The acclaimed coastal scientist Orrin Pilkey, who died at the age of 90 on Sunday, had more stories than an old wet dog.

A few years back, we were sitting around the kitchen table in the retirement community in Durham, North Carolina, where he lived in later years. It was a comfortable apartment, messy with books and papers and walls filled with Orrin’s impressive collection of Indian arrowheads. Importantly, it was close to Orrin’s beloved Duke University, where he taught coastal science for a half-century and still had a coveted parking space in the faculty lot.

Orrin was telling me how he grew up in Richland, Washington, near the Hanford Reservation Reactor.

“We used to play in the puddles after it rained,” he said. “It drove my mother crazy. When the whistle went off, she would rush to the door and call us kids inside because they were about to release a radioactive cloud. We liked to say the dogs in Richland all glowed at night. It was great fun growing up there.”

In a 2019 book, “The Geography of Risk, Epic Storms, Rising Seas, And The Cost of America’s Coasts,” I described Orrin this way: “Pilkey is a short, square hobbit of a man, with an unruly gray beard and a disarming sense of humor. Depending on your point of view, he is either a prophet or the antichrist of the coast.”

I worried a little that Orrin might be offended, but when an acquaintance brought up the description, he roared and said, no, he loved it. It was exactly right.

Orrin was maybe 5 feet, 4 inches tall, and had an impressive belly. He swore to me that he used to run marathons and had broken three hours at the Boston Marathon. I was a decent enough runner back in the day and had struggled to break three hours, which is considered the standard separating real runners from hobby runners.

Like many of his stories, it verged on the unbelievable. But Orrin was like that, always surprising, a prolific and important writer of books on North Carolina and other coasts, a provocative critic, a generous, dedicated teacher, and as Rob Young, one of Orrin’s former students and the head of a coastal science program at Western Carolina University, wrote in a LinkedIn post, “He was funny as hell.”

You had to work hard to not like Orrin. Over a quarter-century, I watched developers and engineers scream invective at him for challenging the way they stacked fragile beaches and sand dunes with ever-larger investment properties. But I also reveled in how Orrin could disarm even his most hostile critics with an impish grin and a joke.

Once, back in the winter of 1998, I was showing Orrin around some of the new development in Corolla, on the northern Outer Banks. We had just finished emptying our over-caffeinated bladders behind some wax myrtle, when one of the developers roared onto the gravel lot in his Caddy and began screaming at us for violating private property. This lasted roughly a minute when suddenly he stopped, stared at Orrin, and exclaimed, “Hey, I know you. You’re that Pilkey guy.” Orrin smiled and marched over to the car. By the time it was done, the developer had Orrin’s email and was his next best friend.

Some of the engineers at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers bitterly criticized Orrin’s science and complained that he was training a cadre of young “Pilkeyites,” who would ruin the coast. By ruin, I think they meant put a halt to the development and the Corps’ costly beach replenishment projects, in which they pump millions of cubic yards of sand onto eroding beaches to save the property lining the shoreline. Pilkey correctly pointed out that those projects were mere Band-Aids, lasting a few years before the next storm came along and washed the sand out to sea. “It’s madness,” he told me many times. “Absolute madness.”  

A Florida engineer complained that Pilkey “got all of the students who got 1600 on their SATs,” and then indoctrinated them in his ways. I loved that. They just didn’t know what to do with Pilkey.

“My approach to coastal science and management is very different from his,” Young wrote. “But, my approach to life is not. My dad died when I was 21. Orrin was the closest thing to a father I had for the last 40 years. He gave me my current position. I owe him so much.”

Orrin got his Bachelor of Science in geology at Washington State University and his master’s in Montana and figured he would become an expert on mountains and shale. During summers, he worked as a smoke jumper and manned a fire tower deep in the forest. Instead of staying out West, he picked up his PhD in coastal science at Florida State and became an expert in sedimentology.

He lived for a time on Sapelo Island, off the coast of Georgia, where he attended church in a ramshackle chapel with the Gullah Geechee. “Hey, I really like the singing, Pal,” he told me. He called everyone pal. Later, he researched the abyssal plain, a gaping mud hole in the ocean so deep sunlight does not reach the sea floor.

In the mid-1960s, Duke took a chance and hired Orrin to start a marine geology program. “It was a big leap,” he said. “They were taking a big chance.”

Over the years, he helped to train thousands of students now scattered across the land. Early on, he was approached by Paul Godfrey, a marine biologist working for the National Park Service on Cape Lookout, and asked to sign a petition protesting a reckless development along the coast. “I was new and didn’t sign,” he told me, with a frown. “It was a big mistake, one of the biggest mistakes I ever made.”

In time, he would become one of the loudest critics of what we were doing to our coasts, penning scores of opinion articles and essays, often appearing on radio and television. Duke was his local podium, but he traveled the nation and the world, spreading the gospel of Pilkey, which might be summed up this way: Preserve as much as possible of what we have left at the coast, stop hardening eroding shorelines with groins and sea walls and, above all, allow the barrier islands to keep moving, the way Mother Nature always meant.

Orrin wasn’t impressed with many of the incremental policies being implemented to protect the coast. He believed they were too little, too late. In time, he became a national advocate for retreating from the coast as the seas rose and storms became larger and more destructive. His position felt impractical to some coastal geologists, who knew that developers, politicians and property owners would fight efforts to remove them. Far too much money was at stake.

When I asked him if he was becoming out of step, he shrugged and told me “I’ve always been out of step.” And then he laughed.

In the fall of 1927, G. Albert Lyon, millionaire businessman, gifted inventor, and renowned sportsman was restless and looking for a challenge.

It could be almost anything: a new gadget to tinker with in his home laboratory, a journey to an exotic country to hunt big game, or maybe a fall fishing adventure in Cape Hatteras, one of his favorite places in the world.

Lyon grew up in Philadelphia and worked as a mechanic. By day, he repaired engines, but at night, he tinkered and explored. Friends described the ebullient entrepreneur as bursting with energy and ideas. A dropout, Lyon was smarter by years than many of his better-educated companions, and more ambitious as well.

At the age of 19, he was awarded his first patent for an automobile bumper, and soon thereafter borrowed $100 to start a manufacturing company. As with many of Lyon’s ideas, the one for a bumper came from everyday life. One morning, Lyon was walking to his job at the garage when he saw a woman lose control of her sedan and crash into a street lamp, crumpling the hood. The accident left Lyon to wonder why the sedan didn’t have some sort of protective girdle or skirt, and he set about designing one. His timing was impeccable. Automobiles were transforming the daily lives of Americans and sales were booming. Within a few years, Lyon had earned his first million; many more would follow.

Patents would also keep coming, year after year: for bumpers, hub caps and stainless-steel wheel covers, fender wells and skirts, steering wheel attachments, luggage carriers, rims, disks, radiator baffles, side mirrors, horns and, later, helmets, sailboats, even aluminum masts for yachts. In all, Lyon would be awarded nearly 1,000 patents, establishing him as one of the most prolific inventors in history.

But Lyon’s unique spirit of inquiry wasn’t limited to tinkering. He also painted portraits, designed his own vacation home, studied the planets and stars, dove on coral reefs in the Bahamas, kept two or three chess games going at once, and amused his friends with his skills at the slingshot.

Lyon later moved to Allenhurst, New Jersey, from Philadelphia, but also spent part of his time in Detroit.

According to century-old newspaper stories, Lyon first visited the Outer Banks in the early 1920s to go fishing with his friends Rex Beach, a popular author of outdoor adventures tales, and Van Campen Heilner, a silver spoon explorer, and the son of a wealthy coal magnate. Heilner and Lyon both lived near Asbury Park, on the northern New Jersey coast, then a kind of arcadia for sportsmen, artists, and writers. They fished and hunted for waterfowl along Barnegat Bay with the noted illustrator, Frank Stick, who also lived nearby.

During one of their adventures, Lyon’s yacht, Alberta, exploded and burned to the waterline near the mouth of the Barnegat Inlet. Lyon and Stick saved themselves by jumping into the swirling waters.

Lyon and his pals made the long journey to the Outer Banks to take advantage of the world-famous fishing there. The warm waters of the Gulf Stream hug the coastline near Cape Hatteras, drawing some of the Atlantic’s largest and most-prized species – yellowfin tuna, blue marlin, and red drum.

Heilner already had a small fishing camp between Hatteras Village and the inlet. He also owned a 1920 Model T outfitted with fishing rods and gear, known locally as “The Pride of Pamlico.” They used the sedan to travel up and down the banks in search of fishing holes, landing 100 channel bass during one adventure, scores of red drum during another.

Lyon decided it was time to own a piece of Hatteras for himself. He purchased a 1,500-acre tract at the southern tip of Hatteras Island, not far from the world-famous inlet, from Andrew S. Austin, a local merchant. The following year, Austin helped Lyon build a hunting lodge, later named the Gooseville Gun Club. The simple structure wasn’t as large or elaborate as some of the other hunting lodges, but it served its purpose and over the years was greatly enjoyed by Lyon and his guests. Aptly, the land surrounding the lodge was shaped like a fishhook and included a creek, nearby sand reef and two miles of unspoiled oceanfront.

Luther Austin, the brother of Andrew and the longtime manager of the hunting lodge, recalled that Lyon would “travel down to Gooseville on his yacht,” which was also named Alberta, for one of his daughters, to hunt and fish with his family and friends. Rex Beach was a frequent companion and kept a houseboat nearby.

“He stopped in here and they hunted. This feller Rex had a houseboat. He had all of his hunting equipment on it. They stopped in here and old man Lyon was with him. That’s why he built the place here,” Luther Austin explained to Elizabeth Farrow and several co-authors in a history of the Gooseville Gun Club.

The hunting parties used a small boat to get out to the sand reef, where they had blinds, batteries and sink boxes, Austin recalled. The boxes were made from concrete and sunk in the sand. When the tide came in, they pulled a canvas cover around themselves and used iron decoys to sink the wooden batteries low in the water. Of course, there were wooden decoys as well. So many, it took several trips to haul them all out, Austin told the authors.

In the 1930s, Lyon hired a well-known local pilot, David Driskill, to ferry wealthy guests from Manteo and other locations to his hunting lodge. The design and operation of airplanes had improved dramatically since the Wright Brothers made their first heavier-than-air flight in 1903. But coastal flight, with its unpredictable winds, layers of marine fog, and beach landings, was still challenging. As if to prove the point, Driskill lost one of his wheels during a takeoff when it became stuck in the beach sand, according to published reports.

During the Great Depression, Driskill delivered mail, food and supplies to the federal work camps scattered up and down the Outer Banks. Thousands of poor, itinerant workers were building an artificial sand dike from the Virginia border to Ocracoke Island. According to a 2018 Driskill profile by the historian Casey Huegel, Driskill also flew more than 500 injured workers from Cape Hatteras to a Marine Corps base hospital in Norfolk. Later, Driskill became one of the first test pilots for prototype helicopters and flew one over the Outer Banks photographing the government’s sand dune. In October, 1949, Driskill was killed while testing an experimental helicopter near Moorestown, New Jersey.

Over the years, Lyon entertained scores of visitors at the Gooseville Gun Club. Many of them were wealthy business acquaintances and artists. At the same time, he tried to maintain good relations with locals from the nearby villages. In 1930, he donated $35,000 for a club building and library for high school girls in Hatteras. The hope, speculated one writer, was that the club would positively direct the girls’ “energies which in some instances, might otherwise go astray.”

Lyon’s attitude toward the locals stiffened after he found hundreds of red drum left to rot on the beach by a careless angler. Afterward, he positioned a guard on his property and angered locals by blocking them from hunting and fishing. For a time, he also battled efforts by the National Park Service to condemn his property for a national seashore on the Outer Banks. In 1954, Lyon finally sold his club and land to the Park Service for $47,000.

Lyon shifted his attention to the tiny tropical island of Bimini, in the Bahamas, where he built a million-dollar mansion on Paradise Point and spent his days snorkeling and fishing the gin-clear waters for bonefish and tuna. In 1957, a writer for Sports Illustrated profiled Lyon, calling him “The Commodore of Bimini.” The writer described a typical Lyon day this way:

“Guests find a typical day can begin in the predawn darkness with the Commodore rousing the house to come look at a favorite star through his telescope on the roof. A swim in the pool or sea may follow, and after breakfast the day really gets under way. The morning may be taken up with deep sea fishing for giant tuna or blue marlin; or a skin-diving expedition, led by the Commodore, to the wrecks around the reefs and an hour of water skiing, and always a continuous chess game aboard either of the two fishing cruisers which act as floating bases for the day’s sports.”

