl. On blue sky days it was possible to see three miles across the shallow sound to the distant mainland towns of Coinjock and Moyock. Look to the east and the even darker blue ocean limned the sand dunes.
Slick was unsure what to do with the historic property now that he owned it – or if he even wanted to keep it. He wavered between developing it and preserving it. Between building a small arcadia of cottages and leaving the rest alone, a sanctuary.
In 1973, he asked William E. Hollan Jr., who had recently begun working for him, to see if the National Audubon Society, The Nature Conservancy or the federal government might be interested in buying the tract. “He thought at the time he could flip it to a conservation entity,” Hollan recalled. “I spent about a year trying to find some type of nonprofit or government entity to acquire Pine Island at cost. … At that time there was no money or no interest.”
Slick didn’t want the Currituck Banks to be swamped by development the way Kill Devil Hills and Nags Head had been in the postwar building boom that transformed the Lower Banks into a vacation resort. Currituck County commissioners shared his concern and asked for Slick’s help as they scrambled to formulate a plan to manage the expected growth. In a controversial move, Slick agreed to restrict traffic through his property unless developers agreed to cluster-style resorts with centralized utilities. But slowing the wave of development was never going to be easy. Developers and speculators had already acquired 6,000 lots on the Currituck Banks, and another 5,000 were listed for sale. It seemed inevitable that a road would eventually be built.
And it was.
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Unable to sell the property, Slick tried to develop it. For help, he turned to his first cousins, Joe and Rex Frates, real estate developers from Oklahoma, and their associate Devane Clarke from Dallas, Texas. The out-of-state trio entered into a partnership with Slick to design and market a modest resort. “They sent out a man and he did a lot of work,” Hollan said. “The idea was to build 50 to 100 cottages around the Pine Island Club House. They would leave the rest of the property open. It would have a low-density appearance.”
But the timing couldn’t have been worse. In 1973, the nation slipped into a lengthy recession after OPEC implemented an oil embargo. Real estate projects dried up everywhere and the Frates brothers and Devane Clark found themselves squeezed for cash. The plan for Pine Island stalled as well. The cousins met with Slick and it was decided to end the partnership. “I think they looked at the plan and said this is just not marketable. We’re not going to get our investment back. We would like to gracefully back out,” Hollan recalled.
Slick turned his attention to the southern portion of his Pine Island holdings, known as the South Mile, near the border of Dare County. He had sold a small tract to the Venture Management Group, which included John C. Whitaker Jr., the son of Slick’s Winston-Salem friend, John Whitaker Sr., the CEO of Reynolds Tobacco. The young developers modeled their Sanderling resort – named for the small, puffy sandpipers that skitter along the beaches – after the restrained, Nags Head style cottages of old, advertising Sanderling as “Life the way it was” on the Outer Banks. There were no pools or tennis courts but lots of trails and quiet, natural spaces.
The group developed two sections of Sanderling but then stopped. Once more, Slick faced a dilemma: find someone to continue building or sell and recoup some of his original investment. Hollan said Slick leaned toward selling but that he convinced his boss to allow him to take over the project. They finished six additional sections and in 1986 added an inn with 29 condominium-style rooms. Over time, more condominiums were added, a spa and tennis facility, and two restaurants, one basically a coffee shop, the other for fine dining. A copy of Audubon’s “Birds of America” was placed in the lobby of the inn.
“Mr. Slick wanted it to resemble a hunting lodge,” Hollan said.
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Earl Slick didn’t run Pine Island like other hunting clubs. There were no memberships, meaning you couldn’t buy your way in. You had to be invited. Slick kept a close group of friends from his Yale days and business dealings. Many were from the Winston-Salem area. But there were also friends from Nova Scotia and a “flying preacher” who likely landed his plane on an airstrip Slick built near the marsh. There was a men’s only trip, trips with wives, a dove-hunting trip in September, trips to fish, and of course opening day of duck hunting season in December – maybe a dozen trips a year, said Hollan.
The guests might hunt for an hour or two, have lunch at Pine Island or The Narrows, play cards (Slick loved to bet and to win), and enjoy a drink before supper. The bar was fully stocked and there was usually a bottle of Aquavit in the freezer. Slick stuck with vodka, gin or light rum, depending on the season and his mood. The upstairs bedrooms were small and spare but comfortable enough. Later, Slick built several cabin-style houses for his wife and family in the upland woods overlooking the fields and marsh. His daughter Phyllis and Paul Mickey Sr., the Steptoe & Johnson attorney, also built cabins nearby.
