Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. More of his work can be found on his website.

Earlier today, March 20, I gave a lecture at the annual Whales and Whaling Symposium in Beaufort. It is a special event, and one that I treasure.

Sponsored by the Bonehenge Whaling Center, which is part of the North Carolina Maritime Museum, the symposium invites scientists, historians, and the public to come together and share their knowledge of whales and the history of whaling on the North Carolina coast and throughout the Atlantic.

My lecture was titled “Nye’s Clock Oil and the Bottlenose Dolphin Fishery at Hatteras Island.”

The photograph above was one of the illustrations that I used in my lecture. It shows one of the crews that was hunting bottlenose dolphins on Hatteras Island in the winter of 1907 to 1908.

This crew worked for the William F. Nye Co., a New Bedford, Massachusetts, firm that operated a bottlenose dolphin fishery on Hatteras Island between 1907 and 1928.

Arising in New Bedford when it was the whale oil capital of the world, the William F. Nye Co. was the country’s largest maker of highly specialized whale and dolphin oils uniquely suited for lubricating clocks, watches, chronometers, scientific instruments, and other delicate machinery.

The company did not obtain those oils from whale blubber, but from two anatomical structures only found in the heads of bottlenose dolphins, pilot whales, belugas and other small-toothed whales.

Specifically, the William F. Nye Co.’s “oilers” extracted those oils from the fatty tissues in the animals’ lower jawbones and from an organ in their foreheads that is called the “melon.” 

Both play central roles in the echolocation ability of those whales and dolphins. That is, they are key to the way that they navigate, find prey and generally “see” underwater by emitting sound waves and interpreting their echos when they reflect off objects around them.

On Hatteras Island, the company’s workers butchered the dolphins on the beach. They then did a small degree of refinement at a facility on Durant’s Island, a knoll on the sound side of the island.

They then shipped the oil to the company’s factory in New Bedford for far more extensive refining.

Between the American Civil War, which spanned from 1861 to 1865, and 1900, the William F. Nye Co. acquired the largest part of its supply of those oils from pilot whale strandings on Cape Cod and Long Island.

In many of those cases, local fishermen herded the whales into shallow waters where they were trapped and grounded.

To establish a more stable supply of those oils, William F. Nye’s son Joseph came south and established the bottlenose dolphin fishery on Hatteras Island in 1907. He recruited local fishermen and seafarers, many of whom had been involved in earlier bottlenose fisheries on Hatteras.

Hatteras Island was the site of the oldest and longest running bottlenose dolphin fishery in North America.

At the National Museum of Natural History’s Paleobiology Archive, I found records indicating that there had been a commercial bottlenose dolphin fishery on Hatteras Island on and off since at least 1851.

To oversee the Hatteras fishery, Joseph Nye employed a third-generation Hatteras oiler, William C. Rollinson.

Rollinson had been involved in hunting bottlenose dolphins most of his life, as had his father and grandfather before him.

His father, John W. Rollinson, had been superintendent of a bottlenose dolphin fishery at Hatteras that had been operated by a company based in Wilmington, Delaware, in the 1880s and 1890s.

Even further back in time, his grandfather had been captain of a bottlenose dolphin crew at Hatteras Island before the Civil War.

It was hard, dirty work. When I was younger, and some of the men were still alive, they described it as a very grim business, the kind of job that one only did if there was no other way to make a living. But that was often the case on Hatteras Island in those days.

The William F. Nye Co.’s bottlenose dolphin fishery remained on Hatteras Island until 1928 or 1929.

I do not want to give the whole story away here, but if you want to learn more, the North Carolina Maritime Museum has already posted my lecture on its YouTube channel.

The whole symposium was wonderful. The amazing Vicki Szabo, who teaches at Western Carolina University, gave a fascinating presentation on the extensive mythology and scientific knowledge of whales in Medieval Iceland and other parts off the North Atlantic.

Keith Rittmaster, the founder and driving force behind the museum’s Bonehenge Whaling Center, gave an extremely informative overview of the 35 species of cetaceans that have been documented on the North Carolina coast.

Keith also discussed the conservation challenges ahead for whales and dolphins on our coast, and he charted some the exciting, day in and day out work that is happening at the Bonehenge Whaling Center, also in Beaufort.

Another exciting presentation was by marine biologist Tommy Tucker of the Coastal Studies Center on Cape Cod. With a contagious passion, they are devoted to understanding and raising public awareness of the critically endangered Rice’s whale, which is only found in the Gulf of Mexico.

Their presentation was brilliant. In addition to studying Rice’s whales, Tommy also uses arts and crafts to nurture interest in them, including this tapestry in which each depiction of a Rice’s whale represents one of the 51 Rice’s whales currently known to be surviving in the Gulf of Mexico.

All of these presentations are now available on the museum’s YouTube channel. I don’t know about mine, but the presentations by Vicki, Keith, and Tommy are not to be missed!

I found the whole day inspiring. It was so encouraging to be at a museum where the staff are so dedicated to telling the story of North Carolina’s coastal history and do so in such a professional way.

The museum’s auditorium was full of people from many walks of life, including scientists, historians, students, fishermen and women, and all sorts of other lovers of whales and the sea.

All were coming together to discover more about these glorious creatures of the sea and what we might do to make sure that they are still here to inspire and enthrall our children and grandchildren.

It was a joy to be part of it.

* * *

The Bonehenge Whale Center was built by volunteers dedicated to marine conservation, education, and research on the whales, dolphins, and porpoises of the North Carolina coast. You can learn more about the Center’s remarkable work and how you might contribute to it here.

Part of an ongoing series on coastal North Carolina’s observance of America’s 250th.

Tensions began to brew between the colonists and Britain in the early 1760s after the Seven Years War, also called the French and Indian War, in North America. The British decided to impose new taxes on the colonies to recoup the funds that went to the war, but instead incited widespread protest.

Britain passed the Stamp Act March 22, 1765, and then in June 1767, the Townshend Act imposed duties on paint, paper, tea and other commodities. British troops attempted to enforce the Townshend duties in Boston October 1768, ultimately leading in March 1770 to the Boston Massacre that left five dead.

The British, to help the struggling United East India Co., passed the Tea Act in May 1773, allowing the company to import and sell tea to the colonies duty-free, undercutting the Dutch who had been smuggling tea in, and creating a monopoly.

Then, on Nov. 28, 1773, the Dartmouth sails into Boston Harbor, and three more ships were expected to arrive, all carrying chests of tea.

Over the next few weeks, colonists met to figure out a way to fight back. On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, around four dozen men impersonating Native Americans boarded the ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into the harbor.

Almost a year later, 51 women in Edenton took a more peaceful approach to protesting the tea tax by drafting a document explaining their boycott. The women committed to no longer drinking tea or wearing British cloth because of taxation without representation and sent the final copy to England.

“This action forms one of the earliest-known political actions written and organized by women in the American colonies,”  the Edenton Historical Commission explains. “The events of the ‘Edenton Tea Party’ today form an iconic moment in our nation’s history, when a community of women used their own voices to stand by their loved ones and risk the wrath of the Crown by protesting injustice.”

The women of Wilmington responded to British taxation with a similar protest in the spring of 1775, though little is known about the gathering to publicly burn tea.

Burgwin-Wright House and Gardens Assistant Museum Director Hunter Ingram told Coastal Review that the Wilmington Tea Party is an oft-overlooked event in the final days before the start of the American Revolution.

In the port city of Wilmington, the import of tea had ground to a halt by the spring of 1775.

The Continental Congress had forbidden tea from coming through the colonies’ ports, so it had become a scarce commodity, he said. That is why events like the Boston Tea Party and the Edenton Tea Party were so crucial to the cause of resistance.

“Tea was hard to come by and sacrificing it sent a message to those who were already hurting from the disruption of its trade,” Ingram continued.

The Wilmington Tea Party happened in the spring of 1775 and is only documented in one place: the writings of Janet Schaw, a Scottish woman who was traveling through Wilmington to visit her brother.

“She wrote a single line about her observations of the tea resistance in Wilmington, which she did not support. ‘The Ladies have burnt their tea in a solemn procession, but they had delayed however ’til the sacrifice was not very considerable, as I do not think anyone offered above a quarter of a pound,’” Ingram said. 

While the simple description doesn’t give many specifics, Schaw was clear in what the protestors did, Ingram said. “Burning the tea was unique, and it meant the women of Wilmington, even in the eleventh hour before the outbreak of war, were willing to set a precious privilege blaze in the name of revolution.”

The Burgwin-Wright House is the oldest and largest historic site in Wilmington, comprised of four of the eight remaining colonial structures in town, Ingram said of the house’s importance during the Revolution.

“We have three buildings from the city’s first jail, circa 1744, and the mansion home built in 1770 on top of the main jail building after the prisoners were relocated. It has sat at the corner of Third and Market streets for 256 years, and it has watched Wilmington grow from small-but-mighty port city into a thriving town that was, for a time, the most populous area in the state,” Ingram explained.

“The colonial era in Wilmington doesn’t always get its due, but the surviving home built for merchant and politician John Burgwin can tell that story –– and has been for generations,” said Ingram.

Ingram explained that that the Burgwin-Wright House had partnered with the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Wilmington Ladies Tea Walk Chapter to commemorate the 251st anniversary of the protest with the “Wilmington Ladies Tea Walk.”

The Wilmington Ladies Tea Walk event begins at 10 a.m. Thursday, March 26, at 224 Market St. the program will include remarks from a few historic organizations and officials and samples of a brand-new tea blend by Cape Fear Spice Merchants.

“Guests can walk through the gardens, enjoy a presentation about Janet Schaw and then join members of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Sons of the American Revolution as they walk, in a solemn procession, to river to burn tea in commemoration of this act of resistance on the eve of revolution,” he said.

The historic home is a good fit for the Wilmington Ladies Tea Walk because the site likely would have been “witness to that solemn procession into history, and the act of resistance that helped give Wilmington a reputation for rebellion even before the war.”

Schaw was also a Loyalist, as was Burgwin, and it’s “likely she would have visited the house during her time in Wilmington. This was a home built for a wealthy guest list, and Janet would have qualified,” he said.

Though the program is offered at no charge, registration is required. Call 910-762-0570 to register.

“If you can’t get in this year, we hope to make it a recurring event through multiyear A250 celebration,” Ingram said, referring to the state’s official celebration of 250 years of independence, America 250 NC, a program under the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

This story is presented in celebration of Women’s History Month, the theme for which in 2026 is “Leading the Change: Women Shaping a Sustainable Future.”

Heather Rose flashes a knowing smile toward her sister, Becky, across a table at Blackbeard’s Grill, their family’s seafood restaurant in Beaufort. “Honey, we’ve got some gooood memories together.”

“Epic memories,” Becky replies.

Those unforgettable moments were often squeezed into late nights between the grueling days when Heather clocked 12-hour kitchen shifts, and Becky, stepping away from the restaurant and neighboring Rose Seafood Market, worked dawn to dusk, moving dirt, hauling rocks and setting shrubs for her own landscaping company.

Their grind never stood a chance against the tide.

“When darks come and the businesses closed, we go get in the truck, go to the boat ramp,” Heather says.

Pushing off for the banks to fish until the sun touched the horizon, the women were overjoyed to be under the stars, even that night when a mud-clogged motor stranded them, exhausted and ravenous, until their parents arrived like a rescue squad with cheese biscuits.

“We just sat there in the boat eating those biscuits. We could barely hold our eyes open,” Heather chuckles, Becky nodding in rhythm. “But we had a boatload of flounders, and we had spent all night talking to each other.”

The sisters’ bond is as deep as their roots on the Carolina coast. It’s a connection forged in the salt of their shared seafood heritage and tested by the daily demands of the family business.

Despite the relentless labor of running both Blackbeard’s and Rose Seafood Market, and the looming shadow of an uncertain commercial fishing industry, Heather and Becky are unwavering. They’ve made it their mission to keep their landmark corner of Beaufort thriving for the next generation.

A legacy without blueprints

Surrounded by black-and-white snapshots of the commercial fishers and boat builders who came before, the women reflect on the proud way of life handed down to them. Today, the sisters lead that legacy: Heather oversees the seafood market, while Becky serves as the chef and proprietor of Blackbeard’s Grill.

Their ties to the coast reach back to the 1700s, Becky says. Ancestors were boat captains in the Northeast before navigating south to Swan Quarter, where a bay bears the Rose name. Some relatives headed to Cape Lookout, establishing the early Rose Town community.

In 1910, their great-great-grandfather, George Rose, moved his family from the cape to Harkers Island. There, later generations established Rose Brothers Boat Works, which became famous for crafting fine wooden yachts and charter boats built entirely by eye without plans or blueprints.

It was in that boatyard that Heather and Becky’s parents, Rodney and Mary, first met.

Rose Seafood Market was born of necessity. Frustrated by low dockside prices, Rodney and Mary founded the business in 1986 to eliminate the middleman. What started as a backyard mom-and-pop grew into a Marshallberg fish house sourcing from 30 local commercial fishers. By 1993, the couple moved to their current Beaufort location, soon after adding a take-out window. Two years later, they opened Blackbeard’s Grill to highlight “Down East” heritage recipes.

Today, the sisters manage day-to-day operations, with their parents’ constant inspiration and presence. The women draw strength from recollections of their father networking with fishermen, setting the standard for relationship building his daughters rely on today.

Dad, who still fishes, pops in — though not often enough, Heather laments, missing her father — to deliver and help process the catch, as well as share insight with customers about the challenges facing commercial fishers.

Years of watching their mother diplomatically negotiate the sale of thousands of pounds of fish weekly to far-flung markets in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, then turning around to masterfully head shrimp, shuck scallops and pack fish, made anything seem possible.

“Growing up and seeing that, I never felt like a woman was out of place in this industry,” Becky says of the male-dominated seafood sector.

The market still sources catches docked by local commercial fishers, including Heather, and carries beloved Rose family recipes, like their Aunt Dora’s shrimp salad. Locals watch Blackbeard’s specials for regional favorites such as scallop fritters and hard crab stew. Offerings depend on what’s fresh next door.

The scale is staggering. “We’re probably going to feed about 60,000 people here (at Blackbeard’s), and just on five nights that we’re open each week, for the year,” Becky says. Between the restaurant and the market’s grab-and-go section, which Becky stocks with crab pies, lasagnas, shrimp salad and more, the sisters are in a state of constant motion.

“We love the connection,” Becky says. “When you go and catch something yourself, do all the work involved in doing that, and then you prepare it and cook it for somebody, and you hand it to them and they eat it…that’s a feeling that can’t be duplicated in any other way.”

‘Don’t fight it, accept it’

Heather remembers happy childhood days clamming and shrimping with her parents and packing seafood at their then-fledgling business. “I was young, full of energy, you know, and always willing and anxious to help.”

Becky, 11 years younger, was just a toddler at the time, trying to stack boxes in her tiny oilskins. As a youngster, she headed shrimp after school at Rose Seafood in Beaufort and told customers, “My daddy caught these.”

“I still have some older ladies that come here and say, ‘Were you that cute little blonde-headed girl that waited on me in the seafood market?’”

Despite those precious memories, both women envisioned paths away from the water. In college, Becky studied marketing, a talent she skillfully applies to the businesses’ engaging social media feeds. Heather worked for 10 years as an officer with the Morehead City Police Department. Throughout their own careers, both sisters kept a foot in the family seafood business.

“I think both of us felt that was our calling,” Becky reflects.

“There was a time when I was younger, I was always trying to run away from it,” Heather adds.

“Well, I think we both knew how hard it was,” Becky says, finishing her sister’s thought.

The pair’s management era began with the COVID-19 pandemic. When the virus’s spread shuttered dining rooms, the Roses, like many restaurateurs, turned to walking takeout orders to vehicles lined up in the parking lot. By then, the market had closed, but with the public’s limited access to grocers and other seafood outlets, the Roses realized that they needed to reopen the store to sustain the community and their own livelihoods.

Heather had already left police work to help her parents at the restaurant, but she was facing burnout even before the pandemic. That’s when Becky stepped in, leaving an unfulfilling job in the wholesale plant industry to help her family keep up.

“It was really hard on me at first, because I hadn’t really been dealing with seafood for a decade,” she remembers. “It was hard to build up to the strength and endurance that it takes to clean 500 pounds of spots a day, to filet 1,000 pounds of flounder, to head 1,000 pounds of shrimp.”

The sisters stop to compare scars. “You can look at our hands, and you know,” Becky says.

Heather smiles. “Me and Beck, we look at each other when we’re exhausted and we say, ‘Don’t fight it, accept it. This is your calling.’”

‘These are the really special times’

Demanding work and a powerful desire to make their parents proud fuel the sisters’ mission. They also genuinely like their jobs.

Becky, always a foodie, found that working in horticulture deepened her interest in herbs and cooking, setting her up as a chef who understands both local food culture and how to craft contemporary dishes like crispy crab Rangoon with sweet Thai chili sauce or half-shell oysters roasted with bacon jam, a dollop of goat cheese to finish.

“She literally elevates this kitchen to a different level than it’s ever been,” Heather says of her sister. “She has a lot of pride, and she’s, she’s a perfectionist. She wants it to be right and won’t accept it any other way.”

Heather loves nothing more than fishing, but her wide-ranging experience in and outside the business make her indispensable to both operations, Becky says. Heather’s seafood chowder is an enduring menu staple, and she formulated the various breading recipes used to fry different seafoods.

“The tenacity,” Becky says of Heather, “if she makes up her mind that we’re doing something or she’s doing something, she’s doing it…And she can wire things. She’s very mechanical, and I am totally not…So when we come together, we don’t fight or argue like sisters sometimes do. We really work well together.”

Who will take on the business years from now is a constant worry, especially as North Carolina commercial fishers lose docks to new waterfront development. They also face fierce competition from recreational fishing interests with the capital to fund lobbyists and marketing campaigns that, as the sisters see it, demonize fishing families as destroyers of the very resources they depend on.

“We don’t have family to leave it to,” Heather says. “And that makes me very sad,” Becky adds, “and it’s something I think about every night before I go to bed.”

That uncertainty pulls at them, but it hasn’t slowed their pace. Instead of pulling back, the duo doubles down with new ideas, like Heather’s upcoming seafood boils to go and adding beer and wine sales to the market’s offerings. Becky takes on public education, sharing the story of the state’s seafood heritage through speaking engagements and staging fundraising dinners aimed at preserving the commercial fishing way of life.

Both agree they’d like nothing better than to fire up the boat after work more often and head out for an all-nighter. Meantime, they try to live by the advice Becky often gives Heather.

“You’re going to look back on today, and you’re gonna say, ‘Those were good times,’ even if you’re having a bad day here … We got to make the most out of each day, because these are really special times right now for this business and for our family.” 

Part of an ongoing series on coastal North Carolina’s observance of America’s 250th.

The patriot victory over loyalist forces at the Battle of Moores Creek in the early morning of Feb. 27, 1776, set North Carolina up to be one of the first colonies to vote for independence from British Rule.

That bloody battle in a Pender County swamp is considered the first decisive win of the American Revolution and is commemorated every year with a wreath-laying ceremony by the National Park Service and regional partners at Moores Creek National Battlefield.

This year, the commemoration was expanded to two days, Feb. 27-28, and anchored the weeklong inaugural First in Freedom Festival held Feb. 21-28. Taking place at historical sites, museums and other locations in Bladen, Brunswick, Columbus, Duplin, New Hanover, Onslow, Pender and Sampson counties, the festival was supported by the state’s official celebration of independence, America 250 NC, under the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

The weekend was both somber and celebratory, with a wreath-laying ceremony that began the two-day commemoration, living history demonstrations with both loyalist and patriot reenactors who camped on the grounds near the earthworks built by patriots for the battle, a ribbon-cutting for two new exhibits in the visitor center, and special guest, Diana Gabaldon, creator of “Outlander.”

“Outlander,” both a series of books and a television show, is about a World War II nurse who travels through time to 18^th century Scotland, where she meets a young Highlander. The historical fiction series follows the couple from 1740s Scotland to the colony of North Carolina after the American Revolution.

While rainy conditions on the first day, Feb. 27, prevented a handful of the outdoor programs from taking place, including the weapons demonstrations. The weather, while still gloomy the next morning, allowed the sun to peek out later that day.

“Despite some challenges brought forward by the weather, the event was a great success, bringing over 17,500 visitors to Moores Creek National Battlefield during the event. The success was the result of a wonderful collaboration and partnership among the National Park Service, state and local partners, as well as volunteers, reenactors and living historians,” Battlefield Chief of Interpretation, Education and Volunteers Jason Collins told Coastal Review after the event.

With the steady pitter-patter of raindrops drummed on umbrellas and tents, leaves and puddles in the background, Michael Elston, president general of the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, said from the podium during the wreath-laying ceremony that North Carolina was one of the earliest colonies to end royal rule and establish its freedom from Great Britain.

The last royal governor of the North Carolina Colony, Josiah Martin, fled to the safety of a royal naval ship in July 1775 and began plotting his return to power as head of an army of loyal colonists. “Unfortunately for Gov. Martin, he overestimated the support he had in North Carolina,” Elston said. About 1,600 loyalists answered met him in what is now Fayetteville and they began marching to the coast to join British forces.

Meanwhile, patriot forces maneuvered the loyalists toward Moores Creek Bridge, where they had established a strong position.

“The patriots fought on their terms and won an extremely short battle with only one man killed and another wounded in the aftermath,” Elston said, disrupting loyalist recruiting efforts in the state. “The battle put an end to loyalist organization in North Carolina, more than five months before the Declaration of Independence.”

Historic Halifax State Historic Site Assistant Site Manager Frank McMahon, also coordinator of the 3rd North Carolina reenacting group, took the podium as well, and filled in what happened next on the state’s road to freedom.

After the Battle of Moores Creek Bridge, the people of North Carolina elected a provincial congress to lead the colony. The fourth provincial Congress, made up of 83 delegates representing 29 counties and six of North Carolina’s most populated towns, met in Halifax to define a new direction for the American Revolution.

On April 12, 1776, the members unanimously adopted the Halifax Resolves, the date for which on the North Carolina flag acting as a direct reminder of the significance of the event, McMahon said.

The document known as the Halifax Resolves was first read to the members of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in June of 1776, and “would empower North Carolina’s members of the Continental Congress to collaborate with other united colonies to declare independence from Great Britain,” McMahon said.

McMahon took the opportunity to mention the next America 250 NC signature event, the “Halifax Resolves Days: Prelude to Revolution.” There will be living history activities, historic weapons demonstrations, guest speakers, food and live music at the site southeast just east of Interstate 95 near the Virginia line.

Special to the weekend is the original copy of the Halifax Resolves that was presented to the Continental Congress in 1776, on load from the National Archives. The document will be on display in the newly renovated historic Halifax State Historic Site visitor center.

Part of the afternoon activities was a ribbon-cutting ceremony to introduce two new exhibits in the visitor center.

Collins said from inside the building that the existing displays were installed in 2006 but only tell part of the story.

“A couple of the major parts of our history that we don’t get to tell are the stories of the naval stores and the story of music in this battle,” he said, which are the focus of the two new exhibits.

‘Outlander effect’

A “Weekend with Diana Gabaldon” featured three ticketed events, starting with “An Evening with Author Diana Gabaldon” Feb. 27 in Penderlea Auditorium in Willard, followed by a guided tour of the battlefield early Feb. 28, and concluded that afternoon with a book signing at a private venue. All events were sold out months ago.

During the evening program, Hunter Ingram, the assistant museum director for the colonial Burgwin-Wright House and Gardens, a 1770 structure open to the public, had a conversation with Gabaldon about how her path as a historical fiction writer brought her to Moores Creek and the influence her detailed accounts have had on tourism.

A lifelong and avid reader, Gabaldon said she knew at the age of 8 that she was supposed to write novels, “I just didn’t have any idea how.”

Before trying her hand at writing, Gabaldon pursued a career as a scientist, earning three degrees in the subject, including a master’s degree in marine biology and a doctorate in quantitative behavioral ecology. After she and her husband married, they just celebrated 54^th anniversary, they had three children in the space of four years.

“It was busy, and at this point in my life, and I’m not sure why, probably sleep deprivation, I decided that this was the time to start writing a novel,” Gabaldon said. “Two jobs and three small children and a husband who decided to quit his job and start his own business.”

The inspiration for “Outlander” came from a “really old rerun of ‘Doctor Who’ on public television,” she said. “Doctor Who” is British science fiction television series that began in 1963. 

“I was attracted, in this particular instance, to one of the doctor’s companions, who was a young Scotsman who appeared in his kilt, and I was thinking, ‘well, that’s kind of fetching’,” she explained, leading her to begin researching 18^th century Scotland.

“So that’s when I started writing ‘Outlander’,” she said, explaining that she opted for historical fiction because “it seemed easier to look things up than to make things up.”

She begins “Outlander,” the first book that was published in 1991, with “people disappear all the time.” The line came to her one day but wasn’t the first line she wrote.

“I was thinking, ‘Well, sure, they do, but why do they?’ and then the next couple of lines just sort of evolved. This is one reason. This is another reason. And it got more mysterious, and I was sitting there thinking, ‘Well, why do they disappear?’ And that’s why there’s time travel in these books.”

As for how the characters end up in North Carolina, it’s because she’s following history. After the Battle of Culloden April 1746 in the Scottish Highlands, she said there was no reason for her characters to go back to Scotland and brought them to the Americas. Culloden was the final conflict in the Jacobite Rising and is featured prominently in the series.

“I was following history,” she said and the Highlander migration across the state, which is how colonial historic sites became part of the “Outlander” story.

Ingram praises her detailed description of Moores Creek in “A Breath of Snow and Ashes,” which is set in 1770s North Carolina.

It is not often that there are examples of someone looking at the region’s history from the outside and making it part of something so globally beloved, he said, adding it’s an interesting way to look at not just Moores Creek, but local history in Wilmington, in the Cape Fear region, and across North Carolina.

“A lot of the historic sites have seen an impact from people being interested in ‘Outlander’,” Ingram said.

Gabaldon told the audience that she’s seen similar in Scotland and has been given honorary doctorate degrees for services to country by the University of Glasgow and the University of the Highlands, and the Scottish Government gave her a Thistle Award, which spotlights the tourism industry.

It is being called the “Outlander effect.”

She recounted that when the show first began filming, she was on set for about six weeks in a village near Glasgow. During lunch, she and another writer went to a café to buy sandwiches, but the shopkeeper didn’t have change. He then realized she is the creator of “Outlander,” and explained that she had had no idea what she had done for the economy there.  

Ingram said the effect has been noticeable at historic sites in the region and mentioned the discussion they when she was a special guest on the podcast he hosts for the Burgwin-Wright House called, “Outlander in the Cape Fear.”

He said that during the podcast, they discussed her impact and, “You said you felt it was a lovely side effect of the work that you’ve done, not just here in North Carolina — but we’re kind of biased that, you know, we want to see more people pay attention to our history — and so the fact that we’re all here on the 250th anniversary of Moores Creek today, I think, is a testament to what you’ve done.”

During the tour of the battlefield the next day with Historic Weapons Supervisor and Special Park Uses Coordinator Jason Howell and Gabaldon, Howell said something similar.

“She does a really good job of pulling you into the earthworks in the morning fog,” he said, adding how he remembered being captured by her writing. “And one thing Diana does is, she gets people like you interested in these sites. It’s from her viewpoint and it’s from an alternate viewpoint, but she captures your attention.”

And, as a result, he’s seen Outlander fans come to the site, who admit to not liking history that much but are interested in the battlefield.

More information on America 250 NC events, including details on the Halifax Resolves Days, can be found at america250.nc.gov.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. More of his work can be found on his website.

A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture at Duke Law School on the history of the white supremacy movement of 1898-1900 and how it shaped our political system, our society, and our legal system here in North Carolina.

I always have to brace myself a bit to give that lecture: It is grim tale, one of the darkest chapters in my home state’s history, and I do not think that anyone could find a silver lining to the story.

Nonetheless, I rarely decline an invitation to give that particular lecture: the subject is just too important.

By almost any measure, the white supremacy movement of 1898 to 1900 is the most important event in North Carolina’s history over the last 150 years.

No event did more to shape our 20th century. None has done more to shape the world in which we live today.

None tells us more about why so many people today feel so helpless to mend the brokenness in our society.

None has more to teach us about how and why we, as a people, have come to feel so torn asunder and divided from one another.

None that I can think of speaks more directly to why so many working people today, of all races, find themselves shunted aside.

And yet, despite its central role in the state’s history, the white supremacy movement of 1898 to 1900 remains largely unknown to the vast majority of North Carolina’s citizens.

To my knowledge, no book, documentary, or museum exhibit has ever focused on the white supremacy movement of 1898-1900 as a whole.

Neither does any historical marker tell its story. Nor does any monument or memorial stand as a warning to us today.

With few exceptions, our schoolchildren are not taught about it.

In much the same way as I was at their age, our students are kept in the dark about one of the chapters in North Carolina’s history that they most need to understand if they are going to have a chance to make a better world than they have inherited.

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In the last few years, I have given one version or another of my lecture on the history of the white supremacy movement of 1898 to 1900 at colleges and universities, high schools, community centers, book clubs, and Sunday school classes.

I am always surprised how people respond to it. If you grew up in North Carolina as I did, you were not taught anything at all about the white supremacy movement of 1898 to 1900.

At most, we were taught a thing or two, probably incorrect, about what we now call the Wilmington Massacre of Nov. 11, 1898.

The Wilmington Massacre was the worst atrocity committed by the white supremacists. However, the murder of so many of Wilmington’s black citizens and the takeover of the city’s government was only a small and in some ways far from central chapter in the state’s white supremacist movement.

The white supremacy movement of 1898 to 1900 did not arise in Wilmington.

None of its most important instigators came from Wilmington. Few of the wealthy bankers, industrialists, and attorneys who were its leaders and principal financiers came from Wilmington.

The white supremacy movement of 1898 to 1900 also drew only a small percentage of its supporters from Wilmington.

As a case in point, the white supremacists organized more than 900 “white supremacy clubs” in North Carolina in the spring and summer of 1900.

This is the mission statement of the white supremacy clubs as written by one of the movement’s leaders, an attorney and future United States senator named Furnifold Simmons, in the winter of 1900:

“The purpose of the organization shall be to fully restore and make permanent in North Carolina the SUPREMACY of the WHITE RACE and to develop in the state’s citizens a belief in the necessity of establishing and maintaining WHITE SUPREMACY, as the only hope for the preservation of our civilization.”

Not more than one percent of those “white supremacy clubs” were organized in Wilmington.

In that same summer of 1900, at least two dozen white militia groups called Red Shirts operated in North Carolina. They were the militant wing of the white supremacy movement, and they terrorized both Black voters and white citizens who stood with Black voters.

At most, only one of the Red Shirt militias was based in Wilmington.

Similarly, In 1900, the white supremacy movement’s leadership organized a speakers bureau that included more than 100 individuals.

If an individual volunteered to be part of the speakers bureau, he – they were all men – would accept assignments to speak at white supremacy rallies and at meetings of local white supremacy clubs.

Those speakers included past and future governors, several former and future U.S. senators and congressmen, and a large contingent of former and future district, superior, and state supreme court judges.

None of the white supremacy movement’s most popular orators were from Wilmington.

All of which is to say: We cannot say too much about the Wilmington Massacre. Its story was silenced for too long.

But at the same time, we have to keep our eyes on the prize, which to me, in this case, means focusing on the white supremacy movement of 1898-1900 overall and how it shaped our state then and now.

We have to remember something that we were not taught, but know now: in 1898-1900, white supremacists took over the state of North Carolina.

They took control of its legislature, its governorship and all its state agencies. They took over its judiciary, its towns and cities, and every one of the state’s public colleges and schools.

As you can tell from the illustrations that I am featuring here, these were not people to whom I am retroactively applying the term “white supremacy.”  These were people who referred to themselves as white supremacists.

Who ran on the “White Supremacy Ticket.” Who joined “white supremacy clubs.” Who sang the “White Supremacy Song.”

Who celebrated “White Supremacy Day.”

Who carried white supremacy flags, wore white supremacy political buttons, and marched with banners proclaiming “White Supremacy.”

Whose leaders said things like:

“The Anglo Saxon planted civilization on this continent and wherever this race has been in conflict with another race, it has asserted its supremacy and either conquered or exterminated the foe. This great race has carried the Bible in one hand and the sword [in the other]. Resist our march of progress and civilization and we will wipe you off the face of the earth.”

William A. Guthrie, Oct. 28, 1898

Once in control of the state, the white supremacists methodically set about embedding the primacy of white supremacy and a deep distrust of fair elections and the democratic process in our municipal, county, and state government institutions and policies, as well as in our state’s economic and civic life.

As I discussed with the Duke law students, that is one of the reasons that attorneys played such a central role in the white supremacy movement in 1900. After taking power in 1898, the movement transitioned from taking power to institutionalizing white supremacy in North Carolina’s laws and civic life.

Writing the laws of white rule, revising the electoral process, and centralizing control in Raleigh, rather than at the local level, was the work of attorneys.

The white supremacists were extremely successful.

They were so successful, and the breadth of their success was so great that, in the following decades, dissent was almost unheard of. In the decades after 1900, I have yet to find historical evidence of a single one of our state’s political, business, or religious leaders, on any end of the political spectrum, who raised their voice against white supremacy.

In fact, the leaders of the white supremacy movement of 1898 to 1900 became our heroes. North Carolina’s leaders built statues to them. They named college buildings after them. They dedicated historic sites in honor of them.

Over time, and the passing of the generations, their way of thinking about the world, and the divisions they erected between us and our neighbors, began to be taken for granted. We could not remember a different kind of life. We lost sight of the possibility that a person’s race one day might not matter or that there might be a better way to treat one another.

We could not imagine that there could be a different kind of world than that into which we were born.

We forgot that we do not have to be so scared of one another. That we do not have to be so fractured.

We did not even dream anymore that we could be the kind of people that look out for one another and are there for our neighbors, no matter who they are or where they were born or who or how they love.

We could not imagine that we are all in this hard, hard life together, and that we might have been put here to help one another get through it.

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The students at the law school were wonderful. They were engaged, curious, serious, and kind-hearted.

One even seemed to be worried about me. She wondered if I found it hard to study and talk about such dark moments in our history.

I do not. I am far too old for that. But I appreciated her thoughtfulness, and I found it very endearing.

Inevitably, the students were astonished and perhaps somewhat shaken by the similarities between the white supremacy movement of 1898-1900 and what is happening in America today.

I have come to see that as only natural. When I give this lecture, I do not draw explicit comparisons between the past and the present. However, the similarities are so striking that, on learning about 1898 to 1900, people of all ages inevitably see parallels between that time and ours.

Sometimes, like when I gave a version of this lecture at a Raleigh high school a few weeks ago, I can literally feel the sudden change of mood in the room as it dawns on the students that this is not just a history lesson but is about their lives and the struggles that they have ahead to make this a better world.

At those times, I can feel a kind of breathlessness in the room. Everything gets more serious.

Sometimes students who had not done so take out their notebooks and start taking notes for the first time in the lecture.

Then we can really get down to work. Then we begin to put our heads together and go beyond what I know.

That is when it gets really interesting and exciting for me.

The young people often see things that I do not, and they often make connections that I had not previously made.

Many times, they find far more lessons in the past that bear on our lives and our struggles to make a better world today than I had ever imagined.

At those moments, I am filled with hope. Their intellectual seriousness, their moral courage, and their refusal to accept an America that seems to have given up on being good or noble lifts me up.

And even if none of us by ourselves has all the answers — I certainly do not — I find every gathering where people come together to consider how we got here, and how we might contribute to making a better future for our children and grandchildren, tremendously uplifting.

I find that to be true whether I am in a crowded college auditorium, a high school classroom, or a table for six at a senior center.

It is always worth doing.

As James Baldwin famously said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Across from the Pleasant Plains Baptist Church and just outside of Winton in Hertford County, it remained unclear for years whether the historic but badly damaged Rosenwald Pleasant Plains School built in 1920 could be saved.

If it could not, the school building, which replaced an earlier structure built on the grounds in 1866 that may have been the first “Colored” school in Hertford County, would probably be lost.

And then, in September 2024, a driver ran their car off U.S. 13 where the school is, and slammed it into the building with such force that the entire structure was moved off its foundation. The driver was drunk at the time.

With the one corner of the building crushed, the school off its stone foundation, and brick and other debris littering the inside, things looked bleak for the building that the National Register of Historic Places described in a 2016 report “as the only graded public school that served both local African American and Native American students in the Pleasant Plains community … from 1920 to 1950.”

As the report notes, the building was “a very intact, representative example of early twentieth-century rural school design.”

Yet what at first seemed like a disaster, may ultimately have saved the building. The insurance settlement was enough put the structure back on its foundation, repair the roof and exterior and paint the building.

There is, though, still work to be done.

Even before the accident, the roof had been leaking, and a new roof “stopped the problem with the leaks,” Roy Pierce said, who has been monitoring the condition of the school and handling repairs for years. “But before that took place, there were some leaks around those old chimneys, and the water seeped in and damaged some of the wooden ceiling.”

The ceiling needs repair, but it is just one of a number of problems pushing the cost of bringing the building back beyond the means of the Pleasant Plains Church, which owns the building and property.

Pierce pointed to the windows that have been boarded up to prevent vandalism. He explained that when restoration experts looked at the windows, he was told much of the glass was original, as were the frames.

“The estimate on just fixing those windows, was $17,000,” he said.

The land where the school rests has always been owned by the Pleasant Plains Church. The church, founded in 1851, is one of the oldest multiracial houses of worship in North Carolina. When founded, the church was for the nonwhite, free people of color only.

“Permission was granted to organize a church provided no slaves nor their descendants were allowed to join the church. The church was to be solely for the use of free-born people,” Corinne Hare Brummell wrote in Pleasant Plains Baptist Church 150th Anniversary Program in 2001.

At that time, and well into the 20th century, a person of color was anyone who was Black, African American or of mixed ancestry.

It is possible that there was a school associated with the church as early as the 1850s, but early church records were destroyed in a 1941 fire. It is known, however, that as early as 1866 “ten men were responsible for building a school house at Pleasant Plains,” the Hertford County Herald wrote recounting the history of Hertford County.

The first school house was one room, and “the only elementary school accessible to people of color, including African Americans and the descendants of Native Americans, in the Pleasant Plains community,” the National Register of Historic Places notes.

By the turn of the 20th century, it was clear a one-room school house was inadequate and in 1902, the county approved $90 “for the school with a total of ninety-eight students in the three classrooms,” according to the historic places document.

In 1920, hoping to improve the Pleasant Plains school, the community raised $750, the Hertford County school board contributed another $850 toward building a new three-room school, and the community received a $300 grant from the Rosenwald Foundation.

Although about a third of the construction cost of the school was low compared to other Rosenwald schools, Julius Rosenwald, the founder of the fund, “agreed to allow … funds to help rural Southern communities erect schools for black,” the historic places document explained if the community also contributed.