Second in a series

In January 1972, Earl Slick purchased the Pine Island Hunt Club for $2.75 million.

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.

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.

~

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.

~

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.”       

First of two parts

In 1972, between 50 and 100 people called the Currituck Banks home. The actual number isn’t important. It could have been a little more or even a little less. The point is no one really knew or cared. The miles of scrubby sand dunes, low-lying interior flats, and sprawling brackish marsh was largely empty except for birds and fish, and that was how the natives preferred it. 

That it couldn’t stay unspoiled was more or less a given. Currituck, a poor, centuries-old economy based on agriculture, needed money, and developing its 23 miles of unspoiled oceanfront seemed to be the answer. Developers had already purchased thousands of acres and were busy laying out designs for resorts from Duck to Corolla. The county had a rough plan to manage what was coming but needed time and help to pull it off. It was, in a way, an existential moment. No less than the future of the Currituck Banks, so bright yet also so perilous, stood in the balance.

One night that year, Earl Slick, a multimillionaire developer from Winston-Salem, took a surprising phone call from a Currituck duck hunting guide. Carl P. White knew every inch of the sound, sure. But more than that he was a savvy investor who listened closely to the wealthy industrialists who hunted the Banks and used that knowledge to buy stocks and land. A few years earlier, White had steered Slick to purchase the Narrows Island Club, a 1,000-acre strip of rich mainland marsh south of Poplar Branch Landing. Now, White proposed another deal. The longtime owners of the Pine Island Hunt Club, the Barney family from Hartford, Connecticut, were looking for a buyer. The property included nearly five miles of unblemished marsh and oceanfront stretching from the Dare County border north.

Slick knew the property. He had been a guest at the club and enjoyed shooting there. But he already owned The Narrows and planned to build a larger, more accommodating family lodge there. His answer was no. Still, the idea of owning Pine Island nagged at him and over the course of several days, Slick found himself wavering back and forth. Finally, he asked White to find out how much the Widow Barney wanted.

Slick’s decision would have an outsized impact on the future direction of the Currituck Banks, both dramatically preserving and altering its landscape, reshaping the architecture, even helping to shift the economics from an economy based on second homes to an investment-driven market. Not that many of the visitors teeming onto the Northern Banks would recognize these impacts. Most have never heard of Earl Slick or know his history. And for Slick, who died in 2007 at the age of 86, that would have been just fine.

When asked his profession, Slick jokingly called himself a “dog-trainer.” Yet here was a maverick, instinctual investor who owned airlines, cattle farms, wineries, and television stations, among his many and varied interests. And while Slick rarely sought publicity, he built two of the most talked-about resorts on the Currituck Banks – Sanderling, a rustic, nature-themed community, and the sprawling Pine Island resort, with more than 300 luxury-styled beach mansions. In a way, Earl Slick’s story mirrors the larger, complicated story of the Banks themselves, a mix of breathtaking natural reserves, waterways and maritime forests, interposed with a conveyor belt of ever-larger, more exclusive vacation resorts — a cultural and environmental drift that has been playing out now for decades.

~

Earl Frates Slick was born in 1920 in western Pennsylvania but grew up in Oklahoma City, where his father moved the family to hunt for oil. Tom Baker Slick was a man of the American moment: independent, hard-charging, seemingly tireless. But he was so luckless at first, locals took to calling him “Dry Hole Slick.” That changed in a heartbeat when Tom B. struck oil at the No. 4 Eakin well, producing 10,000 barrels a day. Another well produced a staggering 43,000 barrels a day. Soon, the same locals were calling Tom B. the luckiest wildcatter around — hell, “The King of all wildcatters,” the most famous wildcatter in the world!

Money spilled all around. Millions and millions of dollars. Earl and his older brother, Tom Jr., grew up in wealth and privilege, boarding at Exeter and attending Yale, with a $10,000-a-year living stipend. But life wasn’t always easy. They lost their father to a stroke at the age of 46. The boys were only 14 and 10. Their mother remarried Tom B.’s partner, Charles Urschel, who continued running the oil business. Years later, Tom Jr., considered a brilliantly esoteric student, became obsessed with hunting the Yeti. He, too, died at 46 when a plane he was piloting crashed returning from a Canadian adventure. Those who knew Earl Slick said he was haunted by the deaths and worried that he was destined to die young as well.

After Yale, Slick flew cargo transports in the war and saw the business possibilities of using planes to haul food and cargo from coast to coast. Shortly after being discharged, in December 1945, he learned that the military planned to auction nine surplus Army Curtus Commandos and headed to Washington. According to a short profile in Time Magazine, he walked into the surplus plane division at 1 p.m. and came out 15 minutes later owning the planes. “After that, things really began to move fast,” he told the reporter.

Slick was all of 25. Clearly, he wouldn’t have been able to buy the planes, which cost $247,000, without family money. Yet, like his father, he was relentless, impatient, and endlessly creative. Over the years, he would build Slick Airways into one of the two-largest air transport businesses in the nation, hauling fresh fruit and vegetables in refrigerated cargo planes from California to the East Coast, later contracting to transport military equipment back and forth to Southeast Asia.

While building Slick Airways, Earl was also on the prowl for other business opportunities. In 1948, he sold two cotton ranches to Lloyd Bentsen Sr., father of the future U.S. senator and candidate for vice president. He also bought a 16,000-acre quail-hunting farm, Mossy Dell, in Georgia, where the boyishly handsome six-footer would shoot from the saddle, and invested in a sprawling cattle ranch in southwestern Australia with the television host Art Linkletter and other celebrities. In time, he would expand into commercial real estate development, building one of the first Thruway Shopping Centers in North Carolina, invest in a vineyard, renovate historic buildings, buy stakes in radio and television stations, build nursing homes, fund a Formula 1 racing team, Slick Racers Inc., collect expensive artwork, and exhibit show horses, including Beau Black, a solid black gelding that, according to newspaper stories, “seldom tasted defeat in the show ring.”

“Earl loved the adventure,” recalled Paul Mickey Jr., an attorney and family friend. “I think he kind of liked the life of Ernest Hemingway. I never got the sense he was a deep thinker so much as a resourceful, canny businessman. Whenever I saw him, he was in fatigues. He was a sportsman.” 

In 1952, Earl moved the operations of Slick Airways to Los Angeles while relocating his family to Winston-Salem, a small but prosperous center of textile and tobacco industries. William E. Hollan Jr., a family friend and longtime business colleague, explained that it was probably so Slick could be closer to Washington, D.C., where he and his air transport business were represented by the powerful regulatory law firm, Steptoe & Johnson. “This was before jets. It was propeller-driven planes … and it was a long flight from San Antonio to Washington. Winston-Salem was a lot closer. He could get up and back in a day,” Hollan said.

Slick also liked the close-knit, genteel culture of Winston-Salem. He quickly became friends with CEOs from Hanes textiles, Chatham Manufacturing, Reynolds Tobacco, as well as Paul Mickey Sr., a managing partner at Steptoe & Johnson, who also was from Winston-Salem. Earl and his wife Jane built a retreat at Roaring Gap, a small, exclusive mountain resort where corporate elites from Winston-Salem socialized. There, they fell into a comfortable rhythm among a small group of friends who valued their privacy and privilege.

“There was a lot of money, yes,” said Hollan, who acted as a spokesman for the family for this article, “but it was not showy wealth, like the Yankees up North. Earl admired that. There was a lot of Southern charm. It was much more his style of things.”

Earlier in his career, Slick spoke to the press and even seemed to enjoy it. But as he aged, he became more discreet, even publicity shy. Pictures rarely appeared in the papers and he avoided interviews. His philanthropy, often generous, wasn’t broadcast. When different rumors and stories circulated, he instructed his employees not to respond. A code of behavior was evolving. His approach extended to hunting on the Currituck Banks, which Slick first appears to have visited in 1952 as a guest of Steptoe & Johnson. When he purchased his own club and had guests down, they discovered there were strict rules. Guests never shot before dawn and once they were given a blind, they weren’t allowed to change. They were provided one box of shells – always copper, never lead because lead was poisonous – and when they were gone, that was it. For Slick, hunting was about the experience and the camaraderie, not how many birds a hunter put in his bag.

There is another possible explanation for Slick’s penchant for privacy. In the 1930s, his stepfather Charles Urschel was kidnapped from their Oklahoma City mansion while playing bridge with friends. The kidnappers were led by the infamous George “Machine Gun” Kelly and his wife Kathryn. Urschel was returned home after nine days. But the family was never the same, withdrawing from public life and hiring armed guards to surround their house.

Now, as he debated whether to buy the Pine Island Club, Slick wavered between his roles as a conservationist who loved the outdoors, and as a developer who made millions buying and selling land. How could he balance these seemingly opposing forces? Should he even try? Or should he just walk away from the deal?

Next in the series: The story of Pine Island

In 1976, Walter Davis purchased 4 miles of oceanfront near Kitty Hawk for $2.1 million. It was not his first foray on the Outer Banks. The colorful oilman turned land speculator had been gobbling up large chunks of the Banks for the better part of a decade, with an eye toward controlling the oceanfront from Kitty Hawk to Corolla. 

Davis, who grew up on a soybean farm near Elizabeth City, worked as a stockboy for $9.50 a week at F.W. Woolworth’s, then built a billion-dollar empire stretching from Texas to New York, wasn’t interested in building beach houses. He saw the sandy tract as an investment and one day hoped to sell it at a hefty profit. After all, he was a speculator and that’s what speculators do. They don’t get rich by betting small. They bet big. Which is what Walter Davis had been doing for decades, sometimes rashly, but almost always without regret.

Still, this latest purchase was different. Southern Shores was an actual development with hundreds of houses and at least that many empty lots waiting to be built. Davis was like a dog chasing a car. Now that he had finally caught the car, he didn’t know what to do. He needed help.

He turned to Charles Hayes Jr., better known as Mickey, a talented young landscape architect who had grown up in Virginia Beach and spent part of his youth frolicking on the Banks. Davis called Hayes to come visit him at an upstate office in Cary. When Hayes arrived, Davis was nowhere to be found. So, he plopped down in a chair to wait. And wait. When Davis finally emerged from an interior office, Mickey Hayes saw that he was wrapped in a spider’s web of telephone wires.

“He had three telephones going at once. It was a Sunday and he had $350,000 bet on pro football games. He was in there managing his bets,” Hayes recalled.

It is unclear if Davis won or lost that day. He bet so much, and so often, it was hard to keep score. It was a different story for Mickey Hayes. Not only did he win a job, Davis gave him “full autonomy” to finish designing and building Southern Shores, today considered one of the more attractive communities on the Outer Banks. Walter Davis’ bet on Southern Shores eventually paid off as well. In 1985, he agreed to sell the development for $6 million – or about three times his original investment.

~

How do you begin to describe someone who in many ways is indescribable?

Walter Royal Davis was a singular, larger-than-life American: self-possessed, enigmatic, impulsive, quick-tempered, yet wildly, even rashly, generous. Booted from several high schools for his indifference to classroom schooling, he nonetheless prized learning and later gave away millions for scholarships and libraries and was invited to sit on the boards of prestigious universities. But his philanthropy wasn’t limited to slapping his name on buildings. Stories abound in Eastern North Carolina of Davis leaving $100 tips for $1 cups of coffee. A rare raconteur who also listened closely, Davis would lean into a waitress and ask about her life and goals. If she dreamed of going to college, Davis would make it happen.

According to a family biography written by North Carolina journalist Ned Cline, Davis once paid to bring the comedian Bill Cosby to a school in Manteo as a reward to the children. By the time he died in 2008, at the age of 88, it is estimated that Davis had given away over $100 million. His generosity included his ex-wives. Davis was married six times to four different women (two, twice). Cline recounts that Davis agreed to settle one divorce for $1 million but insisted that the money be delivered in $1 bills by armored truck. That was also Davis: an unrepentant rogue. But not one you wanted to rub the wrong way.