One of Slick’s favorite guests was Donal O’Brien, a prominent New York City attorney for the Rockefellers and a board member of the Audubon Society. He came every year with his wife Kate. O’Brien was a legendary fundraiser and likely met Slick that way. Slick donated to Audubon and was the recipient of various conservation awards. The duo got along famously. O’Brien was a natural storyteller, discreet, humble, and he could shoot. He quickly saw the value of the Pine Island marshes as a refuge for birds and in March 1977 wrote an impassioned memo to his board following a solitary morning hike.
“There must have been 2,000 birds, mostly Pintails and Canada Geese, but there were others as well – Blacks, Ducks, Mallards and Green-Winged Teal. I was stunned by this spectacle. I know I had never seen so many waterfowl in one place at one time … and in those magical moments of that March sunrise, I knew that this was a property that had to be saved for the ages.”
A year later, in August 1978, Earl Slick agreed to donate half of Pine Island to Audubon and help to endow a fund for the planned sanctuary. As part of the agreement, Slick continued to manage the property for a decade, while also earning a generous tax break, spread over several years. Initially. Audubon agreed to pay Currituck County property taxes on the tract but then reversed itself, fearing the nonprofit was setting a precedent that could affect its other land holdings.
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A decade later, in 1989, Donal O’Brien approached Slick with a new idea. According to Hollan, O’Brien proposed to Slick that Audubon give back most of the oceanfront it had received as part of the original donation. In return, Slick would give Audubon the remaining marsh he owned. Audubon officials described the deal as a win-win. The marsh held more value for migrating birds; it was a safe place for the birds to rest and feed. Slick, on the other hand, would add prized oceanfront. This at a time ocean property was doubling and tripling in value.
Slick saw the value of the swap. But Hollan said he was concerned how the trade would look. “He didn’t want to be thought of as a slick (no pun intended) real estate developer.” There had to be a net gain to Audubon, so Slick decided to also give the nonprofit the 1,000 acres of mainland marsh he owned as part of The Narrows Hunting Club. After the trade, Audubon controlled about 3,000-acres of marsh, while Slick owned most of the oceanfront from Sanderling to Pine Island.
Slick, now nearly 70, wanted to move quickly. The market for oceanfront real estate had begun to veer toward larger, more luxurious houses from the more restrained cottages that John Whitaker Jr. built as part of the original Sanderling. Instead of passing second homes across generations, investors saw the bigger homes as money machines — a way to generate both sizable tax breaks and profits by renting them to vacationers for up to $10,000 a week. An investor could pay off his or her mortgage in less than a decade and use the profits to buy another house, and then maybe another. Currituck, once a lonely outpost, was fast becoming a source of vast wealth for developers, investors, and county officials.
Slick owned the land. But Hollan turned to a popular local builder, Bob DeGabrielle, to develop and market Pine Island. In a bio, DeGabrielle writes that he developed and sold over $1 Billion worth of real estate on the Outer Banks. After he retired in the 2000’s, he became one of the early entrepreneurs in the emerging cannabis industry, founding the largest outdoor cannabis farm in North America. In 2001, he sold the farm for $67 million.
“Bob is a force of nature, very enthusiastic, the most efficient person I’ve ever met in my life,” Hollan said. “He started at 5 in the morning … and he carried two Dictaphones with him.”
DeGabrielle built to the new luxury market – houses with six to 10 bedrooms, HGTV-style kitchens, entertainments centers, and pocket pools fronting the sand dunes. On weekends, it wasn’t uncommon to see a dozen cars parked in driveways. But where the oceanfront narrowed along the South Mile, the long rows of houses appeared crowded together. Not everyone was happy. Stories and letters to the editor appeared in local newspapers. The writers complained that Pine Island changed the aesthetics and economics of the Banks. They weren’t wrong. But it was too late to pine for the old days. The Outer Banks were now driven by wealth and that wasn’t about to change.
Hollan told me that Slick, who passed away in 2007, at the age of 86, was pleased with the houses. “I think the Audubon thing worked out well,” he said. “I think it was what he wanted to see happen and I helped to bring it to fruition.
“Yeah, those are bigger lots than typical lots, but those are bigger houses,” he continued. “They are what they are. It’s not Sanderling. It is a nice community.”
In June 2022, I arranged to visit the Pine Island sanctuary, just a stone’s toss from the oceanfront mega houses. Robbie Fearn, the manager of the sanctuary the last decade, took me on a tour of the century-old lodge before we picked our way through the nearby woods to a pocket beach where brackish water has crept ever higher and created a ghost forest.
In the distance, a car speeding past the mansions left a contrail of noise but then was gone. At one point, Fearn, medium-built and thoughtful, raised his hands as if addressing the sky. “Isn’t it amazing,” he said, meaning the road, the cars, the mansions, and this startling refuge for thousands of migrating birds. “In the summer all of these cars fly by and I don’t think any of them even know we are here. It’s as if we don’t exist.”