The school was in use from 1920 to 1950. When it closed, students began attending C.S. Brown School in Winton, which was also a Rosenwald-funded school that is now the Hertford County C.S. Brown Cultural Arts Center and Museum in Winton.

Chief Thomas Lewis, chief of the Meherrin nation, began his formal education at the school, but he recalled, “the floor fell in, and we had to go from there to one of the county schools. So by living in this area, we went to C.S. Brown.”

When he got to his new school, he and his brother who was in the second grade, “had to repeat grades,” he said. “I don’t know the reason, but that’s what they made us do.”

Although he attended the Pleasant Plains school for only the one year, Lewis has a clear memory of at least one of his teachers.

“Miss Ardelle Garrett, she was my girl. I brought her an apple every day,” Lewis said.

Garrett who, was born in 1904 in Ahoskie, had a long association with the school. As early as the 1930 census, Garrett is listed a teacher in a public school on the census form. And “the North Carolina Education Directory in 1939 notes the school with three teachers, including Ardelle Garrett, the principal,” according to the historic places research.

As a teacher, Garrett seemed to have had an impact on all her students.

“My father’s 96 and he talks about Ardelle Garrett to this day,” Lewis said.

There are other memories of what the school was like as well. Lewis mentioned that in the morning “we had people designated to go to the coal power and get coal, because that’s how the classrooms were heated.”

There is also a mention in the historic places report that Lewis recalled using “the outhouses in back of the school.”

There was a strong sense of community among the families surrounding the Pleasant Plains community.

“This stretch of highway, at one time you could leave Winton and drive to Ahoskie, and you knew that was Roy’s house and Thomas Chavis’ house, and whoever’s house. Back then, we knew everyone,” said Dr. Terry Hall, Pleasant Plains Church deacon, in describing U.S. Highway 13 that passes the church.

Yet if the C.S. Brown School was a larger and more modern school, it still took the community keep it going.

“There were a lot of fundraisers,” Lewis recalled. “They would sell cakes and pies to buy band uniforms and football equipment, all that kind of stuff.”

“They used to show movies. You could pay 15 cent and go see a movie,” Pierce added.

Although the school did not have the resources the white schools of the county had, what it did have were very good teachers.

“The teachers were good. We had people from here that went on to colleges and did well,” Hall said. “I think in some of the competitions, they used to have debates and stuff like that. They did good.”

In 1968, Hertford County Schools began the process of consolidating their schools and for the first year, student attendance was optional.

“It was part of what they called freedom of choice. I wanted to try to get a new experience. So I transferred (to Ahoskie High School),” Pierce said. Pierce graduated from Ahoskie High School in 1968.

The greater opportunity that was offered by the white schools may now be playing a role in how difficult repairing the Pleasant Plains School has become.

“We’ve gotten into an older population and people have gone into different professions,” Hall said. “Years ago, Thomas and his father and other people that did carpentry … they would have been buying the materials would have been all that would have cost us.”

“It’s like my younger brother, he said, ‘I’m leaving here because I’m not doing nothing with my hands,’” Lewis said. “And he moved to Roanoke Rapids.”

The North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort welcomed visitors Saturday for the first time in over a year after closing to the public in late 2024 for a major overhaul of the heating and cooling system.

During the yearlong closure, staff worked to revamp existing displays and installed two new exhibits, Museum Site Manager Jamie McCargo explained during a ribbon-cutting last week.

“We have two brand-new exhibits. We are very proud to say one is called ‘North Carolina’s Road to Revolution,’” McCargo said, which celebrates America’s 250th anniversary, and “is wonderfully aligned with our division-wide initiative to celebrate the anniversary.”

The other new exhibit is “Swell Times,” which highlights coastal recreation, such surfing, fishing and boating, she said.

The maritime museums are under the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, which is leading America 250 NC, the state’s yearlong commemoration of the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Programs, experiences, exhibits and more are scheduled throughout the year at sites across the state.

McCargo highlighted one panel from the “Road to Revolution” exhibit. During the winter of 1777-78, Gen. Washington’s army was camped Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and desperately in need of supplies.

“They were cut off and just really were in dire need, and North Carolina rose to the occasion. North Carolina was able to provide food and clothing. They came from Ocracoke Inlet and traveled up our rivers and sounds and were able to deliver items to both South Key, Virginia, and on up to Valley Forge,” McCargo said.

McCargo added that the extensive upgrades inside the facility required moving all of the artifacts, around 10,000, to a controlled-climate room, while the rest of the facility’s HVAC was replaced.

During the site closure, staff continued to work by planning new and updating existing exhibits, including adding new artifacts to the Queen Anne’s Revenge exhibit. The museum is the official repository for the ship, which Blackbeard the Pirate was captaining when it ran aground in Beaufort Inlet 1718, and are expecting more from the Queen Anne’s Revenge conservation laboratory in Greenville.

McCargo also thanked the Friends of the N.C. Maritime Museum, for the $80,000 gift the nonprofit made toward the updates before welcoming the president of the group that supports the museum, Tom Kies.

“The museum is important on many different levels. First and foremost, it safeguards our history. The stories preserved within these walls of boatbuilders, sailors, fishermen, families and communities — and pirates — are not just relics of the past. They are living reminders of who we are and how this region was shaped by the sea. The educational programs offered here ensure that these stories are not last or lost, but passed on to a new generation who will carry them forward. But this Museum’s impact extends far beyond education and preservation,” Kies said.

He added that places like the Maritime Museum are where visitors can connect with the state’s maritime heritage, experience something authentic and meaningful, and understand why this part of North Carolina is so special.

“When they do, they don’t just visit the museum, they support local businesses, stay in our hotels, dine in our restaurants, and leave with a deeper appreciation of our community. In that way, the Maritime Museum is both a cultural anchor and an economic engine, strengthening the region in ways that are sometimes unseen but always felt,” Kies said.

Division of Cultural and Natural Resources Secretary Pamela Brewington Cashwell opened her remarks by telling the room that, for the past year, she had been asking when the facility would reopen. 

“How long does it take to put in a new HVAC system?” she said, with a hint of humor. “To which my staff says, ‘It’s not a window unit, secretary, it’s different,’” and the museum underwent a facelift, which she said many state sites need.

She thanked legislators for help with the $1.8 million project and the supporters, who are “critical to allowing us to do what we do across all of our over 100 sites in North Carolina.” The total includes other sites in the nearby area, like Fort Macon State Park and the N.C. Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores.

The museum was initially scheduled to reopen Jan. 31 but the event was rescheduled for Feb. 21 because of inclement weather.

‘America 250 NC,’ ‘Swell Times’

The museum’s Information and Communications Specialist Cyndi Brown told Coastal Review that the “America 250 NC” exhibit is the first of three phases looking at North Carolina’s role in the American War for Independence.

“This first phase, which will remain on exhibit for about three years, looks at Revolutionary War commerce. The exhibit explores the state’s imports and exports, shares stories about some of its interesting figures and details the importance of the maritime routes in supplying war efforts to the north,” Brown said. “Phase 2 will focus on North Carolina’s privateers and the state’s navy. The final exhibit will look at the end of the war, focusing on coastal raids and the battle of Beaufort.”

Brown explained that creating these exhibits, as with all exhibits in the museum, starts with the history curator and collections staff.

“The historian will come up with a potential theme or concept and research it to be sure there are enough primary sources accessible to tell the history. He’ll then work with collections to be sure we can support those histories with artifacts that are either already in our collection or available for purchase or via loan from another institution,” she continued.

The other new exhibit, “Swell Times,” explores the history of recreation along the coast, specifically on the water.

“There’s info on surfing and sailing, boating, spearfishing, hunting and more. There’s a fun interactive with various historic postcards, front and back, to show some personal perspectives of being on the coast,” Brown said.

Second of two parts; read part 1

Not every slave master in Moses Grandy’s life was cruel. Some actively worked with Grandy to help him buy his freedom.

There was “Richard Furley, who … gave me a pass to work for myself.”

The agreement between Furley and Grandy was simple.

“I obtained work by the piece where I could, and paid him out of my earnings what we had agreed on; I maintained myself on the rest, and saved what I could…He paid seventy, eighty, or ninety dollars a year for me, and I paid him twenty or thirty dollars a year more than that.”

Sometime around 1813 or 1814 Grandy noted “the English blockaded the Chesapeake, which made it necessary to send merchandize from Norfolk to Elizabeth city by the Grand Canal, so that it might get to sea by Pamlico Sound and Ocracock Inlet…”

A skilled waterman by this time, he “took some canal boats on shares; Mr. Grice … was the owner of them.”

Most likely that is Mr. Charles Grice, described in a National Register of Historic Places survey of Elizabeth City as “the leading merchant in Elizabeth City’s early years.”

Grandy’s arrangement with Grice gives an indication of how valuable and trusted Grandy was. “I gave him one-half of all I received for freight: out of the other half, I had to victual and man the boats, and all over that expense was my own profit,” he described as the business arrangement.

It was during this time, when visiting “my brother Benjamin returned from the West Indies,” that how cruel and capricious life was for an enslaved person becomes clear.

Grandy was in one room and in another room “heard the heavy blows of a hammer…went to see what was going on. I looked into the store, and saw my brother lying on his back on the floor, and Mr. Williams, who had bought him, driving staples over his wrists and ankles; an iron bar was afterwards put across his breast, which was also held down by staples.”

His brother had done nothing wrong, he was told, “but that his master had failed, and he was sold towards paying the debts.”

Grandy Tries to Buy His Freedom

Although increasingly independent, Moses Grandy was still owned by James Grandy and at the suggestion of Grice, Moses asked how much would it cost to buy his freedom.

After considerable negotiation, $600 was the agreed price.

“I then went heartily to work, and whenever I paid him (James) for my time, I paid him something also towards my freedom, for which he gave me receipts,” Grandy recalled.

When $600 was reached, Moses went to his master and “he tore up all the receipts: I told him he ought not to have done so; he replied it did not signify, for as soon as court-day came, he should give me my free papers.”

Read the first part: Enslaved in Camden County, Moses Grandy knew its cruelty

When the court date came, James “was playing at billiards, and would not go with me.”

Concerned his chance for freedom would be lost, Moses went to the Grices and asked for help. Mrs. Grice sent for James who “cursed her, and went out of the house.”

Mr. Grice then met with James and he agreed to go to court and sign the papers. Instead “he rode away, and kept away till court was over” and sold Moses for $600 to a Mr. Trewitt.

It was the first of three attempts by Grandy to buy his freedom.

Trewitt, agreed to the same arrangement Grandy had had with Grice and that $600 would buy his freedom.

After two and a half years, Grandy had paid the full $600. Trewitt on Christmas Eve asked him, though, to take a letter to a Mr. Mews on Newbegun Creek, a small tributary to the Pasquotank River, in Weeksville.

When he delivered the letter, Mews read it “and looking up at me said, ‘Well, you belong to me.’”

Trewitt had used Grandy as security on a loan and failed in his payments.

“‘Mews’ was almost assuredly William T. Muse, a Pasquotank land speculator who owned slaves and more than twenty thousand acres of swamp forest. Muse, who had not really wanted Grandy, sold him back to Sawyer,” Cecelski wrote.

Initially his time with Sawyer went well. His second wife was owned by Sawyer, and Grandy’s maritime skills afforded him a better life and more freedom than most other enslaved people.

“I got into a fair way of buying myself again; for I undertook the lightering of the shingles or boards out of the Dismal Swamp …” Grandy said.

But Sawyer had gone into business with “his two sons-in-law at Norfolk, who failed; in consequence of which, he sold eighteen coloured people, his share of the Swamp (lightering), and two plantations.”

Grandy was again in the fields, but this time may have been the worst.

“The overseer was a bad one, his name was Brooks,” Grandy said.

Working in the field, if a worker did not put in sufficient effort, “One black man is kept on purpose to whip the others in the field; if he does not flog with sufficient severity, he is flogged himself: he whips severely, to keep the whip from his own back.”

Grandy witnessed Brooks kill “a girl named Mary” and “also killed a boy about twelve years old. He had no punishment, or even trial, for either.”

After years working as a waterman, the hard labor of field work was wearing him down and Grandy told Sawyer that he had “not been used to it for a long time; that his overseer was the worst that had ever been on the plantation, and that I could not stand it.”

Grandy pointed to how little food the field hands were given, Sawyer agreed to provide more food. The slaves working in the field “much rejoiced that I got this additional allowance for them. But I was not satisfied; I wanted liberty.”

A payment of $230 had already been made to Sawyer, and Grandy again began negotiations for his freedom.

Sawyer agreed to sell Grandy for the $600 he paid for him plus the $230 already given him. Grandy, “hired an old horse and started for Norfolk.” At Deep Creek he went to the house of “Captain Edward Minner … in former days I had done much business for him.”

Minner agreed to pay the $600 for Grandy’s freedom with the understanding that he would be repaid. At first Sawyer refused to sell his property, but Minner “shewed him the paper he had given me, saying, ‘Mr. Sawyer, is not this your handwriting?’”

Unlike everyone else who had purchased him, Minner was adamant that he would not own another human being.

“Mind, gentlemen, I do not want him for a slave; I want to buy him for freedom. He will repay me the money, and I shall not charge him a cent of interest for it. I would not have a coloured person to drag me down to hell, for all the money in the world,” Moses recalled Minner telling Sawyer.

By 1828, Grandy had repaid Minner and he had his “free papers, so that my freedom was quite secure, my feelings were greatly excited. I felt to myself so light, that I almost thought I could fly, and in my sleep I was always dreaming of flying over woods and rivers.”

He moved north, first to Providence, Rhode Island, then to Boston, Massachusetts. He traveled the world as sailor, telling of trips to “St. John’s in Porto Rico…(and) several other voyages, and particularly two to the Mediterranean. The last was to the East Indies.”

He had now saved enough to purchase the freedom of his wife. “I sent it to Virginia…She came to me at Boston. I dared not go myself to fetch her, lest I should be again deprived of my liberty, as often happens to free coloured people,” Grandy said.

He was also able to buy his son’s freedom as well and learned that at least two of his six daughters had purchased their freedom.

Grandy, now a free man, found life in the northern states troubling.

“Although I was free as to the law, I was made to feel severely the difference between persons of different colours. No black man was admitted to the same seats in churches with the whites, nor to the inside of public conveyances, nor into street coaches or cabs …” he said, adding however, “the abolitionists boldly stood up for us, and through them things are much changed for the better.”

Grandy was particularly harsh in his criticism of the American Colonization Society, the organization that was founded to send Black and enslaved people back to Africa.

“As to the settlement of Liberia on the coast of Africa, the free coloured people of America do not willingly go to it. America is their home: if their forefathers lived in Africa, they themselves know nothing of that country,” he indicated.

Enoch Sawyer was a vice president of the Camden County American Colonization Society the Raleigh Register, and North-Carolina State Gazette recorded in 1825.

Although illiterate Grandy was a keen observer of events and the personalities of the people he met along his journey. There were slave owners, as he noted, that did treat their human property well, at least by the standards of many slave owners.

But overall “The proprietors, though they live in luxury, generally die in debt: their negroes are so hardly treated, that no profit is made by their labour. Many of them are great gamblers. At the death of a proprietor, it commonly happens that his coloured people are sold towards paying his debts. So it must and will be with the masters, while slavery continues: when freedom is established, I believe they will begin to prosper greatly.”

The concept of freedom and its importance to the individual is an idea Grandy returns to a number of times throughout “Late a Slave in America.”

“Slavery,” he observed, “will teach any man to be glad when he gets freedom.”

First of two parts

A highway sign installed last September in Camden County calls attention to Moses Grandy, born there an enslaved person, and the story of his life told in “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy; Late a Slave in the United States of America.”

The book was published in London, England, in 1843. When the book was printed, he was, Grandy guessed, 56 years old, although as he notes in his book, “Slaves seldom know exactly how old they are: neither they nor their masters set down the time of a birth; the slaves, because they are not allowed to write or read; and the masters, because they only care to know what slaves belong to them.”

The book was published the following year in the United States.

There are no kindly “Old Black Joes,” elderly enslaved people treasured for their wisdom by caring masters in Moses Grandy’s autobiography. Rather, early in the book, there is a description of his mother, “blind and very old … living in a little hut, in the woods, after the usual manner of old worn-out slaves.”

Grandy observed late in his narrative that, “As far as the owner is concerned, they live or die as it happens; it is just the same thing as turning out an old horse.”

The book is filled with Simon Legree-like characters, capricious in their cruelty, and chilling descriptions of the horrors of the American institution of slavery. Legree is a harsh slaveowner in Harriet Beacher Stowe’s fictional, antislavery novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

Yet the book is more than that. Grandy’s eye for detail and his memory are remarkable. What emerges from the pages is an exceptional and complex description of the institution of slavery.

It is Grandy’s penchant for remembering names that may provide the most damning indictment of slavery.

The title page of the book carries the warning, “It is not improbable that some of the proper names in the following pages are incorrectly spelled. M. G., owing to the laws of the slave states, being perfectly illiterate, his pronunciation is the only guide.” Yet, if some names are muddled in pronunciation and untraceable, there is still plenty to go on.

He describes his first master, Billy Grandy, as “a hard-drinking man” who “sold away many slaves.”

The Camden County 1790 census lists 18 slaves in the William Grandy household, but its apparent there had been more.

“I remember four sisters and four brothers; my mother had more children, but they were dead or sold away before I can remember. I was the youngest,” Moses Grandy recalled. 

His master died when he was probably 9 and the Grandy will bequeathed Moses to James Grandy, the son of William Grandy. James and Moses were the same age and there was a stipulation in the will that Moses would be hired out until “my master and myself were twenty-one years old.”

When he was old enough “to be taken away from my mother and put to field-work, I was hired out for the year, by auction, at the Court House, every January; this is the common practice with respect to slaves belonging to persons who are under age.”

The first person to buy his services, a Mr. Kemp, “used me pretty well; he gave me plenty to eat and sufficient clothing,” he then went to Jemmy Coates, “a severe man”

“Because I could not learn his way of hilling corn, he flogged me naked with a severe whip made of a very tough sapling…The point of it at last entered my belly and broke off; leaving an inch and a-half outside…On looking down I saw it sticking, out of my body: I pulled it out and the blood spouted after it. The wound festered, and discharged very much at the time, and hurt me for years after,” he said.

“I was next with Mr. Enoch Sawyer of Camden county,” Grandy recalled.

A prominent North Carolina politician immediately after the Revolution, Sawyer was deeply involved in developing the Great Dismal Swamp Canal. If the gravestone the Elizabeth City Economist found in November, 1897 is to be believed, Sawyer was a good man.

“Sacred to the memory of Enoch Sawyer, who was born on the 10th of March, 1758. and departed this life on the 16th of March, 1827, age 68 and six days. He was universally beloved and respected, and a faithful servant of the Lord Jesus. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his Saints,” the Economist reported.

If Sawyer was a good man to his neighbors and peers, to Grandy, “It was cruel living.”

“We had not near enough of either victuals or clothes … I have often ground the husks of Indian corn over again in a hand-mill, for the chance of getting something to eat out of it,” Grandy reported. “In severe frosts, I was compelled to go into the fields and woods to work, with my naked feet cracked and bleeding from extreme cold.”

If the living was cruel in working for Sawyer, Grandy learned a skill that gave him a degree of freedom very few enslaved people enjoyed.

“The young Moses Grandy tended the ferry across the Narrows on the Pasquotank River,” historian David Cecelski wrote in his 1994 article “Moses Grandy: A Slave Waterman’s Life,” written for the Institute for Southern Studies.

The Black watermen were, Cecelski wrote, “an elite fraternity … both irreplaceable to the plantation economy, and subversive of the racial bondage that fueled it.”

That skill served Grandy well, raising his importance as a commodity, and the value that was placed on his skill as a waterman underscores how complex the institution of American slavery was.

After three years working for Sawyer his services were acquired by “Mr. George Furley (probably George Ferebee, early postmaster of South Mills) … he employed me as a car-boy in the Dismal swamp; I had to drive lumber, &. I had plenty to eat and plenty of clothes. I was so overjoyed… that I then thought I would not have left the place to go to heaven.”

Although no longer working under Sawyer, the “cruel living” touched him once again.

“I married a slave belonging to Mr. Enoch Sawyer,” he said. After eight months of marriage, he was returning home on a Friday, when he “heard a noise behind me, on the road which ran by the side of the canal … When they came up to me, one of them cried out, ‘Moses, my dear!’… It was my wife. She cried out to me, ‘I am gone.’

His wife had been sold.

He was able to walk with her for a short distance “and bid her farewell. I have never seen or heard of her from that day to this. I loved her as I loved my life.”

Next in the series: To purchase his freedom

From the starvation and struggle of the ill-fated Lost Colony to the house-snatching fury of the latest nor’easter, endurance has always been a primary occupation on North Carolina’s remote Outer Banks. Even today, with soaring bridges and ribbons of asphalt connecting the outside world, a blustery winter day can isolate a soul in relentless gray.

But for locals who call Hatteras Island home, one bite of a savory, golden brown fish cake reminds them why they choose to stay on these unsteady sands.

Sharon Peele Kennedy understood that devotion better than most. A culinary icon known through her cookbook, “What’s for Supper,” and her voice on local radio stations, she was the primary guardian of Outer Banks foodways.

For Kennedy, who passed in January 2024, a plate of fish cakes wasn’t just a meal; it was an essential starting point for stories about the traditional Hatteras way of life she cherished.

To taste a fish cake in the “Banker” style, the name locals use for the ancestral residents of these islands, is to take a bite of history. Born from the resourceful kitchens of coastal families, these aren’t the typical heavily seasoned fried patties. Just as their forebears did at least two centuries ago, cooks here hand-flake fresh, local fish and then gently fold it with mashed potatoes and not much else.

Kennedy’s own recipe was handed down through generations. Her father, Maxton Peele, was a commercial long-haul and pound-net fisherman who cooked “in the traditional island style” of barely seasoning seafood to preserve its delicate flavor, Kennedy wrote in “What’s for Supper.” Her mother, Juanita Peele, was an expert at adding “unexpected touches” to those dishes.

Kennedy started working at Hatteras-area seafood restaurants when she was just 12 and grew up to become a champion for North Carolina’s commercial fishing families.

“This is a very traditional food on these banks,” Kennedy told me while she shaped fish cakes for a 2023 fundraising dinner in Nags Head to benefit NC Catch, a nonprofit promoting North Carolina seafood. 

Usually, leftover fish was “repurposed by mixing it all together … potatoes, onions and fish,” Kennedy said. “A little salt, a little pepper and an egg. And then shape it. That’s it.”

Such simplicity was forged in an era when grocery stores were nonexistent on Hatteras and thrift was the essential lifeline for island families. The first paved road didn’t open until the 1950s, and a boat or ferry was the only access to the island until a bridge opened in 1963. As Kennedy often reminded her audiences, Bankers “used what they had … what grew in the garden.”

Fortunately, fish was plentiful and could be salt-preserved for the larder. Onions and white potatoes – long known as “Irish potatoes” along the North Carolina shore from Virginia to eastern Carteret County – were the other essentials. Both thrived in sandy coastal soil. The humble staples formed the heart of the Banker fish cake.

Those potatoes and onions hint at how fish cakes became a Hatteras Island tradition, though the local recipe’s exact origin and timeline remain a mystery. When English settlers first arrived at Roanoke Island, the British were not yet potato eaters. While Europeans were introduced to the vegetable in the mid-1500s, most did not widely accept it until the 1700s.

While some credit Scandinavian sailors with the invention of potato-based fiskekaker, others point to the coastal traditions of Ireland. There, boiling potatoes in seawater to serve alongside the daily catch was one kind of survival meal, a flavor profile strikingly similar to the fish cake.

Regardless of who first mashed the two together, the concept found a perfect home on the Outer Banks.

For decades, the threat of piracy and the memory of the Lost Colony kept many settlers away from those shores, but by the mid-1600s, potato and onion farming had taken root in the nearby Albemarle region. As piracy dissipated in the early 1700s and more settlers moved to the barrier islands, they brought “Irish potatoes” and onions with them.

All the ingredients were finally lined up for an Outer Banks fish cake. While Kennedy’s cookbook also offered variations made with rice or hush puppy batter, the basic recipe many Hatteras locals use has remained unchanged: a modest, resourceful marriage of the garden and the sea.

As Kennedy shaped fish cakes for that NC Catch dinner at Basnight’s Lone Cedar Café in Nags Head, her son Jeffery Kennedy stepped in to grab a full tray. He gently laid the plump fish cakes into a deep fryer behind his mother. The pair’s easy cadence made it clear that this was not the first time the family had cooked fish cakes together.

Sizzling in oil, the fish cakes sent up a mouthwatering aroma. As Jeffery lifted the golden-brown disks from the fryer, his mother advised that any leftover fish would do – drum, bluefish, speckled trout, mackerel, whatever was available – whether baked, broiled or boiled. Throughout the process, she repeated how easy fish cakes were to prepare, offering not a hint of how utterly delicious they would be.

“Show her Jeffery,” Kennedy told her son. He picked up one of the hot patties and split it open with his hands. Inside, flaked white fish mingled with mashed potatoes, sending up a delectable fragrance. Meaty and substantial, the cake somehow maintained a pillowy texture that contrasted beautifully with its crisp exterior. One bite and I wished I could stay on the Outer Banks forever.

Fish Cakes

4 cups of cooked fish

3 cups of mashed potatoes

1 small onion diced or 1/3 cup chopped green onions

2 eggs, beaten

Salt and pepper

Flake fish in a bowl with mashed potatoes, add onions and beaten eggs, season to taste. Shape into small patties. Fry in about ¼-inch (deep) medium hot oil, until nice and brown.

Source: “What’s for Supper” by Sharon Peele Kennedy

Note: Because cooks often rely on leftover fish for fish cakes, the patties are traditionally enjoyed for breakfast. Try them in place of English muffins, use fried eggs instead of poached on top and skip the bacon for a delicious “eggs Benedict.”

By all accounts, it was bitterly cold in the wee hours of Feb. 27, 1776, when loyalists, soaked to the bone from enduring days of rainfall, began a 6-mile march through swampy muck and dense brush in present-day Pender County to seize a patriot camp on the west bank of Moores Creek Bridge.

The move to confront the patriots at the Black River Road bridge that crosses Moores Creek was an unplanned step in a larger strategy for England to recapture North Carolina, a plan British Royal Governor Josiah Martin coordinated when he lost control of the colony and was exiled in the first half of 1775, according to the National Park Service.

After Martin convinced his superiors that his plan to raise an army of 10,000 and march to the coast to join with British forces would restore royal rule to the colony, he began recruiting at Cross Creek, now known as Fayetteville, in early 1776.

He ended up with 1,600 loyalists, mostly Scottish immigrants, marching east, but patriots thwarted their attempts to reach the coast.

By the end of February, the last direct route to Wilmington that the patriots hadn’t blocked was the sandy and narrow Black River Road.

Patriots knew that Moores Creek Bridge was the last defendable position and got the upper hand by arriving there first.

When the loyalists arrived Feb. 26, 1776, they offered the patriots a chance to forgo the battle and pledge allegiance to the crown, which the patriots declined. The loyalists had sent a scout to get a read on the patriots’ plans. The scout reported the troops were vulnerable, and loyalists decided to attack.

The loyalists left camp at 1 a.m. the next day to hike the 6 miles through backcountry to the patriot encampment, only to find it abandoned.

Unbeknownst to the loyalists, the patriots had moved camp the night before to the east side of Moores Creek Bridge, knowing that was the only way to cross the creek to continue along Black River Road to Wilmington.

The patriots were lying in wait, cannons and muskets ready, hidden behind earthworks they built on a ridge overlooking the creek.

Loyalist Lt. Col. Donald McLeod led about 50 loyalists to the bridge around 5 a.m., only to discover it partly dismantled. Planks had been removed and those that were left were slathered in soap and tallow.

Undeterred, McLeod was confident he had enough men to attack. The commander drew his weapon “and exclaimed, ‘King George and Broadswords.'”

The small group charged, not expecting around 1,000 patriots to be hidden behind the earthworks just 30 feet away until McLeod, and more than two dozen other loyalists, were fired upon and killed instantly.

“With McLeod, the Loyalist commander at the bridge, now dead, the attack stalled, and the remaining Loyalists gave up and retreated into the darkness,” the park service explains.

“This battle marked the last broadsword charge by Scottish Highlanders and the first significant victory for the Patriots in the American Revolution,” the park service website states.

“In the days that followed the battle, the resounding victory echoed though the colonies, and a new hope was born. On April 12, 1776 the Patriot leaders in North Carolina signed the Halifax Resolves, a document that gave the delegates of the colony sent to the Continental Congress the right to vote for Independence. North Carolina would become the first colony to take such action.”

Related: Battle of Moores Creek Bridge virtual program Feb. 19

Now preserved, the grounds are the centerpiece of the 88-acre Moores Creek National Battlefield, which is celebrating the 250 years that have elapsed since that significant battle.

“This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Battle at Moores Creek Bridge, the first decisive patriot victory in the American Revolution and the moment that has set North Carolina on the path to becoming the first colony to call for independence,” Superintendent Matthew Woods told a handful of journalists during a recent press conference.

Woods, along with other project partners, invited media to the site to explain details about the inaugural First in Freedom Festival taking place Feb. 21-28. The weeklong regional celebration is a coordinated effort of eight counties to commemorate the 250^th anniversary of the battle and the subsequent signing of the Declaration of Independence in July 1776. 

The anniversary is a “milestone, not only for this park, but for American history,” Woods continued, and the festival is a way of using this moment to shine a broader spotlight on the people, the places and the stories that define the state’s role in American history. 

“Over the course of the week of the North Carolina First in Freedom Festival, historic sites, art institutions and community partners across eight counties will come together to interpret more than 250 years of history through both heritage and the arts, culminating here at Moores Creek National Battlefield with a three-day commemorative event,” Woods said. 

Special to the inaugural celebration is a weekend with author Diana Gabaldon, creator of the “Outlander” series. Unfortunately for those who didn’t jump on the tickets when they went on sale in November, the three events with the author are sold out.

“Outlander” is a historical fantasy series about a World War II nurse, Claire, who travels through time, from 1945 Inverness to 1743 Scotland, where she meets Jamie. Both the novels and the show based on series follow their love story across time and then the ocean, when the characters immigrate from Scotland to North Carolina, making stops in New Bern, Wilmington, and Moores Creek, and take part in the American Revolution.

Gabaldon, in a virtual chat during the press conference, explained that she featured Moores Creek because of the importance of the battle for the American Revolution and the Scottish settlement in the colony. “That seemed a very logical place to set part of their story. Also, this is essentially where we began, so to speak. So if we’re going to work through the Revolution with them, it seemed like the just the normal place for them to be.”

More about the festival

Moores Creek Chief of Interpretation Jason Collins explained that the battlefield will welcome on Feb. 26 multiple school groups to experience living history demonstrations. Feb. 27 will begin with a traditional wreath-laying ceremony, followed by living history demonstrations and special speakers, and Feb. 28 is a celebration with music, games, “Freedom” Art Show, food trucks and living history displays.

“To pull back the curtain,” Collins said, there’s typically around 75 reenactors for an anniversary event. “Take that number and multiply it by about two and a half for the number of reenactors we’re expecting for this year’s event. Roughly around 200 — kind of — almost neatly split between loyalists and patrons, which is really exciting.”

Collins said First in Freedom is bigger than Moores Creek. From Feb. 21-28 and throughout the year, there will be activities in Onslow, Pender, New Hanover, Brunswick, Duplin, Sampson, Bladen and Columbus, the eight counties making up the region.

For example, on Feb. 21 is the Historical Society of Topsail Island’s Visit Colonial Topsail at the historic assembly building, living history events at Brunswick Town/Fort Anderson State Historic Site, and a Black History Carnival in Wilmington. 

The following day, Feb. 22, Colonial Faire at Harmony Hall is to take place at 1615 River Road, White Oak, in Bladen County, as well as “North Carolina’s Black Patriots of the American Revolution” aboard the Battleship North Carolina and “Freedom’s Road: the refugee crisis of 1865 in the Lower Cape Fear,” at the Oak Island Library.

Collins continued that for this year’s celebration of the 250^th, First in Freedom Festival has released a companion passport, similar to the National Park Service’s passport program, for the festival.

“Folks are going to be able to visit different sites throughout the counties,” Collins said. At each site, they can have their passport stamped, and there will be different levels of prizes. Participants will need to turn their booklets in by Dec. 31 to receive a prize.

Flying Machine Brewery Sales Manager Allen Denning mentioned during the press conference that the taproom on Randall Parkway in Wilmington is featured on the passport, where the brewery will be serving its First in Freedom Battlefield Porter. The limited-edition beer was brewed using research-based colonial techniques for the 250th anniversary.

Denning explained that hops were hard to come by in the Americas at the time, so they got creative and used plants like spruce tips, he said, and the new beer is a nod to that ingenuity. 

Moores Creek National Battlefield Association President Jim Buell reiterated that Moores Creek was the first decisive patriot victory, and “North Carolina was the first colony to declare their independence.”

Buell said that Woods, the park superintendent, had the idea for the First in Freedom Festival that “has now sprouted and grown tremendously. And we’re here today to kick it off officially, and then we’re hoping that a lot of people come enjoy it.”

First in Freedom is taking place with the support of America 250 NC. The initiative coordinated under the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources helps the state’s communities commemorate 250 years of United States history.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

In May of 1938, a young woman named Muriel L. Wolff spent several weeks interviewing people in Terra Ceia, a community of Dutch immigrants, African Americans, and other settlers who had all come to that part of the North Carolina coast to try to make a new home in hard times.

When she went to Terra Ceia, Wolff was working for the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal program that employed writers who were struggling during the Great Depression. Some wrote guidebooks; others, like Wolff, documented American life and history.

Wolff talked with all kinds of people while she was in Terra Ceia. She then came back to her home in Chapel Hill and wrote a chronicle of her time there and what she had learned.

In that account, Wolff also included at least partial transcripts of the interviews that she had conducted in Terra Ceia.

Some time ago, I found the original copy of Muriel Wolff’s writings on Terra Ceia in the Federal Writers’ Project Papers at the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Wolff opened her report with these words:

“About twelve miles from the blue waters of the Pamlico Sound in Beaufort County there lies an area of drained swamp land, so rich that it was once given the name ‘Heavenly Earth’ although the people who live there facetiously call the region `The Dismal.’

“Oddly enough, both names fit because it is a community of sharp contrasts.

“There are comfortable, well-built houses with all conveniences and there are miserable little shacks that seem to be falling apart; there are big dairy farms with 60, 70, or a 100 cows, but many families do not possess even one; on the vast, black fields, thousands of bushels of potatoes and corn, grain and beans are grown, yet laborers steal because they are hungry.”

That was during the last years of the Great Depression, but I guess some things have not changed: that seems very much like the world in which I grew up, and also very much like the world in which we live now.

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When Muriel Wolff went to Terra Ceia, she was still quite young. She was born in Concord, between Greensboro and Charlotte, in 1910, so she was only 28 years old at the time.

Her passion was for the theater. She began her acting career at North Carolina College for Women, now UNC-Greensboro, where she appeared in student productions between 1926 and 1928.

After leaving Women’s College, she studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. She then came back south and join the Carolina Playmakers, the well-known repertory company based at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

She toured with the Playmakers from 1929 to 1931. At that time, the troupe was writing, producing, and performing plays set in some of North Carolina’s most hardscrabble communities: the state’s cotton mill villages, its tobacco farming hamlets, its mountain hollows.

One of Wolff’s most memorable roles was the lead in the original cast of “Strike Song,” a play that was set against the backdrop of a textile workers’ strike in the Carolina Piedmont.

In “Strike Song,” Wollf played “Lily May Brothers,” the most dynamic and inspiring of the strike’s leaders.

Her character was modeled after Ella May Wiggins, a 29-year-old mother, songwriter, and labor activist who was murdered in retaliation for her union activism in Gastonia, in September 1929.

Sometime in 1931, Wolff evidently found that she could not make a living with the Playmakers and took a job as secretary to William T. Couch, the director of the University of North Carolina Press.

However, she continued to moonlight with the Playmakers and to act in local experimental theater for most of the 1930s.

Her work with Couch led to her job with the Federal Writers’ Project. In 1938, in addition to his job at UNC Press, Couch was also serving as the southern director of the Federal Writers’ Project.

In that capacity, Couch employed Muriel Wolff to conduct a series of oral history interviews in Terra Ceia.

In all likelihood, he had first heard of Terra Ceia through several recent magazine and newspaper stories that had featured the community’s Dutch immigrants and their flower farms.

In the 1930s, when other cash crops seemed lacking, a number of Dutch immigrants in Terra Ceia had turned to growing flowers on a commercial scale.

Before long, the sight of their broad fields of tulips, iris, and daffodils began to attract crowds of visitors to the little community in the spring.

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Terra Ceia’s roots reached back to the late 1800s and early 1900s, when the Roper Lumber Co. and the Norfolk & Southern Railroad worked hand in hand to clearcut and drain hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin swamp forest on that part of the North Carolina coast.

A pair of brothers, John A. and Samuel Wilkinson, were the driving force behind the founding of Terra Ceia.

They were farmers in a little crossroads community called Wilkinson (named, of course, after their family), a few miles east of Terra Ceia. They bought thousands of acres of cutover land from the Roper Lumber Co. and drained and burnt off what was left of the swamp forest.

Once the forest was gone, the Wilkinson brothers marketed the reclaimed swampland to farmers. They took special pains to recruit white Midwesterners, many of them immigrants.

Soon after arriving in Terra Ceia, Wolff and a young local woman, Margaret Respess, rode horseback out to Wilkinson to visit Sam Wilkinson, the only one of the brothers who still lived in the area. He was farming on the land where he and his brother had grown up.

The little settlement was not much more than Sam Wilkinson’s house, broad plains of farmland, a crowd of shacks where farmworkers lived, and a general farm supply and grocery store owned by the Wilkinson family.

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Sitting down with Muriel Wolff in the store, Sam Wilkinson told her about the birth of Terra Ceia.

He told her:

“When I was a boy all that land over there wasn’t anything but swamp. It was full of great big cypress and juniper trees timber that never had been cut. Well, back in 1905, I was working for the Roper Lumber Company, located over in Belhaven, and they started logging that swamp.

“To do that, they had to dig ditches and drain off some of the water, but it still wasn’t fit for anything when me and my brother bought up 20,000 acres in 1911.

“The first thing ever put in that land was stick corn—you know what that is, don’t you? You just stick a hole in the ground, drop in a grain of corn and cover it up. That corn was put in before the stumps were cleared or the land really drained, but it produced between 15 and 20 bushels an acre.

“That’s when the stories got started about how rich the land was over there.

“If you don’t believe we spent the money, I’ll tell you what we had to do. That was swamp land, remember, and ditches wouldn’t drain off all the water. There had to be 40 miles of canals besides the ditches.

“We paid $20,000 for a dredge to dig canals. It broke after the first seven miles. We bought another but it broke too before we finished.