Davis’s politics veered from Democrat to Republican, depending which party happened to be in office. He gave generously to all, millions by his count, not necessarily expecting anything in return except that the politicians would pick up the telephone when he called, which they did. Walter Davis could make or break careers and legislation. He knew everyone and, if he didn’t know someone, he quickly found a way to befriend him. When he returned to his native North Carolina from the Texas oil fields, he kept a suite at the Radisson Inn in Raleigh Triangle Park, where politicians paraded by for his drinks, advice and money. In the late 1960s, he bought a shabby motel in Kitty Hawk and spruced up one of the rooms to host all-night poker parties. Among his guests were Sen. William J. Fulbright of Arkansas and House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill. He also knew Henry Kissinger and Dean Rusk, and once socialized with French President Charles de Gaulle, according to his biographical sketch.

When young Marc Basnight was considering a run for the North Carolina Senate in the 1980s, Davis pulled him aside and told him he wasn’t ready. Still, he saw something. Like Davis, Basnight had barely escaped high school yet was preternaturally smart and good around people. Davis bought Basnight a subscription to The Economist magazine and quizzed him weekly while they tooled around Manteo in his Lincoln Town Car. When it appeared Basnight wasn’t keeping up, Davis called him stupid and advised the would-be politician to pick up the pace. Basnight won his election and went on to serve as Senate pro tempore, the second-most important position in North Carolina politics. Visitors to his Raleigh office recalled it being filled with magazines of all stripes — many of which were dogeared or marked-up. Clearly, he had gotten the message. Dumb wasn’t going to cut it.

~

After quitting Woolworth’s, Davis rotated through different jobs, working as a long-haul trucker, office manager and restauranteur. He spent three months in federal prison for failing to pay business taxes, then relocated to Salinas, California, where he met another rebellious entrepreneur, Fred Rumbley, who quickly recognized Davis’s innate business savvy. The pair worked profitably together for a quarter-century. In the 1950s, Rumbley backed Davis on a new venture: hauling oil from wells to refineries in the booming Texas Panhandle. Davis moved to Midland, the hard-driving, hard-drinking center of the oil fields, and began buying tanker trucks and making friends, including the future president, George H.W. Bush. The flamboyant Davis became so popular, bartenders named a drink for him at the Midland Petroleum Club – the “Walter Davis,” straight Seagram’s VO over ice, according to Cline’s biography.

After a number of years, Davis was hauling a half-million barrels of crude a day and making millions for the Rumbley-Davis partnership. In time, he would branch out, adding real estate and manufacturing businesses, and his wealth would grow to preposterous levels. But the Texas Panhandle was brutally hot in summer and Davis decided to split his time at a Nags Head bungalow he bought. In the late ’60s, he began to invest in Outer Banks real estate, picking up a home here and there, the old Sea Ranch Motel, even a fishing pier.

Davis had more stories than a dog. One that stands out is how, one summer day in 1968, he was looking for a bottle of Orange Crush soda on a Kitty Hawk pier. When he couldn’t find one, he complained to the pier manager, who apparently didn’t recognize Davis and told him, “Tough,” and if he didn’t like it, he should buy the pier. Which Davis did, writing a check on the spot for $96,000. A decade later, he sold the pier for $2.5 million – a testament to Davis’s skill, luck, and the soaring real estate values on the Outer Banks.

About this time, Davis was introduced to Armand Hammer, volatile chairman of the board of Occidental Petroleum. The meeting was arranged by North Carolina Gov. Terry Sanford and took place at an Outer Banks marina, where Hammer’s yacht docked beside Davis’s prized boat, Gemel 1. Initially, Davis liked Hammer. He was an impulsive gambler, like him. Two years later, he merged his oil business with Occidental. It would prove to be a horrible mistake, Davis would later say. The worst decision he ever made.

In the late ’60s, Davis began to buy large tracts along the pristine Currituck Banks, including 4 miles of oceanfront for $1.2 million from the members of the Currituck Shooting Club. He used Carl P. White, a legendary waterfowl guide and hunt lodge manager who speculated in land on the side, as his proxy. White acquired an option and then sold it back to Davis.

A year later, Davis turned to White again, this time to buy the Pine Island Hunt Club, which had been owned since the 1930s by the Barney family from Connecticut. The tract included roughly 5 miles of gently rolling sand dunes, interior forests and sprawling salt marsh from the Atlantic Ocean to the Currituck Sound. Davis, then a vice president of Occidental, used a company subsidiary to pay for the $2.5 million option on the land. According to legend, when Hammer learned about the deal, he quickly canceled the payment. Not long after, an embittered Davis left Occidental.

With his plans to control the Currituck Banks scuttled, Davis sold the Currituck Shooting Club land to James Johnson and Coastland Realty, which developed the popular Ocean Sands resort. But Davis wasn’t quite done. In 1976, he purchased the 2,700-acre Southern Shores property from David Stick, the local historian and developer, who was having money issues. Davis and Stick had become friends while working together on the initial Coastal Resources Commission Advisory Committee a few years earlier. Stick was divorced and in debt and wanted to devote more time to his writing. According to Mickey Hayes, “Mr. Davis thought a lot of David. He had no interest in the real estate. He wanted to help David and that is what he did.”

Davis left Hayes to finish Southern Shores. Hayes said he worked tirelessly during the day laying out the undeveloped lots, “trying to make the houses fit the land,” and his nights designing houses on the side. One house he designed was for Davis along the northern oceanfront in Southern Shores. Hayes laid it out horizontally, not vertically, like most beach houses today. “It was a huge house and had everything you could put in there,” he said. “It didn’t matter what it cost. Mr. Davis said: `Do what you can do.’ And I did.”

This historical profile is presented as part of Coastal Review’s 2024 yearlong examination of 50 years of the North Carolina Coastal Area Management Act, including the science that helped to inform and the advocacy and leadership that resulted in passage of the landmark 1974 legislation, as well as the coastal environmental challenges yet ahead.

Robert Dolan and Paul Godfrey didn’t meet the way scientists often do, at a conference or sharing a drink after a long, technical talk. Instead, they met on a wind-blown beach near Cape Lookout, part of the long, winding bands of sand we know as the Outer Banks. It was 1971.

Godfrey, a quiet but creative botanist, and his wife Melinda, a pathbreaking marine biologist, had been digging cores along transects in the sand and mud for a research project trying to determine the history of the remote, 28,000-acre Cape Lookout National Seashore. Each layer of sand, peat and mud was like a chapter in a book, they recalled, secrets revealed here, surprises there, building to an unexpected ending.

Dolan, a coastal geologist who specialized in sedimentology, was also digging cores, near Cape Hatteras. He had arrived there almost on a lark in 1959 searching for a topic for his doctoral dissertation. “Why not study the Outer Banks?” one of his professors at Louisiana State University suggested. At the time, little was known about the chain of islands’ geology; some scientists even theorized the Outer Banks must be anchored to a coral reef, which prevented the islands from washing away. Ever confident and always up for an adventure, Dolan packed the family wagon, collected his wife and young daughter, and off they went. A decade later, he was still studying the islands and publishing seminal papers when it was suggested he meet Paul Godfrey and his wife, who were doing similarly impressive work a couple of hours away by boat on the undeveloped Core Banks.

Dolan and Godfrey knew one another from their work and contacts in the National Park Service, which manages the seashores. But they had never spoken, let alone met. Paul and Melinda took Dolan and several park service officials to see their cores, which Melinda had cleverly engineered with PVC piping.

Paul Godfrey, now 83, and living on a nature preserve in Western Massachusetts, recently recalled: “I think Bob was really intrigued. All of the species we identified as being adapted to the coast, he picked up on that right away. He saw we were coming to similar conclusions. The islands weren’t fixed in place like people thought. Nor were they washing away. They were fine, healthy, moving and adapting, the same way humans do.”

“The islands weren’t fixed in place like people thought. Nor were they washing away. They were fine, healthy, moving and adapting, the same way humans do.”

— Paul Godfrey

After their meeting, Dolan and Godfrey began to work together on various projects while they consulted for the park service and held down jobs as young professors at the University of Virginia and the University of Massachusetts, respectively.

Their collaborations would forever change the way coastal scientists looked at barrier islands and prompt the National Park Service to reverse its decades-old policy of trying to hold the islands in place by constructing artificial sand dunes, engineering the beach, bulldozing sand around after storms, even fertilizing the grass and shrubs by plane.

It all sounds so simple today — allow water, wind and storms to naturally sculpt the islands — but it was a revolutionary idea in the early 1970s, even heretical. Many villagers had grown accustomed to the park service protecting them and keeping open N.C. Highway 12, the only route on and off the islands. Even today, decades later, the politics are challenging, with the park service expected to provide a buffer between the ocean and the ever-larger and more expensive vacation homes that line the eroding shoreline and fuel the Banks’ billion-dollar tourism economy.

~

They made an unlikely pair. Robert Dolan grew up in Southern California and was an avid surfer and self-described beach bum at a time when surfing was considered novel and daring in the Golden State. Following a stint in the Navy, he earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in the Earth sciences at Oregon State University. He then headed south, to Baton Rouge, to work on his doctorate in coastal geology at Louisiana State University. Various profiles of Dolan, including one in John Alexander’s 1992 book, “Ribbon of Sand,” described him as confident, exuberant, passionate and adventurous.

Paul Godfrey grew up on a small farm in central Connecticut where he developed an abiding respect for nature. Melinda: around water on Cape Cod, where she learned how to handle boats and measure her own confidence in a world dominated by men. The future couple met in graduate school at Duke University, where Paul was pursuing a PhD, Melinda a master’s. One day, Melinda walked into a call on soil composition affectionately called “Dirt.”

“It was all men,” Paul recalled. “Melinda walked in and all these men were saying, ‘What is she doing here?’” They became lab partners and later Paul followed Melinda to Beaufort, where she worked as an assistant in the school’s renowned marine lab. “It was how I got interested in the coast. Melinda taught me. She was pretty, too,” he laughed.

After arriving on the Outer Banks, Dolan settled his wife and young daughter in a Nags Head cottage about 200 yards from the Atlantic Ocean. In the early morning of March 7, 1962, Dolan awoke to find the ocean rushing under their cottage. Another cottage, seaward of his own, had broken loose and was crashing toward them.

“In record time, I packed my personal belongings and research gear into a four-wheel-drive vehicle and headed for high ground,” he wrote 25 years later in an editorial for the Journal of Coastal Research.     

Dolan had wanted to study the effects of powerful storms on barrier islands. Here was his chance. After delivering his wife and daughter to higher ground, he returned to take measure of the damage. The Ash Wednesday Storm, a three-day nor’easter featuring five high tides, each one higher than the last, was one of the strongest storms to ever strike the Outer Banks. It flooded or flattened scores of homes, crumpled a pier where Dolan had recently installed a tidal gage, and washed away a 30-foot aluminum tower he had built to take photos of the beach.

But the storm also answered some of his research questions. For example, it showed that the massive artificial dunes that Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps workers had constructed during the Great Depression to “stabilize” the islands were no match for the storm surge and waves. It also demonstrated how the storm washed large fans of sand across the road to the middle of the island, elevating it, a form of coastal adaptation now known as overwash. As long as man didn’t interfere, barrier islands would heal themselves even after epochal storms, Dolan concluded, shifting sand inland, slowly rebuilding foredunes, widening the marsh along the tidal inlets and sounds.

Dolan had also used a machine to dig 140 cores to study sand samples and test the theory that the islands were anchored to coral reefs. He dug and dug. But all he found was sand, layer after layer, one older than the last — a clear indication that the islands weren’t fixed in place, but were moving. Always moving.

Paul and Melinda Godfrey arrived at similar conclusions near Cape Lookout. Melinda had ingeniously found a way to use PVC piping to take deep samples of sand and mud. She and Paul then pored over each layer, studying the shells, clams and plants for hints that helped to date the formation of the island. The wider and deeper they dug, the more surprises they found: snails near the beach that only could have come from the marsh; shells near the marsh that only could have come from the beach. It was their eureka moment, “powerfully proving,” Godfrey said, “that the islands were moving, slowly rolling over themselves as they inched their way toward land.”       

~

Dolan had begun writing up his findings in research papers for the National Park Service while becoming increasingly vocal about the threats that rampant development posed to Cape Hatteras National Seashore. In 1972, he was joined by Paul Godfrey in a paper questioning the park service’s decades-old practice of spending millions of dollars on dune-building and beach-engineering after storms. The service’s practices gave “the false impression of safety and stability offered by the [artificial] barrier dunes,” they wrote. “As the system is stabilized, man builds roads and utilities that establish a `line-of-development’ which soon becomes a ‘line-of-defense.’”