“Then we had to put through a branch line of the railroad — 11 miles of it at $1,000 a mile. Before we could lay a track, we had to buy the right of way and buy $70,000 worth of Norfolk & Southern stock. But we got the railroad through. There it is today.

“Our original plan was to get the land in a good state for cultivation, divide it into 50-acre plots and make it available to poor people and give them a long time to pay for it. We might have been able to do this, if we hadn’t had some more bad luck.

“My brother and I both had stock in the Roper Lumber Company, and it burned without being covered with a cent of insurance.

“Another trouble was land fires. A lot of that land over at Terra Ceia is peat soil and once it gets on fire you can’t hardly put it out. When you do get it to stop smoldering, it’s been ruined.

“All the reverses we had made it impossible for us to carry out our plan. We didn’t have any capital left…. There’s been a sight of money spent on Terra Ceia, and there was a time when money was made there, when land that first sold for $15 to $20 an acre brought $200 to $300 an acre.”

Wilkinson made clear that those days were long gone. “Well, we got experience, but it cost us mighty high,” Wolff quoted him.

He then walked out of the store and across the yard to his house to have his dinner before he headed back into the fields.

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On another morning, a local farm woman named Odell Snows took Wolff to visit a Mrs. Tantrelle in Terra Ceia. Tantrelle was the wife of an Italian immigrant who managed a large farm for a group of northern investors. Wolff was taking room and board with the Snows family.

“It was mid-morning when we started out in the new Plymouth,” Wolff wrote.

“The Snows live in a small settlement which might be called the center of Terra Ceia. Here is the only store run by a white in the community, here the Christian church and the Dutch church which was once the schoolhouse.

“We drove down the dusty road. On one side of it a few scattered houses stood in bare dirt on the edge of the fields; along the other side ran the canal and the railroad track, beyond which were fields.

“Odell drove slowly and explained the landscape. `Negro tenants live in that house, and there too. Yes, most of them are Negroes, except in that place. They’re some white tenants of Mr. Radcliffe’s.

“`An Italian man lives in the place there by that big barn. They say he can write music and poetry and play any kind of instrument.

“`See how far down from the road this land is? I can remember when it was almost level with the road, but it’ s burned down that far.’”

She was referring to the effects of peat fires on the landscape in Terra Ceia. In some places, the layer of peat beneath the swamp forest had been 10 and 12 feet deep, so that when it burned off it left the roads far higher than the surrounding fields and pastures.

In her report, Wolff continued to quote Odell Snows.

“`Now down here is the land owned by that Winston-Salem man who doesn’t do no farming at all. He just ships the dirt. His overseer has a gang of Negro men working most all the time, digging up the dirt, packing it in bags and loading it on that freight car that stands over on the siding.’”

“`When they have a carload (of the peat soil),’” Wolff continued, still quoting Odell Snow, “`the train will come through and pick it up. They say he gets a good price from people who buy the soil to put on their lawns and gardens. It’s so rich I guess it takes the place of fertilizer.’”

She went on:

“When we had come about a mile down the road from Odell’s, we crossed the canal to turn into the road where the Tantrelles lived. Built by a Northern company many years before, this little settlement had an overgrown, uncared for look which was still somehow picturesque.

“About a dozen steep-roofed cottages were spaced along both sides of a shady road and a canal bordered with sycamore trees. We left the car in the road and reached the Tantrelle’s house by way of a bridge that arched over the canal where several ducks were swimming.”

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The settlers in Terra Ceia had taken many different paths to that part of the North Carolina coast.

As Wolff went about doing her interviews for the Federal Writers’ Project, she found that many of the black families in Terra Ceia had come from the east side of the Pungo River, in Hyde County.

They were largely the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of African Americans who had been enslaved laborers along the shores of the Pamlico Sound before the Civil War.

While in Terra Ceia, Wolff also met people—white people— from Appalachia and others from as far away as Iowa, Kansas, and Michigan. At least a couple were Italian immigrants. More were Dutch immigrants.

In her report, Wolff described meeting a husband and wife from Mt. Airy, N.C., in the Appalachian foothills. She met another couple from near Bryson City, N.C., in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Still another couple had come all the way from Kansas City.

Yet another husband and wife that she met were Dutch immigrants who had first settled in the Midwest.

Things had not worked out for them there, so they had left and moved a thousand miles east to the North Carolina coast, not to Terra Ceia at first, but to a farm colony called New Holland.

New Holland was located on the southern shore of Lake Mattamuskeet, 45 miles east of Terra Ceia. It had not lasted long. The colony’s fate had depended on a grand scheme to drain the lake and turn it into farmland, but the lake had turned out not to be so easy to do away with.

Like countless others trying to find a home in the 1930s, when so many lives were tossed and turned about, the Dutch family pulled up roots again. They left New Holland and put their hopes for a new life in Terra Ceia.

The Great Depression had been hard on all of those people. All of them were trying to make a new beginning.

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I found Muriel Wolff to be at her best as a writer when she was chronicling small moments. She often recalled even the briefest encounters with a kind of grace and beauty that made them memorable.

One of those was a visit with an African American woman named Sarah Lovett.

Sarah Lovett and her husband, the Rev. James “Jim” Lovett, lived in White Six, a settlement of mainly African American families on the eastern side of Terra Ceia, on the old dirt road that led to Pantego.

In the Fall 2010 issue of the Beaufort County Community College’s wonderful oral history journal, Life on the Pamlico, one of the college’s students quoted her mother, saying: “We lived in an area known as White Six. It was given that name because it was a predominantly black neighborhood, but there were six white families that live on farms in the area.”

Most of the black residents of White Six worked in the local flower fields as often as they could get work in them.

The Lovetts were both from Hyde County, but had moved to White Six when times had gotten hard on that side of the Pungo River.

When they first arrived in White Six, the Rev. Lovett had made a decent living as a barber, which I imagine he did in addition to working in the fields. That was before the Great Depression, and he and Sarah had even been able to save up enough money to buy a bit of farmland.

In addition to barbering and working in the fields, James Lovett was the minister at one of the two African American churches in White Six.

Wolff wrote:

“On one of his plots of black earth, Jim Lovett built a small white house and Sarah… coaxed thin little borders of verbena, roses, and privet to grow along the edges of the bare front yard.

“It was in this yard that Sarah stood with me one fresh May morning, while three small boys and one girl looked up at us with solemn black eyes.”

“Sarah’s voice was as soft and charming as her personality,” Wolff wrote.

“She had a way of cocking her head to one side and squinting at the sky as she talked.”

The Depression Years — and a late freeze that spring — had been devastating to the people in White Six, Sarah Lovett told Wolff.

“`I work in the field by the day, when I can get it. Everybody was mighty hurt this year when the flower crop froze. It knocked so many out of work — especially the women folks. Out here in White Six, where most of them work by the day, it’s been a hard spring.’”

Sarah Lovett continued, “`Two of these little children I’m keeping today belong to a neighbor of mine who’s been sitting at home worrying for a month because there wasn’t nothing for her to do. Today she got a job digging iris. That will bring her a dollar for every day she works.’”

Sarah Lovett told Wolff that, unlike some other settlements around Terra Ceia, at least most of her neighbors in White Six could put food on the table for their children, even if it wasn’t always much.

She said, “’It’s a good thing so many of the White Six people own their own houses and enough ground to have a garden, some chickens, and hogs. They manage to raise most of what they have to eat, anyway.’”

I could almost see the two women there in Sarah Lovett’s kitchen, the humble cottages of White Six all around them, the endless fields, the great labyrinth of canals leading down into the sea.

There, with the sunlight coming in the window, they talked about life and told stories and held one another up a bit, as people do.

That is all I wanted from becoming a historian: to be able to listen to voices like theirs, and the more of them the better, a gentle murmur rising all around us, like some great tenderness in the dark.

Second installment of a two-part series special to Coastal Review

My mullet-fishing experience began in Carteret County, over half a century ago, but over the subsequent years and many scientific expeditions to find fossils, we have continued to cross paths with our “jumpin’ mullet,” catching them in places as far-flung as Hawaii and seeing them in markets of Europe, Africa, and Madagascar.

We have long marveled that our local tradition for drying mullet roe, which goes back many generations in my wife Lida Pigott’s family, somehow has its roots on the Mediterranean Island of Sardinia, the source of “Cabras gold,” the prized bottarga di muggine of Italian cuisine.

On my first visit to this enchanted island, just off the coast of Italy and second only to Sicily in size in the Mediterranean, I presented a talk at an international meeting of paleontologists and archaeologists on the topic of “Early Man in Island Environments,” featuring my years of work studying prehistoric Madagascar. I was fully captivated by the mysterious Sardinian landscapes, with more than 7,000 ancient ruins from the Neolithic and Bronze Age, some as old as Stonehenge and the pyramids.

I told myself I had to get back to Sardinia one day with more time to absorb it. I knew Lida would love this place because it is so strange and at once familiar. That was 1988.

We finally got back there a few months ago, for a nice long stay, and one of our projects was to explore the very heartland of one of Italian cuisine’s most famous products, bottarga di muggine, our own beloved mullet roe.

The wonderful archaeological museums and sites on the island tell the story well. Big estuaries with hydrology and scale similar to our own Core Sound, known locally as stagno (ponds), have been exploited for mullet seasonally, just as here in coastal NC or Hawaii or hundreds of other places in all the warm oceans of the world.

Mullet have undoubtedly fed Sardinians steadily for 5,000 years or more, from the indigenous Nuragic culture, through successive colonization by the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Spaniards, and medieval feudal lords.

In fact, one of the last vestiges of feudalism as an economic strategy anywhere in Europe was the mullet fishery of famous bottarga producers like the Stagno di Mar `e Pontis, near Cabras, Sardinia.

By the mid-1900s this ancient lucrative industry, still owned by what today might be described as an “oligarch,” was regulated through eight levels of bureaucracy, whereby so many folks with fancy titles and allegiance to the “owner” got such large cuts that sometimes not much was left for the fishermen who did the catching.

Long-standing issues flared up regarding the maintenance of the canals to the ocean that have regulated the water flow for centuries, even millennia. Poaching was rampant. The fishery was in a poor state.

Something had to be done, and some violence came with the transition, as fishermen’s consortiums, government officials, and local business interests tried to set things right in a variety of sometimes conflicting ways.

In an infamous 1978 crime incident, the feudal overlord, Don Efisio Carta, was kidnapped by banditi and never found, although a ransom was collected.

By the 1980s, the now outlawed feudal hierarchy had been replaced by a consortium of fishermen’s cooperatives, and to this day they run a thriving fishery based primarily on the mullet and bottarga but also with eel and tuna fisheries, shellfish farming, and other maritime industries to sustain the large work force through the off-season for the migratory mullet.

Over several weeks, Lida and I had been eating seafood, especially targeting bottarga dishes, all over Italy and Sardinia. We were especially excited to arrive in the absolute world capital of the jumpin’ mullet and the bottarga industry, Cabras, for a few days of culinary “mullet research.”

We visited the splendid local museums, but as mullet fishermen ourselves we were just as interested to see where the fishermen store their nets and dock their boats, what kinds of tackle they are using, and what they are generally about.

We were amazed to discover that the Cabras cooperative uses a single type of molded fiberglass skiff, a stout outboard motor of a single brand, and nets nearly all alike in tidy labeled bins and net bags.

As net hangers ourselves, we were impressed that their tackle and techniques looked almost exactly like ours, down to the corks and knots.

The folks at a local store selling bottarga and smoked mullet insisted that, with our interest in the subject, we really had to visit the museum dedicated to the history of the local fishing culture, just down the road a bit.

We walked there along a causeway through the vast wetlands to reach the cluster of buildings on a high place out in the marsh, beside a deep channel leading out into the stagno.

Part of the “fish tourism” project of the Cabras fishermen’s consortium, Mar’e Pontis Museum had a sweet friendly charm that reminded me of our own Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

The site also hosts a great restaurant, featuring local seafood, and an ancient chapel where the fishermen have prayed for safe and productive fishing for almost a thousand years.

From Pinuccio Carrus, a mullet fisherman who also guides museum tours, we learned about the boats, fishing gear, and thousands of years of fishing and fishing culture on this spot.

Probably since the Neolithic, fishermen here used small agile boats made entirely of reeds from the marsh, and some still do.

Wooden rowboats from years past, shaped like large high-ended canoes, similar to the gondolas of Venice, are now mostly rotting in yards, with molded fiberglass being the material of choice for most commercial fishing in the stagno today.

The museum had all kinds of nets and traps, for mullet and eels primarily, including ones that looked like our pound nets and gill nets.

Today, the fishermen use monofilament gill nets almost identical to ours in North Carolina, although the spear-fishing from reed boats is still practiced, too, much as it has been since prehistoric times.

Drawings and photos of fishing activity during the heyday of the feudal fishery show pound nets and fish corrals full of mullet with fishermen standing in their midst, taking them out by hand.

Having done a bit of that myself, I couldn’t help wondering if they had to watch out for stingrays lurking on the bottom of the mass of hemmed-in fish the way we do!

Of all the mullet-based meals of the trip – and there were many all over Italy and Sardinia – one of the most memorable was at the Restaurante de Madre de Rosy Circu in the heart of Cabras, at a junction of several of its ancient labyrinthine streets.

It was the only time anywhere that we dined on an entirely mullet-based pizza. It had a thin crust, a tomato and parsley sauce, and a topping of smoked mullet, sprinkled liberally with ground mullet roe (bottarga), a kind of double-mullet treat!

Another favorite we had several times around the island was a type of thick, rectangular local pasta with tiny clams (vongole veraci) and loads of ground bottarga. One of the best dishes was purple artichokes smothered in thin amber slices of bottarga, a feast for both the eye and palate.

Local shops sold a wonderful pâté made from bottarga and just right for any imaginable cracker.

The mullet fishery of Sardinia, although today only a small fraction of the historical fishery, seems to be doing fairly well. The industry in value-added fish products from local mullet, eel, and tuna seems to be thriving.

One change is that whereas relatively cheap U.S. mullet roe used to be imported salted or frozen to Italian factories for conversion to preciously expensive bottarga (not quite as expensive as caviar, but in that league), fish industries from Carteret County, to Manatee County, Florida (Cortez area) have sprung up that convert local mullet roe to a quality bottarga that sells on the internet for prices similar to the celebrated Sardinian stuff.

Combined with beach tourism and the draw from internationally unique 3,000-year-old giant stone statues (I Giganti di Mont’e Prama), folks there on the Sinis Peninsula seem to make a pretty good living by the stagno.

The mullet still come in large numbers from the sea every year, swelling the estuaries and feeding the people, dolphins, and birdlife, then returning to deeper water to complete their life cycle. Just like back home here in Carteret County,  and virtually all the warm coastal waters of the globe.

Our mullet is a fish for the world, a true cosmopolitan. I’m glad to have made its acquaintance in so many wonderful places.

First of two parts in a series special to Coastal Review

To many Carolinians coming to the beach for a little fishing, the mullet is a lowly baitfish, often cut into strips for bottom fishing. They may confuse it with an unrelated fish in the drum family known locally as the “sea mullet.”

To the folks of Down East Carteret County, and some locals throughout coastal NC, however, the “jumpin’ mullet,” as they call it, owns a special place in their hearts and kitchens. Often known as the grey mullet, flathead mullet, or striped mullet elsewhere in the English-speaking world, Mugil cephalus is a consummate jumper.

Back in 1980, while cutting mullet strips to use on offshore trips on the Carolina Princess with the original owner and captain, the late James “Woo-woo” Harker of Harkers Island, he and I would joke about how much better-flavored they were than the fish that we caught with them to sell at the fish house or that our clients from upstate were seeking on their charter trips with us — red snappers and groupers mostly. (Those were different times!)

For nearly a decade by then, I had been learning from my in-laws, the Pigotts and Nelsons of Carteret County: 1) how to strike-net mullet in a fast shallow-draft boat with lots of gill-net set in a circle around a seething school of mullet; 2) how to charcoal the fillets on pecan wood, for several hundred people at a time if necessary; and 3) how to prepare that most wonderful of eastern North Carolina delicacies – dried mullet roe – the bottarga di muggine of Italian cuisine (more on that later).

Well over a century ago, many Carteret County families literally cast their fates with the mullet fishery. Some of my wife Lida’s relatives even followed the mullet fishery elsewhere, particularly to Cortez and Punta Gorda, Florida, as described by historians Dr. Mary Fulford Green and David Cecelski.

This “mullet fishermen’s migration” showed how important one species of fish can be to human livelihoods and culture, reminiscent of the singular role of cod in European history or salmon for the Northwest Coast Native American tribes and the indigenous Ainu of northern Japan.

But where did North Carolinians pick up mullet fishing and all that goes with it, especially their appetite for the dried egg masses? North Carolina explorer John Lawson wrote in 1709 that eastern parts of the state had “Mullets, the same as in England, and in great Plenty in all places where the water is salt or brackish.”

Perhaps Down Easters may have learned originally about mullet and their fabulous roe from their Native American neighbors in the late 1600s and early 1700s, who undoubtedly knew it well.

Or perhaps, one could speculate, they learned or relearned directly from cultural transmission from Europe. After all, fishermen in this area have been selling mullet roe for export to Italy for many decades. In any case, drying mullet roe for cooking later is part of the “traditional ecological knowledge“ (TEK of anthropological lingo), of eastern Carteret County people.

During World War II, my father-in-law, the late Osborne G. “Bill” Pigott, asked his family back home to send him just one thing – some dried mullet roe. When he heated it on the wood stove in his tent somewhere in France, it drove his tentmates out with its powerful smell. “That was OK,” Bill would recount with a twinkle “more for me that way.”

As Lida and I made our way through the 70s and a subsequent half-century, we crossed paths with the cosmopolitan, under-rated mullet in many improbable places. It’s truly a worldwide fish and fishery, we began to realize, as we encountered them in fish markets of Europe, Africa, Madagascar, Hawaii, and elsewhere.

Part of our research involved excavating fossil sites on islands, to try to better understand past natural and human roles in the drastic environmental changes there. Lida and I feel really lucky to have done island paleoecology all around the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans.

Several of our sites on the Hawaiian island of Kaua`i, especially Makauwahi Cave on the south shore, were full of bones of prehistoric mullet, that same Mugil cephalus as our “jumpin’ mullet.”

Sites we excavated and radiocarbon dated showed mullet were there in large numbers thousands of years before the first humans to land on those shores. But we also studied prehistorically managed fishponds, places where the mullet (`ama`ama in Hawaiian) were raised in large numbers.

Oral tradition indicates that mullet were caught in nearby estuaries and transferred live to these ponds, or lured inside through slatted gates. They were kept well-fed on what mullet like best, low-on-the-food-chain treats like algae and zooplankton. These most revered fish were for consumption only by the ali`i or chiefly class. Commoners could make do with ordinary reef fish and such, but for the chief and his guests – it was likely to be `ama`ama.

On outings with my friend Joe Kanahele of Ni`ihau Island, I had the good fortune on several occasions to see how native Hawaiians catch mullet and similar fish today. With an oversized cast net, he would often catch a dozen large fish in one throw, after a careful stalk along a rocky shore.

On the Alakoko (Menehune) Fishpond near Lihu`e, I helped the pondkeeper, Robert Rego, set a gill net across the pond, and we caught and ate some nice mullet — from the same place Hawaiian aquaculturists practiced mullet farming in a pond that our radiocarbon dating had shown they built in the 1300s.

Native Hawaiians were among the first people to build fishponds and cultivate fish on a large scale, but they were certainly not the only ancient folks, as Pliny the Elder writes about Roman fishponds shortly before his demise in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that buried the Pompeii area in 79 C.E.

The magnificent tile mosaics and other art recovered from the buried city included pictures of — you guessed it — mullet. Two kinds actually, our grey, or jumpin’ mullet (cephalo in Italian), and the red mullet (Mullus surmuletus, or triglia di scoglio in Italian).

So the ancient Romans knew all about our dear Carteret County fish, but although Rome might have been the capital of the known world at that time, the real capital of the jumpin’ mullet is arguably the Mediterranean island of Sardinia.

In part 2, Lida and I will make a “culinary pilgrimage” to the very heart of the mullet fishing and bottarga-making industries, along a body of water so much like our own Core Sound. Our cosmopolitan fish was already at the center of the culture there before the time of Stonehenge and the pyramids.

Next in the series: Back to where it all began

Well before, and long after, the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, Dare County has been the site of pivotal moments in the country’s history.

The historic county on the Outer Banks has incorporated what it calls “the unique contributions of our region to the broader story of the United States” into its official America’s 250^th anniversary celebration, “Land of Beginnings.”

The phrase “Land of Beginnings” comes from the many nationally significant firsts that occurred there, “including the first English colony in the New World, the birth of Virginia Dare, the first Freedmen’s Colony during the Civil War, the first powered flight, and the first transatlantic wireless communication,” Dorothy Hester, co-chair of the Dare County A250 Committee, explained to Coastal Review.

Dare A250 is the county’s official planning committee for America 250 NC, the state’s commemoration effort under the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. The state-organized celebration is part of America 250, the national U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission that marks the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

“America 250 is about telling the full story of the nation’s origins, and Dare County represents several of the earliest and most consequential chapters in that story,” Hester said. “I am incredibly proud of the many organizations, volunteers, and community members who have come together to create meaningful and lasting ways for people in Dare County to connect with our local history during this celebration.”

The committee rolled out two activities associated with the anniversary earlier this month. The “Land of the Beginnings” interactive map that highlights 28 historic sites and the self-guided Dare A250 Passport Program.

The county is also preparing for the April 18 patriotic festival “Dare A250 Faire: Liberty, Legacy and Liftoff in the Land of Beginnings” at the Wright Brothers National Memorial. Arts and crafts vendors must submit their application to set up by Feb. 1, all other vendors have until Feb. 15. Applications for both can be downloaded from the website.

“As Dare County’s signature event commemorating the nation’s 250th anniversary, the A250 Faire will feature live music, food and beverage vendors, local artisans, historical demonstrations, educational programming, community exhibits and patriotic festivities that highlight Dare County’s enduring spirit of innovation and discovery,” according to the website.

Outer Banks History Center Director and Supervising Archivist Tammy Woodward said that for the past year, she has been the history subcommittee chair for Dare County’s A250 Committee. The center is the eastern branch of the State Archives of North Carolina.

The first project that they were charged with was to draft a timeline of the history of the county dating back to the 16th century, “or as far back as the written record can take us. From that timeline, we selected 28 sites to plot on an interactive digital map with short historical narratives and images for each site.”

The subcommittee members are Kristen Stilson, a GIS analyst for the county, Jockey’s Ridge State Park Ranger Austin Paul, Brian Edwards, associate history professor and chair of the Social Sciences Department at the College of The Albemarle, Meaghan Beasley from Dare County Libraries, and Ladd Bayliss, executive director of the Outer Banks Conservationists.

Stilson creates Dare-themed maps each year for National GIS Day in November, and was asked to tie this year’s annual map in with the A250 celebrations. She used the subcommittee’s timeline of Dare County’s history to design the interactive map that allows users to learn about the nearly 30 sites around the county.

“We chose historic events that highlight the role of Dare County in the formation of our country from the first voyages to the first flight. And also events that celebrate beginnings in Dare County, like our first lighthouses and lifesaving stations,” Stilson explained.

Woodward said that history subcommittee members and volunteers wrote and sourced the narratives and images on the interactive map. The names of the map’s contributors and their associated agencies can be found at the bottom of the map if you scroll all the way down.

“We had writers from many organizations across Dare County, this was huge collaboration,” Stilson said, adding that the sources vary for the write ups and the majority of the photos came from Outer Banks History Center. The history center is the eastern branch of the State Archives of North Carolina, under the N.C. Department of Natural & Cultural Resources.

“My favorite tidbit I discovered was the man that purchased Kitty Hawk Pier because they didn’t serve orange soda and then when he sold it later, he gave the profits to the employees,” Stilson added.

Stilson said that from there, she still needed a way to connect the map that launched in January with GIS Day in November.

“That is when we came up with the passport program” that culminates Nov. 18 on National GIS Day, she said.

The history subcommittee selected from the interactive map the 13 sites that are stops for the passport program, described in promotional materials as “an initiative designed to engage residents and visitors in commemorating America’s 250th anniversary by exploring the many places that have changed the course of history and define Dare County as the ‘Land of Beginnings.’”

At each passport site, participants can scan a QR code to collect a virtual stamp, gradually building a digital passport that reflects the participant’s voyage.

The 13 passport sites are marked on the interactive map and a hint of where the QR code signs are located on the property. Visitors can scan the code to log their visit to the site. 

“Users can explore the county and significant places from their computer or they can get out and explore the places these historical events occurred in person,” Stilson explained about the two tools.

Once the program wraps up on GIS Day, participants will earn certificates based on how many locations they visit.

The following are the 13 stops:

Flat Tops of Southern Shores are unique homes built in the 1950s that reflect the vision of Frank Stick and the early development of the community. “Their simple design and iconic flat roofs remain a symbol of Outer Banks history,” as described by the county in promotional materials.

Icarus Monument to a Century of Flight in Kitty Hawk is “an enduring sculptural legacy to the first century of aviation” according to the monument’s website.

Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kill Devil Hills celebrates when Orville and Wilbur Wright made history in 1903 with the world’s first powered flight. “The memorial celebrates their innovation and the birth of modern aviation,” as county officials described it.

Jennette’s Pier in Nags Head was originally built in 1939 and now serves as both a fishing pier and an educational center for marine science.

Jockey’s Ridge State Park in Nags Head is home to the tallest living sand dunes on the East Coast and has been protected as a state park since the 1970s.

The black-and-white-striped Bodie Island Lighthouse in Nags Head has guided mariners since 1872 and its beacon continues to aid in navigation.

Fort Raleigh National Historic Site in Manteo “preserves the site of the first English settlement in the New World, established in 1587 it’s a place tied to the mystery of the Lost Colony and the roots of America’s story.”

Island Farm, also in Manteo, is a living history site depicting what daily life was like on Roanoke Island in the 1850s. Visitors can experience farming, cooking and traditions of early Outer Banks families.

Bethany Church in Wanchese, built in 1857, is one of the oldest churches on Roanoke Island.

The historic Chicamacomico Life-Saving Station in Rodanthe tells the story of the U.S. lifesaving service, the forerunner of what is now the U.S. Coast Guard.

Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum located at the edge of Hatteras Island highlights maritime history, legends and survival.

Pea Island Cookhouse in Manteo honors the legacy of the Pea Island Lifesaving Station, the only all-Black crew in the United States.

Now a ghost town, Buffalo City at the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge on the mainland was known for its logging and moonshine.

“Through the interactive historical map, passport program, the A250 Faire, special events, and youth-focused activities, we’ve worked to ensure there is truly something for everyone—whether you’re a lifelong resident, a student, or someone discovering Dare County’s story for the first time,” Hester said.

From shortly after the Civil War until the mid-2000s, when the last menhaden plant was shuttered, the town of Beaufort would “smell of money.”

“The menhaden industry made Beaufort prosperous. Local menhaden companies once provided hundreds of jobs in the local community and surrounding areas with numerous factories and vessels working this lucrative fishery,” according to information from the North Carolina Maritime Museum, which has held several programs on the industry.

“The fishery itself, processing plants ashore, and support infrastructure provided steady employment opportunities, especially for African-Americans. While many visitors remember the smell of the fish, locals call it the ‘smell of money,’” It was their livelihood. Local merchants all benefited from the influx of people and money during menhaden’s fishing season. Menhaden fishing was recognized throughout Carteret County as an important part of this county’s commercial fishing industry.”

In the early days of catching menhaden, the mother boat would deploy smaller purse boats to maneuver a large net around a school of fish. Once the string draws the net shut around the hundreds of pounds of menhaden, the fishermen would haul the net by hand.

To perform this physically demanding, dangerous work, the fishermen would sing work songs, or chanteys, to help rhythmically synchronize their movements.

Barbara Garrity-Blake, fisheries social scientist and adjunct at Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort, told Coastal Review that the menhaden fishermen used to sing these songs before hydraulic net-lifting technology was introduced in the early 1960s.

“Each vessel carried a crew of about two-dozen men, mostly African Americans, who worked shoulder to shoulder in purse boats to pull in a giant seine net heavy with menhaden — sometimes a 100,000 or more fish. The men would coordinate their pulling by singing in a call-and-response style where the leader would sing out a line and the crew would answer in harmony,” she continued.

Their songs were a seafaring tradition known as chanteys.

After the menhaden industry became mechanized in the 1960s and 1970s, and the songs were no longer sung, some of the former and retired fishermen began to perform these traditional work songs for audiences, eventually becoming formally known as the Menhaden Chanteymen in 1988.

After the group began performing publicly, they sang for the North Carolina General Assembly, National Council on the Arts, at New York City’s Carnegie Hall and on national television, including for a segment on “CBS Sunday Morning” with Charles Kuralt. The group recorded the album “Won’t You Help Me to Raise ‘Em: Authentic Net Hauling Songs from an African-American Fishery,” for Global Village Music in 1990.

The remaining members made special appearances at events throughout the county, including a handful at Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

Beaufort Mayor Sharon Harker awarded in 2022 the two surviving Chanteymen, Ernest Davis and the Rev. Leroy Cox, the key to the city. Cox died in 2023, leaving Davis as the “last legacy-bearer of the Menhaden Chanteyman” until the final member, Davis, 86, died Jan. 3. His service and burial was Jan. 8 Mt. Tabor Missionary Baptist Church of North River. Noe Funeral Services of Beaufort handled the arrangements.

Garrity-Blake noted that Davis was the youngest of the Chanteymen and had “explained that singing generated a special power or strength, used for nets otherwise too heavy for human strength alone. So the chantey songs were used as a tool.”

In a recording, Davis explains that the fishermen would sing a chantey when they needed to raise up a net full of fish.

“If we couldn’t sing, we couldn’t get them raised up,” Davis said. The singing “would give you more spirit, and more power” and you could raise your fish better.

“At night you couldn’t sleep because you’d be hurting and cold so you just make up songs,” Davis said. And most of the captains would be singing right along with the crew. “Music could be heard all over the ocean … like music was on the water.”

Garrity-Blake said in an interview that she worked for many years with Davis and other menhaden workers on a project called “Raising the Story of Menhaden Fishing.”

The 2005 closure of Beaufort Fisheries, the last menhaden plant in the state, inspired North Carolina Humanities Council-funded project that Garrity-Blake helped launch in 2009 and 2010 with the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

Davis was among a group of menhaden workers, including captains, crewmen, cookhouse and factory workers, who met several times at the Beaufort train depot to plan the project, “which was hilarious because ‘planning’ took a backseat to telling tales,” Garrity-Blake said, adding that the meetings always turned into a big storytelling session and nobody wanted to leave when the meeting was over.

“I realized that the menhaden folks had a hunger for getting together to talk about fishing. They feared their experiences and the industry’s legacy as the economic backbone of Carteret County would be forgotten. So we decided to call it ‘Raising the Story’ — just as the men worked together to raise fish, we’d work together to raise the story of menhaden fishing,” Garrity-Blake continued.

Garrity-Blake conducted about a dozen oral history recordings of people representing different skills in the fishery, from ring-setter in the fishing process to factory owner, the late Jule Wheatly in December 2009. He died in October 2011.

Fine art photographer and Beaufort resident Scott Taylor took portraits of all the folks who were interviewed, and developed an exhibit for the waterfowl museum. The oral history interviews and photos are part of the Core Sound museum’s online collection, on a Facebook page also called “Raising the Story of Menhaden Fishing,” and on Carolina Coastal Voices YouTube channel.

As part of “Raising the Story,” the group wanted to involve young people who didn’t know anything about the industry, so they collaborated with Josie Boyette’s seventh grade class at Beaufort Middle School.

“Three of the men, including Ernest Davis, were invited into the classroom to share stories, and the kids asked questions and recorded them,” Garrity-Blake said. “Davis talked about his role as first mate, although he’d also served as fish boat captain on occasion. He was proud to have made a good living, putting his kids through college, menhaden fishing. He said, ‘A lot of people think fishing is a disgrace. But I made a good living. Didn’t look to get rich or nothing.’”

She added that Davis’ grandson Trevor was in the classroom. “It was wonderful to see the pride on that little boy’s face when his grandad shared a story about fending off a shark that had swum in the net.”

The project culminated in what Garrity-Blake called a “jam-packed event” at Core Sound, where the middle school students showcased their work, captains and crewmen told stories to the audience, and the Menhaden Chanteymen performed their songs.

“When they performed, it was powerful and otherworldly; everyone was mesmerized,” Garrity-Blake said.

Historian and author David Cecelski has written extensively about coastal North Carolina’s fisheries, including that of menhaden, many of which can be found on his personal website such as “Menhaden Fishing Days” and “It Was Like a Ballet’: Menhaden Fishermen at Work, 1947,” which he describes the process of hauling a net based on a photo from the North Carolina State Archives.

He was invited to speak at the “Raising the Story of Menhaden Fishing” event held in the fall of 2010. In 2017, Cecelski reflected on the “Raising the Story” project and shared his comments from that event in an essay he titled, “Music All Over the Ocean.”

In the essay, he calls the project a “commemoration of the central role that the menhaden industry played in Carteret County for generations.”

Cecelski, who grew up near Beaufort, writes that anybody listening to the oral histories Garrity-Blake recorded for the project would be impressed with what the menhaden fishery meant to Carteret County, particularly the stink that permeated the town when the fish were being processed.

“When the wind was right, the aroma of the fish covered those towns like a blanket. Coastal visitors sometimes complained, but my cousins in the industry used to call it ‘the smell of money,’” he wrote in 2021.

Cecelski explains in his 2017 piece that Davis’s story was typical of what the industry’s wages meant to local fishermen and fish factory workers.

Davis, who left school when he was 15 and went to work menhaden fishing at Beaufort Fisheries, said in his interview that it was hard work but it was what he had to do. He fished for 41 years and became one of the most respected first mates on the East Coast, sending all five of his own children to college and helping raise and educate nine younger brothers and sisters.

The oral histories also show how the men and women watched the menhaden industry change over their lifetimes, like motorizing the process to haul in the fish, business became more corporate, unions made headway and state and federal governments enacted environmental regulations, just to name a few.

“But through it all, I could hear two things in the men’s voices: a love for menhaden fishing — master net mender Lee Crumbacker said it well: ‘it grows on you like a barnacle on a pole’— and a fierce pride in their craftsmanship,” Cecelski writes.

Cecelski writes that as a child, the first thing he ever heard about the menhaden industry was his mother’s stories about those chanteys. His mother grew up in Harlowe in the 1920s and 1930s, when Highway 101 was still a dirt road.

“Many of Beaufort’s African American fishermen lived in Harlowe, particularly in a reclusive community just across the county line called Craven Corner. As they drove oxen and carts down the road on their way to Beaufort, the menhaden fishermen sang the same songs that they sung as they hoisted the nets onto their boats,” he writes.

“Early Monday mornings, long before first light, my mother would wake up in her bed at the sound of those beautiful, haunting songs and listen to them as the fishermen moved through the darkness and toward the sea.”

Cecelski observes that the fishermen in the interviews talk about the chanteys the same way his mother did.

Davis said in his “Rising the Story” interview they “would sing all night long just to keep their minds off the cold and hurt. It ‘just seemed like music was all over the ocean’,” Cecelski writes.

“The fishermen mostly stopped singing their legendary chanteys with the introduction of power blocks and hardening rigs in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but those songs have remained a powerful memory for all who ever heard them.”

And while the chanteys have not been heard on a menhaden boat in a long time, but older people from around Carteret County still remember them, and tell Cecelski “how, on cool autumn days, you could sometimes stand on shore and hear the songs coming across the water. They filled the air and stirred the heart and got deep inside your bones,” Cecelski describes.

“And if you heard those songs, like my mother did when she was a little girl, you never forgot them or the way that they made you feel. It is hard to put into words, but it was not just the beauty of the melodies or the men’s fine voices, but the appearance that the music was rising right out of the sea.”

Editor’s note: The following is from historian David Cecelski’s “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” The Carteret County native introduced the nearly 20-part photo-essay series earlier this year on his website, explaining at the time that the images he selected from the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection were taken in the late 1930s into the early 1950s of the state’s farms, industries, and working people.

In this photograph, we see a long line of fishing nets drying in the sun on Harkers Island, N.C., in the fall of 1944.

It is hard to see them, but there are two men talking in the midst of the net reels.

The photographer’s notes only identify one of the men: Stacy W. Davis, a local fisherman, charter boat captain, and fish dealer. That’s his fish house and dock on the far side of the net reels and fishing nets.

Capt. Stacy had built the fish house just before the war. He and his brother Leslie also owned the S.W. Davis & Brother Seafood Co. in Beaufort, on the other side of the North River.

The shoreline is beautiful, but in a way the tranquility of the scene belies the great upheaval that was happening on the island just before and during the Second World War.

When I was younger, old timers from Harkers Island often told me that it all seemed to start with the great hurricane of ’33, which is a story in itself and one that I think I’ll save for another time.

But not all storms come out of the Atlantic, and what happened over the next few years turned island life upside down more than any hurricane or nor’easter ever had.

Just a few years after the ’33 storm, in 1936, Harkers Island’s first road was paved. The age of automobiles and trucks was coming.

Three years later, in 1939, electricity arrived on the island, delivered via a submarine cable that ran beneath North River.

The stars would never be as bright again.

A year later, in the latter part of 1940, the biggest thing of all happened: workers finished building the first bridge from the mainland to Harkers Island. The bridge opened to the public a few weeks later.

That was on New Years Day 1941. Many a time, I have heard old timers say that it was the best and worst day in the island’s history. More than anything, it marked the end of one way of life, the dawn of another.

Then, of course, the war came. Young men and women went away to fight in distant lands and on distant seas. On the island, families crowded around radios to follow the news from places that few of us had known existed until that moment. Soldiers and sailors were everywhere.

An Army camp was built on the island. Soldiers and sailors seemed to be constantly coming and going.

During the war, untold numbers of islanders also crossed the new bridge and went out into the larger world to take jobs at shipyards, military bases, and defense factories. Some commuted every morning to defense jobs as close as the Naval Section Base in Morehead City; others moved as far away as the big shipyards in Wilmington and Newport News.

The Great Depression had worn people down, but suddenly there seemed to be work for any and all.

A hundred things about the war changed the island, but few things more than the War Department building the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station only 25 miles away in 1942.

Nearly 10,000 men came together at at a remote crossroads on the south side of the Neuse River to build Cherry Point – carpenters, brick masons, ditch diggers, logging crews, railroad builders, and many, many others. Among other things, they laid enough concrete to build what is believed to have been the largest aircraft runway in the world at that time.

Most of those workers were fresh off the farm or right off a fishing boat.

When Cherry Point was finished, people came from all over the country to work there, and most particularly to find jobs at the base’s assembly and repair department, a massive aircraft repair and refitting operation that relied on civilian workers and was usually just called “A&R.”

Those workers included many a Harkers Island fisherman. And when they left their boats and crossed the new bridge, they began a new life in more ways than they possibly could have imagined at the time.