As you might imagine, the criticism made for some tense moments between the researchers and the park service. “But to their credit, they came around,” said Godfrey. In 1973, Director Ronald H. Walker announced that the park service would no longer try to hold the line against the forces of nature. “There is just no way the National Park Service can continue to fight nature,” he told reporters. “We’ve spent all of this money; tried various ways to control the situation, but none of them has worked.”

“There is just no way the National Park Service can continue to fight nature. We’ve spent all of this money; tried various ways to control the situation, but none of them has worked.”

— Ronald H. Walker, Director, National Park Service, in 1973

The policy shift was the direct result of the work of Dolan, who died in 2016, and Paul and Melinda Godfrey showing that the Outer Banks were “dynamic natural landscapes” that will adapt and repair themselves after storms, losing sand in some places but gaining it in others as part of the natural evolutionary process of barrier islands.

Despite their warnings, developers and governments continued to add thousands of vacation houses and investment properties along the shifting shorelines – scores of which quickly were threatened by rising seas and storms. In the last few decades alone, county, state and federal taxpayers have spent tens of millions of dollars renourishing beaches, building and rebuilding artificial dunes, and constructing multimillion-dollar bridges to bypass storm-damaged roads.

In 2021, the park service adopted a revised sand management policy to help speed up the permitting process, allowing state workers to repair dunes and scrape sand off of N.C. 12 and other applicants to seek sand management permits within national seashore boundaries. But even that may not be enough to satisfy property owners and politicians.

Recently, U.S. Rep. Greg Murphy, a Republican representing North Carolina’s 3rd District, drafted language directing Cape Hatteras National Seashore Superintendent Dave Hallac “to identify potential long-term, cost-effective sediment management activities to minimize the impacts of beach erosion.”

The spending bill provision and ever-evolving policy could place the National Park Service back in the beach-building business.

Footnote: Dolan and the Godfreys continued to study the Outer Banks for decades, bringing hundreds of eager students to dig cores, study the ecology and geology, and experience the unfiltered beauty of the Banks.

In the early 1970s, the Outer Banks were still rough enough around the edges that it was possible to confuse the rolling sand dunes and pounding surf with the rugged coast of England. At least, that is what Lilias J. Morrison thought the first time she saw Nags Head.

It was sometime around 1970, she thinks. She was cruising along the interstate in a turquoise VW Bug with her good friend, Jennifer Frost. They were on holiday, heading back to New York City, where they were graduate students at Columbia University. It was 4 or 5 in the afternoon. The sun was sinking. Rounding a bend in the road, a sign for the then-modest resort appeared. “It sounded like a place back home in England,” Morrison recalled. “I said to Jennifer, ‘Let’s go see.’”

Morrison had grown up in Lancashire, on the edge of the Lake district of the United Kingdom, earned degrees in theology at Sheffield and Oxford, then spent three years teaching Latin at a girl’s high school in Nairobi, before moving to the United States to continue studies for her doctorate.

She never collected the advanced degree.

The Outer Banks got in the way.  

~

Most of the visitors who crowd onto the Outer Banks probably have never heard of Lilias Morrison, let alone know her remarkable backstory: A theology student who became one of the Outer Banks’s most influential designers — not to mention, the first woman builder of consequence along the Northern Banks. Like one of her mentors, the late Earl Slick, she is proud yet quiet, comfortable yet humble. But don’t ever confuse her with lacking ambition. Morrison helped to design and market Sanderling and Palmer’s Island, two of the more admired developments north of Duck. She later formed her own company, Real Escapes, focusing on environmentally friendly and energy efficient builds, remodels, and sales – or as she likes to say, “houses that blend into the land” instead of overwhelming it. Along the way, there were forays into local politics, a campaign to protect the quaint, village-like nature of Duck, even a drive to fend off big-box stores and keep the skies dark.

Morrison, who describes herself as “over 75” and still has a pleasing lilt in her voice, never wanted to be an ordinary developer. “I became a builder because local builders wouldn’t do anything except beach boxes,” she said “We didn’t want to turn the oceanfront into suburbia by the sea. We placed a great emphasis on preservation and conservation.”

Which isn’t surprising when you learn a bit about Morrison’s past. Growing up in the Lake District in Northwest England, she was surrounded by botanical gardens and historic buildings. “I grew up with these wonderful landscapes. There were living gardens. Land for parks and museums. In the old industrial steel towns, historic factory buildings with abstract strength I admired. All of this had a great influence, you see.”

Morrison had always wanted to travel in Africa and after university got her chance. With a family friend’s help, she landed a job teaching at The Kenya High School for Girls, one of the best schools in the British Commonwealth. “My job other than teaching some biblical stuff to train people to think, I taught Greek and Latin as well. It was high academics with a goal of getting the girls to take the Oxford and Cambridge entrance exams.”

During breaks, Morrison and the other young teachers explored the continent, visiting wildlife parks and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. One of her favorite places was Kampala, the capital of Uganda. “Those days, Kampala was the Athens of Africa, (home to) writers and artists,” she said.

In the mid-1960s, Morrison moved to the United States to continue graduate studies in theology at Union Theological Seminary, affiliated with Columbia University. She landed there amid wrenching cultural shifts and student protests. “We were rebels,” she laughed. “I remember climbing a gate.”

She met Jennifer Frost at Columbia, an older student from Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, who liked to travel and surf. They planned adventures, moved to Germany to learn the language, drove to Atlanta, and then tumbled into Nags Head, where they fell in love with the locals and the coast. “We didn’t have much time. We spent the days walking the beach, swimming, walking the upper ridge of Jockey’s Ridge, which was bigger in those days. We both said we would come back to this wonderful place,” Morrison said. And they did.

They returned the following fall. Then again that spring. The owners of a Nags Head bakery invited them for drinks, recalling how they had moved to the Banks from the Midwest. The idea for a bakery evolved slowly but once it did, it stuck. They opened on Memorial Day and closed on Labor Day, and made just enough to get through their first winter and reopen the following spring. Lilias and Jennifer were enthralled and decided they should do a business, too. But what kind of business? And where?

They wound up in Manteo where they discovered the history of “The Lost Colony” and met a helpful real estate agent named Phil Quidley. They had no money, they explained, but wanted to start a small business. Somehow, Quidley negotiated a modest down payment and they became the owners of the Fort Raleigh Hotel. During season they could count on overnight guests coming to see “The Lost Colony.” They also became agents for Western Union. Lilias used her botanical skills to turn a garden into a local attraction, naming it for Sir Richard Granville, the daring naval commander from Cornwall.

Lilias and Jennifer ran the hotel for two seasons. Like many Bankers they scrambled in the off-season, working as waitresses at the Sea Ranch Motel and studying in their spare time for their real estate licenses. “We weren’t too proud to be waitresses. Our main financial goal was survival, you see,” said Morrison.

By now, it was the mid-1970s. Lilias and Jennifer began to sell houses and lots in Hatteras, Nags Head, and Collington. They eventually found their way north, to the Village of Duck, which wasn’t much more than a few dozen houses, a surf shop, post office, and a grocery store. Still, they saw the potential and wanted a piece of the action.

One day, Jennifer saw an advertisement for a project called Sanderling and, on a hunch, phoned. She soon found herself speaking with John C. Whitaker Jr., a talented young builder with a vision for a quaint, natural community built in the old Nags Head style – no tennis courts, no swimming pools, but lots of nature trails and unpretentious houses meant to be passed from generation to generation.

In 1977, Lilias and Jennifer began working for Whitaker as sales agents and landscape designers. Morrison gives credit to Whitaker for creating one of the more unique resort communities on the Northern Banks. But without Lilias and Jennifer, their boundless energy and creativity, Sanderling may never have thrived. “They turned out to be super salespeople,” said William E. Hollan Jr., who continued developing Sanderling after Whitaker and his partners stepped away in the early 1980s. “I give them 100% of the credit for carrying through on the mission.”

Hollan and Earl Slick, the owner of the property, finished six additional sections of Sanderling and then built the Sanderling Inn. Jennifer left to start a radio station in Duck and take up other real estate ventures. Lilias continued to work closely with Hollan and Slick at Sanderling. Later, when Hollan acquired a small tract of land just north of the Dare County border, Morrison joined him in developing the exclusive gated community known as Palmer’s Island. There was only enough room for a dozen houses – but what houses! They were outsized, New England-style beach homes, with spectacular views of the ocean and the sound.

 “It was zoned for multifamily and could have been condominiums. It would have changed the whole character and Sanderling. And so, we decided to build large summer homes rather like Newport for extended families,” Morrison said. “In a way, Sanderling and Palmer’s Island was more old money and old beach atmosphere. Pine Island was more new money: fortunes from the computer industry and Wall Street. Owners who wanted the latest thing. The character of those houses changed.”

At Palmer’s Island, Morrison designed a house for an executive of General Motors. Another house sold to heirs of the DuPont fortune. “Their goal was to be very peaceful and incognito. They were very cautious of their privacy,” Morrison said.

Around 1993, Morrison moved out of Sanderling and set up a new business, the Real Escapes Group, in a historic building in the center of Duck. Her focus shifted from building to designing and remodeling, with a strong focus on preservation and conservation. Today, she runs her business out of a commercial outlet in Harbinger but lives near the sound in Southern Shores in a house she purchased from David Stick, the late historian, politician, and developer.

Related: Frank Stick: A Maverick Who Helped Shape the Outer Banks

She owns other property but doesn’t think she will develop it. “Let’s face it,” she said, “if you are in real estate … you are interested in acquiring property the way (other) people acquire a good overcoat or a pair of shoes.”

Morrison has now lived on the Outer Banks for a half-century. During that time, she has witnessed incalculable changes yet hasn’t lost the sense of surprise or awe she felt that late afternoon she landed in Nags Head years ago. “As far as I am concerned, the Outer Banks are world class,” she said. “There is still a pristine quality I hope will remain in spite of development.”

Frank Stick was in search of two things when he arrived on the Outer Banks in the 1920s: adventure and money. He found enough adventure to fill a lifetime but like many Bankers on the isolated barrier islands, he scrambled to pay the bills. Once one of the largest landowners, with property from Kitty Hawk to Hatteras, the artist turned developer lost many of his holdings during the Great Depression. Stick eventually recovered and developed the much-admired Southern Shores community with his son David and other partners. A complex man of shifting interests and unwavering opinions, Stick was both a conservationist who played an instrumental role in the formation of Cape Hatteras National Seashore and an avid land speculator who wrote of turning the Banks into a playground for tourists.

This is his story.

Chapter 5: Southern Shores

Read the entire series

Frank Stick was now in his sixties and approaching retirement. He had managed to right the family’s finances by selling his remaining real estate and keeping to his steady work habits. There was even enough money for he and Maud to spend winters in Florida, first at San Carlos Bay, near Fort Myers Beach, and later in Key West. Still, Frank worried about building a nest egg and, as always, kept an eye out for opportunities.

One surfaced in 1945 when Walter J. Townsend, a shipping magnate from Bayonne, New Jersey, considered selling 2,700 acres he owned just north of Kitty Hawk — his only investment on the Outer Banks. The tract ran from ocean to sound and included four miles of pristine oceanfront and even more shoreline fronting Currituck Sound and Ginguite Bay. Long ago, a sand wave had washed over the flat beach and sculpted a series of terraces and gradually rising slopes that elevated the profile from beach to sound.

At $30,000, the price was considered extraordinary and was well beyond Frank’s reach. But he believed the area was promising; developers were busy filling up Nags Head and Kill Devil Hills and would eventually look north for more land. He approached friends for help and offered Townsend an option on the four miles. Townsend’s secretary officially accepted. But then Townsend began having second thoughts. Sensing that his land was worth even more, he declined to go through with the sale and failed to respond to letters Frank wrote.

Frank turned to his son-in-law, attorney John McMullan of Elizabeth City, who sued Townsend for failing to exercise the contract. McMullan won at trial and then on appeal. Frank rewarded his son-in-law with a one-third interest in the property. McMullan suggested that his law partner, N. Elton Aydlett, and Aydlett’s brother, Cyrus, a successful realtor/investor, cover the $30,000 option in return for another one-third interest. A partnership was born, with Frank in charge of managing the design and construction.

The first order of business, choosing a name, proved problematic. Frank and his partners bounced around possibilities, finally settling on Southern Shores. Frank had hoped for something a little artier that captured his plan to build a communal kind of resort that appealed to artists, writers and vacationers of all economic stripes, not only wealthy outsiders. The name was also geographically confusing. The four-mile tract near the Wright Brothers Memorial Bridge served as a gateway to the northern beaches of Duck and Corolla, and wasn’t part of the Lower Banks. An advertisement even stressed its location “At the north end of the beach – A fully restricted ocean front development for discriminating people.”

Frank got busy laying out the streets along the oceanfront, with a paved road, Ocean Boulevard, running north to south and side streets positioned east to west. Lots were set in 50-foot increments. However, customers were required to buy two lots at a time, or 100 feet of frontage. Instead of a la carte pricing, Frank introduced fixed-pricing that included the lot, site preparation, and house. Using his skills as an artist, he gave each potential owner a handsome sketch of his house.

One of the earliest buyers was Huntington Cairns, a polymath from Washington, D.C., who had gone directly to law school after high school, skipping college, and spent his spare time studying Plato and Shakespeare. In addition to his work as lawyer, Cairns wrote books across such diverse subjects as philosophy and journalism, including a biography of his old friend, Baltimore writer, H.L. Mencken. For years, he served as secretary and general counsel for the National Gallery of Art, and as an unpaid adviser to the Treasury Department, judging whether Post-War art arriving in America should be considered pornographic. Unsurprisingly, Huntington and Frank hit it off and Frank built Cairns a cottage next door to an oceanfront house Frank built for himself. The Sticks and Cairns often shared dinners with an array of famous and not-so-famous writers and artist friends of Huntington. Cairns called Southern Shores his second Eden and later retired there.

Building affordable housing during the war years had influenced Frank’s thoughts on style. So, too, the simple low-slung bungalows that Frank saw in Florida, At Southern Shores, Frank merged these influences in a signature new Outer Banks bungalow known as a Flat Top – a single-story, whitewashed block bungalow with a flat roof. The design was driven in part by a shortage of building supplies following the war. Many of the usual supplies, wood and steel, weren’t available. Frank and his Hatteras buddy, Curtis Gray, formed a company, Kitty Hawk Concrete Products, and used sand they carted off the beach (illegal today) to manufacture concrete blocks.

According to the architecture writer Marimar McNaughton, “A Flat Top house took roughly four months to build and cost one-third less than a traditional home.” Nevertheless the Southern Shores partners sold only one house in 1947 and Frank was forced to take on the role of salesman, reaching out to a long list of friends and associates. He also turned to his son David, then working in New York City as an editor, to come help.

For the next few years, the Sticks concentrated on the oceanfront, slowly filling in scores of lots and developing new sections. Meanwhile, the land along the sound and scruffy upper terraces remained untouched because it was thought to be worthless. It would be David who saw the value of extending Southern Shores, laying out lots and roads, digging lagoons, adding a marina, golf course and freshwater lake, turning Southern Shores into a destination for retirees and year-round Bankers, as well as an oceanfront resort.

But even as the business was beginning to show a profit, the working relationship between Frank and David soured. There were scuffles over responsibilities, salaries, and business philosophies. David resented the way Elton Aydlett seemed to question his every decision, and more than once threatened to quit.

Some of the tension was likely the normal back and forth between fathers and sons. But the disagreements also felt personal at times. Frank could be impatient and controlling and may not have given David enough credit for his good work. “Tact was a trait for which Dad was never noted, nor am I,” David once observed.

One of the issues was that Frank was growing restless once more. Southern Shores was moving along and he wanted more time for himself, for Maud, and for his beloved art. He had begun painting again and wanted to do more than illustrations; he wanted to leave something lasting for his family as his legacy. In the 1950s, Frank also began visiting the island of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and being Frank Stick, he of course had ideas.

In 1952, Frank formed a new partnership with John McMullan and the Aydlett brothers and purchased 1,600 acres of the old Lameshur Sugar Plantation overlooking Cruz Bay on the island’s south coast. The goal was to develop an exclusive mountainside resort or, alternatively, restore the property and “make a quick and profitable turn-over,” Frank wrote. It never worked out. Money was short and the investors had trouble finding equipment and workers. In 1954, Frank wrote that he had had an epiphany: Instead of building a resort, why not set aside the land as part of a national park, like he had done on the Outer Banks. Frank donated his share of the land and sold the rest at cost for the park. Working with the financier Laurance Rockefeller, who owned property on the north coast, Caneel Bay, and his old friend, Conrad Wirth, of the National Park Service, Frank helped plan the Virgin Islands National Park.

That same year Frank informed his partners that he was retiring. He was 70. While he would continue to give advice to David and help to mediate the growing disagreements between David and Elton Aydlett, Frank used most of his time to travel and paint. He died in 1966, at the age of 82, and was buried in Kill Devil Hills.

After Frank’s death, David continued to develop the soundside at Southern Shores, digging channels to the Currituck Sound and interior ponds to help drain swamp land for building. Planning began for a separate development-within-a-development known as Chicahauk, with canals and open space nestled among the coastal dunes. Sales increased. Nevertheless, David was saddled with debts and “almost on the verge of bankruptcy,” he would later recall. In 1976, he agreed to sell Southern Shores for $2.1 million to Walter Royal Davis, a flamboyant character who had grown up poor near Elizabeth City but gone on to make millions hauling oil in the Texas Panhandle. Davis turned the job over to a talented landscape architect named Charles “Mickey” Hayes Jr. who finished Southern Shores and then designed the exclusive Currituck Club in Corolla.

Frank Stick was in search of two things when he arrived on the Outer Banks in the 1920s: adventure and money. He found enough adventure to fill a lifetime but like many Bankers on the isolated barrier islands, he scrambled to pay the bills. Once one of the largest landowners, with property from Kitty Hawk to Hatteras, the artist turned developer lost many of his holdings during the Great Depression. Stick eventually recovered and developed the much-admired Southern Shores community with his son David and other partners. A complex man of shifting interests and unwavering opinions, Stick was both a conservationist who played an instrumental role in the formation of Cape Hatteras National Seashore and an avid land speculator who wrote of turning the Banks into a playground for tourists.

This is his story.

Chapter Four: Inventing the Seashore

Read the ongoing series

In the 1930s, with the nation in the throes of the Great Depression and any signs of a land boom now a distant memory, Frank Stick shifted tactics and returned to his role as a conservationist.

Writing in the July 21, 1933, edition of The Elizabeth City Independent, Frank outlined a sprawling new vision calling for the government to set aside a large share of the Outer Banks as a park. Entitled: A COASTAL PARK FOR NORTH CAROLINA AND THE NATION, Frank argued that the government had scores of beautiful parks out West – Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, among others – but barely any presence in the East, and nothing along the coast. Why not a park for the Outer Banks? he asked. The low, slim barrier islands included miles of “shining beaches, peaceful sun-kissed sounds, and bountiful wildlife.”

Frank’s cri de coeur took up an entire page of W.O. Saunders’s broadsheet. That by itself should have signaled to readers that Saunders favored the idea. In fact, a decade earlier the editor had called for a state park in Hatteras in his newspaper. Frank Stick’s plan was far more elaborate, taking the readers through the logic for a park, where it might be located, and how it would boost the isolated Banks and its faltering economy.   

Frank began by telling readers that the “opportunity for healthful outdoor recreation and communion with nature” was an indispensable part of America’s progress as a nation — as important as commerce, politics or education. Unfortunately, he continued, speculators had acquired the majority of the nation’s shoreline for private development. With so much land tied up in private hands, ordinary citizens would have dwindling opportunities to experience the serenity and beauty of the seashore.

At first blush, it might seem odd that Stick, one of the largest title holders on the Outer Banks until the Depression, would single out speculators. However, it is worth remembering that Frank never saw himself as a real estate man greedily buying up the oceanfront. In his mind, he was a conservationist striving for an equitable balance between development and nature. Was it true? Not exactly. He landed on the Banks with a plan and needed to make money in real estate after abandoning his art career. Still, his later developments, especially Southern Shores, did achieve some of the balance he sought.

Frank proposed that the government should acquire up to 100 miles – or most of the Banks – via philanthropic gifts, condemnation, and outright purchases. The Outer Banks, he wrote, were “unique among all lands on the earth,” enjoyed a mild year-round climate, and rarely experienced hurricanes. Contrary to popular narratives, he added, meteorological records showed that the Outer Banks were no windier than the New Jersey coast where he had lived for more than a decade. It was a bold claim and likely made to boost his park plan. In private correspondence, Frank often complained about the relentless wind on the Outer Banks. Indeed, only months after writing his proposal, a hurricane struck the Banks, leveling Frank’s pavilion on Kitty Hawk Bay.

At the time, there was only a small section of paved road on the Banks, paralleling the ocean from Kitty Hawk to Whalebone Junction. Frank envisioned constructing a highway the length of the Banks. With his usual confidence, he explained to readers: “This roadway is no fantastic dream; no expansively enthusiastic scheme to attract public or political favor, but a sensible, well thought out project that would prove inestimable economic and esthetic value …”

Frank calculated that a seashore park would attract 50 visitors for every one visitor to an inland mountain, lake or forest. He wasn’t wrong; a seashore park would draw large crowds. But his numbers were wildly exaggerated. In recent years, even with up to 3 million visitors annually, Cape Hatteras National Seashore ranks well behind the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with its nearly 13 million visitors. Indeed, none of the National Park Service’s 10 national seashores crack the top 10 in attendance for its many parks.

Frank ended his proposal by suggesting that a seashore park could be dedicated to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the newly elected president. It was a savvy political move but probably unnecessary. The administration was already looking for projects for its New Deal relief programs and had embraced legislation calling for the development of recreational areas and public parks. Within a year or two, the Work Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) would employ thousands of jobless and homeless Americans, using them to clear and maintain forests, build camps, repair wildlife refuges, and scores of other jobs. The men would provide a ready source of cheap labor for a seashore park.

The idea of a seashore appealed to National Park Service officials, who, like Stick, worried that the nation’s coasts were being bought up by wealthy Americans, shutting out everyone else. “When we look up and down the ocean fronts of America, we find that everywhere they are passing behind the fence of private ownership,” wrote Harold Ickes, Secretary of The Department of Interior, which includes the National Park Service.

The Park Service sent Marion Shuffler, a researcher, to study the possibility of using the Outer Banks as America’s first national seashore. Shuffler reported back that the economy of the Outer Banks was in serious decline “and tied to a way of life that no longer exists.” He then argued that the future of the Banks depended on tourism, tied to a park. A subsequent study identified a dozen possible locations for federal seashores but settled on the Outer Banks as the best choice.

The momentum was now behind Frank’s proposal. All he needed was for the politics to align.

~

Frank Stick didn’t think of himself as a political person. He called himself “a lefty” but that appeared to be a joke. He complained about some of the New Deal programs and criticized government bureaucrats who never acted quickly enough for his mercurial tastes. If anything, his politics veered more Republican than Democratic.

In a strange twist, in 1940, the FBI office in Charlotte opened an investigation of Frank after they received information that “Frank Stick is an individual who is in favor of dictatorships and opposed to the democratic form of government in this country,” records show. Edward Scheidt, the Special Agent in Charge, asked Victor Meekins, the Dare County Sheriff, to investigate. A few days later, Meekins wrote the agent that Frank had originally been a Republican but was now trying to “adjust himself … to Democratic sentiment.” Meekins added that Frank appeared to be loyal to his country but perhaps became confused at times. “With a world gone hay-wire, he probably is perplexed himself, and scatters remarks without discreetly remembering who is listening.” The Bureau dropped its probe.

After being appointed to a state commission established to promote an Outer Banks park, Frank bristled at the slow pace of those working with him and sometimes took matters into his own hands, traveling to Washington and Raleigh to push his proposal. Over the next few years, Frank worked tirelessly on his vision and was a relentless letter-writer to politicians and key government officials, urging them to move more quickly.

In Frank’s mind, the window for a park was limited. Residents of the Outer Banks had responded favorably to his proposal. But Frank knew there were limits to their enthusiasm. Like him, they had a tenuous relationship with the government. They liked when the government built them roads and bridges. But they worried that the park might be a land grab and restrict their ability to move about freely, hunting and fishing. Their concerns – as well as missteps by the government, and the coming war – would delay the seashore for years.

Park Service officials admired Frank’s energy and dedication, especially Conrad L. Wirth, a Washington, D.C.-based administrator who helped to plan the National Seashore and eventually would be named NPS director. Publicly, Wirth praised Frank. But privately he worried that Frank had “ulterior motives” and might be pushing the park to boost the value of his remaining real estate. It was a classic case of supply and demand. If the government controlled large swaths of the Banks, the remaining land in private hands would go up in price. In a letter to Maud, Frank once noted that if the park were approved, it would be good for them and might help to turn around the family’s fortunes. Of course, Frank wouldn’t have been the only one to benefit. In any event, the two ideas, pushing for a large swath of the Outer Banks to be preserved and encouraging a vibrant tourist economy, weren’t mutually exclusive in Frank’s mind.     