Some of those islanders, my older friends on Harkers Island used to tell me, were saved by that trip to Cherry Point. Others lost.

For the island’s women, the coming of Cherry Point meant, if anything, even more. Because so many men had gone to war, the base employed thousands of women in jobs that would have traditionally fallen to men.

Those jobs ranged from aircraft painters to mechanics, PX and commissary managers to electronics specialists.

My grandmother was one of those women. She lived on a farm in Harlowe, about halfway between Harkers Island and Cherry Point, and she found a job in A&R’s machine shop during the war.

With the opening of Cherry Point, a daughter fresh out of school, perhaps still living with her parents, might suddenly be earning more than her fisherman father and all her brothers put together.

Of course, that changed things. Maybe not right away, but over time.

Likewise, with the coming of the bridge and the war, a lad that had never taken to the water — and there were plenty of young men like that even on Harkers Island — suddenly had a chance for a different kind of life.

I guess what I am saying is that photographs tell some stories, but not others.

Our tranquil scene of fishing nets drying in the sunshine also does not really speak to what had been happening out at sea during the war.

By 1944, things had calmed down out in the Atlantic, but only a couple years earlier, in the first months after Pearl Harbor, the war had seemed much closer to Harkers Island that it did to most of the United States.

Many of the island’s young fishermen had gone into the Navy and Coast Guard, and they were serving all over the world. But the U.S. Navy had also recruited the island’s fishermen for war duty closer to home.

As German submarines torpedoed merchant ships out in the Atlantic, one of the islanders patrolled the beaches out at Shackleford Banks, watching in the surf for the corpses.

Others, when they heard the explosions offshore, had the duty of taking their boats far out into the Atlantic to search for survivors and the dead.

Out in those seas, 15 and 20 miles off Cape Lookout, they often found themselves in a hellish seascape of charred hulls, burning oil slicks and scenes of which few of them would ever speak.

Special thanks as always to my friends at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

Editor’s note: The following is from historian David Cecelski’s “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” The Carteret County native introduced the nearly 20-part photo-essay series earlier this year on his website, explaining at the time that the images he selected from the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection were taken in the late 1930s into the early 1950s of the state’s farms, industries, and working people.

In this photo-essay in my “Working Lives” series, I am looking at several photographs that feature workers on a railroad that old timers, when I was a boy, still called the “Old Mullet Road.”

The real name of the railroad was the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad (A&NC). First in business in 1858, it ran from the coastal port of Morehead City, west to New Bern, Kinston, and finally Goldsboro.

Owned by the state of North Carolina, the railroad was usually leased to private operators and it played a vital role in opening the economy and communities of the North Carolina coast to the outside world.

In Goldsboro, at the railroad’s western end, other lines connected the A&NC’s passengers and freight to Raleigh and to distant markets and cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York.

Local people referred to the A&NC as the “Old Mullet Road” because of the seemingly endless barrels of salt mullet that its freight cars carried out of Morehead City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

With the opening of the railroad in 1858, the local fishery for striped mullet — what we’ve always called “jumping mullet” — grew into the largest saltwater fishery anywhere in the American South.

Long a staple in local pantries, barrels of salt mullet were soon as common in the country stores of eastern North Carolina as pickled pigs feet and rounds of farmers cheese.

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The construction of the A&NC and the building of the coastal town of Morehead City went hand in hand.

The town’s resort trade, its famous charter fishing business, the state port, the local menhaden industry (one of the largest fisheries in the U.S.), and really the region’s entire wholesale seafood industry — none would have been imaginable without the “Old Mullet Road.”

The same could be said for the truck farming business throughout that whole central part of North Carolina’s coastal plain.

Over the years, the A&NC’s trains became part of daily life in the towns and crossroads through which it passed.

For people who lived along the tracks, the coming and going of the train, its whistle, and the sense of curiosity and wonder about what lost soul might be coming home, or what trouble might be arriving, became measures of time passing as much as the tides and the changing of the seasons.

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Taken in Morehead City or New Bern in 1942, this photograph introduces us to one of the railroad’s employees who was something of a legend in that part of eastern North Carolina.

His name was J. B. Davis, people called him “Captain Davis,” and he was a conductor on the railroad for close to half a century.

On Nov. 30, 1924, the Raleigh News & Observer referred to Capt. Davis and the railroad’s three other conductors as “the most popular quartet in this part of the State….”

The paper went on to say, “They know more people than all the politicians in Wayne, Lenoir, Craven, and Carteret counties.”

A railroad conductor saw the best and worst of humanity. Capt. Davis came to know the high and mighty and the utterly defeated, those that were good, and those that were set on evil, people anxious to get back home, and those desperate to get away from home.

Along the railroad’s path, people often sought him out to get the latest news from other towns. Many a day, he was the first to bring word of births and marriages, shipwrecks, hurricanes and floods.

His own life on the railroad was far from uneventful: Capt. Davis was injured in a derailment in 1933, and he and the train’s brakeman were usually the first to reach the poor souls who were killed on the railroad tracks.

In 1939, when a new company, the Atlantic & East Carolina Railroad Co., took over the railroad’s lease, Capt. Davis was fired for allegedly not collecting fares from some of his passengers.

His discharge made headlines across eastern North Carolina, and he was eventually rehired, but there has to be story there.

Maybe he was just looking out for his friends. On the other hand, times were hard in the 1930s and I like to think that maybe now and then he looked the other way and let a penniless soul or two ride for free.

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I assume that this gentleman was one of the train’s firemen, whose job it was to maintain the fire in the engine’s boiler by shoveling coal and watching the boiler’s water levels as well.

A 1947 newspaper article concerning a derailment mentions an A&NC fireman named Henry Peterson. This may be him, but I cannot be sure.

Judging from the way he holds himself, I might have thought that he was the train’s engineer, but that was not possible in eastern North Carolina in the first half of the 20th century because he was African American.

At the turn of the 20th century, the A&NC’s president was a New Bern banker and real estate mogul named James A. Bryan.

Bryan was one of the leaders of the white supremacy movement that swept North Carolina in the period from 1898 to 1900. To attract New Bern’s white working class men to the white supremacy cause, he promised to discharge all of the railroad’s black employees and give their jobs to white workers.

After the Wilmington Massacre and the victory of the white supremacists in November 1898, Bryan lived up to his promise.

According to documents preserved in the Bryan Family Papers at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Southern Historical Collection, he discharged dozens of A&NC conductors, porters, brakemen, mechanics, blacksmiths, and other skilled railroad men in 1899 and 1900.

He also fired many of the company’s lowest level black employees, including the night watchman at the company’s rail yard.

In exchange for white workingmen’s support for a state constitutional amendment that took all voting rights from the state’s black citizens, Bryan also pledged to embed white supremacy in the railroad’s labor policies into the future.

In practice, that meant: the A&NC’s managers would hire and promote whites preferentially, regardless of qualifications or experience; would never pay a black worker as much as a white worker; would never employ a black individual in a management role; and would never hire or promote a black man or woman into a job–such as locomotive engineer– that gave them supervisory responsibilities over any white employee.

The railroad’s policies with respect to race were still in place in 1942.

You can learn more about James A. Bryan’s leadership in New Bern’s white supremacy campaign, and see some of the manuscripts related to his firing of the A&NC’s black workers, in my essay, “The Other Coup D’Etat: Remembering New Bern in 1898.”

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Only a few years before these photographs were taken, the railroad had seemed on its last legs.

The private railroad company that had leased the track from the State of North Carolina since 1904, the Norfolk & Southern, had defaulted in 1934, a victim of the Great Depression.

After the Norfolk & Southern’s default, state coffers could not keep up with the railroad’s maintenance and repair needs. Years of neglect began taking their toll: broken railroad ties abounded, embankments needed reinforcement, and much about the old railroad seemed frayed and worn out. Reports of derailments grew more common.

Things began to look up in 1939 however, when the state finally found a new private company to take over the railroad’s lease.

The new company, the Atlantic & Eastern North Carolina, invested in new engines and track repairs, updated at least some depots, and even repainted the cars a perky “Spanish blue” instead of the old dull black.

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Then the war came. Everybody was on the move. Soldiers, sailors, defense workers, and civilians of all kinds.

A new prosperity was in the air, heightening the demand for carrying passengers and hauling the region’s agricultural products and other freight.

Probably most importantly, the federal government began constructing two massive new military installations on the central part of the North Carolina coast in 1941 and ’42. To build the two bases, the railroad’s freight cars would carry enough lumber, brick, piping, and other construction materials to build two good-sized cities from scratch.

The railroad ran a short spur from Havelock Station into the construction site for the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station (originally called Cunningham Field). To the south, the railroad carried construction materials to Camp Lejeune via a track that ran from New Bern to Jacksonville, then along a short spur owned and operated by the Navy.

By the time these photographs were taken, the railroad was making a profit again for the first time in recent memory.

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The war changed the railroad and the North Carolina coast in a thousand ways, some easy to get used to, and some that probably haunted the workers that we have met here — Capt. Davis, the fireman, the mail clerk, the brakeman, and the porter in the photograph above — for their rest of their lives.

More than 25 years ago, I interviewed an elderly woman named Gretchen Brinson in Morehead City.

During the early part of World War II, Ms. Brinson had been a nurse in the burn unit of the town’s little hospital when German U-boats were sinking merchant vessels off that part of the North Carolina coast.

This is an excerpt from that interview:

“I married Bull Brinson in 1937. While my daughter was still an infant, I started working at the hospital. Very shortly, we began hearing depth charges and if they had a strike we could see the fires, the ships burning.

“The debris washed up on the ocean front, and there were several years we couldn’t swim up there because of the debris and the oil slicks.

“We could see the ships burning.

“When there was a strike out there at night, we knew this had happened and that next morning there would be casualties come in. Bodies, corpses did wash in on the beach. And they were brought into the hospital: burns, all manner of traumatic situations. The hospital was full. It was only a 30-bed hospital. They lay in the hall on cots. We were not prepared for the onslaught.”

She continued:

“Many of the young men who came here, son, did not live. When the 3 o’clock train left town, the baggage car doors were most always open, and you could see several coffins in their wooden boxes, being shipped to other places. There was seldom a day for months, maybe a year or more, when there were not one or two or three or possibly more that went out on that 3 o’clock train.”

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My story “Gretchen Brinson: A Born Nurse” originally appeared in my “Listening to History” series in the Raleigh News & Observer on June 14, 1998. You can find a copy of the story here. 

Sinking your teeth into a buttery, old-fashioned sweet potato biscuit is a legendary experience quickly fading into North Carolina culinary obscurity despite an almost unbelievable pedigree.

Sweet potato biscuits were reportedly served at the opening of the First Continental Congress in 1774. One hundred and forty-eight years later, the great African American botanist George Washington Carver championed this Southern delight as a crucial way farmers could diversify their crop usage.

That significant history is now mostly memorialized in memory. East Carolina University alumni long past their college days join locals in pining for the version once served at the late Venter’s Grill in Greenville. Shuttered Sweet Potatoes Restaurant in Winston-Salem was celebrated for a recipe that today endures only in cofounder Stephanie Tyson’s “Well Shut My Mouth” cookbook.

With North Carolina foodways vanishing as quickly as residential sprawl eats up the state’s farmland, sweet potato biscuits are becoming rare finds on menus and in the repertoire of home cooks. But in Camden, it stands as a delicious reminder of why such a simple thing is worth saving.

Beyond nostalgia

On a foggy morning in the tiny, coastal community, dogs bound excitedly through endless farm fields. Ruritan Club signs announcing a Brunswick stew sale dominate political H-stakes stuck along the roadside.

Inside a crossroads restaurant marked by an age-tangled oak tree, the caramelly aroma of roasting sweet potatoes fills the kitchen as chef Katherine “Kat” Silverwood’s wooden rolling pin squeaks across a cold-hard block of pastel-orange dough.

“We found that sweet potato biscuits actually act better if you make the dough day before,” she says. “It’s best to let it chill for at least a few hours.”

Silverwood knows what she’s talking about. Her Taylor’s Oak Restaurant produces hundreds of sweet potato biscuits each year, especially around Christmastime when fastidious locals, like many North Carolinians, relish fried country ham on their sweet potato biscuits.

 “You feed a bunch of old farmers, you better be making something from scratch,” Silverwood said.

That kind of cooking is what the chef grew up on in Camden. Vegetables fresh from her parents’ garden and baking with Grandma launched her interest in cooking as a child.

She never encountered sweet potato biscuits until around age 9 or 10. Her sister was dating and ultimately married a farmer. His mother made sweet potato biscuits. Silverwood was smitten at first bite. Within a year or so, she was baking her own.

“It’s like that perfect balance of the sweet and the savory,” she said.

As much as Silverwood loved cooking, she didn’t envision it as a worthwhile career. Instead, she joined the military and worked in construction but always had a kitchen side gig. Along the way, she honed her sweet potato biscuit recipe, testing tips from fellow chefs, like folding the dough during rolling to achieve flaky layers.

Eventually, Silverwood accepted her calling, taking a full-time chef position and dreaming of one day opening a restaurant. Her position left time for a night job. She asked the grandfather of a childhood friend if he needed a hand at the family’s new venture, Taylor’s Oak Restaurant. The spot held a special place in Silverwood’s own heritage. Her maternal aunt married into the Taylor family. The couple helped raise Silverwood’s mother after she lost her parents.

“They were only open one day a week. So, I asked if they would like some help, maybe get open for breakfast in the mornings. And that’s how I started here,” she says. “I wrote the recipe for sweet potato biscuits.”

When Silverwood had the opportunity to purchase the business a few years after starting at Taylor’s in 2018, the chapters of her sweet potato story culminated.

“As soon as we decided we were going to open up for dinner, I was like, ‘We got to have mini sweet potato biscuits go on the tables … that’s our signature,’” Silverwood says.

The perfect bite

Throughout telling her story, Silverwood shares many pointers for preparing and eating sweet potato biscuits. Besides chilling the dough before rolling, the Taylor’s team pinches cold butter into flour by hand, just like Silverwood was taught as a kid. They roast whole, skin-on sweet potatoes. Boiling would introduce too much moisture. Before mashing, they drain all liquid from the vegetable. Bags of the puree are frozen so that biscuits can be made quickly.

Just enough sugar goes into the dough to enhance the sweet potato flavor. That’s different from recipes like the one Venters’ chefs used all those years ago in Greenville. Silverwood’s biscuits are flaky and savory; Venters’ were soft, sweet and pillowy with pronounced notes of warm spices like cinnamon. The recipe for Sweet Potatoes Restaurant’s version falls somewhere in between.

“Everyone has their own different ‘you got to do it this way, you got to do it that way,’” Silverwood says, declining to share the family recipe that inspired her way.

Carver’s formula, among the earliest, verifiable printed recipes, leans soft and savory. Although the biscuits served at the First Continental Congress have been attributed to Thomas Jefferson, no original recipe has been found. Any biscuit recipe Jefferson favored was likely developed in kitchens run by enslaved Africans. This is also true for the sweet and salty combination of fried country ham sandwiched between a sweet potato biscuit.

Silverwood prefers less salty city ham rather than country ham. A slice of New Jersey’s Taylor pork roll (no relation) is even better, she reveals. Sausage plus a little mustard is tasty, too, as was the sandwich she offered with pimento cheese and spicy fried chicken.

Still, most Taylor’s Oak Restaurant customers ask for country ham. It’s easy to understand why when Silverwood finally splits open a hot sweet potato biscuit and lays on sizzling country ham directly from the griddle.

The hot ham melds with the biscuit’s interior, creating an almost creamy texture and old-fashioned flavor that fills your mind with memories of home, family and holiday anticipation. Suddenly, you’re wrapped in thoughts of icy mornings, coffee boiling on an old stove and the simple life you wonder why anyone would leave behind.

“I’ve had a couple people almost bring me to tears because they said ‘That’s just how my grandma used to make it taste,” Silverwood says, “‘exactly like that.’”

With each humble bite, the sweet potato biscuit becomes more than a meal; it is a profound, lasting link between generations. It is the legacy of a waning recipe that fatefully defined one woman’s life and continues, every day in Camden, to feed the soul of an entire community.

Sweet Potato Biscuits

Take:

½ cupful mashed sweet potatoes

½ teaspoon salt

1 cupful flour

4 teaspoons baking powder

2 tablespoons butter or lard

Milk sufficient to make a soft dough.

Sift the flour, salt and baking powder together several times; add these to the potatoes, mixing in with a knife.

Now work the fat into the mixture lightly; add the milk; work quickly and lightly until a soft dough is formed; turn out on a floured board; pat and roll out lightly until about one-half inch thick; cut into biscuits; place on buttered or greased pans and bake 12 or 15 minutes in a quick oven.

Source: “How the Farmer Can Save His Sweet Potatoes and Ways of Preparing Them for the Table” by George Washington Carver (Tuskegee Institute Press 1937).

Update 11 a.m. Tuesday: Organizers announced late Tuesday morning that the Core Sound Chow Down set for Friday night has been canceled because of the weather forecast. Ticketholders can submit using an online form their preference to refund the ticket to the event held entirely outside. Options are a full refund, transfer to 2026 or donate the cost to the museum. Festivities on Saturday and Sunday will continue as planned.

Original post:

One of the first signs that the holidays are upon us is when the two-story Christmas tree made entirely of crab pots begins to illuminate the grounds of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

The multicolor glow from the symbol of Christmas — plus all the holiday lights decorating the sizable facility — also means that the Waterfowl Weekend is just around the corner.

The museum, which highlights the heritage of the 13 unincorporated communities of Down East Carteret County, has held the annual celebration the first weekend of December for the last few decades, and are gearing up for this year’s scheduled for Dec. 5-7.

The weekend gets underway Friday evening with the Core Sound Chow Down stew competition, a ticketed event. The doors open to the public at 8 a.m. Saturday and again at 10 a.m. Sunday. During both days, visitors can meet the more than 45 carvers, artists, photographers and crafters set up at the festival.

While winding down Harkers Island Road on the way to the museum, travelers will pass homes decorated to the hilt, and residents selling crafts on the roadside.

They’ll also drive by Harkers Island School, where the Core Sound Decoy Carvers Guild’s 37^th annual Core Sound Decoy Festival is taking place. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, the campus will be filled with carvers, vendors and antique decoy exhibits. Carving competitions are scheduled throughout both days, and food will be available for purchase.

When the Waterfowl Weekend was in its early days, the focus was mainly on decoys, but the festival has evolved over the years and is now a part of the holiday celebration for many.

“We have turned what used to be a weekend for decoys to a season of traditions,” Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher told Coastal Review, and a large part of that is the joy and nostalgia that holiday decorations invoke.

“The museum’s Christmas lights are about Core Sound. Celebrating communities and traditions. That’s what we do every day,” she said.

The two-plus-story Christmas tree made of crab pots and the “Gallery of Trees: Telling our Story” are “part of that celebration for sure,” she explained. The Gallery of Trees features crab pot trees that families, friends and area businesses sponsor and decorate. The first was first held in 2020 and has become a special part of Waterfowl Weekend.

Amspacher said that adding the giant tree made of crab pots to the holiday decor was inspired by social media, with the first try in 2010 or 2011.

“Blame it on Facebook. We kept seeing pics from Maine where they were stacking lobster traps and Maryland where they were stacking crab baskets and we said ‘why not?’” Amspacher said. “The first attempts were a learning experience — small and sometimes more square than round — but then Abbi (Davis) and Kenny (Brennan) took on the project, and their engineering skills and a lot of rebar and zip ties made it happen.”

The small team of volunteers spent the last few days of this October building the 2025 tree, including Davis, a Harkers Island native.

Davis began working part time at Core Sound on and off the summer of 2015 and again while she was attending trade school. Now a volunteer, she helps when she can, which isn’t very often because her career keeps her on the road a fair bit, she said. She currently resides in South Carolina where she’s a lineman.

“The museum is such an incredible place,” Davis told Coastal Review.

Core Sound has captured the sense of place “that most people have a really hard time understanding if they haven’t lived it and gave them a glimpse into the culture of Down East. That is something that would have otherwise been long forgotten by the world.”

Though the tree of crab pots was part of the picture before she began working there, Davis started helping out with the tree in 2015, when the lights were powered by a generator that had to be regularly be fueled up.

“I remember I would ride down there to look at it because it was so beautiful but I also worked at the museum so I took on the job of being the ‘gas lady’ whenever I could that year,” Davis said.

There was a pause on putting the tree up for a few seasons because it became harder to borrow crab pots, compounded by the damage to the facility from 2018’s Hurricane Florence that closed the main building for a few years to undergo repairs.  

“In 2020 I started working there again and when I did, we talked about making Christmas big,” Davis continued. “That year I wanted the tree to make a comeback. I remember asking everyone I knew who had crab pots or who had been a crabber in the past, if we could get some for this tree. Everyone I talked to was excited but finding someone that had pots available and the time wasn’t easy.”

The first year that Davis took the project on, her father and sister helped load the crab pots into the back of her pickup truck and in a trailer to haul to the museum. “It took three trips,” Davis said.

Davis explained that the team likes to “joke and say the engineering is a little bit organic because it doesn’t have to be exactly the same to work.” And they’ve been working together for so long, that “at this point we just know what to do.”

Their favorite saying is that “we’re making circles out of squares,” she continued. “We always start with the same amount for the bottom. Make a ring out of pots basically and then fill it in. Each row is done the same way just a smaller number of pots until it gets to the top. The pots are secured through heavy duty wire ties and rebar.”

This year, it took 170 crab pots arranged in 12 rows to build the 23-foot-tall tree.

Once the tree is complete, a glowing handmade star is placed on top.

“The coolest part about this tree for me is what it represents. These pots are actually used by commercial fisherman in the sound. Every year they harvest and haul hard crabs. Knowing that they’re real and not something just bought for decoration,” Davis said.

New this year, the tree is being decorated with buoys hand-painted by local kids, “which is really special,” she said, “And knowing that in every way possible this tree is Down East, makes it absolutely great! It captures the spirit like many things at the museum and it’s put on display so the world can have a chance to see a small glimpse of that.”

“Because everyone loves,” the giant Christmas tree, it is being featured on the museum’s holiday apparel line, Amspacher said. “It has become a symbol of Down East Christmas.”

Waterfowl Weekend details

The fourth annual Core Sound Chow Down and Best Sweet Potato Pie Down East competition starts at 5:30 p.m. Friday. Tickets, $35 for members and $45 for nonmembers, include four cups of your choice from the spread of chowders, soups and stews made by cooks from around the county. Molasses Creek will perform live music.

Competitors returning this year are D’s Island Clam Chowder, Per-Atlantic Crab and Corn Chowder, and Gloucester Mardi Gras Chicken and Sausage Gumbo. New this year will be stewed shrimp, crab-shrimp bisque, stewed scallops, chili, and Cedar Island original lima beans and crab meat. The submissions will be judged by seafood market and chefs from across eastern North Carolina.

Doors open at 8 a.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Sunday, and each day has special programming.

On Saturday there will be live music at 11 a.m. with Asher Brinson and Friends, noon with Mac McRoy and The South Point Band, and 1 p.m. with Molasses Creek. Preview for the live auction is at 2 p.m. and the auction begins at 3 p.m. The online auction is live now through Dec. 6.

On Sunday, a church service is scheduled for 8 a.m. and at 2 p.m. is a World War II Pearl Harbor Day memorial gathering.

Every year, the museum’s “Core Sound Quilt Crew” sew a quilt that is put up for action to raise funds for the nonprofit museum. This year’s theme is “Reflections of Diamond City.” Tickets can be purchased online for the quilt raffle, as well as the Christmas raffle. Winner takes home $5,000.

The Indian Woods historical marker at the intersection of St. Francis Road and U.S. Highway 17 in Bertie County is easily missed while cruising at 55 or 60 miles an hour.

Located at the edge of a farmer’s field after the fall harvest of cotton, the sign leans to the north, and hints of the story and its aftermath of an almost forgotten war between Native Americans and colonists in the early 18th century.

It is the northernmost of at least seven signs that are found throughout coastal North Carolina from Wayne County to Bertie County that trace the story of that conflict.

The Tuscarora War was brutal and horrific. Launching a coordinated attack on the morning of Sept. 22, 1711, Tuscarora warriors slaughtered 140 men, women and children throughout eastern North Carolina.

“The Tuscarora devastated white settlements in the Pamlico Neuse region and raised serious fears for the continuance of English occupation in North Carolina,” Thomas Parramore wrote for the North Carolina Historical Review in 1982.

Unable to defend its own people, the North Carolina colony’s general assembly begged Virginia and South Carolina for help.

Virginia refused to send troops, but put pressure on neutral Tuscarora villages in its colony to remain out of the conflict. South Carolina sent combined white and Native forces.

In the end in March of 1713, when the last pitched battle of the war was fought at Fort Neoheroka, which is present day Snow Hill in Greene County, at least a thousand Tuscarora were dead and another thousand sold into slavery in South Carolina.

In North Carolina, as many as 200 colonists were killed and the combined white and Native combatants provided by South Carolina suffered an additional 200 deaths.

Tuscarora lineage

The Tuscarora were part of the Iroquois, whose original lands stretched from New York state into Canada. The migration to North Carolina most likely occurred sometime around the 1500s, Dr. Arwin Smallwood, dean of the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at North Carolina Central University, told Coastal Review.

Smallwood, who traces his lineage to the Tuscarora people, grew up in Indian Woods and has studied the history of the Tuscarora extensively.

“In the 1500s they’d already moved down from (New York) and settled North Carolina,” he said, adding that “they never broke their blood ties to the five nations,” which are the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca.

By the 1580s, when Sir Walter Raleigh’s doomed expeditions landed on Roanoke Island, the Tuscarora were well established in eastern North Carolina and probably were the dominant Native nation of the region. They may have been the ones who decided the colony’s fate.

“Tuscarora oral traditions say they were the ones who destroyed the Lost Colony,” Smallwood said. “They always had large numbers of people who had European characteristics like red and auburn hair, even sometimes blonde hair, but definitely what (Native Americans) called the Tuscarora eye, which was blue-green, kind of a hazel eye, that was prevalent throughout the Tuscaroras and that distinguished them.”

War: Longtime complaints

At its simplest, the Tuscarora War was about long-established complaints of the Tuscarora: Encroachment on lands they had traditionally controlled and unfair and dishonest trading practices.

But, Smallwood noted, there were other factors at play.

It was “trade routes. The Tuscaroras controlled the Piedmont and the coastal plains of North Carolina. They controlled all the major trade routes between North Carolina and Virginia,” he said. “Anyone who needed knives, axes, guns, gunpowder, whatever they had to trade through them, including rum. They had to trade through the Tuscaroras. For the southeastern Indians, it was a way of eliminating them as the people who monopolized trade.”

It is possible that, after at least 60 years of observing the internal politics of the North Carolina colony, the Tuscarora were aware of the internal rivalries that were threatening to tear the colony apart, and that may have played a role in the timing of the initial attack.

Cary’s Rebellion pitted Thomas Cary, the Quaker-leaning former governor of the colony, against Edward Hyde, who the Lords Proprietors had selected to govern the colony. The rebellion exposed the deep political divisions within the colony that led to open warfare with Hyde finally taking the reins of the governorship in 1711.

At that time, the colony was divided into two counties: Albemarle in the north and Bath in the south. Although in 1711 the nominal capital of the colony was Bath. There was no government office there and it’s doubtful if the population of the town ever reached 300 people.

The northern Albemarle colony was dominated by the supporters of Hyde and the resentment from Cary’s attempt to wrest control of the colony permeated the region.

“The Cary Rebellion had pitted Albemarle against Bath and had left the colonists of the two counties somewhat at odds with each other. It was by no means clear that Albemarle would rush to the defense of Bath County and, in fact, it did not,” Parramore wrote.

If there was a proximate cause of the war, it was the settlement of New Bern by Swiss immigrants and members of the Palatine religious sect escaping religious persecution in Europe.

“New Bern was built on what (the Tuscarora) considered to be part of their capital city,” Smallwood said.

Baron Christopher DeGraffenreid, the founder of New Bern, in his “Account of the Tuscarora War,” touched on many of the issues that have been cited as causing the conflict.

“What caused the Indian war was firstly, the slanders and instigations of certain plotters against Governor Hyde, and secondly, against me, in that they talked the Indians into believing that I had come to take their land,” he wrote. “Talked them out of this and it was proven by the friendliness I had shown them, as also by the payment for the land where I settled at the beginning (namely that upon which the little city of New Bern was begun), regardless of the fact that the seller was to have given it over to me free.”

Captured with surveyor John Lawson, DeGraffenreid was able to talk his way out of imprisonment and possible death.

It is possible Lawson could have avoided his fate, but, Smallwood said, “he quarreled with the chiefs. You’re being held prisoner, and you’ve been put on trial, and then you go argue with the prosecuting attorney and the judge who decides whether you live or die.”

Lawson, whose book “History of North Carolina” gave accurate and clear-eyed accounts of Native life in the colonies, was not so lucky, and may have had a hand in his own undoing. Accused by his captors of surveying the Tuscarora land for the purpose of selling it, he was tried and convicted and sentenced to death.

Like the North Carolina colony, the Tuscarora had internal divisions. Parramore described the Tuscarora as “not a nation and probably not even a confederacy though colonial perceptions of them had not traditionally recognized any significant internal divisions.”

Smallwood, however, paints a different picture.

“The whole structure was family based,” he said. “With that being said, they were all united because the whole nation is united by blood.”

Within that nation family, there were specific ways to make decisions that would affect all members for the Tuscarora nation, Smallwood said, describing the decision-making process as “a democracy.”

Smallwood explained that Lawson was convicted after “all of the chiefs met in the war council. In that council, they all agree to execute Lawson.”

War: First conflict

When the war first broke out in 1711, South Carolina sent military aid. Col. John Barnwell left South Carolina with “30 white men and nearly 500 Indians,” the Carolana website states.

Although Barnwell may have included giving military aid to North Carolina in his reasoning, by his actions and those of the men under his command, the profit that could be realized from the bounty on scalps and selling Native Americans into slavery was an important part of why he made the trip.

Thomas Peotta in his 2018 doctoral dissertation, “Dark Mimesis: A Cultural History of the Scalping Paradigm,” at the University of British Columbia, describes how profitable scalps and prisoners could be.

“Virginia and Carolina offered scalp and prisoner bounties to militiamen and allied Indians. Virginia…offered £20 per scalp to British colonists, while uninvolved Tuscaroras on Virginia’s frontier were offered a bounty of 6 blankets apiece…for the scalps of Hancock’s warriors, and market prices for enslaved women and children,” he wrote.

For Barnwell, the scalps had an additionally benefit, Peotta wrote, noting that “scalps and prisoners also offered a way to tally the dead: Barnwell’s forces recorded 52 scalps and 30 captives after (his) victory at Torhunta in 1712.” Torhunta is present day Pikeville in Wayne County.

After a series of battles with the Tuscarora including a 10-day siege at their main settlement in Craven County, Barnwell reached an agreement with the Tuscarora combatants to pay tribute and lay down their arms. After signing the agreement, he invited some of the local Indians, who had not attacked the colonists, into his camp. They were then seized, DeGraffenreid wrote, and sold into slavery

“He thought of a means of going back to South Carolina with profit, and under the pretense of a good peace he enticed a goodly number of the friendly Indians or savage Carolinians, took them prisoner at Core Town (to this his tributary Indians were entirely inclined because they hoped to get a considerable sum from each prisoner) and made his way home with his living plunder…This so unchristian act very properly embittered the rest of the Tuscarora and Carolina Indians very much, although heathens, so that they no longer trusted the Christians,” he wrote.

War: Conclusion

The action reignited the war, with King Hancock again leading the Tuscarora aligned with him. Renewing the conflict may have been justified, but it was not sanctioned by the war council, allowing the northern Tuscarora to remain neutral.

It would take another military expedition from South Carolina, this one led by Col. James Moore to end the war, but it also led to an open rift between King Hancock and the northern Tuscarora.

King Hancock was captured by northern Tuscarora at the orders of Chief Blunt (or Blount) in November of 1712 and turned over to North Carolina authorities who executed him.

The war did not end with Hancock’s death, however.

The agreement with Blunt was that he was to deliver the scalps of key leaders to North Carolina authorities by the end of the year. When he failed to do so, Moore renewed his campaign.

Finally, following a three-day siege at Fort Neoheroka the war came to an end, although there were sporadic raids and fighting until 1715.

Aftermath

For the tribal nations that had aligned with the South Carolina expeditions, their participation sparked “a continental war in the back country,” Smallwood explained.

“Because of the role,” Smallwood continued. “Those Indians in that area played in the war, it set off a continental Indian War. he Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondaga, the Senecas, and (allied tribes) came south, and they completely obliterated the (the southern tribes).”

In North Carolina, the war was a harbinger of extraordinary change. Initially the war’s end brought brought economic hardship to what was then called Bath County, an area that now includes Beaufort, Hyde, Bladen, Onslow, Carteret and New Hanover counties.

“The concentration of Indian attacks on frontier settlements during the war and the continuation of raids after the peace of 1713 stifled economic growth in Bath County and contributed to temporary food shortages throughout the colony,” Christine Styrna explained in a 1990 doctoral dissertation at the College of William and Mary.

But if the initial effect was to wreak havoc on the colony’s economy, the war also “provided certain colonial leaders with the opportunity to reinforce their economic and political power while serving as a catalyst for economic development,” Styrna noted.

Bath and New Bern had taken the brunt of the Tuscarora raids, and there, Styrna wrote, “colonists slowly rebuilt their homes and fortunes.”

The rest of the colony, though, experienced a “boom period” in which coastal and local trade increased dramatically. According to the shipping reports Styrna cites from the Boston Newsletter, “the number of vessels sailing to and from ports in North Carolina ports elsewhere between 1716 and 1720 increased fourfold in comparison to the five-year period before the war.”

If, however, North Carolina was on the road to recovery, the fate of the Tuscarora was one of enslavement and exile, leading to a diaspora of the tribal nation that stretched from North Carolina to Canada.

Most of the southern Tuscarora emigrated north. The largest group returned to the Iroquois in New York, becoming numerous enough that in 1722 the Tuscarora became the sixth nation of the Iroquois Confederacy.

As they moved north, some settled in Pennsylvania. There is today, a Tuscarora Mountain in south central Pennsylvania.

Many of them, though, settled in small communities throughout North Carolina and other states east of the Mississippi.

“It’s like you take a plate or mirror and you drop it on the floor and it shatters and shards go everywhere,” Smallwood said. “There’s some big chunks, and then there are lots of little chunks. And those little chunks, are scattered all over eastern North Carolina. They’re at least today, seven different factions of Tuscaroras that are (in North Carolina). And larger groups of them who are in Virginia, and even over into eastern Ohio.”

Coastal Review will not publish Thursday and Friday in observation of the Thanksgiving holiday.

Stepping through the wrought-iron gate flanked by the First Baptist Church of Beaufort and Ann Street United Methodist Church, the Old Burying Ground offers a quiet respite from bustling Front Street in Beaufort, North Carolina’s third oldest town.

The low-hanging branches of gnarled live oaks tangle above most of the 300-year-old cemetery on the 400 block of Ann Street, casting shadows on the worn dirt paths that meander between the seemingly organized fenced-in family plots next to simple headstones wedged like crooked teeth between the ornate, weathered monuments, obelisks and statues.

There’s an area that appears to be an open space near the corner of Craven and Broad streets under a tree that Carteret County native Bill Lewis has determined is the unmarked grave of 13 of his ancestors, including Thomas Lewis Sr., born 1740 and died 1815.

A lifelong historian and genealogist of the Lewis family, Bill recently retired from the defense industry and splits his time between Morehead City and Virginia.

He told Coastal Review during a telephone interview that he has always known where his family was buried in the centuries-old graveyard. The location has been part of his family’s oral history for generations. 

He decided about three years ago, after his father and aunt died within days of each other, to expand on the family history research he inherited from them, and prove to some skeptics that his ancestors were in those unmarked graves. 

The Old Burying Ground

Beaufort, first known as Fishtown, was established in 1709 and the street plans for the town that were designed in 1713, and are still in use. Around 1724, the town deeded the lot to the wardens of St. John’s Parish, the first Anglican church in Beaufort, for the church and, presumably, a cemetery. Though speculation is that the land was used as a graveyard before 1724, documents state.

“The Old Burying Ground grew up around the building used for sessions of the Court and for reading the service of the Anglican Church in St. John’s Parish,” according to the Beaufort Historical Association, which manages the graveyard.

The property was transferred to the town in 1731 when an adjacent lot was added but was full by 1828. The graveyard was enlarged in 1851, 1855 and again in 1894 by the Baptist and Methodist churches that have stood on either side of the graveyard’s Ann Street gate since the mid-1800s. The Methodist congregation’s first building erected in 1820 now houses Purvis Chapel AME Zion Church, on the corner of the Old Burying Ground at Craven and Broad streets, according to the nomination form. 

The graveyard has around 500 marked graves, with about half from before and during the Civil War, which took place between 1861 an1865, 150 between 1865 and 1900, then a handful of 20^th century markers.

“The whole area with its lichen-encrusted stones shaded by great trees is pervaded by an atmosphere of age, peace, and pleasant melancholia that makes it one of the most memorable spots in one of North Carolina’s most picturesque communities,” reads the National Register of Historic Places nomination form submitted in 1974 for the nearly 3-acre graveyard. “The range of tombstone design is quite remarkable, from the primitive grace of the simple cypress slabs to the sober functionalism of the long brick grave covers to the ornate memorials of the Victorian period.”

Visitors can take self-guided tours using a map provided by the Beaufort Historical Association, the nonprofit that manages the graveyard, to see where the girl is buried in the barrel of rum, the monument topped with a cannon for Capt. Otway Burns, who was an American privateer during the War of 1812, the soldier from the British Navy who was buried standing up in full uniform facing England, the grave of a romance rekindled after decades of separation because her father didn’t approve, or the northwest corner, which is the oldest part of the cemetery. 

“The corner looks empty, however a 1992 archeological survey confirmed that there are many graves in this area. It is probable that some of the unmarked graves contain victims of the Indian wars whose skulls were cleft with tomahawks of hostile Coree and Neusiok Indians. It is recorded that in September, 1711 the area had ‘been depopulated by the late Indian War and Massacre,” according to the association. 

The Lewis ancestors

The Old Burying Ground holds “the history of our family roots, where Thomas Lewis, an often-overlooked progenitor, is buried alongside David Lewis and his wife. My siblings and I were captivated by our grandfather Raymond and father’s tales there. The cemetery was our playground, sparking imaginations with stories about our ancestors, including whimsical claims that Thomas was born a pirate and one of the first settlers in Carteret County,” Bill Lewis notes in his family research.

Bill is a native of the Promise Land, which is a neighborhood from 10^th  to 15th streets on the sound side of Morehead City, and a graduate of West Carteret High School. The Promise Land, Harkers Island and Bogue Banks were settled in the late 1800s and early 1900s by Cape Bankers, pronounced Ca’e Bankers, when these fishing and whaling families moved to the mainland after their settlements on Shackleford Banks experienced a series of devastating storms.