Throughout this period, Frank worked closely with Lindsay C. Warren, the congressman from nearby Washington, in Beaufort County, who represented the Outer Banks. Like Stick and others, Warren saw the future of the isolated barrier islands as tied to tourism. Warren was young, 36, ambitious and eager for headlines. In 1937, he introduced legislation in the House to create the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, and also played an instrumental role in directing millions of New Deal dollars to Eastern North Carolina and the Banks.

When FDR unveiled the WPA and CCC, Warren saw an opportunity and began lobbying the administration. In May 1935, FDR invited Warren to spend a weekend on his yacht, Potomac, along with Harry Hopkins, the President’s right-hand man on the New Deal. Two weeks later, Warren announced that the WPA was setting aside over $1 million dollars to fight erosion and help “stabilize” the Outer Banks.

Like most barrier islands, which are constantly shifting, the Outer Banks suffered from chronic erosion. The problem was especially acute near the historic Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, which was being undermined and was at risk of collapsing into the Atlantic Ocean. Following publication of Frank’s proposal, a cadre of state foresters and geologists visited the Banks to study the issue. They concluded that the Outer Banks (let alone a park) would not survive without human intervention. They proposed a towering artificial sand dune to prevent sand from washing across the islands in storms. The barrier would extend from the Virginia border to Ocracoke Island.

Frank never mentioned erosion or the supposedly ragged condition of the Banks’ sand dunes in his proposal. Nevertheless, he quickly endorsed the idea as his own, contending that a stable dune was needed to protect the asphalt road he envisioned running the length of the Banks. Later, he directed a crew at one of the eight government camps on the Banks that housed thousands of itinerant workers building the dunes.

Years later, in 1973, the NPS would abandon its dune-building activities. Erosion was a natural part of barrier island migration, scientists said, and blocking sand from washing across the islands and elevating the interiors was a mistake. The artificial dune also provided a false sense of security, the scientists wrote, encouraging development in areas prone to flooding and storms. By then, the Service had spent millions of dollars moving around sand. State engineers had spent millions more.  

America’s first national seashore didn’t officially open until 1953. By then, Frank Stick had moved on to new ideas and interests, including new real estate deals. His son David would assume the family lead in helping the seashore into existence, working closely with state and federal officials, writing articles, and giving talks.

Next in the series: Southern Shores

Frank Stick was in search of two things when he arrived on the Outer Banks in the 1920s: adventure and money. He found enough adventure to fill a lifetime but like many Bankers on the isolated barrier islands, he scrambled to pay the bills. Once one of the largest landowners, with property from Kitty Hawk to Hatteras, the artist turned developer lost many of his holdings during the Great Depression. Stick eventually recovered and developed the much-admired Southern Shores community with his son David and other partners. A complex man of shifting interests and unwavering opinions, Stick was both a conservationist who played an instrumental role in the formation of Cape Hatteras National Seashore and an avid land speculator who wrote of turning the Banks into a playground for tourists.

This is his story.

Chapter Three: Setbacks to A Dream

Read the ongoing series

The Elizabeth City Independent’s publisher W.O. Saunders liked Frank Stick. He thought he was a dreamer and an artist with a worthy plan to transform the isolated Outer Banks into a national destination for tourists and create thousands of jobs and unprecedented wealth.

The curmudgeonly editor filled his newspaper with story after story touting Stick and his partners, helping to promote their Virginia Dare Shores project near Kitty Hawk. THRONGS EXPECTED AT VIRGINIA DARE SHORES, a June 3^rd headline enthused. Frank Stick was “selling America’s most beautiful coastal playground to Americans,” Saunders wrote in another story.

But W.O. Saunders was no one’s toady. When he felt he was being misled by Stick and his partners, the laudatory stories vanished and he turned on the New Jersey developers.   

“THE TRUTH ABOUT THAT VIRGINIA SHORES,” a November 1927 headline thundered. “HOW A PAIR OF ENTHUSIASTIC AMATEURS AND A PAIR OF INDIFFERENT BUSINESS ASSOCIATES PULLED A FLIVVER” (Selling a car in bad condition).

“In the spring of this year it started out with a great flourish of trumpets, proclaiming a fifty-million-dollar development on the North Carolina Coast in the vicinity of Kill Devil Hills,” Saunders wrote. “It was going to build cement streets on the sand, build hotels, run a great resort and sell lots on Virginia Dare shores faster than deeds could be recorded. AND IT ALL ENDED IN A FIASCO. The lots didn’t sell and the company didn’t pay its bills around town.”

Saunders accused Stick’s longtime associate Allen Hueth of over-promising. He wrote that Elmer Geran, the former congressman, “was losing money and needed to make money.” He called Frank Stick a dreamer who lacked business experience. Capt. Frank Winch, the former publicist, “made a great noise,” Saunders wrote. “But he did not sell lots. He did make a lot of bills … and then he woke up and there wasn’t any more money to pay their bills. NOW THAT WAS A PRETTY HOW DO YOU DO.”

The Saunders story was only the beginning of the troubles at Virginia Dare Shores. The partners were also squabbling. Hueth accused Winch of wasting thousands of dollars on expenses while failing to set up sales offices along the East Coast.

“We do not see how we can go along with [future] financial assistance unless you are willing to follow out our idea,” Hueth wrote in a letter stamped “Confidential.” “As it is now, your company, Shore Properties has had a great deal of money advanced, which we believe should have been spent to much better advantage.” In another letter, Hueth called Winch’s efforts “an absolute failure.”

Winch angrily defended himself, accusing Hueth and Stick of failing to build any actual cottages, let alone a bridge linking the resort to the mainland. “Because of lack of organization and support, because of uncompleted development of the properties itself, because of nasty rumors, because we have permitted our credit to be shattered … these are some of the causes and NONE of them are up to me,” he declared.

There are no records of what happened next, but presumably Winch was fired or quit. For months, Stick and his partners struggled to recover. But progress was slow and they fell behind on payments on their properties. In December 1928, they hosted a gala at their Virginia Dare Shores pavilion celebrating the 25^th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ talismanic first flight. Thousands of politicians, government officials and celebrities arrived by ferry for the festivities. Amelia Earhart rode in the bucket seat of a sedan with Frank Stick’s son, David.

For the moment, all seemed upbeat. But the expected flurry of sales never materialized. Then, following the celebration, tragedy struck. On the ferry ride across Kitty Hawk Bay, Allen Hueth suffered a massive heart attack and died. He had been talking with the region’s young congressman, Lindsay Warren, at the time. Apparently, they had been discussing how to save Virginia Dare Shores.

~

Frank Stick didn’t just lose a fishing buddy and close friend when Hueth died, he lost an important business partner as well. Hueth provided decades of experience in real estate and finance. He was also a critical source of capital. In the succeeding years, Frank struggled to cover options on thousands of acres of Outer Banks property their various companies owned. Some of the lenders began to call the loans and, in some cases, Frank’s shares were offered at tax sales at the county courthouse in Manteo.

According to David Stick, his father emerged from the Great Depression owning a fraction of his original holdings. He lost a half-interest in a large ocean-to-sound tract in Nags Head; a one-third interest in his Colington Island property, and scattered interests along the Lower Banks. I couldn’t confirm this but did stumble across one instance in which Frank arranged for an Elizabeth City businessman to bid on his Kitty Hawk property at tax sale and then transfer the property back to Frank’s Hatteras Holding Corp., in return for an interest in the land. In any case, even as the market for coastal land collapsed, Frank kept enough property to not entirely give up his dream, and continued to advise some of his fellow Asbury Park investors on other land deals.   

For years, Frank had been splitting his time between Interlaken and the Outer Banks, where he stayed in hotels. In 1929, he agreed to lease an old lodge called Skyco on Roanoke Island. Frank, Charlotte and David lived there much of the time. Maud commuted back and forth and spent a fair amount of time looking after their parents. Later, Frank built a family home in Kill Devil Hills.

As the Depression deepened, Frank spent most of his time scrambling to keep the family afloat. In the 1930s, he switched from selling lots to building homes. But instead of building traditional Nags Head cottages with wrap-around porches and slanted, overhanging roofs, Frank designed colorful Cape Cod-style beach houses. A row of these cottages along the oceanfront in Kill Devil Hills became known as “Millionaire’s Row.” Later, Frank formed a company, Community Housing Inc., to build low-cost housing in the Tidewater, Virginia, area; lead a work crew clearing a right-of-way for utility lines near Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point; undertook a government-funded restoration of Fort Raleigh on Roanoke Island; and served as executive director of a government commission promoting a seashore park on the Outer Banks – anything to pay the bills.

In public settings, Frank remained calm and confident. However, in Depression-era correspondence with Maud, he let down his guard and allowed his inner doubts to surface. Writing in December 1934, Frank apologized for the family’s financial struggles, blaming himself for his real estate failures and observing that the children shouldn’t have to “suffer” because of his mistakes.” However, Frank rarely ended his letters on a dark note. Hope was always just around the corner, and he often expressed confidence that a big deal he was working on would pan out soon.

In what today feels like a desperate plea, Frank even placed an advertisement in The Independent, declaring: “With faith in the Future — FRANK STICK.”

Next in the series: Inventing the Seashore

Frank Stick was in search of two things when he arrived on the Outer Banks in the 1920s: adventure and money. He found enough adventure to fill a lifetime but like many Bankers on the isolated barrier islands, he scrambled to pay the bills. Once one of the largest landowners, with property from Kitty Hawk to Hatteras, the artist turned developer lost many of his holdings during the Great Depression. Stick eventually recovered and developed the much-admired Southern Shores community with his son David and other partners. A complex man of shifting interests and unwavering opinions, Stick was both a conservationist who played an instrumental role in the formation of Cape Hatteras National Seashore and an avid land speculator who wrote of turning the Banks into a playground for tourists.

This is his story.

Chapter Two: The Nature Lover Turns Speculator

Read Chapter One: The Outdoorsman

In the summer of 1926, Frank Stick put aside his paint brushes and made the long journey from Asbury Park to the Outer Banks. Details about the August trip are scarce. It appears that Frank and a friend drove from New Jersey. But where they stayed or for how long is unclear. Years later, family members would say Frank came to go fishing, fell in love with the spare beauty of the Banks, and decided he wanted to live there. It is a good story and in keeping with the narrative that Frank and others crafted of the artist as a tireless adventurer who often made decisions from the gut. And for nearly a century it has gone unquestioned, repeated in numerous books and articles.

But the story is incomplete. Frank Stick was looking to land more than a few bluefish when he visited the Banks. His career as an illustrator whose paintings appeared on the covers of such diverse national magazines as Field & Stream, Redbook and Ladies Home Journal was beginning to unravel. Frank was restless and looking for a new, lucrative career. He had identified the Outer Banks as one of the most promising shorelines on the East Coast. His partner on the trip, Allen R. Hueth, was a wealthy main street real estate agent who owned or managed hundreds of properties around Asbury Park. True, they were fishing buddies. However, they brought along more than rods and reels on this trip. They also brought a plan, and cash, plenty of cash.

Hueth and Stick saw the Outer Banks as an opportunity, maybe even a way to get rich. Other than seven or eight small villages scattered here and there from Kitty Hawk to Cape Hatteras, there were miles and miles of empty oceanfront, rolling sand dunes, and maritime forests fronting the Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds. Unlike Asbury Park and other booming resorts along the northern New Jersey coast, where oceanfront lots sold for thousands of dollars, land on the Banks was cheap, costing only a few dollars. Many sales were on installment. All investors had to do was put down something and take an option on the rest, paying off as they went. With restless Americans looking to escape the summer heat, and an exuberant stock market refreshing pocketbooks, the moment felt ideal for a land boom at the beach.

Stick and Hueth arranged a meeting with Capt. Daniel Webster Hayman, a native of Kitty Hawk who piloted steamboats and yachts from Norfolk to Key West, and somehow had managed to come into possession of 30,000 acres on the Banks. Wanderlust caught Capt. Dan early in life and at the age of nine he had shipped on a three-mast schooner as a mess boy. In more recent years, he had piloted a millionaire’s yacht up and down the Florida coast, where a land boom was transforming mangrove forests and sawgrass into rivers of gold. Recognizing the possibilities, Capt. Dan had returned to North Carolina and begun investing in real estate.