In his research, Bill introduces himself as “a proud descendant of Ca’e Banker and Waterman Thomas Lewis Sr. (1740 – 1815),” and he draws inspiration from his late father, Jerry Thomas Lewis (1937 – 2023), “a steadfast Promise Lander and beacon of strength” and his mother, Edna Faye Garner (1938 – 2013), who “came from a determined Salter Pather squatter family.”

His late father was in the military and traveled extensively, but every time they were home in Carteret County, they would visit the cemetery to put flowers on the unmarked graves. “He would say, I want you and your brother and sister to go out here in this graveyard and find Thomas Lewis Sr. Well, my dad new there was no headstones,” he told Coastal Review.

“We embarked on an exhilarating adventure through time as my father took us to a mysterious graveyard, where history whispered through the wind. He paused by an ancient oak tree, excitement gleaming in his eyes, and pointed to an elongated grave. ‘Can you believe this? This is the resting place of your great-great-great-great-grandfather, a son of a pirate!’ His enthusiasm was contagious,” Bill continues. “We were reminded of our family’s rich heritage in Carteret County, where the earliest Lewises settled between 1635 and 1730, helping to shape the community during its formative years.”

Bill said during the phone call that he pored over documents, records and other resources to corroborate the family lore. Once he had substantial proof, he approached the town with the idea to have a headstone installed marking his family gravesite. 

The Carteret County Historical Society oversees the History Museum of Carteret County, where Bill volunteers, and has been asking for donations to purchase and install the proposed 30-inch by 78-inch ledger, which, in this case, is a piece of stone about the size of an interior door the length of a grave, and the 13 footstones expected to be 8 inches by 4 inches.

He told Coastal Review Wednesday that, so far, they had raised around $1,700 and needed close to $5,000 for the simple marker they have designed, and are still taking donations. Call the society at 252-247-7533 for information.

Town of Beaufort Planning and Inspections Director Kyle Garner said in an interview Thursday that he has been working with Bill Lewis for the last year on the proposed headstone.

Bill “has done extensive research,” Garner said, “it’s amazing what he has been able to find.”

Garner added that the graves could have been marked at one time, but the marker could have been wooden and is no longer there. 

Because the cemetery is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Garner and Bill Lewis have been consulting Melissa Timo, the historic cemetery specialist at the Office of State Archaeology, to make sure the proposed marker wouldn’t degrade the cemetery. 

Timo explained to Coastal Review that the state has limited information on the cemetery and “I don’t believe that the cemetery has been 100% surveyed archaeologically” by ground penetrating radar or similar. 

“There was a limited archaeological survey done in 1991 where they opened shallow trenches in what appeared to be ‘open areas’ in the north-central part of the cemetery,” Timo continued. “No surprise, their work reveal that the area wasn’t free from graves at all. There were dozens of unmarked graves and potential graves,” but the digging was just deep enough to expose the tops of grave shafts and not into the burials or human remains themselves.

Timo said that while this survey doesn’t appear to line up where the Lewis ancestors are, “it is very telling for the possibilities in the section he’s concerned about. I tell people that what’s on the surface in a historic cemetery rarely, rarely matches what’s underground,” Timo explained. “There are probably a great deal more people in that cemetery than we expect. Additionally, since this is an urban cemetery, popular but hemmed in on all sides, we might expect people to be much more tightly aligned than a rural cemetery with plenty of room.”

Beaufort Historical Association Executive Director Michael Tahaney said in an interview that the Beaufort Historic Site is looking forward to including this newly publicized Lewis family heritage and the new headstones on tours of Beaufort’s Old Burying Ground. 

“The watermen and whalers were invaluable to the formation of coastal village settlements that grew into the Carteret County towns of today. I’ve spoken with several of our long-term docent guides who have very little previous knowledge of these unmarked graves. The headstones will be a testament to the family’s legacy,” he said.

Serving Southerners true pound cake is a serious culinary dare.

This is not just dessert; it’s a traditional masterpiece. Get it wrong, and you’ll be met with the polite-but-deadly judgment: “Well now, isn’t that interesting.”

Here’s the secret, though: Switching in mock pound cake is what many Southerners do and without a lick of shame. Yes, the true version is the holy grail, tangled up in family history and strong opinions. But the substitute is a welcome compromise that could save you from anxiously staring down the oven, praying for success.

In fact, experts have weighed in: N.C. State Fair baking judges and blue-ribbon winners argue that mock pound cake is every bit as traditional, challenging and delicious as its “true” counterpart.

“It’s only a sin when someone tries to call it a true pound cake,” says longtime judge David Schoening.

How it all started

True pound cake’s pedigree certainly contributes to its exalted status. The first printed recipe, dating to 1747, immediately established the cake’s reputation as a demanding bake. It called for a pound of butter, a pound of flour, a pound of sugar and 12 eggs (six of the whites whipped separately).

The baker’s challenge was to beat the ingredients literally by hand, in a single direction, or with a wooden spoon for a full, excruciating hour before baking the cake in a “quick” oven — a temperature often judged simply by how long the cook could hold a hand inside.

Bakers initially depended on the air they painstakingly beat into pound cake batter to achieve rise — no doubt with fingers crossed while the dessert baked. Exactly when the term “mock” pound cake emerged down South is unclear, but a turning point came around 1881.

In her influential book, “What Miss Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking,” one of the first published African American chefs, Abby Fisher of South Carolina, offered pound cake recipes calling for “the best yeast powder.” This addition was surely a relief, finally giving bakers formal permission to use a backup leavener.

Around the same time, commercial baking powder became widely available. Pound cake was finally approachable, and it seemed clear what qualified as mock pound cake — or was it?

Exactly what is true mock pound cake?

The debate over the definition of mock pound cake continues to this day. Take Ivy Hilliard of Wilmington, for instance. She won the 2024 N.C. State Fair blue ribbon for true pound cake, yet she grew up on both versions, recipes she believes date back generations within her family.

The story of her pound cake lineage begins with her maternal grandmother, Maggie Massey, whose family settled in North Carolina in the 1740s. Massey baked the finest mock and true cakes (her recipe is the one that secured Hilliard’s 2024 win). Later, Ivy’s mother, Polly Hilliard, was known for her mock pound cake, especially a scrumptious chocolate adaptation.

Flavor variation is one of the licenses granted to mock pound cake bakers. While true pound cake is typically limited to one flavoring — caraway seeds in that first printed recipe, later rose water, vanilla or lemon — mock pound cake has virtually no limits. N.C. State Fair entries have included praline, coconut lemon and Hilliard’s own margarita pound cake made with tequila.

What qualifies as mock pound cake varies as much as the flavors. State fair guidelines specify that true pound cake contains only butter (or margarine, which traditionalists reject), sugar, eggs and flour. “Mock pound cake can include baking powder, baking soda and milk but cannot include boxed cake mix,” the rules state.

Interestingly, Hilliard, like her mother, uses vegetable oil and milk but skips the leavener entirely. Her mock pound cake relies on beating the eggs well for lift — a method that is hardly a guarantee or shortcut.

“It’s like a three-hour process,” Hilliard says of preparing her mother’s mock pound cake. First, all ingredients must be brought to room temperature, and “you’ve always got to sift the flour. You can’t skip it,” she insists. The cake, like the true version, bakes for more than an hour with no peeking allowed.

The payoff is worth the effort, Hilliard says: “When it was my birthday, I would always ask for the mock pound.”

Not as easy as you think

Despite the work involved with preparing mock pound cake, the category draws significantly more fair entries than the true pound cake class — 42 competitors versus 18 in 2025. State fair exhibit manager Debbie O’Brien confirms the conventional wisdom: “That’s the way usually everyone goes because it’s easier.”

Like Hilliard, the 2025 N.C. State Fair mock pound cake champion, Willie Pope of Raleigh, takes extra time, shunning leavener, because that’s how his mother made mock pound cake. He has evaluated recipes with and without leaveners but noticed slight difference in the final taste or texture. So, he continues to “just beat the stew out of the egg whites,” a method that finally earned him his first blue ribbon after about 15 years of entering the competition.

For Pope, it all comes down to nostalgia: “It goes back to what you grew up with,” he says. “This recipe that we always make is one that my mother used to make…And part of her joking was always that for us to get an inheritance, somebody had had to win the state fair contest.”

The final determination of which is better, true or mock pound cake, comes down to personal taste. Hilliard thinks mock versions are moist and velvety inside and out thanks to additions like milk, sour cream or even cream cheese. True pound cake, she says, serves an irresistible golden, crackly crust.

Pope and his family have always loved mock pound cake so much that he’s never bothered with a side-by-side comparison to see if their secret recipe stands up to the true version.

Ultimately, the discussion is less about ingredients and more about what’s in a cook’s heart. As Schoening says, “Mock pound cakes are a true Southern tradition because they’re all about love.”

Maggie Massey’s Mock Pound Cake

Crisco shortening

Flour

2 sticks of butter, at room temperature

3 cups sugar

½ cup Crisco oil

1 cup whole milk

6 eggs

3 cups sifted, all-purpose Red Band flour and ½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon lemon flavoring (see cook’s note)

Cook’s note: This is Ivy Hilliard grandmother’s original recipe. Hilliard’s mother’s chocolate version originally incorporated a full can of Hersey’s Chocolate Syrup. When the company stopped making the canned syrup, the family made their own syrup from scratch and added 14 ounces to this recipe at the end of the creaming process. To make the syrup, blend 1 cup of sugar, 1 cup of cocoa and 1½ cups water and a dash of vanilla extract in a saucepot. Bring the mixture to a boil and then let it simmer for about 15 minutes. “And you will have the best chocolate syrup you’ve ever eaten,” Hilliard says.

Cake procedure: Grease a Bundt plan well with Crisco shortening and then dust the pan with flour. Set aside.

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.

Cream the butter. Add the sugar and cream well. Add the Crisco oil and cream well. Add the milk and cream well (if using chocolate syrup, add here and cream well). The mixture should be fluffy. Alternately add flour and eggs, beating well after each addition. Add lemon flavor and mix well.

Bake for 1½ hours. Do not open the oven door until the cake has been cooking at least 1 hour or the cake may fall. Test near center. If cake is done, tester will come out clean.

Source: Ivy Hilliard

True Pound Cake

Lard

Sifted flour

2 cups butter, at room temperature

3½ cups sugar

10 large eggs, at room temperature

4 cups sifted all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

Cook’s note: This is Hilliard’s grandmother’s recipe, the one that helped Hilliard win the N.C. State Fair pound cake blue ribbon in 2024. Hilliard says, “This cake is too large for a standard Bundt pan. Do not fill the pan closer than 2 inches from the top. If you have excess batter due to a smaller cake pan use excess batter for an extra loaf cake.”

Cake procedure: Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Grease a Bundt pan with lard and then dust the pan with sifted flour.

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Alternately add eggs and flour, beating on low speed after every addition to ensure ingredients are well blended. Add vanilla extract last.

Pour the batter in the prepared pan and bake for 1 hour and 20 minutes. Note: Bake times can vary due to ovens. Check at 1 hour and 15 minutes to monitor doneness. You will need a long cake tester to test doneness as this is a deep cake. If test comes out clean, cake is done. When you remove the cake from oven, let the cake sit for 10 minutes in the pan before you turn it out.

Source: Ivy Hilliard

Anne Edwards’ grandmother rarely spoke about the young man wearing a Navy “Crackerjack” uniform in the photograph displayed on a table in the living room of her New Bern home.

As a child, Edwards would hear her mother occasionally refer to him as “uncle.” From what other relatives said, he was a sociable, kind man.

“There’s not a whole lot,” Edwards said. “My mother and grandmother really didn’t talk about it a lot. All I knew was that he died in Pearl Harbor.”

His photo from the table has since gone missing. The Navy does not have an official photo.

His death was untimely, violent — his remains could not be identified and returned to his family for burial. The pain of it all was likely too much for them to convey in conversation, Edwards assumes.

Last week, Edwards attended her great-uncle’s burial with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. The Oct. 8 ceremony was held more than 80 years after he was killed in the attack that thrust the United States into World War II.

Navy Fireman 1^st Class Edward Bowden was aboard the USS California on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor near Honolulu, Hawaii.

Early in the raid, two Japanese aerial torpedoes slammed the ship’s forward and aft, ripping a 40-foot hole in her hull. She would later be hit by a bomb that further opened her insides to flooding.

The attacks claimed the lives of 103 of her crew, including Bowden, a 29-year-old New Bern native. Bowden bore a striking resemblance to his sister who had raised him from the time he was roughly 10 or 11 after their parents died.

That would be about as much as Edwards would know about her late great-uncle, who died about three years before she came into the world, until a letter from the U.S. Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency arrived at her Onslow County home more than six years ago.

Edwards called the agency, which works to identify the remains of unknown prisoners of war and those missing in action. She wanted to make sure the letter, one that requested a sample of her DNA, wasn’t some kind of a hoax.

It wasn’t.

This past April, Edwards got the call that Bowden’s remains, long since buried as an unknown at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii, were officially identified as those of her great-uncle.

She now has a document some two inches thick that contains details about the young man in the black-and-white photograph that was a staple in her grandmother’s house.

Bowden was 28 when he enlisted in the Navy on Aug. 28, 1940, in Raleigh. He reported to the USS California by November of that year.

His sister, who was 18 and married when he moved in with the young couple, signed an affidavit as his guardian, according to the paperwork provided by the casualty office.

Records do not reveal where in the ship Bowden was when it was hit and eventually sank to the bottom of the harbor three days after the attack.

Navy personnel recovered the remains of the ship’s crew between December 1941 to April 1942.

“The problem with identification came because their remains were comingled and so they didn’t really know who they were,” Edwards said.

In all, there would be 20 unresolved casualties from the USS California and 25 associated unknowns buried at the National Cemetery of the Pacific.

Remains of servicemembers yet to be identified in the cemetery were all exhumed by March 2018. As of August, 10 had been identified as being from the USS California.

Edwards was given the discretion to decide where her great-uncle’s remains should be buried.

“Now he can always be found,” she said. “That’s the reason I chose Arlington. I want any family that might be out there related to him to be able to trace him and find out about him.”

Bowden’s military awards include the Purple Heart Medal, Combat Action Ribbon, and World War II Victor Medal.

Edwards was joined by more than a dozen relatives for the Oct. 8 burial. Nieces, nephews, their children, cousins and their spouses traveled from New Bern, Greenville and Maryland to the exceptionally manicured grounds of the cemetery marked by rows and rows of glistening white crosses.

“It was unbelievable,” she said. “Everything was perfect. I was very, very pleased that the young people from the family came. I was very pleased that they felt like they should honor him. I felt a sense of closure for him. He’s not just a name anymore.”

Editor’s note: The following is from historian David Cecelski’s “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” He introduced the nearly 20-part photo-essay series in early August, explaining at the time that the images he selected from the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development Collection were taken between 1937 and 1951 of the state’s farms, industries, and working people. More of the series can be found on his website.

Like all the photographs in this “Working Lives” series, these next few photographs are also from the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection at the State Archives.

However, this set of photographs is more personal for me than most of the other photographs that I have featured here: they were taken at my great-uncle George Ball and his brother Raymond Ball’s potato farm in Harlowe.

Uncle George, as my mother called him, was married to my grandfather’s sister Lizette. Their farm was on one side of the Harlowe Canal, while my grandfather and grandmother’s farm was on the other.

These photographs were taken in November 1942. In this first one, Mr. Raymond is standing on the left in front of a wall of bushel baskets. This is evidently the farm’s curing barn and the baskets are full of sweet potatoes.

According to the photographer’s notes, the other individual is J.Y. Lassiter, who I believe was a county farm agent.

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Here we see two young African American men harvesting sweet potatoes at the Ball brothers’ farm in Harlowe, November 1942.

Old timers have told me that 300 to 350 men, women, and children worked for the Ball brothers at harvest time back in those days.

Most were local people, the large majority of them African American families that resided on the west side of Clubfoot Creek.

The Balls sometimes hired migrant laborers from Florida as well. When I was young, you could still see the ruins of the barracks where they stayed.

During the war, when these photographs were taken, Great-Uncle George and his brother also employed German prisoners of war.

My mother sometimes worked in the farm’s packing shed when she was a girl. She often told me about working alongside the young German men.

Harvesting sweet potatoes was no easy thing, and I have met farm people that would rather do just about anything else.

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The Ball brothers were what in those days were called “progressive farmers.”

According to an article that was published in Carolina Co-operator magazine in August 1939, the Balls first invested in a tractor, an International Harvester Titan 10-20, in 1919.

In a family reminiscence, I learned that the tractor had a top speed of 3.5 miles per hour and made so much noise that locals looked at the “IHC” painted on the front, for International Harvester Co., and said it stood for “In Hell Continuously.”

The Balls were evidently the first farmers in Carteret County to own a tractor.

They were also at the forefront of other local innovations in farming that were transforming agriculture in the first half of the 20th century.

According to the Carolina Co-operator, they were among the county’s first farmers to use manufactured lime to fertilize reclaimed land, instead of burnt oyster shells and hardwood.

Similarly, they were among the first local farmers to build a modern irrigation system, to practice crop rotation, and to invest in farm machinery such as an oil burner for their curing barn and an automatic hay bailer.

By the time of this photograph, they had upgraded their tractor to a big 3-ton machine, but it is nowhere to be seen in these photographs. All we see in them are plow horses and field workers.

In the second photograph above, and in our next photograph, we see plowmen breaking up the ground, then other field hands, called diggers, following behind, often on their hands and knees.

They are digging the sweet potatoes out of the upturned ground by hand, cleaning them off, and placing them in bushel baskets.

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This is another view of the sweet potato harvest at the Ball brothers’ farm in Harlowe, November 1942.

According to the article in Carolina Co-operator, the Ball brothers only grew three crops: white potatoes, sweet potatoes, and cabbage.

After the harvest, the Balls cured their sweet potato crop for several months. Then, late in the winter and early in the spring, they trucked the crop to markets in Petersburg, Richmond, and Washington, D.C.

Some years ago, near the end of his life, I sat down with my great-uncle George’s son Billy Ball and talked about his family’s history on that land.

Cousin Billy told me that his father George Ball, his uncle Raymond, and two of their brothers had bought almost 350 acres there on the north side of the Harlowe Canal on credit in 1917.

It was an abandoned farm that had grown up in sweet gum and pine. Before that time, the Balls had been living in South River, a little to the east.

At that time, only 15 acres of the abandoned farm remained cleared. The Ball brothers built makeshift shelters for themselves and their mules, and they, and presumably a great many Black men from North Harlowe, began timbering, grubbing, and clearing the land.

The Balls didn’t make much money farming at first, but they sold the timber to make the payments on their bank loan.

George and Raymond’s two brothers eventually left the farm. Billy told me that it was too hard for them and they wanted a different kind of life.

Billy told me about the days when hundreds of people worked in the fields.  He recalled that his father and Mr. Raymond took trucks to North Harlowe to pick up the workers, then carried them home in the evening.

He remembered the men and women from North Harlowe bringing their lunches in lard pails, often just collard greens and corn dumplings.

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In this photograph, we see my great-uncle George Ball paying one of his harvest workers in scrip.

According to the photographer’s notes, my great-uncle and his brother paid their field workers 5 cents a bushel.

I do not know how or when the field workers redeemed the scrip.  Perhaps they exchanged it for cash at the end of every workday or work week, or even after the harvest was completed.

Before the war, many of my family’s African American neighbors had few other options other than working in the fields.

By the end of 1942, when these photographs were taken, that was beginning to change largely because of the construction of the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station 11 miles to the west.

Thousands of civilians, of all races, found jobs at Cherry Point. To try to compete with the federal dollars, farm wages would have to go up, and many a white farmer that failed to treat his or her black workers with the respect or dignity to which they were entitled soon found themselves short on labor.

-End-

Editor’s note: The following is from historian David Cecelski’s “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” He introduced the nearly 20-part photo-essay series in early August, explaining at the time that the images he selected from the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development Collection were taken between 1937 and 1951 of the state’s farms, industries, and working people.

One of the more unusual scenes of working life that I found in the NCDC&D Collection at the State Archives in Raleigh was a series of photographs taken aboard the James Adams Floating Theatre while docked on the Pamlico River in Washington in 1940.

The James Adams Floating Theatre’s troupe of actors and actresses toured coastal waterways from Florida to New Jersey from 1914 to 1941. Tugboats towed the theater from town to town, and the boat’s troupe usually did a weeklong run before heading to their next stop.

Over the years, I have seen many photographs of the James Adams Floating Theatre. However, nearly all of them have been looking at the Floating Theatre and its traveling troupe of performers from a distance, usually when it was tied up at a wharf or being towed down a local waterway.

This group of photographs is different. Most were taken on the Floating Theatre, and they show the daily life of the boat’s performers and crew in a way that I have never seen before.

They show actors and actresses rehearsing a play. They take us into the boat’s galley and introduce us to the troupe’s cook. They give us a view into the ticket booth, and of one actress preparing her costume, another whiling away time between performances by fishing off the barge.

And, as we see in the photograph above, they give us a glimpse of stage manager and actor Daile Herlit doing his makeup just prior to a performance.

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In this photograph, we see members of the boat’s troupe rehearsing a scene from a popular temperance play called “Ten Nights in a Bar Room and What I Saw There.”

Based on a very popular 1854 novel by Timothy Shay Arthur, the play had been a staple on Vaudeville and in traveling shows for many a year.

The actress in this scene, Helen Brown, was one of the troupe’s stars.

Reflecting on the Floating Theatre’s heyday, Earl Dean of the Durham Morning Herald Oct. 1, 1950, recalled that the troupe’s staple fare was “the old blood-and-thunder melodrama with an atmosphere supercharged with dark and dirty deeds, tear jerkers with a pretty maiden, a mortgaged homestead and a villainous sheriff with a mortgage in his hip pocket.”

Plays like “Ten Nights in a Bar Room” were really just part of the offerings on the Floating Theatre though.

Musical performances, magic acts, ventriloquism, acrobatics, fortune telling, maybe a magic lantern show or even a pet act or two — there was no telling what you might see when the curtain went up!

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Here we see a winsome pair of clowns all dressed up and ready to go on stage.

In the reminiscence that he published in the Durham Morning Herald, Dean described the Floating Theatre as “a great seagoing barn on a barge with a little house on top.”

The Floating Theatre, he recalled, carried a cast of a dozen or so, a seven-piece orchestra, and a cook or two, as well as the crews for the barge and the two tugboats that towed the barge from town to town.

Everyone did more than one job. Our clowns here might have served as ushers before the curtain went up, might have played a banjo and fiddle on stage between acts, and then helped with a play’s special effects when they were not on stage.

The boat’s theatre had room for about 400 persons when this photograph was taken in 1940.

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Here we see the Floating Theatre’s captain taking tickets before a show.

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And here we see one of the Floating Theatre’s actresses ironing a costume before that night’s show.

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By 1940, times were catching up with the James Adams Floating Theatre. By then, at least in larger towns, the public could go to a movie theater and watch the latest Hollywood films.

More and more people also owned radios and record players. In many larger coastal towns, you could walk through the streets and hear all kinds of music coming out of people’s windows — Big Band music, jazz, opera and the latest dance numbers from New York City.

Many people also religiously followed their favorite radio dramas, comedy shows, and soap operas, at the time as well.

Perhaps by 1940, some of the novelty of the Floating Theatre was wearing off. It was getting easy to forget the thrill and excitement that the arrival of the James Adams Floating Theatre had given audiences in its early days, especially back in the 1910s and ’20s.

Built in 1913, the Floating Theatre was built in 1913 and had first begun traveling coastal waterways in 1914.

Over the years, as I have done historical research on other subjects, I have often been surprised at the places where I found the Floating Theatre’s troupe of players performing on the North Carolina coast.

The Floating Theatre’s players regularly staged shows in the state’s larger seaports, such as Washington, New Bern, and Elizabeth City. But the troupe also visited little coastal villages such as Winton, Murfreesboro, Bath, Bayboro, Oriental, Swansboro, and many others.

I even stumbled on the Floating Theatre hosting shows at a very remote lumber mill village on Juniper Bay, 10 or 12 miles east of Swan Quarter. The mill village was so small that it vanished when the mill eventually shut down.

In those sorts of places, even in 1940, theaters were few and far between, radios were uncommon, and most weren’t even on the old medicine show and traveling circus circuit.

When the Floating Theatre tied up at a wharf in a place like Juniper Bay, people came from far and wide to its shows.

They’d drive all day in a horse and cart or crowded into a farm wagon. They put down their saws and tromp out of the log woods. They’d close the schoolhouse’s doors and declare a holiday, all for the chance to see a show and laugh, forget their troubles, and feel things deeply.

As best I can tell, the Floating Theatre’s troupe welcomed one and all to their shows, as long as they could buy a ticket. To abide by the Jim Crow code of the time though, the ushers had no choice but to segregate white customers from those who were African American or Native American.

That was the law of the land and there were no exceptions, at least not in the light of day.

As the old saying went, “after midnight there was no black or white,” and truer words were never spoken.

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In this last photograph in this series, we meet Rose Teal, the James Adams Floating Theatre’s cook.

Teal was evidently the kind of person who believed in preparing for the worst.

A year or two earlier, the Floating Theatre had hit a snag and sunk on the Roanoke River. I believe that the accident occurred while being towed from Murfreesboro to Williamston.

At the time, a newspaper reporter wrote, “Best prepared of the passengers was Rose, the cook, who has been with the show boat for the past six years. Rose, on the weekend trips from place to place, not only sleeps fully clothed and shod, but has all her belongings neatly done up in cardboard boxes.”

The reporter continued: “Her cabin was down under the stage, but she was among the first to reach the top-side, though how she and her collections negotiated the narrow stairway, was inexplicable.”

Nobody was hurt when the Floating Theatre went down. The boat was soon refloated and, as they say, the show went on.

Nevertheless, I can understand Rose Teal’s caution. That incident was at least the third time that the James Adams Floating Theatre had gone down.

Note from the author: This is the second photo-essay in a series I’m calling “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” You can find my introduction to the series here or here.

In this second group of photos, the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development Collection photographers introduce us to workers in a sawmill, a handle mill, and a veneer plant that were located on the banks of the Roanoke River in 1938 and 1939.

During the late 19th and early 20th century, wood mills seemed to be up every river and creek on the North Carolina coast turning out lumber, shingles, veneer paneling, and, as we’ll see, even ax handles.

At the industry’s zenith around 1900, tens of thousands of men worked in those mills.

Millions of acres of forest were cut. Thousands of miles of railroad track were built to carry logs to mills and lumber to distant markets. Towns rose, and often fell, with the opening and closing of mills.

I was drawn to this photograph, and to the others below, because they give us a rare glimpse at the people inside those mills.

In this first photograph, we see two young men and an older gentleman cutting and stacking veneer panels at the Weitz Veneer Co.’s plant in Plymouth in 1938.

Based in Chicago, Weitz had made veneer paneling in Plymouth since the turn of the century.

The work was hard, exacting, and much of it required great skill. It was also notoriously dangerous. The rate of accidents was especially high in the furnace and boiler rooms and for those, like the men in this photograph, who operated lathes, planers, and other cutting machines.

At Weitz, the making of veneer began by sorting, debarking, and cutting raw logs into boards.

The company’s workers then used rotary lathes and slicing machines to cut the boards into thin sheets of veneer. Once that was done, they dried the veneer in kilns, then cut and fashioned the panels into whatever size and shape that was appropriate for the final product.

From there, the workers handed the veneer panels over to the finishing department, where other workers sanded and often stained or coated them in some way before other workers assembled them.

According to newspaper reports, the Weitz plant’s workers were largely using the veneer to manufacture wooden boxes when this photograph was taken in the late 1930s.

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In this photograph, also from 1938, we see the Weitz Veneer Co.’s plant from the outside, a lone man strolling by.

The Roanoke River and the company’s wharf is on the other side of the plant. Down the road, but not visible in this photograph, was a section of company housing called White City.

Plymouth was booming in those years just before World War II. Large numbers of people were migrating to the little river town to work in the lumber and wood products industry.

Some came to Plymouth to work at Weitz or one of the town’s smaller wood products companies. Most, however, were looking for work at a massive new pulp mill that had opened in Plymouth in 1937.

A division of a large corporation based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the North Carolina Pulp Co. had built the pulp mill on the banks of the Roanoke, 3 or 4 miles upriver of the Weitz plant.

Some of the town’s new residents came to Plymouth from towns where other mills had closed. A sizable contingent of workers from a shuttered mill in West Virginia, for instance, moved to Plymouth to take jobs at the pulp mill.

But hundreds of others were African American families that had forsaken sharecropping or tenant farming elsewhere in eastern North Carolina to make a new start at Weitz, the pulp mill, or one of the town’s other companies that were connected to the lumber industry.

At Weitz, the work was sweltering hot in summer, freezing cold in winter, ill paid, and as I mentioned earlier, often dangerous.

Nonetheless, from all I have heard, the company’s workers still considered a job at Weitz a big step up from sharecropping or tenant farming, which no doubt says a lot about what farming was like in that day, at least if you were African American and landless.

-3-

This is a photograph of a pair of the Weitz Veneer Co.’s workers in one of the company’s cutting rooms in 1938.

-4-

This is photograph from another company on the Roanoke, a sawmill in Williamston 20 miles upriver of Plymouth, in 1938. I am not sure, but I believe it is the sawmill at Saunders & Cox, a lumber company that had docks on the river a quarter mile east of the town’s U.S. 17 bridge.

If you look close, you will see at least four of the mill’s workers, and possibly a fifth back in the shadows.

The workers at Saunders & Cox received raw logs on the river and by truck. The logs could have been felled almost anywhere in the Roanoke River bottomland swamps or in the hinterlands– along the Cashie River or in the headwaters of the Pungo River, for instance.

Once the logs were sorted — “decking” in the trade — the sawyers went to work debarking and running the logs through the big saws. In most mills, they then ran the rough lumber through resaws or gang saws, capable of cutting multiple boards, that cut them into thinner boards.

The sawyers then used edging and trimming machines to shape the boards into four-sided lumber, after which the boards were ready for drying, which was sometimes done in kilns, sometimes in the open air.

-5-

This is another view of workers hoisting and debarking a log at the sawmill in Williamston, possibly Saunders & Cox, in 1938.

Judging from the company’s newspaper ads, this was not the kind of mill that shipped lumber far and wide. During the Great Depression, national demand for lumber plummeted and Saunders & Cox’s ads focused on local markets, mainly offering firewood and lumber for local building.

-6-

This is a our Williamston sawmill again, possibly Saunders & Cox, in August of 1938. A man leading a mule and cart through a lumber yard, or a field, was still a common sight in those last years before the Second World War, but that would not be true much longer.

Even in the 1920s and ’30s, mules, work horses, and oxen were everywhere. They pulled plows, hauled in fishing nets, dragged logs out of forests, and hauled wagons and carts laden with all manner of things.

But by the time that I was growing up in eastern North Carolina in the 1960s that had all changed.

I do not remember ever seeing a mule or any other work animal at a mill or factory.

At my grandmother’s little farm, we only knew one neighbor who still farmed with a mule in those days. He was a very endearing man, and very set in his ways, and so was his mule.

-7-

This photograph takes us back downriver to another wood products company that was located on the Roanoke River in 1938: the American Handle Co.’s factory in Plymouth.

The company was a division of the National Hoe Co., which was based in Cleveland, Ohio.

The National Hoe Co., in turn, was a subsidiary of the American Fork and Hoe Co., a sprawling near monopoly that had its roots in Vermont in the early 19th century.

At plants across the eastern U.S., the company’s workers made wooden handles for an astonishing array of farm, factory, and garden tools and equipment; purportedly more than a hundred types of shovel handles alone.

At the Plymouth plant, the company’s workers fashioned wooden handles for axes, hoes and other farm implements. I have often heard local people refer to the plant as the “ax factory.”

By most accounts, the workers made all of the handles out of white ash, which the company obtained from extensive forest holdings in Bertie, Washington, Martin and Halifax counties.

During and just after the Second World War,  the company’s workers were part of a wave of union organizing that sought to improve pay and working conditions for mill workers along that part of the Roanoke and throughout much of eastern North Carolina.

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Finally, we see a train load of logs rolling down the branch of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad between Plymouth and Williamston, 1938.

-End-

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his official website.

Note from the author: This is the first photo-essay in a series I’m calling “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” You can find my introduction to the series here.

I want to begin this series by looking at a group of 21 photographs that chronicle threshing time on a peanut farm near Edenton in the years just before the Second World War.

The oldest of the photographs was taken in 1937. Others were taken in 1938 and in the autumn of 1941, just a few weeks before Pearl Harbor. One other was taken in 1942.

The first group of photographs focuses on the harvest workers, mostly the threshers, but also the diggers. A second group looks at the work of cleaning, grading and bagging the peanuts at a plant and warehouse in Edenton.

An ancient crop native to South America, peanuts spread across much of the world through the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the 16th and 17th centuries. Farmers in West Africa were among those who came to grow them.

Most historians and ethnobotanists believe that peanuts came to North America, especially to Virginia and North Carolina, via West Africa and the slave trade in the 18th century. By most accounts, they were long considered a crop mainly for feeding hogs and for feeding the enslaved Africans that were forced to raise crops on the region’s plantations.

According to a 2019 article in the journal Peanut Science, southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina were especially important in the crop’s early development in North America in large part because of the slave trade.

In the southeastern part of the North Carolina coast, the Wilmington area was also an important center of peanut farming in the the 18th century. Again, wholly reliant on slave labor.

By 1860, the majority of the peanuts in the U.S. were grown on North Carolina’s coastal plain, though they were rarely grown as a commercial crop.

Little is known about how enslaved people utilized peanuts as a food, though it is assumed that some of the traditional peanut dishes of the Gullah Geechee peoples date to the slavery era. A good description of peanut farming’s early history in the Wilmington vicinity can be found at the website for Poplar Grove Plantation, a historic site built around what used to be a slave labor camp in Pender County.

A number of factors contributed to making peanuts into a successful commercial crop in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Those factors included the adoption of peanuts as an easy-to-carry, nonperishable, high protein food by Civil War soldiers; the groundbreaking research that George Washington Carver did on new food uses for peanuts at Tuskegee Institute; and the collapse of cotton prices and the rise of the boll weevil in the 1920s, which led many southern farmers to search for alternative crops.

Another important factor in the growth of peanuts and peanut farming was the development of popular new peanut products.

Modern peanut butter was invented sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century, though there is some disagreement over where it was first made and who first invented it.

Another important development in the growing popularity of peanuts occurred in 1906, when two Italian immigrants, Amadeo Obici and Mario Peruzzi, both innovators in the roast peanut trade, established a partnership that led to the creation of the Planters Nut and Chocolate Co., which is still famous for its “Mr. Peanut” logo and mascot today.

When Obici and Peruzzi located their first plant in Suffolk, Virginia, 50 miles north of Edenton, in 1913, they guaranteed an almost endless demand for peanuts in the northeast corner of North Carolina, and other peanut processing companies followed.

Peanut candies were also growing popular in those first decades of the 20th century. The peanut-laden Baby Ruth candy bar first appeared in 1923, the no less peanutty Mr. Goodbar in 1925, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in 1928, Snickers in 1930, and Payday in 1932.

Cracker Jacks were a bit older — they were first developed in 1898 — but the popularity of Cracker Jacks and roasted peanuts soared with the popularity of baseball in the early 20th century.

All of which is to say, the demand for peanuts skyrocketed in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Throughout that time, the center of the peanut farming and peanut processing industry continued to be southeast Virginia and northeast North Carolina.

When these photographs were taken in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the peanut belt in North Carolina ran from the counties on the north side of Albemarle Sound, including Chowan County, where Edenton is, west through Bertie, Martin, Northampton, and Halifax counties.

In those years, Enfield, a small town in Halifax County, was considered the state’s busiest peanut market.

In the photographs below, you will find something of a guide to this part of life and work in Eastern North Carolina’s history.

The photographs give us a glimpse at the people who worked in the peanut fields, and a look into a peanut mill in Edenton.

They introduce us to the kind of work that thousands upon thousands of mainly African American field workers did for much of the 20th century.

But as you will see, the stories behind the photographs also introduce us to people whom I never would have expected to meet in the peanut fields of Eastern North Carolina, including even Bahamian migrant laborers and Italian POWs from North Africa.

Note: I have arranged the photo-essays in my “Working Lives” series in chronological order to the extent possible. I’m beginning with these scenes from the peanut fields in Edenton because the earliest photograph among them is dated 1937. The last in the series will feature pickle factory workers in Faison and Mt. Olive in 1947.

So let’s get started with our first photograph, taken in the midst of threshing season on a peanut farm near Edenton.

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In our first photograph, a broad view of threshing time on a peanut farm near Edenton is spread out before us. We can see a field that seems to go on forever, threshers at work, several mules, piles of peanut hay, the dust rising up off a mechanical peanut picker, and a pile of burlap bags heavy with peanuts.

Threshing was hard work, but the hardest work had already been done some weeks earlier, when scores of field workers had dug the peanut vines and pods out of the ground and set them out on stakes to cure.

Like beans and peas, peanuts are a legume, technically not a nut, but they are exceptional among the legumes because their pods develop beneath the ground.

To harvest the peanuts in this field, laborers, probably all of them African American, dug up the the whole plant: vine, pods and all. It was a grueling job accomplished with mules, plows, and a great deal of sweat.

After digging the vines out of the ground, the field workers shook the dirt loose from the plants before setting them out to cure. A task that, in my experience, is harder than it sounds and which nobody remembers fondly.

In a field this size, hundreds of field laborers would likely have done the digging, shaking and staking.

Firsthand accounts of peanut field workers’ labors are rare, but on July 5, 1983, the Wilmington Star-News ran an interview with an African American woman who dug peanuts on a large farm around the time that these photographs were taken.

The interview featured Ms. Carrie Simmons Ballard, who was born at Poplar Grove in Pender County in 1905.

The reporter wrote:

“As a child, she ‘put in many hours picking peanuts on The Big Lot’ where her great-grandmother was the main house servant for the Foy family. Her grandmother and mother also worked for the family. ‘They grew some cotton too, but the main farm product was peanuts,’ she said.

“‘I never did much cotton picking, but I sure did my share in the peanut fields…..’”

Ms. Ballard went on to say, “The thing that stands out most in my mind was how hard we worked for so little. It seemed like we had to work so hard for just some food and barely something to wear.”

-2-

In this photograph, we see what is apparently the same Edenton peanut farm, but three years earlier. In the foreground, we get an especially good look at the “shocks” that were typical of peanut farming in that day.

As field workers dug the peanut vines and pods out of the ground, they would place stakes in the ground and build up stacks of vines and pods around the stakes so that the pods could cure before threshing. Those mounds of peanut vines were called “shocks.”

Farmers typically left the shocks in the field and let the peanuts cure for five or six weeks before threshing began. To this day, some old-timers brook no doubt that peanuts cured in shocks are more flavorful than those cured in windrows, the more modern way.

-3-

This is another photograph of threshing time at the farm near Edenton.

In this case, we can see workers operating a mechanical thresher, usually called a picker, in the center of the photograph. However, I was really drawn to this photograph because it highlights the peanut shocks stretched out in the field behind the threshers.

A field full of peanut shocks was a sight to see, reflecting endless hours of toil. In the largest fields, such as this one, they always remind me of the scenes in “Anna Karenina” of threshing time in the Russian countryside.

-4-

After the peanuts had cured, farm workers pulled up the stakes and raked up the hay, as it was called, being careful to stay clear of the snakes and rats that were notoriously fond of them.

Horses or mules would then cart the hay to a stationary mechanical picker that operated in the field.

The 1940s was a moment in history when tractors and mules often worked side by side in Eastern North Carolina’s fields.

Even as late as 1940, only about 4% of the state’s farmers owned tractors. Even a large, comparatively prosperous farmer, as the owner of his field must have been, was unlikely to have more than the one tractor, which, as we will see, this farmer was using to power his mechanical picker.

The end of the Age of Mules was nigh, but it had not yet arrived on the eve of the Second World War.

-5-

Here we see workers unloading hay next to the mechanical picker in our peanut field outside Edenton.

On the right, we can see a pile of stakes that have already been stripped of their vines. On the left, a man is stitching up a burlap bag of peanuts that have just come out of the picker.

-6-

By the time this photograph was taken, at least larger peanut farmers were using pickers such as this one that were powered by long belts attached to the back axel of a farm truck or, in this case, a tractor.

Even a few years earlier, horses or mules would have done the job.

-7-

This photograph provides a closer look at the farm’s mechanical peanut picker, a machine that was designed to break up the hay, remove the peanuts from the vines, and shake out debris and dust. It was a technology that had just come into widespread use in the previous two decades.

An unschooled African American farmer and inventor named Benjamin Hicks, in Southampton County, Virginia, filed what is believed to be the first patent for a mechanical peanut picker in 1901.

By all accounts, Hicks cobbled his ingenious machine together with a blacksmith’s anvil, tool box, and carpenter’s tools.

At least two makers of farm equipment modeled their peanut pickers on Hicks’ design, one of them without his consent.

To learn more about that patent dispute and about Benjamin Hicks, see Anna Zeide’s recent article in the journal Agricultural History, “The Dignity of Invention: Race, Intellectual Property, and Peanut Agriculture, 1900-1920.”

-8-

In this photograph, we see one of the many young field workers that labored in this farm’s fields during the peanut harvest.

The mechanical thresher separated out the peanuts, emptying them into galvanized tin tubs. This worker is carrying the nuts to other field hands who will bag them, stitch the bag shut, and load the bags onto a truck.

At that time, the average wage for agricultural workers on the East Coast of the U.S. was $1.20 a day.

As part of the New Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt and the U.S. Congress had enacted important child labor reforms during the Great Depression. Those laws specifically exempted children who worked on farms.

By one estimate, half a million children were working in America’s fields in 1938.

-9-

In this photograph, we see another young field worker emptying a pail of peanuts into a burlap bag, while another, older man stitches a bag shut and makes it ready for shipment.

-10-

The farm workers next loaded the bags of peanuts onto a truck that would carry them into one of the two peanut processing plants in Edenton.

Note the sea of peanut shocks in the distance. They seem to go on forever.

On the upper left, we can see the dust rising up from the mechanical picker as it separates the vines and peanuts.

-11-

Once the peanuts had been separated, laborers carted away the peanut hay usually for use as livestock feed.

Farmers valued peanut hay as an especially good feed for hogs.

-12-

I am not exactly sure what is happening in this scene, but I suspect that we are looking at a small hay baler or a presser that flattened and compacted the vines after they passed through the picker. Farmers sometimes used such machines to  make it easier to store the hay for use as livestock fodder.

-13-

A large part of the peanuts harvested on that north side of the Albemarle Sound ended up here, at the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s plant in Edenton. Located on a bay that is on the north side of Albemarle Sound, Edenton is the county seat of Chowan County, and at that time had a population of just under 4,000 citizens.

At the time these photographs were taken, Edenton was home to two peanut processing plants, the Albemarle Peanut Co. and the Edenton Peanut Co.

By 1935, according to the Greensboro News & Record on Aug. 16, 1935, the two companies were handling a total of some 25,000,000 pounds of peanuts a year.

The plant’s workers shelled, cleaned and bagged peanuts for farmers near Edenton and the rest of Chowan County, as well as peanuts harvested from farms in surrounding counties.

According to a number of accounts, you could tell when the plant was operating from some distance because a haze of smoke blanketed North Edenton when the plant was fueling its boilers with discarded peanut shells.

-14-

Here we see a great pile of peanuts waiting to be cleaned and graded at the Albemarle Peanut Co.

These workers are stacking freshly arrived, 100-pound bags of peanuts, still in the shell, in the company’s warehouse.

-15-

In this photograph, we see one of the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s hands lifting a bag of unshelled peanuts at the company’s warehouse.

He may be adding the bag to the stockpile or he may be taking the bag off the pile and loading it onto the handcart on the right so that he can carry it into the mill’s shelling and cleaning rooms.

-16-

This gentleman is emptying bags of peanuts so that they can be placed on conveyor belts for cleaning and grading.

Like many of the other photographs of peanut farming and peanut processing in the state-managed collection, this photograph was taken in 1941, quite likely just a few weeks or even days before Pearl Harbor.

Long before that time though, U.S. war planners had begun planning how to adjust the nation’s crop production to compensate for expected wartime disruptions in the agricultural supply chain.

They did so with an eye both toward meeting the country’s domestic food needs and toward fulfilling the country’s Lend-Lease Act agreements with Great Britain and other allied countries.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the war cut off 68% of the nation’s supply of imported vegetable oils within a year of this photograph.

That was an issue of concern to American consumers, but in some cases it was also a concern for the U.S. military.

Just to cite one example, the bulk of the palm oil used in the United States to produce nitroglycerine for military uses had come from the Philippines prior to the beginning of World War II.

However, that supply of palm oil was completely cut off when Japan occupied the the Philippines in May 1942.

Looking for substitutes for imported oils, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Monthly Review July 31, 1942, noted, “a widespread program was launched, calling for increases in production of lard, tallow, cottonseed oil, peanut oil, soy beans, and other fats and oils.”

The article goes on to say, “Farmers in the South. . .  are taking an important part in this program by expanding the production of peanuts.”

At the time this photograph was taken, military planners had just announced a federal program to expand the country’s peanut acreage by 83 percent, roughly half of which would be set aside for use as oil.

Later in the war, the government would push to raise the country’s peanuts acreage by another 50%, all of which left peanut farmers and the workers at the Albemarle Peanut Co. with little time to rest.

As part of the wartime effort to increase peanut production, the USDA even arranged to rent mechanical pickers and threshers to farmers at a low fee in order help them increase peanut acreage.

-17-

Here we see young women removing flawed or shriveled peanuts from a conveyor belt at the Albemarle Peanut Co.

-18-

This is a view of some of the chain belts that powered the conveyors at the Albemarle Peanut Co.

-19-

During the Great Depression, times were hard in Edenton, as they were throughout most of the North Carolina coast.

Somewhere between a quarter and a half of the town’s citizens were on some kind of public relief. Unemployment rose above 25%. Few could afford doctors or medicines. In many homes, mothers and fathers struggled to keep food on the table. Many cut back, trying to get by on one meal a day.

Far too many grew far too acquainted with hunger and malnutrition.

Against that background, the success of the two local peanut plants — no matter how hard the work, no matter how poorly it paid — was one of the few bright spots in Edenton’s business scene.

In the words of the Raleigh News & Observer Jan. 19, 1933,  the two plants were “a great help to the destitute condition of many Edenton families.”

Between them, the Albemarle Peanut Co. and the Edenton Peanut Co. employed some 150 to 200 workers in season and the peanut industry overall was one of the town’s largest employers.

In this photograph, one of the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s workers is sewing up burlap bags of peanuts to prepare them for shipment.

-20-

In this photograph, we see one of the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s workers carting bags of peanuts out to the plant’s loading dock.

Looking back now, the transformation of Eastern North Carolina’s economy that occurred in the scant few years between the earliest photograph in this group– during the Great Depression in 1937– and the last, on the eve of World War II, was almost breathtaking.

As the nation prepared for war, massive federal investments in the construction of military installations, defense industries, and shipyards especially on the North Carolina coast– and a tremendous infusion of federal dollars into supporting agriculture– proved to be a life-changing moment for countless families and for the future of the region.

During the Great Depression, incredibly high unemployment and the collapse of crop prices had been devastating for Eastern North Carolina.

That all changed during the war. By 1943, the War Department had actually declared the whole region to be a “labor shortage zone,” a designation that meant that the federal government should not target the area for other military projects out of concern that there might not be an adequate supply of civilian labor to build or support them.

Even as early as 1941, when many of these photographs were taken, a general shortage of rural labor was being felt throughout Eastern North Carolina, and the federal government’s push for increasing peanut acreage was one of many special challenges.

To address that wartime labor shortage– and regrettably, also to resist demands from African American workers to raise wages and improve working conditions– peanut farmers in northeastern North Carolina often turned to migrant farm workers and to German and Italian POWs.

In 1943, for example, the War Manpower Commission recommended that 1,500 POWs be sent to northeastern North Carolina for the peanut harvest. Five hundred Italian POWs were assigned just to the peanut harvest in Bertie, Hertford, and Martin counties.

That same year, a temporary camp for Italian POWS was erected at a baseball field in Tarboro, in Edgecombe County, just to supply labor for the local peanut harvest.

An article in the Durham Herald-Sun indicated that the Italian POWs at the Tarboro camp were mainly from Sicily and from Italy’s colonies in North Africa – so they may have included men from what are now Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and/or Somalia.

The next year, 1944, state records indicated that POWs alone harvested a total of 9,141 acres of peanuts in Eastern North Carolina. Asheville Citizen Times, Feb. 22, 1945.

For most of the war, the Farm Security Administration, or FSA, also directed migrant laborers to the region’s peanut fields.

In the fall of 1943, the FSA even opened a special government-run migrant labor camp in Enfield, in Halifax County, to house 400-500 peanut harvest workers.

Even as late as the fall of 1945, after the war was over, state and federal manpower agencies diverted hundreds of Bahamian laborers to northeastern North Carolina’s peanut fields.

That year the short-lived Naval Air Station in Edenton also temporarily housed POWs. They were only there during the peanut harvest, then returned to a POW camp in Ahoskie. Salisbury Post, Sept. 4, 1945.

-21-

These may be bags of unshelled peanuts waiting to be carried into the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s plant or they may be bags of processed peanuts waiting to be trucked out or shipped out by railroad.

In that day, a large percentage of the South’s peanut crop as a whole was bound for oil mills and peanut butter factories. Some of the peanuts that came through the Albemarle Peanut Co. no doubt had the same destination.

That said, compared to peanut varieties grown elsewhere, there was an especially high demand for the “Virginia style” peanut variety that was most commonly grown in Tidewater Virginia and in northeastern North Carolina for use as “cocktail peanuts” and for roasting.

In those last days before the war, there was really no telling where these peanuts were bound. Some of them may even have ended up on foreign battlefields, either in the packs of American soldiers or those of soldiers from Great Britain, the Soviet Union, or one of our other allies.

Acknowledgements

I want to extend a special thanks to the USDA’s James Davis III for helping me to interpret the scenes in these photographs. A third-generation peanut farmer in Palmyra, N.C., Mr. Davis was North Carolina’s “Small Farmer of the Year” in 2002 and is now a chief program officer at the USDA’s office in Raleigh.

Mr. Davis told me that some of his knowledge of peanut farming came from his farming days, some from his studies at N.C. A&T, and some from his long years as a county farm agent and director of the USDA’s office in Halifax County, N.C.

Above all, he told me, his most important teachers were his father and grandfather, the latter of whom grew up sharecropping in Edgecombe County, N.C., and ended up buying and operating his own farm in Palmyra just after the Second World War.

I am very grateful for his assistance, and I hope very much that I did justice to his lessons.

Thank you too to Professor Katherine Charron at N.C. State University and the Grant family in Tillery for introducing me to Mr. Davis.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

A chance to climb to the top of the Cape Lookout Lighthouse and look over the expanse of uninhabited barrier islands, sounds and the Atlantic Ocean might be in the foreseeable future now that a much-anticipated, multiyear, projected $15 million renovation project is expected to begin this month.

National Park Service officials announced Friday that Stone and Lime Historic Restoration Inc. received the contract and the work that should start soon could take up to three years to complete.

“The Cape Lookout Lighthouse has long stood as a sentinel for mariners navigating the treacherous waters of the Southern Outer Banks. Time and elements have taken their toll on the structure, prompting the National Park Service to initiate a full preservation effort aimed at safeguarding the lighthouse for future generations,” officials said.

The Cape Lookout Lighthouse is a double-walled, 163-foot-tall tower with a spiral cast iron staircase winding through the interior. First lit on Nov. 1, 1859, the structure, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, replaced the 1812 lighthouse that previously stood on the island. The National Park Service established in March 1966 the Cape Lookout National Seashore, which is made up of 56 miles of undeveloped barrier islands in Carteret County.

“This renovation marks a pivotal step in preserving one of North Carolina’s most iconic landmarks,” Acting Superintendent Katherine Cushinberry said in a statement. “The lighthouse is not only a critical aid to navigation but also a symbol of our coastal heritage.”

Cushinberry is in the temporary role following the retirement this summer of the seashore’s previous superintendent, Jeff West.

Chief of Interpretation and Public Information Officer BG Horvat told Coastal Review that the restoration project includes the repair or replacement of the 200-plus metal stairs, handrails, landings, glass panes, windows and doors, plus new paint for the black-and-white exterior, which will allow the original bricks to “breathe,” or allow air to flow throughout the tower, as it was designed.

Stone & Lime has overseen several lighthouse projects for the National Park Service, including the multi-year restoration of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, which is suffering from similar structural and cosmetic concerns, the company said.

The Massachusetts-based restoration company in a June 6 press release announced that it had been selected to manage the Cape Lookout Lighthouse project and will “oversee a variety of historically sensitive repairs that ensure the public will be able to have access to the Lighthouse in the future while fortifying it against the impacts of the ocean environment, especially as hurricanes and other meteorological events growth in strength and frequency.”

Horvat told Coastal Review that the restoration company won the contract because “their bid was the most successful based on the needs of the project, their experience in historic preservation work, and what the park’s needs were to get the work done with high quality and historic preservation in mind.”

Safety issues for the structure are numerous, which is why the public climbing season stopped after an annual inspection of the tower in 2021, prompting discussions about a renovation, Horvat said.

The concerns were first noted during a preseason safety inspection early that year. That’s when staff pinpointed compromised structural components such as stairs and handrails. Engineers were then brought in for more in-depth inspections, resulting in a list of things to consider repairing.

“The lighthouse was built in 1859. The iron components of the tower are all original. In many areas it is corroded away, or deteriorating. For example, some of the landings are bowing. The metal doorway to the gallery at the top has a small hole in it. The handrails and stairs are rusty in several places,” he said. “The list is pretty big considering the age of all this metal that acts like the ‘bones’ of the whole structure.”

While the tower is undergoing repairs, “the biggest thing” visitors may notice is the refurbishing the ironwork of the watch, lantern and dome levels at the uppermost section of the lighthouse, Horvat said.

“The whole top of the lighthouse will come off, and a temporary cap will be placed atop of the lighthouse tower until the refurbishment is complete. Then, the top of the lighthouse will be placed back where it belongs, new and improved, adhering to historic preservation standards,” he explained.

Visitors will also notice that the lighthouse exterior will be stripped to bare red brick — the first time since 1873 — and then repainted with a breathable paint to help stabilize the moisture content of the bricks. 

Although the lighthouse was completed on Nov. 1, 1859, with its original red brick tower, back in those days, the Lighthouse Board “decided that each coastal light would have its own day-mark pattern, allowing mariners a way to note their location during daytime, as each lighthouse displays a distinct flash pattern at night,” he said.

The Bureau of Lighthouses, established in 1852, replaced the Lighthouse Board in 1910. The U.S. Coast Guard absorbed the bureau in 1939, caring for the lighthouse until 2003, when ownership was transferred to the National Park Service.

“In 1873, Cape Lookout Lighthouse was painted with its distinctive black-and-white diagonal checkers, or diamond pattern,” Horvat said. “Since then, there have been numerous paint jobs to brighten up the day-mark pattern on the lighthouse,” and for some of those layers, oil-based paint was used, which doesn’t allow the exterior to breathe and damages the masonry.

The more breathable types, such as water-based paints, “work with the original red brick masonry to allow moisture built up in the bricks to move freely, or evaporate rather than create pockets of condensation within the tower. Trapped moisture accelerates the deterioration of the bricks and lends to the corrosive problems on the interior metals as well,” he said.

Also, there have been various types of cements used inappropriately for patchwork over the years.

“Of course, materials like paint and cement have all changed over the last 166 years,” Horvat said.

Money for the restoration comes from a combination of sources, including National Park Service line-item construction funds, Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act revenues and cyclic maintenance funds.

“These resources enable us to enhance and maintain our facilities for the benefit of the public,” Horvat said.

While the lighthouse and the immediate area are closed to the public during the renovations over the next few years, visitors are encouraged to explore the rest of the park, like the scenic beaches, and the cultural historic sites. Interpretive programs and updates on the restoration progress will be available through the seashore’s website and social media.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

Today I would like to introduce a series of photo-essays that I will be publishing here over the next few weeks. Each of the photo-essays — some very brief, some longer — will focus on the working lives of people in eastern North Carolina just before, during, and after the Second World War.

The longest of the photo-essays features 22 historical photographs. In the shortest ones, though, I will try to build a story around a much smaller group of photographs, and sometimes only a single picture.

In all cases, I have based my stories on photographs that are part of the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development Collection at the State Archives in Raleigh.

Between 1937 and 1951, the department photographers created a collective portrait of the state’s farms, industries, and working people. Some of the photographs were used in state publications or shared with magazines and newspapers. The vast majority, though, have not appeared in print.

Few of the photographs have the kind of artistic qualities that we see in the classic tradition of American documentary photography. For example, in the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, photographs of life in America during the Great Depression.

Nonetheless, I find something extremely compelling about them. Perhaps above all, I am drawn to the way that the photographs take us into fields and factories that are rarely if ever included in the stories that we historians tell about the history of North Carolina.

They are not romanticized images of working people. They are more matter of fact, more hard nosed and grittier.

These are images from down by the railroad tracks. From the warehouse district. From the engine room.

From the fields. From the lumberyards. From the textile mills. In one case, even from an actor’s makeup room.

In many of them, you can feel how hot it was, or how cold, the strain of the long days, the dangers that the people in them stood up to, all for the sake of making a living and looking after their families.

In some, you can see the pride that the people in these photographs took in their toil and craftsmanship. In others, you look at the people’s faces and wonder how they kept going.

The photographs that I am featuring are only a very small portion of the historical photographs in the Department of Conservation and Development Collection.

I have chosen to sort them into nearly 20 photo-essays featuring a total of 100 photographs in all.

The photographs that I have chosen were all taken in eastern North Carolina, basically east of I-95 today. Some were taken quite close to where I grew up on the North Carolina coast, a few even look at a sweet potato harvest on my great-uncle’s farm in Carteret County.

Others take us into different fields and factories, mills and migrant camps, remote fishing camps and distant seas.

My choice of photographs may seem eclectic at times. But I picked each photograph, or group of photographs, because I thought that they offered a special window into some important aspect of the history of eastern North Carolina, and because I thought that they led us to interesting stories.

I hope you enjoy all of the photo-essays. I will begin the series sometime in the next few days with the longest, which focuses on photographs of threshers in peanut fields near Edenton, at the end of the Great Depression and in the days just before the Second World War.

Even in that very provincial sounding subject — threshers on a peanut farm — I think you may be surprised where the story leads.

As I worked my way through the photographs from that long ago peanut farm, I was introduced to a host of unexpected stories and working people. Just in those few handfuls of photographs, you will meet Bahamian migrant laborers, POWs from North Africa, a pioneering black inventor from Southampton County, Virginia, and Mr. Peanut, among others.

You may also learn, at least I hope you will, a surprising amount about peanuts, the history of peanut farming, the evolution of farm labor and farm machinery, and the national security crisis that led to the dramatic expansion of peanut farming during the Second World War.

To say nothing of plenty of fun facts about the invention of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Baby Ruths.

Above all, and all kidding aside, I hope that these stories will help you to look at these men and women, and sometimes mere children, with a sense of kinship, a feeling of brotherhood and sisterhood.

Next in the series: “In the Peanut Fields of Edenton, 1937-41”

The Outer Banks are known for vast, uncrowded beaches, towering lighthouses, and unique cottages, and while these features beckon millions of visitors, some Outer Banks communities are not as well-known.

Rather than towns, most communities here are unincorporated villages, each home to residential homes and unobtrusive tourist accommodations, a few businesses, and a post office. Hatteras may be one of the best known of these villages.

While it is much smaller than incorporated coastal towns like Beaufort or Edenton, Hatteras is home to centuries of history and a number of notable sites, particularly on the southwest tip of its namesake island.

Hatteras Island was populated in the 16th century by the Croatoan Native Americans. They hunted, fished and ate oysters, depositing the shells in massive middens that are one of the few remaining visible indicators of where they lived. They were one of the many Native peoples that the Roanoke Colony interacted with in the 1580s.

The Croatans allied with the Europeans and counted among their numbers Manteo, the first Native American christened by the English in the New World. They factor into the story of the Lost Colony, since Hatteras Island was one of the many areas where the colonists were rumored to have gone after leaving Roanoke. Due to the shifting sands of Hatteras and the lack of definitive records, the fate of the colonists remains a mystery to this day.

Europeans returned to the area in the middle of the 17th century. Historian David Stick notes in his book, “The Outer Banks of North Carolina,” that the first documented English settlers on Hatteras Banks, Patrick Mackuen and William Reed, likely arrived there by 1711. People on Hatteras lived by fishing, farming, and piloting boats. They also took cargo from the many shipwrecks that regularly washed ashore from the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

Despite a growing number of families living on Hatteras, the area was slow to develop as a proper town. Isolated and accessible only by water, Hatteras did not abut one of the major inlets that was open during the colonial period. As a result, it was ignored by the same legislative assemblies that facilitated town construction at nearby Portsmouth and Ocracoke islands. Although numerous people resided on the southwestern portion of the island by the late 18th century, colonial maps often showed just the empty banks and the cape. The area known today as Hatteras Village finally gained its first post office in 1858.

Hatteras remained mostly isolated through the 18th and early 19th centuries. But while it did not have obvious economic importance, it did have military significance to any group wanting to approach or protect North Carolina by water. This led to the construction of Confederate forts Hatteras and Clark on Hatteras Inlet in 1861.

The forts were surrendered to Union in the first combined action of the Army and Navy during the Civil War. This success, the first by Union Gen. Ambrose Burnside, helped the Union gain control of the North Carolina coast and allowed for future invasions of Roanoke Island and the eastern part of the state.

The post-Civil War period saw the emergence of coastal life-saving stations. These buildings housed crews organized to rescue victims from shipwrecks using the latest technology, such as the Lyle gun used to shoot rescue lines.

Three U.S. Life-saving Service stations lined Hatteras Island by 1905, from Durants near the village to Cape Hatteras at the eastern end of the island. Along with greater lifesaving capabilities came a new effort at political organization. Dare County, one of the last counties formed in North Carolina, was created in 1870 from what had been parts of Currituck, Hyde and Tyrrell counties to help administer the far-flung islands of the Outer Banks. Its southern boundary was the western tip of Hatteras Island.

The modern village of Hatteras began to develop in the early 20th century. Locals built a string of houses such as the Ellsworth and Lovie Ballance House, circa 1915, one of the oldest structures in the village and a survivor of numerous hurricanes over the past century, according to state historic preservation records. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001.

Growth came mainly from tourism. Greater rail and automobile transportation helped more and more visitors reach the beach from such areas as Raleigh, Charlotte and northern cities. More tourists meant an increase in ferry traffic and the growth of roads that made those ferries accessible, such as the highway that became U.S. 264 connecting Belhaven, Swan Quarter and U.S. Highway 64 near Manns Harbor.

In the 1930s, the conservation movement also brought nature tourism to the island through the authorization of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore in 1937, one of the first seashore-protection programs in the country. Conservation protected a unique ecosystem that continues to bring thousands of birding, fishing, and native plant enthusiasts each year. 

With these dynamics in place, Hatteras became a popular vacation destination. Thousands flocked to the coast every summer and engaged in new recreational activities such as surfing and kiteboarding. Demand led to new transportation outlets. The state began to pave roads on Hatteras Island in the 1950s, but it was the completion of the Herbert S. Bonner Bridge in 1963 that provided a direct land connection between Hatteras and the rest of the country.

Soon, the island became home to shops, restaurants and hotels, as well as the familiar fishing shacks and isolated tourist cottages. A 1990 New York Times travel article that praised Hatteras Island’s beach as “one of the loveliest on the East Coast,” also singled out the village for offering “the color of a commercial fishing hub.”

Hatteras has become one of the most popular tourist destinations on the East Coast, growth that has fundamentally altered life in the sleepy fishing village. About 500 residents now live in Hatteras Village fulltime. There are about a dozen restaurants, several seafood markets, general stores, visitor centers, and the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum. A number of these businesses operate year-round and cater to both locals and the summer influx of tourists.

Despite these changes, residents largely are thankful that Hatteras retains much of its village charm.

Patricia Peele, a lifelong resident of the island, told Coastal Review that as recently as 15 years ago, it was like “they used to roll the streets up at 9 p.m. on Labor Day.”

Now, there are always tourists, filling a plethora of mini-hotels across the island. But Peele said that despite the changes, she knows that Hatteras is still secluded compared to the rest of the Outer Banks. It is “not built up like a lot of other places are,” and with the protections provided by the National Park Service, growth will likely remain limited.

Still, Hatteras Village faces many of the same challenges as the rest of the Outer Banks, including those related to rising sea levels, limited resources and strong coastal storms.

The Basnight Bridge, which replaced the Bonner Bridge when the 2.8-mile, $254 million project was completed in 2019, keeps Hatteras Island connected to the mainland, and no matter the challenges, people of Hatteras will likely continue to adapt to life on their ocean sandbar — just as they always have.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

One day I hope that I will know more about Betty Town, a free African American community that white raiders destroyed just before the Civil War to make way for the founding of Aurora.

Now and then, when I have had time, I have done a fair bit of historical research on the people of Betty Town, how their land was taken, and how the community’s people were driven out of their homes.

But there is still much that I do not know. Many of the historical sources are opaque, some of them are difficult to understand, and none tell us what happened from the point of view of the people who lived in Betty Town.

I wish that I had to time to work through those difficulties. But the truth is, my life has somehow gotten far busier than I ever thought it would be at this age: I fear that I will never find the time to do justice to Betty Town’s history.

For that reason, I want to share here what I know now about Betty Town. That way, if other people are interested, maybe they will pick up where I have left off and go further.

Perhaps, after reading this, a younger scholar or a precocious student will take it on, or maybe even a descendant of those who lost their land and homes.

For me the voices of the people of Betty Town are like the fading sounds of whispers in the night. I catch a few words here, and a few words there, but it is always better if more people are listening.

Together we can share what we hear and maybe, just maybe, the story of Betty Town will not be lost.

‘Where the bear, free negro and wild cat roamed’

So I will go first. Here is what I know about Betty Town, the free African American community that used to be on the North Carolina coast, only 30 miles from where I grew up:

First, Betty Town was a rural settlement of free African Americans located on South Creek, 22 miles southeast of the town of Washington, in Beaufort County.

The community was a remote refuge from the evils of the day. Writing in the Feb. 4, 1886, Goldsboro Messenger, one former visitor remembered Betty Town as a land “where the bear, free negro and wild cat roamed at their own free will.”

Another white commentator, also writing after the Civil War, gives us a hint that at least some whites saw Betty Town’s independence and self-reliance as somewhat menacing.

Published in Raleigh’s Weekly Observer on Aug. 10, 1877, that writer declared that Betty Town and its vicinity had been a shady place up until 1857 or 1858.

That part of Beaufort County, the writer declared, was “regarded as an almost worthless swamp except for shingles and staves; the ridges being inhabited for the most part by a thriftless set of free negroes and half-breed Indians.”

That is the way that the state’s white leaders, at least many of them, used to talk about the communities of free, mixed-race people that were located in many different parts of North Carolina’s coastal plain.

In general, they were people set apart and who guarded their freedom, since they knew all too well that it could be taken away if they were not watchful. Nearly all lived off the land — farming, fishing, working in the woods.

The site of Betty Town is now the location of Aurora, a small town that, as the saying goes, has seen better days.

Betty Town’s 18th-century origins

The origin of Betty Town dates at least to the late 18th century and to a free African American couple named Isaiah and Betty Hodge. (Betty Hodge was the community’s namesake.)

The first U.S. census was taken in 1790. At that time, the Hodge family was already residing on South Creek.

In that first federal census of 1790, a “Zear” Hodge, Isaiah or possibly Isaiah’s father, is listed as the head of a household that included four people of color and a white woman.

At that time, Isaiah Hodge would have been 15 years old. He was born in or about 1775.

The Hodges’ neighbors included a sizeable cluster of other free people of color. They included families with the last names of Blango, Johnston, Holmes and Keys, among others.

Exactly how long that group of free African Americans had been in that part of Beaufort County is not clear to me.

However, I did consult the work of master genealogist Paul Heinigg, one of the leading authorities on the history of free African Americans in Virginia and North Carolina.

Heinigg’s research indicates that several free Black families left southeastern Virginia and settled in what became Betty Town and neighboring parts of southeastern Beaufort County earlier in the 1700s.

They included Blangos, Driggers, Perkinses, Moores, and Johnsons (or Johnstons), at the very least.

 A free African American named Thomas Blango, for example, had settled in Beaufort County by 1701, and Blango family genealogists still trace the family’s roots in the county specifically to Betty Town.

Family Blango

According to Stanton Allen’s “Family Blango: A Study of Black American Genealogy,” three free African Americans families with the surname Blango resided at Betty Town in the early 1800s: those of John Blango, John Blango, Jr., and Mrs. Peggy Blango.

Stanton Allen’s article appeared in Bayboro-based The Pamlico News on Aug. 24, 1983.

By the 1810 census, Isaiah Hodge is listed as head of the Hodge household. Eleven others resided with him: 10 free Blacks and one individual who was enslaved, though apparently not by the Hodges.

Thirty years later, Isaiah Hodges is listed in the federal census as head of a household with 15 members, all free, and presumably including children and perhaps grandchildren, and maybe others, too.

(Census takers did not begin to enumerate individual names, other than heads of households, until 1850.)

By 1850, the last census before his death, Isaiah Hodge, then age 75, was listed as the head of a household that included his wife Elizabeth (Betty), three younger adults with the surname Hodge, and an enslaved mother and her five children.

Judging from the census, nine other households of free African Americans lived around them, presumably in what was considered “Betty Town.” They included families with the surnames of Tyson, Hagins, Perkins, Driggers, and maybe Simpsons.

(Judging by their listing in the census, the Simpsons may have resided in a nearby, but slightly different neighborhood).

When I reviewed the Beaufort County deeds at the State Archives, I failed to get a clear picture of Betty Town’s boundaries.

However, the deeds did indicate that Isaiah Hodge alone owned at least 300 acres on both sides of South Creek in the early part of the 19^th century.

Betty Town’s boundaries may have been confined to the Hodge family’s holdings. Or the Hodge lands may have been only the heart of a larger territory that local people called Betty Town.

If Betty Town was confined to the Hodge family holdings, I would suspect that other families also resided on their land and that most of them would have been at least distantly related to Isaiah and Betty Hodge.

Figuring out those relationships will require more genealogical research, but one thing is clear: On the eve of the Civil War, Betty Town was a small but significant enclave of free African Americans that had survived in that part of Beaufort County since the 18^th century.

The Free African Americans of South Creek

The free African Americans who lived in Betty Town were not alone. They were among a sizable minority of free African Americans who resided in that part of Beaufort County.

In the South Creek census district as a whole, free African Americans made up more than a quarter of the total free population in 1850.

According to the census, the South Creek district had a total population of 1,092 persons in 1850. That included 209 free Blacks, 294 enslaved people of color, and 589 free whites.

However, even if Betty Town and similar communities were refuges in some ways, that did not mean that they were safe.

The decade of the 1850s, as the people of Betty Town discovered, was an especially dangerous time to be a free African American in Beaufort County or anywhere on the North Carolina coast.

‘A Free Negro Named Isaiah Hodge’

According to census records, local deeds, and newspaper accounts, Betty Town had vanished by the beginning of the Civil War.

All historical sources that I have seen agree on the basic facts of what happened to Betty Town. First, they agree that one of Beaufort County’s wealthiest and most influential white political leaders claimed to have forcibly taken legal possession of the community’s land sometime in 1857 or 1858.

Even in white circles, it seems to have been acknowledged that the taking of Betty Town’s land was accomplished by legal chicanery.

Second, at least a significant part of Betty Town’s residents, including the Hodge family, refused to abandon their homes.

Third, the holdouts were eventually driven out of Betty Town not by lawful authorities, but by vigilantes.

That much seems clear. Many details do not seem clear to me at all, however. The historical accounts are relatively few, they clash in some cases, and large gaps in the story remain.

While I did not necessarily expect to find it, I was also disappointed not to find an account of Betty Town’s last days that was written by any of those who were dispossessed or their descendants.

To me that is an almost crippling omission. In my long years as a historian, I have repeatedly seen how contemporary white and Black views of historical events are often completely different. Again and again, I have found them to be as different as night and day.

All that said, even the surviving white accounts paint a sordid portrait of the destruction of Betty Town.

The most widely known account was written in 1916 by Robert Tripp Bonner, who was one of the most active local historians and genealogists in Beaufort County in the early 20^th century.

A surveyor by trade, R.T. Bonner (1854-1919), who was white, came from Bonnerton, only a few miles from Betty Town, and spent much of his life in Aurora.

At the time of Betty Town’s troubles, he was just a young boy, five or six years old. However, he inevitably grew up hearing stories about Betty Town.

Years later, in 1880, when the town of Aurora was officially incorporated at the former site of Betty Town, he was the surveyor who laid out the town’s streets.

In the early 20^th century, Bonner occasionally wrote articles on Beaufort County’s history in the local newspapers. One of those articles focused on the town of Aurora’s history.

Published in the Washington Progress in 1916, Bonner’s article was not hesitant about looking at Aurora’s origins:

“The land previous to the Civil War was owned by a free negro named Isaiah Hodge who died from the effects of a cancer and during his sickness was furnished with the necessities of life by Isaiah Respess who took a mortgage on the lands.”

Isaiah Respess was a prosperous merchant, farmer, and lumberman who had extensive land holdings across a broad swath of eastern North Carolina. He was also the mayor of Washington during the early part of the Civil War.

Bonner recalled that, after Isaiah Hodge’s death, which was apparently in 1857 or 1858, Respess called in the family’s debts and, when his widow Betty could not meet them, had their land confiscated.

He then “sold the land under execution by Sheriff Henry Alderson Ellison and bid it in about 1859.”

Sometime soon after, according to Bonner, “Rev. W. H. Cunningham, of Lenoir County, came to South Creek, bought the site of Aurora from Isaiah Respess and began the town.”  

The Rev. W. H. Cunningham (ca. 1824-1895) was a Methodist minister originally from Greene County. Before coming to Beaufort County, he had been serving as the principal of Lenoir Academy, a private school in Kinston, the seat of Lenoir County.

He had a highly entrepreneurial spirit and was involved in a number of real estate and business ventures before, during, and after the Civil War.

The Dispossessed

The Hodges and their neighbors obviously believed that the taking of their land was an injustice.

By all accounts, they did not accept the legality of the sheriff’s proceedings, the right of Respess to have their land confiscated, or Rev. Cunningham’s right to evict them. According to Bonner’s story, they defied Rev. Cunningham and the county sheriff and refused to leave their homes in Betty Town.

Bonner continued:

“Mr. Cunningham had much trouble dispossessing the free negroes, but one Sunday night, [when] these negroes left their homes to go to a big preaching, Cunningham tore down their houses and took possession of their lands.”

The county sheriff evidently allowed the assault, but that would not have surprised anyone, Black or white, at the time. In antebellum North Carolina, free African Americans were left to defend their own.

Betty Town is unlikely to have survived so long if the community had not previously shown that it was able to defend itself.

In his history of Aurora, Bonner then says:

“These negroes emigrated to Ohio and as the law at that time forbid free negroes after leaving the state to return, they and their descendants did not come back.”

The Legal Status of Free African Americans

In 1830, North Carolina legislators prohibited free African Americans from returning to the state if they left for 90 days.

That law was part of a raft of laws and state constitutional amendments in the 1830s that deprived free blacks of many of the most basic rights of American citizenship.

Other rights taken away from North Carolina’s free African Americans in the 1830s included the right of free assembly, the right of free speech, the right to vote, the right to bear arms, and the right to testify against white citizens in court.

Without those rights, Betty Town’s citizens realistically had no path to defending themselves against the takeover of their land, at least not in court, even in the unlikely event that they could have found a local attorney willing to represent them.

According to Bonner’s 1916 story, after taking Betty Town’s homes and farms, the Rev. Cunningham renamed the place “Aurora.”

Even before the Civil War, he began recruiting new settlers to the former site of Betty Town by running advertisements in newspapers in other parts of North Carolina that made “Aurora” sound like Eden.

From North Carolina to Ohio

Betty Town’s refugees were not the only free African Americans who looked to the state of Ohio for shelter in those last years before the Civil War.

Confronted with severe restrictions on their legal rights and by growing white violence, an important number of North Carolina’s free African Americans found new homes in the northern states.

In the 1850s, Cleveland, Oberlin, and other parts of Ohio were especially common destinations for free African Americans from Eastern North Carolina.

Probably the best known of the region’s free Black exiles in Ohio was Lewis Sheridan Leary.

Leary left his family’s home in Fayetteville, and moved to Oberlin, Ohio, in 1856. He was active in the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, probably active in the Underground Railroad, and was one of three Blacks who rode with John Brown at Harpers Ferry.

‘A Gang of Lawless Ruffians’

Another account of Betty Town’s last days was published just a short time after the community’s destruction.

Appearing in the North Carolina Times, a Raleigh newspaper, on Jan. 25, 1860, an anonymous letter writer calling himself “John Veritas” declared that he had visited “Aurora” that winter, while visiting friends in that part of Beaufort County.

In his letter, John Veritas indicated that he had read a newspaper advertisement placed by Rev. Cunningham that sought to recruit settlers to his new town. While in the area, he had decided that he wanted to see “Aurora” for himself.