All told, it is said Capt. Dan sold his 30,000 acres for about $200,000 – or about $7 an acre. That doesn’t sound like much today but it is worth recalling that some Bankers were giving away oceanfront lots for pennies at the time. Stick and Hueth bought a 2,300-acre tract near Kill Devil Hills that included the site where Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first heavier than air flights. They then added 6,000 acres near Nags Head, 8,000 acres between Oregon Inlet and Hatteras and a smaller tract running from the Atlantic Ocean to the Kitty Hawk Bay near the border of Kill Devil Hills and Kitty Hawk.

Almost immediately, Stick and his New Jersey partners began advertising in local newspapers. For example:

“MILLIONS”

HAVE BEEN MADE IN

BEACH FRONT PROPERTY

… shouted an advertisement in the Thursday, Oct. 21, 1926, edition of The Asbury Park Press.

North Carolina the coming playground of America today offers the same opportunity that was found in New Jersey and Florida ten years ago. Accessable (sic); an ideal year-round climate; destructive storms are unknown and North Carolina is conceded to be the most progressive and prosperous State in the Union. Lots as low as $100.00.

Upon returning home, Frank Stick began to recruit friends and business associates from Asbury Park to invest in his Outer Banks’ ventures. Frank’s Interlaken neighbor and fellow illustrator, Bill Koerner, purchased land near Kill Devil Hills. Elmer H. Geran, an attorney, banker, and former one-term congressman, joined Stick and Hueth in their recently formed North Carolina Coast Development Co. T.H. Beringer, an Asbury Park councilman, invested in 500 acres of Colington Island, a prized tract in the Albemarle Sound. Charles Baker and Susan Sutton, owners of the largest department store in Asbury Park, acquired the sand dunes that would eventually become the site of the Wright Brothers Memorial. Meanwhile, Stick formed a separate company, Hatteras Holding Corp., to buy coastal land and build lodges and hunting clubs for wealthy industrialists from the North. He brokered deals for the Phipps brothers, John and Henry, scions of a Pittsburgh steel fortune, and helped design and build hunting lodges for the brothers near Cape Hatteras and Buxton. In turn, the Phipps family provided Stick with a $12,000 loan to help him cover some of his debts, correspondence shows.

Stick and his fellow investors now owned thousands of acres of the Outer Banks. How many exactly? That’s hard to know. Hueth told The Asbury Park Press that they controlled 40 miles of oceanfront and bay in Dare County, which included the barrier islands from Kitty Hawk to Hatteras. Another story put the figure at 75 miles. Neither figure is credible. Frank’s son, David, the late, local historian, used a more believable 14 miles.

In any case, it was a lot. W.O. Saunders, editor and publisher of The Elizabeth City Independent, took notice. “A revolution has come to Dare County,” he wrote. “It is a bloodless revolution … but a revolution nevertheless. Wealthy Northerners … are slowly but surely acquiring mile after mile of beach and marsh lands.”        

David Stick put it more simply. He called it “The Jersey Shore Invasion.”

~

In 1927, Frank and his partners announced plans for a resort north of Kill Devil Hills, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to Kitty Hawk Bay. It would be called Virginia Dare Shores, named for the first English child born in the Americas, near Manteo. As with most of Frank’s visions, it was eye-catching and creative. The design included a wide center boulevard named for Capt. Dan Hayman, with blocks of cottages running north and south. There was to be a pavilion for community events, a dock for the ferry shuttling vacationers from the mainland to the resort. A cement block cottage offered a place for Frank and his family to stay until he moved them permanently to the Banks. Frank also announced plans for two hotels – one a 200-room oceanfront structure near the site of the Wright Brothers’ flight and the other a 30-room hotel on Kitty Hawk Bay. The latter would be built immediately, he promised The Independent.

It was a heady time for Frank and his partners and the locals eagerly cheered their every move. The days of isolation and poverty were finally giving way to a new age. “It is impossible to stem the beginnings of a rush of visitors who are anxious to see the new region for themselves,” W.O. Saunders wrote.

Excitement and enthusiasm are one thing, actual development another. Frank and his partners struggled to find buyers. That wasn’t surprising considering the absence of roads or bridges connecting their planned resort to the mainland. For help selling his dream, Stick turned to Frank Winch, a former publicist for the circus who had recently directed a farewell tour for the showman Buffalo Bill Cody. Ordinary adjectives don’t quite do Winch justice. He was big, loud, excessively confident, and prone to exaggeration. Like Stick, he was a sharpshooter, big game hunter and a naturalist, which likely explains how Frank knew him. Prior to promoting Virginia Dare Shores, Winch had set up shop in Miami, selling the land boom there. “WANT TO MAKE MONEY?” one of his advertisements blared. “I HAVE MADE MONEY.” As the press agent for Coney Island, Winch once got into a row with local media for using the term “hot dog.” That was too “low brow for a summer resort,” he insisted. The proper term was “frankfurter.”

Frank met Winch at a Norfolk hotel and the pair agreed on a plan. Winch would operate out of Washington, D.C., and set up satellite offices in the big cities from Norfolk to New York. That May, the new partners held a get-to-know-us meeting with members of the Elizabeth City Chamber of Commerce and handed out courtesy cards for free ferry rides to their new pavilion on Kitty Hawk Bay. Winch grandly told the crowd that sales had already reached $100,000, and that construction of 15 to 20 cottages would begin in two weeks.

Prior to the gathering, Winch visited W.O. Saunders at his home to celebrate Saunders’s birthday. According to a story in The Independent. Winch presented the publisher with “a handsome silver service … and a beautiful 24 carat virgin gold ruby ring.” The newspaper described the offerings as birthday presents.

Following the meeting, Saunders’s newspaper published a glowing report on the Virginia Dare Shores project, referring to Stick and his partners as “splendid fellows” who were transforming the Outer Banks. He also informed readers that his newspaper had printed “a beautiful supplement” for the developers. Written by Winch, the glossy, 16-page report was filled with bluster and exaggerations. It repeated earlier claims that the partners controlled most of the Outer Banks; that there were “smooth hard roads,” and that Virginia Dare Shores was “ready for immediate occupancy.”

It was fantasy and Frank Stick knew it. There were no paved roads. No cottages ready for immediate occupancy. While they were moving forward, progress was slow and money was tight. Little could Frank know, but his vision of turning the Banks into a summer playground was about to implode.

Next in the series: Setbacks to a Dream

Frank Stick was in search of two things when he arrived on the Outer Banks in the 1920s: adventure and money. He found enough adventure to fill a lifetime but like many Bankers on the isolated barrier islands, he scrambled to pay the bills. Once one of the largest landowners, with property from Kitty Hawk to Hatteras, the artist turned developer lost many of his holdings during the Great Depression. Stick eventually recovered and developed the much-admired Southern Shores community with his son David and other partners. A complex man of shifting interests and unwavering opinions, Stick was both a conservationist who played an instrumental role in the formation of Cape Hatteras National Seashore and an avid land speculator who wrote of turning the Banks into a playground for tourists. This is his story.

Chapter One: The Outdoorsman

After finishing a new book, “The Geography of Risk,” in 2018, I began rooting around for my next project. I thought I might write about the Outer Banks. I had been coming to Currituck for over three decades at that point and had watched it grow from a modest seashore retreat to a modern-day coastal playground with ever larger and more luxurious “cottages” and amenities. I was both intrigued and, I suppose, alarmed by these changes. I didn’t want the Banks to morph into another coastal suburb with big-box stores, chain restaurants, and row after row of grid-style houses. I wanted the old unpretentious Banks, with their rough edges, rogue charms, and breathtaking views. I thought there might be a story and wanted to know more. 

Discovering things is how I work. I rarely begin with an outline. I prefer to get dirty, prowling around in archives and spending countless hours online reading old newspaper stories. In public settings, writers assume a pose of confidence and control. But don’t believe it. A week didn’t pass in which I wasn’t hounded by the thought all my research might be for naught. The Outer Banks, really? Who wants to read a modern history of the Banks? And then one coffee-deprived morning, I stumbled upon Frank Stick.

Of course, I had no idea who Frank Stick was, why he mattered, or what he had to do with the Outer Banks. But there he was, lurking in a yellowed 90-year-old newspaper clipping about a grand new resort he planned to build near the border of Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills. Frank talked about building beach cottages and hotels, and how his plan marked a new beginning for the long-ignored Outer Banks, then one of the poorest places in North Carolina. Local newspaper editors ate it up. Change was at hand, they proclaimed, and not a moment too soon. It was the 1920s, after all, and the markets were roaring, jazz was in the air, optimism rampant.

“Look at Florida,” roared W.O. Saunders, the irascible editor and publisher of The Elizabeth City Independent. “Why can’t the Outer Banks with all of its natural assets be the next Florida? We can fashion a national playground for Americans of all ages, who will come here and spend their money, creating jobs for anyone who wants one. It will be a new golden age, perhaps even a Paradise.”

For reasons I can’t explain, I became obsessed with Frank Stick. Every day I learned a little more of his improbable story – artist, outdoorsman, gadfly, dreamer, developer, speculator — and how he had landed on the Banks in mystery and shadows. What I couldn’t decide was whether Frank (he was now just Frank to me) was a hero or merely posing as one? His motivations were complicated. He was a naturalist who filled miles of beaches with vacation houses. A conservationist who eagerly speculated in land and promised investors big profits. An artist, coveted for his illustrations, who abandoned his art to be a real estate man.

Just when I would think I knew him, some other facet of his personality would reveal itself and I would find myself fumbling for purchase again.

“Stick was a unique individual, characterized by his extreme versatility,” wrote Michael F. Mordell, author of an early biography of Stick, the artist.

That sounded about right. Frank painted, drew, and sculpted. He designed homes and landscapes. And he wrote feverishly, if often baroquely, about a wide range of subjects. At times, he exaggerated, claiming to be a native of the Banks, or took credit for projects he didn’t lead. I imagine it had to do with his competitive personality and solitary upbringing. Frank was uniquely self-possessed and rarely short of confidence. It brimmed in his art and cast a long arc over his family. And over the course of four decades, it had a powerful impact on the Outer Banks.

~

Frank Leonard Stick was born in the railroad town of Huron, South Dakota, in February 1884, but at an early age moved to Sioux City, Iowa, then to Oglesby, Illinois. As a young boy, he vanished into the woods to hunt, fish, and explore. Initially, these forays lasted hours. Then days. Then weeks. Smart but bored with formal schooling, he headed to the woods of northern Wisconsin, where he worked as a camp cook. By the time he was a teenager, he was expert at camping and guiding. In time, he moved deeper into the forests and mountains of the West, traveling as far as Yellowstone in Montana. Grainy photos show Frank dressed in a buckskin shirt and hat, with an ever-present neckerchief and pipe – oh, and an elk strapped across his back.

“I am not able to remember back to a period when I was not engaged in one way or another in getting my full measure of happiness from the out-of-doors,” Stick wrote in the journal Outdoor America, published by the Izaak Walton League of America.

In the early 1900s, Frank found a way to marry his passion for nature and wildlife with a future profession. He began drawing, sketching, and painting landscapes and hunting scenes. In 1904 he sold his first painting of a fisherman landing a bass to Sports Afield magazine for $10. Over the next two years, he contributed 75 illustrations to the magazine, according to Mordell. An expert angler, Frank also wrote stories about his fishing exploits for national publications and later in life would co-author a book on surfcasting.

Around the age of 22, Frank was invited to join Howard Pyle’s Brandywine School of Art in Wilmington, Delaware. Pyle was arguably the nation’s best-known illustrator. Instruction was free, informal, and lasted as long as the instructor and budding artist deemed necessary. Frank stayed three years and was surrounded by an array of talent, including N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish and W. H. D. Koerner, who would become a great friend. It was at Wilmington that Frank also met a petite and exuberant model, 18-year-old Ada Maud Hayes, who would become his partner in both business and life.

Frank and his new bride returned to the woods of northern Wisconsin, where they lived in a simple, Thoreau-style cabin on Squirrel Lake. Frank continued to hunt, fish and paint. His illustrations graced the covers of Field & Stream and other magazines. Others highlighted popular calendars, then a lucrative source of money for illustrators. Frank was a commercial and financial success, with as much work as he wished. Yet, as would become a familiar pattern throughout his life, Frank grew restless. Perhaps tired of solitary life, he decided to move the family east, closer to the big cities with their magazines and publishing houses.