To say the least, he had not been impressed. Rev. Cunningham’s advertisement apparently promised a bustling little town that already had churches, shops, a physician’s office, elegant homes, and other “fine edifices.”

Instead, John Veritas wrote, he found that his white friends there still called the area “Betty Town” and barely remembered hearing anything about a town called “Aurora.”

All that he found there, he said, was “one dwelling house, a schoolhouse, the ruins of an old house, [and] pine and gum saplings.”

Along one side of the schoolhouse, he reported, someone had scribbled a bit of graffiti.

BETTY TOWN, if you are so soon done for—

I wonder what you was ever begun for?

I could be wrong, but I assume that was the schoolhouse that had served Betty Town’s children.

By that time, Isaiah Hodge had already died. The house in ruins, as we will see, was evidently that of his widow, Betty Hodge, and the surviving house was that of her son and his family.

If any of Betty Town’s other families remained on the land, John Veritas had not been shown their homes.

After seeing “Aurora,” the visitor compared Rev. Cunningham’s real estate ad to “a patent medicine advertisement recommending pills efficacious in the cures of all diseases …”

John Veritas’s letter in the Raleigh Times elaborated further on his visit to Beaufort County.

According to the local people with whom he spoke:

… a speculating land gambler came down there, fixing his eye upon this spot as an eligible site, turned up a claim to it, and supposing it an easy matter to get clear of these old negroes, he ordered them to leave the premises.”

The “speculating land gambler” was of course Rev. Cunningham.

Evidently, Betty Hodge and her son did not succumb to the minister’s threats. According to the anonymous letter, they even sought out legal counsel from a prominent white attorney in the county seat.

John Veritas continued:

“They were then threatened with violence … A few weeks later, in the bitter cold of December, [Cunningham] procured a lawless vagabond … to undermine the chimneys to the old woman’s house …”

According to John Veritas, Betty Hodge still did not relent.

 “Finding this cruel heartless act not sufficient to accomplish his purposes, with a gang of lawless ruffians, at a late hour, on a dark, cold, freezing night, attacked the old house, pulling down portions of it and tearing the roof off, drove the old woman forth exposed to the inclement, freezing frost of a winter’s night ….”

In his letter, John Veritas claimed that Cunningham’s thugs then went next door and “inhumanely beat” Betty Hodge’s son and daughter-in-law. Their crime, he was told, was daring to consult the attorney in Washington about their right to hold onto their land.

At the end of his letter, John Veritas indicated that, according to his friends in Beaufort County, justice was somehow served in the end and “the old woman restored to her land.”

That was not true or, if it was, Betty Hodge did not remain in Betty Town for very long.

By the time the U.S. census taker reached that part of Beaufort County later in 1860, Betty Hodge and her family were not there. I do not know exactly when or how they left, but Betty Town was gone.

I do not feel clear about where they went. According to Bonner’s 1916 history of Aurora that I quoted earlier, they left North Carolina and emigrated to Ohio.

However, I have not succeeded in locating Betty Hodge or any of her family in the federal censuses of Ohio in the late 19^th or early 20^th centuries. The only mention of them that I have found anywhere was in a brief part of Bonner’s article that I have not yet discussed.

In that section of his article, Bonner writes:

“About 1885 …, some of Isaiah Hodge[‘s] heirs returned, employed E. S. Simmons and entered suit against the citizens of the [Aurora].”

Attorney E. S. Simmons (1855-1907)

Enoch Spencer Simmons was an attorney in Washington, N.C. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, he was originally from Hyde County, just across the Pamlico River from South Creek.

In 1898, Simmons published a book-length essay called A Solution to the Negro Problem of the South.

In that essay, he proposed that southern whites forcibly remove all of the South’s Black citizens from their land and relocate them to an all-black colony that he proposed the U.S. Government create in the states of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

I do not think you would be mistaken if you took Simmons’ background as evidence of the quality of legal representation that was available to the state’s black citizens in the late 19^th century.

In that 1916 article, R. T. Bonner continued:

“This suit fell through owing to the fact that an unrecorded deed from Sheriff Ellison to Isaiah Respess was found in the safe of Capt. Wilson Farrow who married the only child of Isaiah Respess.”

Isaiah and Betty Hodge’s descendants had not made a claim against Rev. Cunningham, but instead sought damages for what they believed to be the illegal confiscation of their land by Isaiah Respass.

On one of my trips to the State Archives, I looked for the case in the superior court indexes but did not find it. However, I might have missed it; I think it might be worth re-checking.

Few historical records could tell us more about Betty Town, and court filings would also give us a least something from the perspective of the people who lost their homes and land.

The Rev. Cunningham returned to the former site of Betty Town after the Civil War. His claim to the land was recognized by law by that time. Over the next few years, he would welcome new settlers, establish a church, and operate a hotel in the new town of Aurora.

His interests however were rather far ranging. In a New Bern newspaper from 1865, I found an advertisement in which he was selling 1,500 acres of “tar and turpentine land” in Beaufort County.

According to the Charlotte Observer Dec. 5, 1877, edition, he was expelled from the Methodist church district conference for “immorality” in 1877.

The town of Aurora was officially incorporated on the former site of Betty Town in 1880. It grew into a bustling little market town later in the 19^th century, and then into an important regional center for truck farming after the railroad’s arrival in or about 1911.

Today Aurora is best known for being home to one of the largest open pit phosphate mines in North America and for a very nice museum that highlights the marine fossils found at the mine.

I do not know if anyone knows more than this about Betty Town. But I hope that I will find out when I publish this story. I cannot help hoping that somebody, somewhere, maybe even a descendent of the people who lost their homes and land, will see this story and reach out to me.

Before composing over two dozen volumes of poetry, before becoming a professor at the prestigious Cornell University in upstate New York, and long before winning any of his numerous national literary awards, Archibald Randolph Ammons was a poor boy working on his father’s Columbus County farm during the Great Depression.

Ammons would eventually achieve fame under the byline “A.R. Ammons,” a heralded poet noted for his beautiful but also scientifically precise descriptions of nature. However, with those who knew him personally, including those who knew him during his formative years in coastal Carolina, he went by the less precise but more identifiable name “Archie.”

‘Alluvial country’

Archie Ammons was born in his family’s farmhouse just outside of Whiteville on Feb. 18, 1926. The fields he helped his father plow during his youth were 6 short miles from Lake Waccamaw and only 35 miles from the Brunswick County beach communities his family would travel to for the occasional fish fry or oyster roast. Ammons spent these hardscrabble years mostly behind hitched mules, furrowing the soil in which he and his father grew corn, tobacco, peanuts and other cash crops so typical of eastern North Carolina agricultural districts.

Though he would not begin writing poetry until some years later, his experiences on the farm and in what he called the “alluvial country” of the coastal plains impressed him deeply and would eventually find voice in his writing.  

For instance, in the poem “Silver,” about a mule his family owned during his childhood, Ammons remembers how he and Silver would “fall soon again into the slow requirements of our dreams / how we turned at the ends of rows without sense to new furrows and went back / flicked by / cornblades and hearing the circling in / the cornblades of horseflies in pursuit.”

In the poem “I’m the Type,” Ammons would look back at his early life on the farm in light of his later career as a famous writer and note how he “misses the mules and cows / hogs and chickens, misses / the rain making little / rivers, well-figured with / tributaries through the / sand yard.” Ammons learned in his childhood to be attentive to the living world around him, including not only the plants and animals but also the physical forces that shape living things. They entered his imagination as a boy and stayed with him the rest of his life.

From the South Pacific to the Outer Banks   

According to Roger Gilbert, a professor of English literature at Cornell University who is writing a biography of his former colleague, the Ammons family farm was not particularly successful, so a young Ammons sought employment in the largest nearby city.

“He had been working in the shipyards in Wilmington after high school and one day he came home and the farm had been sold,” Gilbert said in a recent interview. “That farm had been his world growing up. So when that was gone, when it was no longer a place that belonged to him, I think he felt he’d lost that sense of having a home.”

This bitter loss began a whirlwind period in Ammons’s life. American involvement in the Pacific theater of World War II was ramping up just as he graduated high school. With no more family farm to tend, Ammons enlisted in the Navy. He was deployed as a sonar operator aboard the destroyer U.S.S. Gunason, on which he sailed through the South Pacific, listening for the pings of reverberating soundwaves that could signal the underwater presence of enemy vessels or weapons.

It was also during this time, on the long voyages at sea, that Archie began writing his first poems. He was training the precision of his ear in more ways than one.  

When the war ended, the poor country boy from Whiteville took advantage of the GI Bill to attend Wake Forest College. Ammons graduated in 1949 and left town with a Bachelor of Science and, more importantly, a courtship with his future wife, Phyllis.

He moved almost immediately to the Outer Banks village of Hatteras, where he would spend the 1949-50 academic year as principal of tiny Hatteras Elementary School — and where Phyllis would join him after their wedding during Thanksgiving break.

Though he was only on the Dare County island for a year, the dramatic seascapes of the Outer Banks entered his poetic imagination just as the sandy farmland of Whiteville had. In an unpublished poem written during his first summer on Hatteras, and kindly provided by Professor Gilbert out of the Ammons archive at Cornell University, Archie tried to capture in words the strange magic of the Banks at night: “Night has come to this small island, / Drowsing on the golden dunes cool-mist opiates. / Far out at sea, a ship’s sea-lantern sways / And a lost gull screams.”

Gilbert noted that Ammons, by this point, had not yet found his unique poetic voice. But “the Hatteras landscape stayed with him and influenced some of those early poems,” he said.

A Second Vision of Land and Sea

By “those early poems,” Gilbert was referring to Ammons’s first collection of poetry, “Ommateum,” which he self-published in 1955. By this point, Ammons was living in New Jersey and working at his father-in-law’s manufacturing firm, which made glassware for laboratories.

In “Ommateum,” Ammons began to dabble in the scientific specificity and abstraction that would later become a hallmark of his style. More central to his first book, however, is one of Ammons’s mainstay themes: the transience of nature and human life.

In fact, the very first poem in “Ommateum” draws on the windswept ecology of Cape Hatteras to show us a narrator, Ezra, seeking his voice amid a powerful vortex of natural forces. Reworking many of the specific images and themes of his unpublished poem from his year in Hatteras, Ammons describes how Ezra speaks his name to the sea, “but there were no echoes from the waves / The words were swallowed up / in the voice of the surf.” The protagonist has to turn away “from the wind / that ripped sheets of sand / from the beach and threw them / like seamists across the dunes.”

Finally realizing the futility of fighting the wind, Ezra decides instead to adapt to and even become part of the landscape. “So I Ezra went out into the night,” the poem ends, “like a drift of sand / and splashed among the windy oats / that clutch the dunes / of unremembered seas.”

The poem sets the tone for the rest of the volume and, in a way, for the rest of Ammons’s career. It is somehow fitting that a poet from coastal North Carolina would begin his first book looking for meaning in a sea squall.  

According to Alex Albright, a retired professor of creative writing at East Carolina University and the editor of the indispensable Ammons volume “The North Carolina Poems,” “There’s a journal entry from when (Ammons was) in the Navy that provides a controlling metaphor for his life.”

“He sees off in the distance the fine line of the horizon,” Albright said in a telephone interview, “and as he gets closer and closer to it, it’s not really a straight line. It’s that second vision that he brings to a lot of his landscapes.”

Becoming a classic

“Ommateum” sold barely any copies when it first appeared. But little by little, Ammons began making inroads into the professional poetry establishment. Individual poems started getting picked up by journals and magazines here and there throughout the 1950s, and in 1964 he was hired to teach poetry writing at Cornell University, where he would later become a full professor and befriend Roger Gilbert.

The same year also saw the publication of his second collection, “Expressions of Sea Level,” this time by a major university press. From that point on until his death in 2001, Ammons would never go more than four years without releasing a new volume.

From the 1970s through the end of the 1990s, Ammons’s star rose without cease. He won the National Book Award for one collection of poetry in 1973, then the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry for a different collection in 1975. It was around this time that the influential literary critic Harold Bloom said that “No contemporary poet, in America, is likelier to become a classic than A.R. Ammons.”

As if to prove Bloom’s point, Ammons released a volume in 1981 that received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and another volume 12 years later that won him his second National Book Award.  In October 2000, just five months before his death at age 75, he was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.

Albright, who knew Ammons personally through their work together at the North Carolina Literary Review, pointed out that the shy, affable farm boy from Whiteville was aware he had a gift.

“He knew that he was in a rare class,” Albright said. “He had a Southern way of deflecting praise, but there were very few poets that he imagined were as good as he was.”

Not Deep down but across

Ammons is by no means omnipresent in Whiteville today, but neither is he or the world of his childhood totally forgotten. His family home was torn down years ago, but Whiteville High School has a couple of old buildings he would have sat in as a student in the 1930s, and the Pentecostal church he attended with his parents still stands out by Spring Branch. There is no plaque for him in town, but the Reuben Brown House, a historic preservation group in Columbus County, runs an annual poetry contest in his honor.

The fields and swamps he roamed as a boy are in a similar state of in-between. “Until very recently he would have recognized the Columbus County landscape,” Albright said. “The bridges are a little better, but it’s still swampy. There’s still bugs, it’s still quiet, and you’re still really close to the coast out there.”

According to Albright, even the Brunswick County beaches of Ammons’s youth have not yet been totally transformed.

“There’s a little place when you go to the right on Ocean Isle, that’s where they went for their oyster roasts,” he said, “and on the back end, you can sort of forget that the high-rise bridge is going over to Ocean Isle, and it can feel very isolated.”

Still, Ammons was powerfully attentive to and protective of the natural world. The poet would likely have some strong opinions about the lack of care taken for the soil, water, trees and animals of southeastern North Carolina if he saw it today.

“He could be looked at as an early environmentalist,” Albright said of his old friend. “His feel for the land was just something. And part of what he would see would be heartbreaking. The factory tree farming, especially.”

In “Making Fields,” one of his most moving poems about his North Carolina roots, Ammons describes the give and take between the land and his ancestors who worked that land going back to his father’s father.

The life he presents to readers in this poem is a hard one, and it unfolds overtop a thin coastal soil stratum that doesn’t always offer bounty and wealth. But at the end of the poem, Ammons can still clearly see and hear his connection to the place of his birth.

“… the land is not deep down but across, as into time” he writes. “the runs, the / ditch banks, the underbrush, the open fields with a persimmon tree / or wild cherry call, they call me.” 

A Hometown Heritage marker telling the story of the Atlantic District Fairgrounds in Ahoskie was dedicated last month as part of a Juneteenth celebration.

The fairgrounds were, at one time, the cultural centerpiece of the region’s African American community.

But those times are gone. The track established in 1920 where trotters pulled sulkies for almost 90 years is overgrown and covered with grass. The brick grandstand, built in the late 1950s, is still there and from a distance looks intact, but the roof of the building next to it that once housed the stables is sagging and the paint is peeling.

The fairgrounds haven’t been used since 2010, but, for most of the nine decades it was in operation, it was a place where people of color in Hertford, Bertie, Gates and Northampton counties had the opportunity “to submit items of work and pride: preserves, needlecraft, woodcraft, cooking, livestock and art for possible prizes. It was rare for people of color to have such opportunities and rewards: to win a ribbon along with a dollar or two,” wrote Marvin Tupper Jones, executive director of the Chowan Discovery Group in a grant application for the nonprofit William G. Pomeroy Foundation.

The marker was unveiled June 14 at the R.L. Vann School Community Resource Center at 415 Holloman Ave. in Ahoskie, located beside the historic fairgrounds, during a Juneteenth program.

The Chowan Discovery Group works to preserve the history of the Winton Triangle, a 280-year-old landowning community of people of color. The Pomeroy Foundation was established in 2005 and offers several grant programs to help communities honor their history.

For a brief time during segregation, there were two fairs in Hertford County. The Hertford County Fair in Winton was first held 1918.

Prominent African American business owners and educators from Ahoskie and surrounding areas formed the Atlantic District Fair Association in 1920 after being denied access to the Hertford County Fair in the county seat.

“The Atlantic District Fair Association, incorporated, Ahoskie in Hertford county, to conduct a district agricultural fair and to promote agriculture, authorized capital $20,000, with $1,000 paid in by Augustus Sessoms of Ahoskie, C.D. Nichens, Winton and many others,” the Greensboro Daily News reported in February 2020.

The fair proved an immediate success, with the Hertford County Herald reporting on Oct. 28, 1921, “Since Tuesday, the opening day of the Atlantic’District Fair (colored), immense crowds have paid daily visits to the grounds…The opening day witnessed the smallest crowd of the 3-day fair. Wednesday’s and today’s crowds have met the expectations of the officials of the fair, who have been making extensive preparations for their initial fair.”

For three years, 1921-1923, the two fairs took place within a few weeks of one another.

But, according to the Ahoskie News Herald, by 1923 the Hertford County Fair was in financial trouble.

“The Hertford County Fair Association has called a meeting of the stockholders of the association … next Thursday, December 6. At that time a report of finances will be given and records of this year’s fair given. On account of the quick change in weather and postponing of the first day of the fair this year, the final report shows the association to have lost money, to the extent of about $350 this year (approximately $6,600 in 2025). This leaves the association worse off financially than before, and the meeting at Winton will probably decide the fate of the organization for another year,” the paper reported.

No further references to a Hertford County Fair was found in area newspapers.

Yet the Atlantic District Fair thrived throughout the 20th century. As the 32nd annual fair got underway in 1954, the Gates County Index reported in its Oct. 7 edition that, “President Clarence Chavis (had) received from Commissioner of Agriculture L. Y. Ballentine a letter in which the Atlantic District Fair was described us the third ranking fair in the state in the amount of agricultural exhibits and premiums, thus only one other fair besides the NC Stale Fair ranked higher than the Roanoke-Chowan’s Atlantic District Fair which in all its history has been promoted and managed entirely by Negroes.”

The paper did not identify the fair that ranked second.

Almost 40 years later, the fair continued to thrive. In a 1993 addendum to “History of the Atlantic District Fairground Association Incorporated … A.D. 1919 – A.D. 1991” wrote author Clarence Newsome, vice president of the association. “The 1993 episode of the Atlantic District Fair … was one of the most auspicious events in the recent history of the association.”

Paid attendance totaled nearly 8,000 people.

If 1993 was an auspicious year, there were storm clouds gathering.

“The population of the area started declining. A lot of the people active in the fair were business people. In the 70s,” Jones explained to Coastal Review. “We weren’t creating new retailers. We weren’t creating any more stores and business people and business people know how to run things.”

The population of Hertford County and Ahoskie have been in decline for more than 50 years, but the past 10 years have seen some of the more significant declines. From a population of almost 25,000 in the county in the 2010 census, the population is now estimated at less than 20,000. Ahoskie’s downtown district, which was at one time a thriving railroad transportation hub, reflects the broader changes seen countywide.

The entire downtown is a historic district, architecturally seemingly frozen in time between 1900 and 1940.

“The range of architectural styles found in Ahoskie is limited due to the relatively short period of the most of the town’s development,” wrote the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources in documents creating an Ahoskie Historic District.

Today, however the downtown is almost entirely deserted, many of the buildings empty and in disrepair. Not all of them though. Toward the west side of town, The Sweets on Main opened in May after renovating a 1948 building that had once housed a doctor’s office. The watermelon sorbet was perfect on a hot summer day, according to this reporter.

Yet even if there are a few businesses trying to bring the downtown back, Jones isn’t sure if there is enough of the same spirit that had once created a bustling, viable downtown Ahoskie.

“I don’t know if I see a new generation of leaders,” Jones said. “In the late 60s, 70s and up, we were trying to hang on to what our parents and grandparents…had passed down to us, but we don’t see a generation behind us that’s going to bolster what we’re doing.”

This story has been updated. A previous version misidentified the date of the harness racing photo.

“Pretty much all my paintings tell a story,” said Rik Freeman.       

“When I was growing up, my grandmother used to say I would eavesdrop on grown folks’ conversations because they were just always so colorful and talking. I would see images in my head of what they were talking about and everything said,” the Washington, D.C., artist told Coastal Review.

For the last few years, Freeman’s art has been telling the story about African American beach communities during the Jim Crow era.

His series, “Black Beaches During Segregation,” features several vibrant paintings representing different historically Black beaches on the Atlantic, including Ocean City on Topsail Island, and goes on display in Onslow County starting Saturday.

The exhibit is part of the 15^th annual Ocean City Jazz Festival set for July 4-6 in North Topsail Beach. The theme of the three-day music festival is “Celebrating History Through the Language of Jazz and Unity.” A full schedule and ticket information can be found on the website.

The festival was first held in 2009 to mark the 60th anniversary of Ocean City’s establishment. Now a part of North Topsail Beach, Ocean City was established in 1949 “as an African-American-owned community 15 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Ocean City was a unique community as it was the first residential beach community with Black home ownership in the state,” according to the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission, which is sponsoring the exhibit with Ocean City Jazz Festival.

Opening reception for Freeman’s show is at 2 p.m. Saturday, June 28, at the Jacksonville-Onslow Council for the Arts, 826 New Bridge St. in Jacksonville. Freeman is scheduled to give an artist’s talk at 3 p.m. and there will be time afterward to view the exhibit. Register online to attend.

Freeman, who spent his youth in Athens, Georgia, said he began drawing as a young child but really got into murals in his 20s, after college. He moved to Washington, D.C., in 1985 when he landed a job at the airport while he was visiting family for Thanksgiving.

He returned to art a few years later at 32. “It was in ’88. My father died — this is about to sound like an old blues song — my father died. I got fired from my job. My girlfriend left me, so I started working back with my art again,” he said.

The D.C. Commission of the Arts and Humanities posted in the newspaper an ad looking for artists willing to work with children during a summer program painting murals. Freeman applied and was accepted. “It started from there,” making a living off painting murals.

The idea for the “Black Beaches During Segregation” series was sparked when he learned that a Black-owned beach in California, which was taken from the family owners in the 1920s, had been returned to the descendants.

“I thought about that and that couldn’t have been the only one,” Freeman said, so he began researching. He came across Chicken Bone Beach, an African American beach in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He asked Honfleur Gallery owner Duane Gautier, who is from the Garden State, if he knew about the beach, but hadn’t heard of it. “And so I started telling them about others.” Freeman’s work is shown at Honfleur Gallery in Washington.

Gautier was interested and told Freeman to write a proposal for the gallery’s Artist in Residence Program.  This was in 2022.

He started with six beaches along the Atlantic Seaboard to research and paint, including Ocean City. He’s up to 14 or 15 beaches now, and he wants to represent at least one beach in every state south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

During his visit to Ocean City, Freeman met with people of the community, including Ocean City Jazz Festival co-chairs Carla and Craig Torrey.

Carla Torrey, originally from Fayetteville but now residing in Durham, is a second-generation homeowner in Ocean City. Her father was the principal builder when the community first started.

When she and others met Freeman in person, Torrey said that he explained how his series “uses art to visually document and celebrate the historical and cultural importance of places like the Ocean City Beach community, which played a crucial role in providing spaces for leisure and community for African Americans during a time of systemic racial discrimination. We are a perfect match.”

The exhibit features two paintings honoring Ocean City. One is based on a photo Torrey gave Freeman of herself as a young girl walking with her father on the pier with Ocean City Terrace in the background. Built in 1953 from an abandoned Navy missile observation tower, the restaurant is no longer standing.

“It’s so special to me, because my father really loved this community,” Torrey said. “I’m very grateful to Rik for doing that.”

She said that after talking to Freeman, the jazz festival organizers felt the series should be brought to the county, “so that they could see the other communities that he had visited and that existed and learn a bit about their legacy in history.”

The other painting features two men playing instruments with a modern-day interpretation of the Ocean City Terrace in the background. Freeman said he thinks they eventually want to get restaurant rebuilt, so he took artistic license when painting the building.

The piece on St. Augustine Beach in Florida, Freeman said, is the only piece that directly confronts the racism of the era.

“Because in June ’64 in St. Augustine, they had, instead of sit-ins, it was a wade-in because you’re wading into either a pool or a segregated beach, and a riot broke out, and a lot of people got injured. It was on the news,” Freeman explained. Around the same time, a motel owner threw sulfuric acid in a pool where high school kids were swimming because they wouldn’t get out of the water.

“Those two incidents led (President Lyndon Johnson) to sign the Civil Rights bill less than a month later. So, I figured I wanted to do at least one piece that did show that out-and-out racism, but most of the pieces are based on showing the joy, the camaraderie, you’re in a safe place, and people just having a good time,” he said.

“But the underlying thing is,” Freeman continued, is that when somebody’s looking at the work and they “say, ‘why is it just all these Black folks at the beach?’ Is this somewhere in the Caribbean, or is it Brazil, Africa?’ No, this is United States of America, and the beaches were segregated.”

In his painting depicting Atlantic Beach in South Carolina, “you can barely see it. You have to look for it. There’s a little orange rope that goes out into the water. And a lady down there was telling me that rope was basically the color line, and she just kind of laughed. She said, ‘What did they think that the water that touched us wasn’t going to come and touch them?’”

Ultimately, Freeman wants people who see the exhibit to see the camaraderie and look at the histories of these beaches.

“I want people to kind of look and see as it’s very commendable what people were able to do to be able to create those beaches and safe places. And you know, some of them had a little bit of trouble and everything, but by and large, they were safe,” he said.

Torrey said that the Ocean City Jazz Festival “provides the perfect historical setting and audience for Rik Freeman’s impactful art, while the NC African American Heritage Commission brings its expertise and mandate for preserving and promoting the rich, often untold, stories of African American heritage in North Carolina.”

North Carolina African American Heritage Commission Director Adrienne Nirdé has been with the state commission since 2020, acting as director for the last two years.

The commission has sponsored the Ocean City Jazz Festival for several years now, which Nirdé said is important for the division within the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

“When talking about segregation and Civil Rights, that’s often associated with lunch counters and schools, and that’s a big part of the history that people learn about, if they learn about it at all, but when you dive into deeper, in a place like North Carolina, this was something that touched every aspect of life,” Nirdé said. “People were recreating. They wanted to go on vacation, they wanted to go to the beach. They wanted to golf and experience swimming pools and all of these different types of spaces. This is just really an important way to share the other layer of this story.”

Council For the Arts of Jacksonville Onslow County Executive Director Kandyce Quintero said she and the council’s executive board “are extremely excited to have this exhibit be the kick-start to the festival this year.”

During Freeman’s talk on Saturday, he said he will discuss the work he curated for this exhibit.

“I really want the visitors to understand how important these paintings are. The stories behind each one and how generations have been affected even in today’s world,” she said.

Every summer, the women of Ocean City Beach organized crabbing trips to Topsail Island’s north end. On a waxing moon, when the tide was exactly right, moms and their kids skimmed the saltwater shallows hunting blue crabs, as many as they could carry. The fat jimmies and sooks were the promise of delectable family recipes: rich gumbo, savory crab casseroles and delicate crab-stuffed eggs.

“My mom would always say that on a growing moon, you get more crab meat than on a wasting moon,” Kenneth Chestnut says. “I didn’t believe it, but I became a believer.”

Chestnut’s faith arrived one unforgettable day. The tide had just begun to turn, creating tranquil waters that are a guaranteed feast for hungry blue crabs. Suddenly, the marsh teemed with them, and harvest baskets quickly overflowed.

“It was almost biblical,” Chestnut marvels. Faced with this unexpected bounty, the women had to think fast. How would they get such a haul home?

“They told us boys take off our jeans — we had on swimming trunks underneath — tie up the bottoms of them and fill them with crabs,” Chestnut says, chuckling at the memory.

Back at Ocean City Beach, everyone went to work steaming the mountains of crabs. Pickers meticulously avoided damaging the fragile back shells. Those were always set aside to dry in the sun for use in one of the most beloved dishes: deviled crabs.

Chestnut’s mother, Caronell, took her version to Michelin-star level. She began by sautéing minced onions and celery in rich butter before adding flour and milk to create a luxurious bechamel sauce. After gently folding in sweet crab meat and chopped, hard-boiled eggs, Caronell Chestnut mounded the exquisite mixture into the sun-bleached shells. She finished each serving with a dusting of cracker meal and “small tip of butter” before baking them golden brown for a neighborhood feast.

And it wasn’t just crabs at those delicious gatherings.

“They would prepare dishes and then share dishes. All kinds,” Chestnut reminisces. Food was the heartbeat of the hamlet, a profound expression of connection, so central, so vital, that someone eventually realized Ocean City Beach needed its own cookbook.

More than recipes

The crabbing and cooking memory Kenneth Chestnut relates resonates deeply with my own childhood in Jacksonville, just 25 miles away. Yet, our neighborhoods were worlds apart.

The Chestnuts were Black; my family was white. Although the Civil Rights Act had been law for a decade when we first drove through Ocean City Beach on our way to and from favorite crabbing spots in the early 1970s, Topsail Island’s lines of segregation were clear.

We understood Ocean City Beach as separate, “the Black beach.” Its enduring community cookbook, originally published in 1980 and titled “Ms. Winnie’s Seafood Cook Book,” is a powerful testament to Maya Angelou’s profound truth: “Human beings are more alike than we are unalike. And the minute we began to understand, just the slightest part of that, we recognize ourselves as family.”

Winnie Robinson, a long-time Ocean City Beach resident, painstakingly assembled that first recipe collection as a fundraiser. Chestnut imagines she walked house to house, asking cooks to share their most delicious creations.

The sumptuous dishes, often elaborate in their seasonings — fish chowder with a splash of white burgundy wine, dill- and nutmeg-scented clam fritters, grilled sesame trout, sweet-and-sour sauteed croakers, to name a few — tell a complex story.

In 1949, Edgar Yow, a white man and former Wilmington mayor, witnessed the harsh realities of racism. He envisioned a haven where people of color could enjoy the shore and own oceanside homes in peace.

Yow held seaside property and collaborated with Kenneth Chestnut’s father, Wade Chestnut, and Wade’s siblings to turn part of the acreage into the milelong Ocean City Beach. By 1954, this determined community had 15 homes, a welcoming motel, a bustling restaurant and, soon after, an Episcopal chapel, a church summer camp and the iconic Ocean City Fishing Pier.

“When growing up, I would go on the beach and I would see it was really crowded to the left, really crowded to the right, recalls Carla Torrey, editor of the cookbook’s latest incarnation, “Tried and True Recipes.” “And there would maybe be me and two other people on our beach. And I always was like, ‘Why is that? Is there something special about me?’”

“And then I later realized why. That it was this invisible line where nobody crossed over and came on our beach.”

Unwelcome at many restaurants and living somewhere set apart for no other reason than its residents’ skin color, Ocean City Beach’s talented chefs cultivated a culinary utopia.

Torrey shows a fuzzy black-and-white photo of a community garden thriving even in dry, sandy soil. She yearns for the creamed corn one neighbor prepared fresh from the cob. Chestnut recalls his dad salt-curing mullet in a barrel and neighbors carefully tending molting crabs that would become fried, soft-shell delicacies.

Kitchen creativity, Torrey and Chestnut explain, blossomed during the summers. Moms and their kids, home from school, lived at Ocean City all week. Working dads joined their families on weekends. The women supported each other by sharing meals and recipes. Those carefree days offered them the luxury of time to lovingly prepare food and experiment with fresh ideas.

“It was a joy to her if she didn’t feel pressured to cook,” Chestnut remembers about his mother. “I think that was why she especially loved it down here.”

Each cook infused delights with flavors and methods passed down through the generations along with the latest trends, like Carol King’s Prawn and Egg Curry and Bessie W. Hill’s shrimp-stuffed eggplant.

As Winnie Robinson herself wrote in the original cookbook’s acknowledgments, “Our source has been the ‘world of food.'”

Cooking up the future

Today, 30 Ocean City Beach homes survive from a peak of 100 that existed before hurricanes Fran and Berta took their tolls in 1996. Storms also claimed the Ocean City Beach pier, leaving behind only a solitary tower standing sentinel on a scrubby oceanfront lot. The village nearly blends into the relentless sprawl all around. In 1990, North Topsail Beach absorbed Ocean City Beach into its town limits.

The triumph of civil rights has slowly, gently, loosened ties to this community born of necessity. “Descendants (of original homeowners) can go anywhere and buy anywhere, as opposed to just here,” Chestnut notes. “That’s the way it should be.”

Yet, the important story of Ocean City Beach is far from forgotten. It lives on in an exhibit at Surf City’s Missiles and More Museum, tracing Topsail Island’s history. The community holds a place on both the N.C. Civil Rights Trail and the Jacksonville Onslow African-American Heritage Trail. A roadside marker near the old pier entrance humbly sums up Ocean City Beach’s founding. Blue street signs delineate its roads.

And there’s the cookbook.

While the societal injustices that compelled Ocean City Beach’s creation are a painful memory, they don’t diminish the deep nostalgia families feel for the idyllic summer days they spent in the village. Ensuing generations cling to heirloom recipes and the cherished tradition of sharing meals, a legacy of resilience and joy expressed in the community cookbook.

Chestnut carries on his mother’s clam fritter recipe, the one with dill and nutmeg. His daughter still prepares her grandmother’s Shrimp and Rice Surprise, an easy, irresistible mélange of ham, sausage, shrimp, mushrooms and melty cheese.

Torrey, driven by a passion for preservation, spent hours immersed in Robinson’s pages. She brought forth treasured recipes and solicited new ones for “Tried and True Recipes,” published in 2014, including her own elaborate citrus crabcakes with coriander and blood orange aioli.

Sales of “Tried and True Recipes” help fund maintenance of the chapel and community building, which continue to host gatherings. Potlucks and an annual Labor Day block party happen annually.  

Proceeds also support Ocean City Beach’s annual Jazz Festival. Every Fourth of July, people of all colors come together for two days of music. Torrey’s husband, Craig, organizes a historic walking tour during the event, guiding visitors through streets that hold so many stories.

“Tried and True Recipes” is always available at the festival and year-round online. Both the cookbook and the Jazz Festival are powerful vehicles to tell the story of Ocean City Beach, Carla Torrey says.

“And hopefully keep the history going so it’s not forgotten.”

Caronell Chestnut’s Deviled Crabs

½ cup chopped onion

½ cup chopped celery

½ stick butter or margarine

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

½ cup milk

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

Seasonings as desired

1 pound crab meat

2 hard-boiled eggs, chopped

Cracker meal or cracker crumbs

Butter or margarine

Sauté onions and celery in butter or margarine until vegetables are tender. Remove from heat and add flour, milk, Worcestershire and seasonings. Return to heat and cook until thick. Add more milk if necessary for the right consistency. Mix this with crab meat and hard-boiled eggs. Fill crab shells or a baking dish with mixture. Sprinkle top with cracker meal or cracker crumbs. Place a tip of butter or margarine on top of each shell. Bake at 350 degrees until brown (about 25-30 minutes).

THE EDGE of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. All through the long history of Earth it has been an area of unrest where waves have broken heavily against the land, where the tides have pressed forward over the continents, receded, and then returned. For no two successive days is the shore line precisely the same.

From “The Edge of the Sea” by Rachel Carson.

Countless reviewers and critics have noted through the decades how Rachel Carson’s words above, first published in 1955, were written from the point of view of a scientifically sophisticated observer.

Carson had the knack for describing the various aspects, patterns and lifeforms — many invisible or unknown to all but the most familiar – found on the world’s three types of ocean shore, all three of which, she noted, are found along the East Coast.

Reared in Springdale, Pennsylvania, just northeast of Pittsburgh, the scientist and writer is best known for her 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” which stirred controversy and raised awareness about pesticides’ harmful effects when used indiscriminately. Her book is often credited as the spark that ignited the environmental movement.

In the years just prior, Carson, a marine biologist with a long career in federal service, had written a trio of bestselling, highly praised books about seashores and sea life, culminating in 1955 with “The Edge of the Sea.”

“Miss Carson, thanks to her remarkable knack for taking dull scientific facts and translating them into poetical and lyrical prose that enchanted the lay public, had a substantial public image before she rocked the American public and much of the world with ‘Silent Spring,’” according to Jonathan Norton Leonard’s report of her death as published April 15, 1964, in the New York Times.

Carson was 56 when she died.

Among the many still enchanted with Carson are Bland Simpson, a distinguished professor of English and creative writing at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, songwriter and pianist for The Red Clay Ramblers; Jim Wann, a theatrical writer, musician and leading man; and Don Dixon, a highly regarded record producer, songwriter and musician.

Together, these three form the Coastal Cohorts, whose collaborative comedic musical, “King Mackerel and the Blues Are Running; Songs and Stories of the Carolina Coast,” is now in its 40^th year.

Tickets are on sale for this year’s performances Oct. 24-25 in Morehead City. The scheduled shows were announced earlier this spring.

The musical presents aspects of coastal life through song and onstage hilarity, but also conveys, more subtly, environmental themes, without lecturing or moralizing. The loose plot involves our fishing-buddy “Cohorts” who set out to help save their favorite destination and its proprietor from the wrecking ball as wielded by prospective condo developers.

The production debuted Dec. 8, 1985, at Rhythm Alley in Chapel Hill. While much of that original performance remains part of the show, the Cohorts have continued over the years to write and perform new songs, weaving them into the show. This most recent song, a reverent homage to Carson, “Edge of the Sea,” that took two decades to develop, may work best as an epilogue, according to the Cohorts.

The song was inspired in particular by Carson’s research in North Carolina in the late 1930s and 1940s, Simpson recently told Coastal Review. That research informed her book “The Edge of the Sea” and its chapter about Bird Shoal in what is now the Rachel Carson Reserve just south of Beaufort.

“We just happened to have pulled it together when one of the very things that Rachel Carson caused to come into being, the Environmental Protection Agency and the laws that it worked under, when those things are being just taken part,” Simpson said.

The song’s development began with a staging of “King Mack” at East Carolina University, Simpson explained during a recent video call with Dixon, Wann and Coastal Review.

“Well, Don and I were playing ‘King Mackerel’ in East Carolina on one of those literary homecomings that (distinguished ECU English professor) Margaret Bauer was sponsoring every year for about 10 or 12 years,” said Simpson. “And there was a little workshop, and they asked us to maybe bring in something new we were working on. And I don’t know how we determined Rachel Carson, but we each brought in a verse. It wasn’t a complete song.”

Wann was unable to be at that particular event, but when he was told about the project, he let his fellow Cohorts know that he had already begun working on his own song about Rachel Carson.

“Jim kind of took the lead, and it grew over some time,” Simpson said.

And grow it did. The song clocks in at 8 minutes, 29 seconds, commencing with ocean sounds and a lush choir of female voices. Those are the voices of Dixon’s wife Marti Jones, as well as Rebecca Newton of North Carolina’s own Rebecca & the Hi-Tones, Durham educator Pattie Le Sueur, and Simpson’s fall 2024 songwriting students at Carolina, Madeline Lai and Maggie Thornton. The Cohorts provide the rest, including lead vocals, with Dixon on bass and guitar, Simpson on piano, and Wann on guitar.

“We went up to Chapel Hill where we were in a studio with those women singers Bland had recruited from his class, and then Rebecca and Pattie, who I knew, and Don was mentoring us from Ohio, through the magic of modern technology,” said Wann. “It was very much a stage-by-stage process to arrive at what we’ve got now.”