In 1917, Frank, Maud, and their young daughter Charlotte moved to the tiny borough of Interlaken, near the seashore resort of Asbury Park, in Monmouth County, New Jersey. Named after the exclusive resort in Switzerland, Interlaken was approximately midway between New York and Philadelphia, centers of the publishing industry. Importantly, it also bordered Lake Deal, a magnet for migratory waterfowl, and was only a short hike to the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay, for fishing. Known as an artist’s colony, the small borough attracted painters, poets and actors. Frank built a large Georgian-style mansion and art studio on the banks of Lake Deal and called it Pine Cove.

Today, the Asbury Park many people know is the one Bruce Springsteen sang about in his seminal first album, “Greetings from Asbury Park,” a gritty, down-on-its-luck, fading seashore resort. But at the turn of the last century Asbury Park was very much alive and thriving. A popular destination for actors, politicians, and wealthy industrialists. Frank seemed to know all of them. Some he met through his art. Others through his adventures hunting and fishing. He also gave talks to any group that asked and frequently wrote about his exploits for the local papers.

One of his closest friends was Van Campen Heilner, a silver spoon scion of an anthracite coal fortune, who lived in nearby Spring Lake. Heilner often appeared in the newspapers in a pith helmet and was a well-known explorer, writer, and filmmaker associated with The Museum of Natural History in New York City. Ernest Hemingway considered Heilner one of the finest anglers in the world and named one of the characters in “A Farewell to Arms” Nurse Van Campen, an inside joke. In 1920, Stick and Heilner co-authored a pioneering work on surfcasting, “The Call of the Surf.”

Along with G. Albert Lyon, an inventor who made millions patenting bumpers and wheel covers for the nascent automobile trade, Stick and Heilner traveled from Maine to Florida hunting and fishing. In one memorable incident, Stick was fishing on Lyon’s yacht, Alberta, near Barnegat Inlet, when the yacht suddenly exploded and burned to the waterline. Lyon, reported The Asbury Park Press, “made a picturesque figure, garbed in a suit of pajamas and hip boots” as he launched himself into the inlet’s notoriously dangerous currents. Stick escaped by dinghy, telling a reporter that he didn’t mind losing his fishing tackle but greatly regretted he was unable to recover a “fine string of big bluefish.”

Frank also befriended Zane Grey, the popular author of “Riders of the Purple Sage”and other Western novels. Grey edited articles Stick wrote for Outdoor America. In turn, Frank illustrated some of Grey’s books and magazine stories. Grey was an avid angler and kept a camp in the Florida Keys, the Long Key Fishing Club. Frank became a frequent guest, sometimes staying for weeks at a time. He landed so many bonefish Grey included him as a character in his 1922 story, “The Bonefish Brigade,” which recounted one of their many fishing adventures.   

By the mid-1920s, sales of Grey’s books topped $1 million, making him America’s first millionaire author. Meanwhile, in one year alone, Stick reportedly sold over 150 illustrations. Even so, Frank complained that his art was beginning to feel cookie-cutter; editors were asking him to produce the same scenes over and over. He also worried that his illustrations of hunters glorified slaughtering the very waterfowl and animals he intended to celebrate. “Of course the main reason I quit art,” he told Maud, “was that I was fed up on that hunting stuff.”

Something had to change.

Next in the series: The nature lover turns speculator

In the spring of 1890, journalist John Randolph Spears made plans to visit Cape Hatteras on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, one of the most isolated and dangerous stretches of coastline in America. For Spears, the Outer Banks loomed as a forbidding geography blackened by fog, lashing waves, and fitful winds, a place where pirates and grubby sea captains battled the elements and over 500 ships had been lost along the boils and shoals scuttling the legendary Cape’s angry waters.

Why go there at all? For the 40-year-old Spears, the answer was obvious: He craved adventure. As a reporter for The New York Sun and Scribner’s Magazine, Spears had covered the Spanish-American war in Cuba, boated down the Amazon River in Brazil, and wandered the bottom of the world in Patagonia. Now, he hoped to document the otherworldly sand waves of Hatteras — giant mountains of snow-white sand migrating across Hatteras Island from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pamlico Sound.

Spears found the idea of the sand waves hallucinatory and thought the readers would share his fascination. Some of the waves were said to be as tall as skyscrapers. Others were moody and fitful, rolling over yaupon and live oaks, burying maritime forests, turning ridges into mountains.

The mysterious waves were the work of the ever-present wind pulsing across the lower Banks. Indeed, the swirls, gusts, and hurricane-force gales — wet from the east, dry and brittle from the west, baking hot from the south, frigid and gray from the north — defined life there, sculpting the desolate and ethereal beaches, bending trees in half, battering flimsy cottages.

Spears assumed the sand waves were a broken thread in the grand design of how the physical world works. But he couldn’t say how or why, and apparently that bothered him. He needed to see for himself.

But first he had to get there, no small undertaking given the isolated geography. Cape Hatteras was far from the nearest mainland town of any consequence. There were no roads or bridges. The only way across was by open boat and the trip was dangerous and long.

Spears’s had grown up in Van Wert, Ohio, a small town originally known as the Black Swamp because of its boggy ground, mud, and malaria. He had worked his way up from a series of no-name local newspapers to The Sun, where he specialized in writing features about far-flung places. Spears had read a line or two about the sand waves of Hatteras and sensed a good story. So, off he went early on a Monday in May, traveling by rail to Norfolk, then securing a berth on the steamer Manteo, which chugged up the south branch of the Elizabeth River, through the recently dug Chesapeake and Albemarle Canal, down the North Landing River, and finally across the shallow, brackish Currituck Sound until he landed at a rickety dock in Manteo, the political seat of Dare County, and then one of the poorest counties in North Carolina.

The town was already shuttered for the evening but Spears managed to find a bed in a local boarding house. He wasn’t nearly as lucky, however, finding a ride to Hatteras, unable to book passage on a mail boat until the following Thursday. It was a 25-mile journey from Manteo to the village of Chicamacomico (now Rodanthe). The captain was a “broad-shouldered, deep-chested” man named J. Clifford Bowser, with “a new-moon mouth, keen eyes, and a most genial temper,” who gleefully laughed as chop and froth “whooped after them.” His boat, the Shad Pilot, was a mighty dugout canoe, 27-feet long, 7 feet wide, and 3 1/2 feet deep. It was cut from two giant cedar trees and halved together with nails and glue, and known locally as a cunner. The ride across took seven and one-half hours. Not that Spears complained. It was adventure he craved. And at 75 cents, the long boat ride was a bargain.

Spears waded ashore in Chicamacomico and found his way to a weather-beaten shack that served as the Post Office. He assumed he must be close to Cape Hatteras and asked where he might see the giant mountains of moving sand. A thin young man “with a thin, yellowish face, yellowish white hair, a yellowish white little mustache, and watery blue eyes” eyed Spears suspiciously. “Whar from?” he asked. “New York,” answered Spears. At which the man shook his head and repeated his question. It finally occurred to Spears that he meant his destination, and he replied, “Cape Hatteras.”

An hour or so later, Spears was back aboard the dugout dodging wind and waves as Capt. Bowser navigated the inner waters to Kinnakeet (now Avon). He spent the night there in an unpainted shack scattered amid sound side woods and a tumbledown windmill, and then hitched a ride on a passing mail boat that finally delivered him to Cape Hatteras. It was 10 o’clock at night on Friday and he had been traveling for nearly a week.

The next morning Spears began hiking north along the beach. The wind was warm and wet, the Atlantic a great sprawl of blue-white foam and waves. He had been hiking an hour or two when he observed a “mammoth wave of sand that towers aloft like a sea-wave, even curling in places like a huge breaker,” tumbling and rolling across the low dunes, as though some wild animal waiting to pounce.

Later, he would write that sand waves extended at least 30 miles, to Kinnakeet in the north, and as far south as Buxton, where the famed lighthouse stood sentinel over the rioting ocean. Spears was no scientist, let alone a geologist, but that didn’t stop him from speculating. Once upon a time, he informed his readers, the entire Outer Banks had been lushly carpeted with forest that anchored the sand in place. However, over decades fishermen and farmers had cut the forest to build houses and boats, and had freely grazed cattle, sheep and pigs up and down the Banks, denuding the landscape and allowing sand to blow freely across the island and form giant heaps.

The speed of the sand waves was increasing each year, Spears continued, and was now “on a mission of death. Foot by foot, yard by yard, rod by rod [as] the wave traveled inland.”

Now, the end was near, Spears warned. “There is as yet no family homeless, but a number of families find the surf from the deadly sand-wave beating at their doors.” Oddly, the humble Bankers appeared indifferent to their fate, Spears observed. Perhaps it was because death always seemed near on the Banks. So many had been lost to the crushing sea, fevers, and the frigid cold of winter. Doctors were hours away and there were no roads to get to them in any event. So far removed from ordinary life, who would save them?

The more Spears wrote, the more his mood darkened. Soon, he concluded, the entire island north of the Cape – the 60 miles or so of Hatteras Island — would be “uninhabitable,” its people “left to wander Ishmael-like.

“Steadily, stealthily, onward creeps the relentless wave,” the journalist concluded, “and calmly, idly waiting, these people accept their doom.”

It made for a riveting yarn. Yet much of what Spears told his readers was incomplete or wrong. True, sand waves had buried cottages but not scores as Spears asserted. Nor did the towering mountains of sand make Hatteras Island a vast wasteland. As anyone who has driven N.C. Highway 12 from Kitty Hawk to Cape Hatteras knows, the Outer Banks are now a destination for millions of vacationers and dotted with thousands of houses and businesses worth billions of dollars.

So, what happened? How did Spears get it so wrong? One explanation is that Spears assumed that the barrier islands had once been fixed in place – a lush paradise of forests and woods that anchored the sand in place. What scientists now understand is that the opposite is true. The Outer Banks are, by definition, unstable, a highly dynamic chain of low-lying islands that are always moving, re-sculpting themselves, grain by grain, eroding here, adding sand there, a forest now, a desert later, retreating and advancing in a cyclical dance as water approaches and falls away.

Millions of years earlier, in what scientists refer to as the Quaternary Period, the North Carolina coast was alternately buried under water as sea levels rose, or nearly dry as glaciers captured water in ice and sea levels dropped precipitously. The shoreline shifted along with the water levels. One million years ago the sea was over 400 feet higher than today and the North Carolina shoreline reached miles inland. Then, during the last glacial maximum, or little ice age, about 17,000 years ago, the shoreline receded so far seaward it extended to the continental shelf, about 50 miles east of where it stands today.

The only constant in this dynamic interplay is change, explains Stanley Riggs, one of North Carolina’s best-known coastal scientists. “The North Carolina coast is a work in progress. It is always evolving and subject to great energy transfers in storms. All it takes is one big storm to reshape an entire island. And despite what some people think, there is no way to hold the line.”

Even as John Randolph Spears worried about sand waves swallowing the Cape and its inhabitants, the sea was rising, steadily gobbling massive chunks of sand and ferrying it down the coast, through inlets that regularly opened and closed, or out to sea, where it formed treacherous deltas and shoals. As Mike Bryant, the former manager of the Pea Island Wildlife Refuge told me, “There isn’t a single grain of sand on the Outer Banks in the same place today as yesterday – let alone epochs, centuries, or even minutes ago.”

In this sense, sand waves were a normal, even predictable, feature of the Outer Banks, not an aberration as Spears assumed. For as long as the Banks have existed, sand has migrated from ocean to sound. It is part of how barrier islands adapt to rising seas and flood waters, and ever so slowly inch their way to the west, toward the mainland. Never stable, always in motion.

Locals put names to the hills and hammocks. There is Penny’s Hill, north of Corolla, and Run Hill and the Seven Sisters, near Nags Head. In the 1990s, scientists used handheld radars to date several of the sand waves. They discovered that some were over 1,000 years old, while others were hundreds of years old, still others barely a few years old.

Jockey’s Ridge, probably the best-known sand wave on the Outer Banks, was once a staggering 150 feet tall, maps reveal, but now is only about one-third of its former height. Is that because of tourists trampling the dunes? Wind pushing the ridge to the south? Perhaps. But natural forces are also in conflict with man-made ones. Oceanfront development in Nags Head “cuts off the supply of sand from reaching the middle of the island,” Stan Riggs explained. “So, the sand doesn’t get to the dune anymore. It is sand-starved.”