In its early development, Wann’s working title was “Kayaking with Rachel,” because, he said, “I read that she used to kayak, you know, when she was in her time around the North Carolina shores. And I thought that was interesting, because that was before — the song says, ‘She was kayaking before kayaking was cool,’ and that kind of was my jumpstart into the song.”

Dixon, at some point, had noted the need for an intro to set up the rest of the song, specifically referencing Carson’s own words: “The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place,” said Wann.

“And you just kind of tossed that out,” Wann said to Dixon, “So I just adapted some of her phrases, those words, and that’s how that came into being.”

The song elevates her words “in this kind of Greek chorus sort of thing,” which is the way Dixon, the track’s arranger and producer, said he was hearing it.

And the story contained in the song is one of triumph over challenges, also reflective of Carson’s life. She was a hero, “not just of environmentalism, but the history of humanity,” Simpson said.

“She was a saint and really gave her life,” Simpson continued. “She was dying of cancer when she went to Congress and was put upon, pushed upon. She did not give — she didn’t give an inch.”

Wann said those aspects of her personality, her history and her quiet, solitary life are woven into the song’s first chorus. “That was kind of the first stage,” he said.

“This is creation, don’t let indifference take it away from you
This is your water, don’t let complacency take it away from you.”

— “Edge of the Sea” by the Coastal Cohorts, © 2025 Wann/Dixon/Simpson

Simpson said the above chorus is a call to action. There will always be forces working against the clean and the pure, he said.

Beloved, smeared

In 1962, when Carson’s “Silent Spring” was published, chemical and pesticide manufacturers attacked her, funded disinformation campaigns and labeled her a likely communist. But Carson’s books had already endeared her to the public.

“That book ‘Silent Spring,’ and even her first ocean books sold in the millions,” Dixon said. “She was beloved by certain people; she was just vilified by industry. It was definitely a smear campaign.”

Those trying to smear Carson may, to many, resemble the evil Greed Heads threatening the coastal environment and culture in the “King Mack” storyline.

Wann noted that some in Congress tried to dismissed her, as well.

“They just said that her science was wrong and that she wasn’t telling the truth,” Wann said. “The truth did prevail.”

In 1963, when Carson went before Congress to advocate for federal controls on pesticide use during hearings on pollution, she explained how chemical poisons had contaminated the environment humans depend on — water, soil, air and vegetation.

“It has even penetrated that internal environment within the bodies of animals and of men,” Carson said in her remarks on June 4 that year. She cited numerous sources: radioactive waste and waste from laboratories and hospitals, fallout from nuclear explosions, municipal wastewater and chemical waste from homes and industry.

“When we review the history of mankind in relation to the Earth we cannot help feeling somewhat discouraged, for that history is for the most part that of the blind or short-sighted despoiling of the soil, forests, waters and all the rest of the Earth’s resources. We have acquired technical skills on a scale undreamed of even a generation ago. We can do dramatic things and we can do them quickly; by the time damaging side effects are apparent it is often too late, or impossible, to reverse our actions,” Carson told Congress. “I have pointed out before, and I shall repeat now, that the problem of pesticides can be properly understood only in context, as part of the general introduction of harmful substances into the environment.”

Simpson noted that there are echoes of those times in the current political environment, in which “radical capitalism” is threatening to undo regulations that were based in science.

“It’s an irony, a terrific irony, that the Environmental Protection Agency having been created in no small part because of the wisdom and intelligence that ‘Silent Spring’ brought forth, that the EPA is now, under the new administration, is now being run by undoers, deregulators and representatives of the chemical industry and so forth, and so we’ve sort of come full circle and back to status quo, antebellum and before Rachel’s work helped cause the EPA,” Simpson said.

But, Simpson added, the new song is as uplifting as Carson’s writings.

“Rachel Carson’s spirit is anything but depressing,” Simpson said. “She found miracles in every speck of anything she ever picked up on the beach. And that’s why we love her so, because her heart informed her science about the value and the interconnectedness of all these things. ‘One creature tied to another,’ I think, is Jim’s lyric.”

Wann said he didn’t recall “making anything up” in writing the song, aside from minor paraphrasing of Carson’s words.

“Pretty much all those words are in the preface of ‘Edge of the Sea,’ the very first few pages of the book,” Dixon said.

Dixon acknowledged the song is a celebration of Carson, but is also it’s “sort of a cautionary tale,” especially for those unfamiliar with her work, the fragility of fish and wildlife, and how her advocacy led to a ban on the pesticide DDT.

“They don’t realize she spawned the environmental movement as we know it today,” Dixon said. “And it really was kind of just her doing. I mean, she was very solitary. She was not part of a big group of people working on this problem that she recognized.”

Carolina connections

Carson’s connections to coastal North Carolina were made when the region looked quite different. In 1947, during her tenure with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, she was tasked with writing a visitor brochure for Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge in Hyde County. Simpson said it was “very unlike the standard flat, elemental tour guide.”

It reflected the way she saw the world. “She clearly devoted herself to science writing and everything she did,” he said.

“When we first wrote the show, I don’t think we fully appreciated the light touch as far as environmental matters,” Simpson explained. “In terms of culture, we were looking at our memories of, you know, the old-style hotels and everybody eats at a long table. It wasn’t a world of high-rises and condos and all that.”

“King Mackerel” follows the Cohorts’ efforts to preserve that era and help their fictional friend, Miss Mattie, save her beachfront hotel and pier. The conflict is outlined in “Corncake Inlet Inn” from the original soundtrack.

“We put the contrast in the lyrics: ‘Greed Head sees a barrel of bucks … Cohort sees the geese and the ducks that won’t come back in the fall,’ the change of environment. That’s all true,” Simpson said.

It’s a contrast that’s meaningful to two area nonprofit organizations that have for decades hosted the Cohorts’ performances in Carteret County.

Todd Miller, who in 1982 founded the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, understood that meaning early on – perhaps, according to Simpson, before the Cohorts had fully grasped it themselves. The Coastal Federation works to protect, restore and preserve coastal water quality and habitats, which are critical to the way of life here.

“Their music and stories are beautifully aligned with our mission — capturing why people love and cherish our coast, even as that love can sometimes lead to its overuse and degradation,” Miller said. “They first performed for the Coastal Federation in the mid-1980s, and since then, we’ve all together become part of a larger coastal cohort. Their appeal runs deep, touching the hearts and minds of people from all walks of life — those of us whose lives are enriched by a coast that is a wonderful place to live, visit, work, and play.”

It’s all those things and a deep culture going back centuries, said Karen Willis Amspacher, director of the Core Sound Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

“It’s everything we stand for,” Amspacher said. “Corncake Inn is all about place and tradition and memories and holding on to youth and the beach and the wildness of it all.”

She said the connections ring even truer now than years ago.

“The Greed Heads have multiplied,” she said.

Wann said he was recently thinking back on the Cohorts’ 40-year journey, the connections made and the introduction of new songs along the way.

“It’s been just really especially rewarding that there’s still this growth element to it,” Wann said. “Even doing the show, it doesn’t feel tired or old, because partly, I think we’ve heard so many times that someone will come up and say to us, some young person will say, ‘We used to listen to your music on the way to the beach. It was the only music that my parents and us kids could agree to listen to.’ Now we’ve met the third generation, parents and grandparents who know about ‘King Mackerel’ and at some point, someone said to us, ‘You know, you started out singing about the culture here, and now you’re part of the culture.’”

Updated to correct the name of Miss Mattie’s Fish Camp.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

Today I am remembering a trip last fall, when my wife traveled to a conference in Cape Neddick, Maine, and I went with her. It was a lovely area — the wild and rocky seacoast, the salt marshes, the bogs, all of it.

While we were there, we took a few extra days to explore that southern part of the Maine coast. We drove up to the old Shaker settlement in Alfred. We visited Winslow Homer’s studio at Prout’s Neck. We went bird watching at Biddeford Pool. We hiked in the Kennebunk Barrens.

One drizzly day though, while Laura was at her conference, I drove down to the Portsmouth Atheneum, a venerable old library located in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 15 miles south of Cape Neddick.

Located on the Piscataqua River, which is the dividing line between Maine and New Hampshire, Portsmouth was one of New England’s most important seaports in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

Founded in 1817, the Portsmouth Athenaeum is above all a library of America’s maritime history. Its books, manuscripts, maps, art, and relics speak to the distinctive maritime heritage of Portsmouth and of the Piscataqua’s lesser seaports, shipyards, and fishing villages.

But the Athenaeum’s collections were not only of local interest. Shipping and shipbuilding tied the region’s seaports to the whole North Atlantic. In the library’s collections, you can learn about the places where local merchant vessels did business, and sometimes where they came for refuge or even to their end.

One of those places, as we’ll see, was the North Carolina coast.

My special interest — aside from the popover shop across the street from the Athenaeum (worth the trip) — was a collection of historical manuscripts in the library’s collection that date to the early 1800s.

They are the records of the New Hampshire Fire and Marine Insurance Co., a firm that was based in Portsmouth and specialized in insuring local merchant sailing vessels and their cargos.

The company was in business from 1802 to 1822. During that time, it occupied the handsome, three-story brick building in Market Square that is now the home of the Portsmouth Athenaeum.

When the insurance firm closed in 1822, the board of directors passed the building onto the Athenaeum. Evidently, when they moved in, the library’s caretakers discovered the company’s business records had been left in the building’s vault. They became the first, or one of the first, groups of historical manuscripts in the library’s collection.

For me, as a historian of the North Carolina coast, the most compelling manuscripts in the insurance company’s records were the claims reports of shipwrecks and storm damage that had some connection to the Outer Banks and other parts of the North Carolina coast.

Only half a dozen of the company’s claims reports involved the North Carolina coast. Nevertheless, I found them a riveting look at seagoing life in that day and time, and most definitely worth the trip from Cape Neddick.

(Again, I would have made the trip for the popovers, so the manuscripts were gravy.)

I found the sworn affidavits in the claims reports the most exhilarating. Most were firsthand recollections of mariners who had lived through a storm or a wreck that had led to an insurance claim.

When I read those affidavits, I felt as if I could almost hear the voices of those seamen as they struggled through storms that came perilously close to sending them to the bottom of the sea.

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Some of the oldest insurance claims that I found related to the North Carolina coast, I mean, were those of the brig, Alligator. According to the claims report, she limped battered and beaten up the Cape Fear River and anchored off Wilmington, on the first day of February 1805.

The insurance company’s policy on the Alligator was a bit of a dry read, but I found far more drama in the testimony of John Stavers, one of the mariners who served on the Alligator.

According to Stavers’ testimony, given before a notary in Wilmington, the Alligator had sailed from Portsmouth to Martinique, which at that time was a French colony where most of the inhabitants were enslaved African laborers imprisoned on sugar plantations.

On Nov. 24, 1804, the Alligator left Martinique, bound for Portsmouth, with a hold full of the ill-gotten molasses and sugar.

She quickly ran into foul weather. In his account of the Alligator’s misfortunes, Stavers testified, “That they had very cloudy hazy weather attended with storms, ice and snow for nearly 30 days….”

The Alligator finally made land on Dec. 1, but a heavy gale out of the north-northwest brought in “a rough sea and very hard freezing weather” that pushed them back out to sea.

Stavers testified that two of his fellow sailors had “their feet frozen.” Another of his mates fell sick, leaving the Alligator shorthanded in the storm.

On Jan. 5, things got worse. Stavers recalled that four more crewmen fell sick and were incapacitated.

Soon the storm also began to take a toll on the Alligator. He and his shipmates were hit, Stavers said, with “severe freezing weather and strong gales of wind from W.N.W.”

The heavy seas sprung the brig’s mainmast.

Then, he told the notary, “the bulk-head labored, and the water ways complaining and one of the Plank shares washed off, and the sails and rigging [were] much cut with the ice—some of the chain bolts carried away, and one of the topmast back stays, [so] they tore away before the wind for the Port of Wilmington N.C.”

He testified that they did so for “the preservation of their lives.” According to Stavers, the brig’s master did not believe that they could make any other port before the Alligator fell to pieces.

Stavers ended his report by telling the notary that they had barely made it to the mouth of the Cape Fear River.

“They had heavy gales of wind with snow and ice with a rough sea,” he swore.

The Alligator struggled to make it through the storm, taking in a great deal of water, until finally, on Feb. 1, 1805, “they came to anchor up the River near Wilmington.”

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Many of the claims reports also featured the sworn testimony of local port officials and shipyard workers.

That testimony focused on their evaluations of the extent of a vessel’s damage, the necessity of repair, the costs of the repairs and what shipyards and maritime tradesmen did the work.

With respect to the Alligator, for instance, the claims report includes the port wardens’ assessment of the damage that the brig had suffered and of the extent of the repairs that had been done in a Wilmington shipyard.

The report also provided a rundown of the tradesmen who worked on the Alligator and a list of the ship chandlers who supplied the materials for the repairs.

The list of the shipyard workers included those I rarely see in seaport records. In this case, the appraisals, receipts, and job orders listed two ship’s carpenters, William Thidden and Thomas Hunter; a sailmaker, Bethel Gentry; a blacksmith named London Harris; and a block maker named either William Bells or William Bills. (The name was hard to read.)

They also indicated that John Woods led the repairs of the Alligator’s rigging, while John Lord supplied planking for the repairs and a merchant named Richard Langdon supplied naval stores.

There was also a rather general bill from a ship chandler, David Smith. He evidently supplied cordage, rudder iron, new spars, and even 13 barrels of flour and 2 boxes of fish that were apparently crew rations either for the voyage home or for the period while they were waylaid in Wilmington.

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Around the same time, another vessel insured by the New Hampshire Fire and Marine Insurance Co., the brig Rockingham, grounded at Currituck Inlet, on the northern end of the Outer Banks.

In the claims files for the incident, I read that the Rockingham’s master, Nathaniel F. Adams, gave sworn testimony that he and his crew had sailed from the British colony of Grenada, in the Windward Islands, bound for Norfolk, Virginia, on Christmas Eve 1803.

Capt. Adams did not indicate the Rockingham’s cargo, but Grenada was another notorious slave labor colony and had recently repressed yet another slave rebellion.

Over a period of 125 years, the British, and the French before them, had shipped an estimated 125,000 Africans to Grenada to serve as their workforce there.

By 1803, when the Rockingham was there, the vast majority of the island’s slaves were confined on sugarcane, coffee, and tobacco plantations. When the brig sailed for Norfolk, its hold was likely full of the products that they had been forced to produce, most likely sugar, rum, and/or molasses.

According to Capt. Adam’s testimony, the Rockingham had a “pleasant breeze” and smooth sailing for the first few weeks of the voyage.

That changed on the 17^th of January 1804. On that date, the captain testified, “a heavy Gale from the northward and westward … blew us off the coast again and continued heavy Gales from the northward and westward until Saturday the 21^{st .”}

For a day they enjoyed fair winds again, as they found themselves nearing Chesapeake Bay.

But only a few hours later, on January 22^nd, a northeasterly snowstorm hit the Rockingham, pushed her back south, and pressed her hard against a lee shore. Soon her crew was struggling desperately to keep her beyond the breakers.

Captain Adams reported:

“… a Heavy Gale the wind about NE bent our cables, close leafed our Topsails & [illegible] up our Foresail[,] the Gale still Increasing and snowing tremendously…. 11 AM saw the land on our lee beam close on board[,] then wore ship and stood to the southward….”

As Adams continued, he recalled that the Rockingham “… just cleared the breakers, continued on to the south and nearly in the breakers the sea making one continual break over us until ½ past 4 PM.”

At that point, he testified, “finding it impossible to keep off any longer,” he made the decision to run the brig onto the beach at Currituck Inlet, a desperate move but the only one he had.

He did so, he said, “for the preservation of our lives and what of our property we could save….”

At the time that Capt. Adams gave his testimony, the Rockingham was still grounded at Currituck Inlet. She was evidently battered and beaten, but must have found a decent place to go aground.

Only nine months later, in fact, a Baltimore newspaper reported that the Rockingham was back at sea.

She had arrived in Portsmouth, Virginia, having sailed from Turks Island, presumably with a cargo of salt. (Baltimore American, 31 Oct. 1804, courtesy of the Maryland State Archives.)

I am not sure why, but I did not find any record of the damage to the Rockingham, its cargo losses, or any potential casualties in the insurance records at the Portsmouth Athenaeum.

The intent of Capt. Adams’ account was clear, however. He sought to convince the insurance company’s appraisers that the brig’s damages were due to an act of God, and thus insured, rather than a result of recklessness or poor seamanship, and thus not covered by the company’s policy.

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A couple months after the Rockingham ran aground at Currituck Inlet, another vessel insured by the New Hampshire Fire and Marine Insurance Co. was also struggling off the Outer Banks.

This was the sloop Polly, which sailed out of York, Maine, a seaport 10 miles north of Portsmouth.

In a claims report dated `March 1804, the Polly’s master, Henry Donnell, his first mate Joseph Vondy, and seaman William D. Molton described a voyage from St. Martin to New Bern, North Carolina.

St. Martin, or St. Maarten, is another island in the Caribbean, the northern side of which was a French colony and the southern side of which was a Dutch colony.

At the turn of the 18^th century, when the Polly traded there, the large majority of the island’s population were enslaved African laborers.

The Polly sailed from St. Martin on the 4^th of March. The sloop enjoyed fair winds until the 24^thof March “when the wind blowing a gale …  carried away the jib stay . . ., and in about two hours after, carried away the back of the mainsail.” 

The three mariners added: “The wind still continuing to blow a gale[,] they sprung the bowsprit at about 12 o’clock.”

On the 25^th of March, they were given a respite. “The wind blew fresh, they took in the jib & set the foresail…. The wind [proved] moderate the latter part of the day, they set the jib and shook the reefs out of the mainsail & stood to the Northward….”

 Two days later though, a gale hit them with new force, “the wind coming on to blow violently at one o’clock P.M.”

The storm carried away the Polly’s main boom and shredded the foresail “all to pieces.”

The gale kept coming. Even two days later, on the 28^th, to quote the claims report again, “the wind continued to blow with great violence & a heavy sea.” Soon the winds sprung the main mast and carried away the cross trees and much of what little was left of the sails.

The Polly was left adrift. The crew spent the next day making a new foresail out of old canvas and repairing the rigging.

They then continued to stagger toward Ocracoke Inlet, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

On the 2^nd of April, they finally made land north of Cape Hatteras, then ran past Diamond Shoals. By noon the next day, the Polly had reached the bar at Ocracoke Inlet.

They anchored by the inlet that night. The next morning, an Ocracoke pilot sailed out to the Polly and guided her through the inlet and into safe harbor behind Portsmouth Island.

“The current setting strong and the wind being light, they did not get over the Bar until three o’clock P.M. and at four ‘clock came to with the best Bower in Wallace’s Channel, and on the 7^th following they arrived at New Bern…”.

At that time, New Bern might as well have been a port in the West Indies, by the look and feel of the place.

The large numbers of enslaved Africans, the multitude of languages spoken along the docks, and the vibrancy of the songs heard in the town’s streets– all gave the little port that feeling. Indeed, to many visitors, the seaport seemed a far outpost of the Caribbean Sea.

The Polly’s crew must have felt right at home, surrounded, as they were, by seamen from far and wide, and of many races and creeds, many of whom, like them, knew the perils of the sea.

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In the New Hampshire Fire and Marine Insurance Co.’s records, I also found three other claims for damages that involved the North Carolina coast. The oldest of those manuscripts, an affidavit dated Nov. 25, 1804, concerned the schooner Dolphin, Ephraim Sutton, master.

That affidavit gave few details but made clear that the Dolphin had been damaged in a storm while sailing from Cape Fear to Portsmouth the previous October.

Another claim, also lacking in detail, concerned a brig named the Reward. According to that claim, the Reward “was cast on shore, at a place called Ocracock, on the coast of North Carolina” either in the last weeks of 1804 or the first weeks of 1805.

A final claim for damages involved a brig called the Forest, another vessel that sailed out of York, Maine. That claim concerned a relatively minor incident, but it provided some interesting details.

In the winter of 1817, the Forest had sailed from Basse-Terre, one of the islands that made up the French colony of Guadeloupe.

At that time, almost 90 percent of Guadeloupe’s population, some 90,000 men, women, and children in all, were enslaved Africans who had been taken from their homelands and forced to work on the colony’s plantations (or were the first generation’s children and grandchildren).

According to the affidavit of Capt. John Perkins, the brig’s master, the Forest left Guadeloupe, presumably having filled its hold with sugar or other goods produced by those enslaved Africans.

 She was bound for Portsmouth but was waylaid evidently by storms on the North Carolina coast.

As Capt. Perkins testified, he and his crew “arrived off Cape Fear and saw Bald Head Light House on the 20^th of … February, and made a signal for a pilot.”

With a gale rising from the south, none of local pilots responded to the Forest’s signal. Fearful of running the inlet without a pilot, Capt. Perkins ordered the crew to anchor outside of the Cape Fear River’s bar for the night.

The strength of the storm continued to grow throughout the night. By first light, the seas had grown so nasty that the captain “judged it would be unsafe to lay any longer at anchor.”

He decided “that it would be most prudent, and was necessary, for the safety of the Crew, as well as the preservation of the Vessel and Cargo, to slip the Cable… and make …  his way in over the Bar, without a Pilot.”

The Forest’s crew “slipped the cable,” abandoning the anchor and chain, and managed to make it  over the bar and into a safe harbor.

As I did not find any record of damage to the Forest, I assumed that the insurance claim was for the loss of the brig’s anchor and cable, a relatively small but not inconsequential expense.

Seen in that light, the level of detail in the claims report was meant make it plain that slipping the cable was necessary, given the storm’s dangers, rather than an act of panic or foolhardiness.

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By the time I finished at the Athenaeum, a hard rain was falling. The library’s last patron, other than me, had gone home, and one of the curators and I walked around the library together.

He told me who was who in the old oil paintings, and we talked about the relics, seemingly in every nook and cranny, that had come from sea voyages and distant seaports many years ago.

It was a cozy way to spend a day, listening to the rain and getting swept up in the scenes of shipwrecks and storms that were described in the New Hampshire Fire and Marine Insurance Co.’s records.

At lunchtime, when it was only drizzling, I had walked down to the banks of the Piscataqua, and then over to where, long ago, the waterfront district called Puddle Dock used to be.

Once upon a time, salt marshes and oyster bays were found on that edge of the seaport. Built up over the water, ramshackle fish houses, sailors’ boardinghouses, canneries, and ship chandleries had stood there. Perhaps a brothel, dance hall, and tavern or two, or three, as well.

A sailor’s world. Sea-salt air. Grimy. Raw sewage in the tidal creeks. People of all colors and faiths. People that had been places, most of them. Had seen things. Knew things. Full of life.

The marsh and oyster beds are long gone now, filled in, replaced with a park and a lovely museum and cobbled streets that at least on a cold and rainy day were empty, quiet, and still.

As I walked those misty vacant streets, my thoughts turned back to the records that I had been reading at the Portsmouth Athenaeum.

I thought about all the slave colonies I had seen listed just in the few claims reports that I had been looking at– Grenada, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Grand Turk, St. Maarten and St. Martin.

And I thought of the seaports on the North Carolina coast, which were not that different, their business grounded in shipping the crops that enslaved laborers grew, the lumber they cut, the fish they caught.

As I came out of the rain and into the Athenaeum, I thought as well of the first-person accounts of shipwrecks and storms that I had been reading that morning.

I thought of those sailors on that lee shore at Currituck Banks, looking out over the breakers, eyeing their end.

I thought about all those on the Alligator, the Polly, and the Rockingham, the Forest, the Reward, and the Dolphin. I imagined them watching the waves roll over the decks, the dark and endless sea all around them.

I thought as well of the people on the nearest shores. Perhaps someplace like Ocracoke Island or, closer to where I grew up, Cape Lookout.

I imagined them: the sky still clear, maybe just the first signs of trouble visible on the horizon. I saw them walking along the beach and scavenging driftwood or digging clams or watching over children playing in tidal pools, unknowing, like all of us, of all that was happening out in the great, wide sea.

An Outer Banks nonprofit that was created to preserve traditional Indigenous principles embodied by a late-16^th century Algonquian leader is concentrating on the roles of women during the organization’s annual two-day educational event scheduled for later this month in Dare County.

Called Secotan Alliance … And Beyond, the organization was formed in 2023 to honor Chief Wingina, leader of the Roanoke-Secotan tribe that occupied almost all of what is now called the Albemarle Peninsula, a five-county area in northeastern North Carolina, when the English first made contact in the 1580s.

The nonprofit’s mission “is to bring Wingina out of the shadows of history to a more prominent, respectful position, and to teach and promote the Indigenous Earth ethic that he and his people lived by,” Alliance Executive Director Gray Parsons told Coastal Review.

In addition to educating the public on the traditional indigenous principles of the Secotan Alliance under the leadership of Chief Wingina, “specifically in terms of their application and value in today’s world,” the organization works to “educate the public regarding the need and the methods to protect Mother Earth through individual, community, corporate and government actions based on the traditional indigenous earth ethic,” the website states.

The coming program, “In the Spirit of Wingina 2: Our Women, Our Words, Our Water” is set for May 30-31 in Nags Head and Manteo and will feature academic talks, oral tradition from Indigenous people, panel discussions and performances that are to highlight Chief Wingina’s Secotan Alliance, and general Indigenous environmental history, with a concentration on the roles of women.

Wingina’s Secotan Alliance was initially documented by the English during first contact in 1584, covering most of the Albemarle Peninsula which today includes Dare, Hyde, Beaufort, Washington and Tyrrell counties. Wingina tried to help the English during that expedition before sailing back to England. When the English returned to the area a year later, Wingina learned of their plans to establish the first English colony. Wingina then began working with nearby villages to unite and drive the settlers away from Roanoke, according to the organization’s website and state documents.

“Sadly it was Wingina’s attempts to expand the alliance inland in order to stop the English intruders that got him beheaded by the English military in June 1586,” the alliance’s website explains.

Parsons, who founded the nonprofit, is a descendant of the Machapunga-Mattamuskeet people of the North Carolina inner banks, and grew up in Washington, graduating from East Carolina University in 1972. He spent his career in various fields, including human services, medical sales and marketing, and the organic and natural foods industry.

“It’s our belief that everyone on the planet is ‘Indigen-US,’” which he said is different from the word indigenous. It’s spelled almost the same way, but by adding US, “that’s meant to be inclusive for everyone, to understand that all of their ancestors, at one point, lived in a sustainable relationship with creation.”

This means that when decisions were made to embrace new ideas or approaches, “there was always forethought given to seven generations ahead as to how those new approaches or adaptations would affect the next seven generations,” he explained.

The organization’s inaugural program was in May of 2024 in Manteo. “In the Spirit of Wingina … and Beyond” centered on the life of Wingina and his Secotan Alliance that he tried to expand in the mid-1580s with neighboring tribes when English expeditioners first arrived, and the traditional Indigenous approach to environmentalism.

Parsons, of Frisco, said that the two-day program will always be titled “In the Spirit of Wingina” but will have a different theme, with this year being the roles of women.

The program, appropriate for ages 16 and up, is being offered at no charge. Organizers ask that those who plan to attend register online ahead of the event for planning purposes. A full schedule, all program contributors and registration are available on the Secotan Alliance’s website.

About the 2025 event

The 2025 program will “focus on and celebrate the unique leadership roles of our women yesterday and today, all through the diverse use of interactive education, performing and musical arts, language and film,” according to the alliance’s website.

The programming begins at noon Friday, May 30, in the Virginia S. Tillett Center in Manteo, followed at 7 p.m. with a concert in Jennette’s Pier in Nags Head. The program will resume at 9 a.m. Saturday in the College of the Albemarle’s Dare County campus in Manteo.

The emphasis on day one is on Indigenous history and day two is more on the Indigenous Earth ethic, a chance for environmental organizations and Indigenous people to learn how to join forces, and begin effectuating change on a large scale, Parsons continued.

“Each year we will tell briefly the fundamental story of Wingina’s life framed in that critical 18-month period that he dealt as the leader of the entire, what we today call, the Albemarle Peninsula,” he said.

Parsons said that because the focus of this year’s event is women, the keynote speakers are female Indigenous historians. Dr. Helen C. Rountree, and Dr. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, professors emeritae at Old Dominion University and New York University, respectively, have been invited to speak.

Roundtree is scheduled to give her presentation, “Native American Life in Carolina’s Sound Country Before and After the Lost Colony” at 1 p.m. followed at 2 p.m. by Kupperman, who is to present “When Does American History Start.”

Roundtree is recognized for her scholarly work on Native American societies, and highlights the roles of Indigenous women in governance, community life and cultural preservation. Kupperman has written extensively on the interactions between European and Indigenous peoples in the 16th and 17th centuries.

“They’re both held in very high esteem,” Parsons said, and “are experts on indigenous history and specifically the role of women in indigenous history.”

Dr. Gabrielle Tayac is to take the podium at 3 p.m. to share “Piscataway Woman: Her Courage and Honor.” Tayac is associate professor in the history and art history departments at George Mason University, consult curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and contributing author for two books.

Also scheduled to speak are Dr. Crystal A. Cavalier, cofounder and director of the Piedmont-based 7 Directions of Service, Coastal Carolina Riverwatch Executive Director Lisa Rider, Dr. Arwin Smallwood, who is Dean of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at North Carolina Central University, David Rahahę́·tih Webb, executive director at Muddy Sneakers, Outdoor Classroom, and Sandra Hope, director of the nonprofit Saving the Circle.

Panel discussions with representatives from Dare County, Frisco Native American Museum, Peace Garden Project, Outer Banks Visitors Bureau, North Carolina Coastal Federation, and other organizations are also on the agenda.

That first day closes out with “An Evening of Indigenous Drum & Flute, Jazz & Indigenous Poetry.” Warren Perkinson of Yapatoko will perform Indigenous hand drum, song and flute, Coquetta Brooks will read Indigenous historical poetry about Wingina from the book “Pampico Blue,” and the Benjie Porecki Trio, out of the Washington, D.C., area, will give a jazz performance.  

“All three of these guys are excellent musicians,” Parsons said about the trio.

Perkinson, who will be performing on the flute at various times throughout the two-day program, will open the evening. Brooks is with the Pea Island Preservation Society, one of the event sponsors.

Programming is to resume at 8:30 a.m. May 31 with an emphasis on “The Traditional Indigenous Earth Ethic.”  Indigenous descendants and members of North Carolina tribes and coastal environmental organizations representatives will be giving talks or holding panel discussions throughout.

Parsons said that among the panel discussions planned, the “Historic Traditional Indigenous Earth Ethic” that begins at 2:50 p.m. May 31 will focus on defining the historic Indigenous Earth ethic, and the panel that follows at 3:30 p.m., “Contemporary Environmental Earth Ethic” will discuss it.

The second day will wrap up after the 4:30 p.m. discussion on the theme for 2026, which will recognize the anniversary of when Wingina was beheaded.

“June 1 of 2026, will be the 440th anniversary of that death,” which he said the event next year will acknowledge, Parsons said.

Parsons expressed his gratitude to the event sponsors, which include Outer Banks Community Foundation, Outer Banks Visitors Bureau, Dare Arts, North Carolina Coastal Federation, Friends of the Outer Banks History Center, Island Bookstores in Kitty Hawk, Duck and Corolla, Outer Banks Pest Control, and Pea Island Preservation Society.  In-kind donations were provided by The Fresh Market, Waveriders in Nags Head, Front Porch Café in Manteo, and Crumbl Cookie in Southern Shores.

Those from out of town can receive the group rate at the Comfort Inn – South Oceanfront in Nags Head. Call 252-441-6315 and mention “Secotan Alliance.”

RALEIGH — Historian David Cecelski didn’t mask the grief he felt while telling the “gruesome stories” littering eastern North Carolina’s past, or the mounting dread that those days will return and put the coast’s natural resources at risk of “plunder, pillaging and poisoning.”

“This may not be the kind of keynote address that you’re used to,” the mild-mannered Carteret County native told a crowd of about 150 people during the first morning of the 2025 Coastal Summit. “I’m an historian after all, a storyteller at heart, and you have to expect that I’m going to tell some stories. I’m also going to talk about our coastal history, and how we got here, and what we might learn from the past that might help guide us today.”

The April 8-9 summit, titled “Ripple Effect: Enhancing Oysters, Salt Marsh and Water Quality Together,” was organized by the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review. The biennial event brought together elected officials, representatives from local, state and federal governments, conservation organizations, researchers and others invested in maintaining a healthy coast.

Board member for the nonprofit organization Allison Besch introduced Cecelski, who “divides his time between two places that he loves deeply”: Durham, and his ancestral home in Carteret County. A longtime contributor to Coastal Review, the historian has written several award-winning books and hundreds of articles about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast.

“David’s writing focuses passionately on telling stories from his little corner of the world that emanates American history more broadly,” Besch said as she described his work.

Cecelski began his address, “Our Coastal Heritage: Past, Present and Future” with an illustration of the mullet fishing camp on Shackleford Banks where his cousins worked five generations ago. He also displayed photos of himself as a young boy on the family farm that bumps up to the Harlowe Canal west of Beaufort.

“When I stay at the house, like I did the other night, I sleep in the bedroom where my mother was born, and her father and his father and his father,” Cecelski said. “And in our neighborhood, people call our house ‘the new house’ because what they call the family homeplace is about a half-mile down the road on my cousin Henry’s land.”

Cecelski said that when his mother was born in the late 1920s, a New Bedford, Massachusetts, company was still trapping bottlenose dolphins in giant haul seines and slaughtering hundreds and sometimes thousands of them every year on the beach at Hatteras Island.

“The islanders would shut their windows so they would not have to hear the cry of the dolphins on the beach at night. The last haul of the day, they often didn’t have a chance to process so they would leave them alive,” he continued. “When they were old men, and I would go and talk with them, local fishermen who were hired to catch and butcher the dolphins would say they still had nightmares about what they had had to do on those beaches.”

When his grandfather was a young man, New York millinery companies, or ladies’ hatmakers, “were still paying the hunters at Cape Lookout to surround nesting colonies of seabirds and marsh birds — royal turns, oystercatchers, piping clovers, sanderlings, herons, egrets, among others,” he said. The hunters would wait until the eggs started hatching, because that was when the birds were least likely to flee, and then they would start shooting, sometimes killing 10,000,15,000, 20,000, 25,000 birds in a single day.

A century ago, the swans and snow geese did not come for Lake Mattamuskeet, and less than a century ago, sea turtles were being shipped in tin cans to four-star restaurants in New York City. A pulp mill in 1937, “without breaking any laws, began dumping untreated sulfur dioxide into the Roanoke River at a site 4 miles upriver of Plymouth. By the start of the Second World War, that mill’s waste had destroyed America’s largest and oldest herring fisheries, dating back at that site two centuries,” Cecelski continued.

And a century ago, one of North America’s great wetlands that covered hundreds of thousands of acres north and west of the Pongo River disappeared. “It was clear-cut, drained and its waters channeled into the Pamlico River. If there is an acre of it left, I have not found it. It’s ancient white cedar forest. It’s cypress glades and the entire body of the oyster grounds of the upper Pamlico River. All gone,” Cecelski said.

“When it comes to that devastating era in the history of the North Carolina coast, I’m afraid I could go on and on and on,” but everything that is loved about the state’s coast today has come about because of recognizing that path couldn’t continue, he said.

“We learned the hard way that the strength of our coastal communities, strength of our coastal families, the strength of our coastal economy, and the strength of the kind of coastal heritage that I grew up in — our traditions of fishing, of boatbuilding, of living off the land and the water, of oyster roasts and shrimp boils, of pilgrimages to the shore to restore our souls — we learned that they are all as entwined as anything can be with the health of our coastal waters, our coastal wetlands, our fields and forests,” Cecelski continued. “And we learned that we have to work together if we want to keep the North Carolina coast the kind of place that our children and grandchildren will hold as tightly in their hearts as we hold it in our hearts.”

Even though progress has been made over the last century with environmental laws and conservation efforts, “we also know that in a lot of ways, we have just got started, and I know when we see what’s going on in the country now, that things look bleak for much of what draws us and people from around the world to our shores,” he said, and the work taking place to care for the coast may be at risk.

“I know — I’m not naming names — that there are people in high office now who act as if, well, as if they never walked down the Kure Beach fishing pier on a Friday night in the autumn when the spots and bluefish are running and seeing the joy in the children’s faces and how nobody is a stranger and everybody’s helping everybody, and how much it means to all our state’s citizens to be there by the sea,” he said. “And they act as if they’ve never walked the shores of Cape Lookout when the sea is phosphorescent, the dolphins are playing in the waves and the fish are biting, and they act as if they’ve never traipsed along the edges of Currituck Sound and felt the beauty of the marshes stir their soul.”

The shackling of the Environmental Protection Agency “alone foreshadows the breathtaking descent back into the worst days of our coastal past, when our estuaries, our beaches, our fisheries and the sources of our drinking water were a free-for-all, open to plunder, pillaging and poisoning,” he said.

“I wish I had more words of comfort for you, but we all know the road ahead is not going to be easy,” Cecelski said, reminding the audience that the work of organizations like the Coastal Federation and its partners “will never, ever be greater than it is at this moment in our history.”

He closed by telling a story about how, in the Coastal Federation’s infancy, its founder, Todd Miller, recruited Cecelski as the first volunteer.

“I think that I was invited here today, hopefully not just to tell gruesome stories, but I think I was invited here because of my historical work on the North Carolina coast,” he said.

It was the early 1980s and Miller convinced Cecelski to spend a year in Swan Quarter spreading the word about a proposed massive strip-mining project.

“They wanted to mine the peat. A large, multibillion-dollar, extremely well-connected group of investors was planning to strip mine hundreds of thousands of acres of coastal wetlands stretching across Dare, Hyde, Tyrrell, Beaufort and Washington counties,” he said.

Cecelski continued that when he first arrived, he rarely met anyone who knew about the proposed plan and on the few occasions he did, they realized the project would leave their home a wasteland and devastate the region’s oyster beds and fishing grounds.

“Past experience had led them to conclude that nobody cared what they had to say, that nobody would listen to them, and there was nothing they could do about it, because it had always been that way,” he said.

His job was “a very small part of the puzzle” to let people know what was happening, and help their voices be heard.

“At that moment, I would not have bet five bucks on the chance of our success. Everything — money, power, time — was against us, but little by little, people of every background, every race, every political party and every little village, began to speak up. Hope flickered,” he said. People began to come together and believed they could make a difference, and in the end, the people of the North Carolina coast prevailed.

Though Cecelski was young at the time, he said the experience taught him that even when it looks bleak and “if we don’t give up hope, if we hold on to one another, if we look past our differences to what we hold in common, good things will happen, and sometimes even a miracle or two, even in the darkest of times.”

Cecelski said he knows he’s a terribly old-fashioned person and out of step with much of modern times.

“I still believe in the golden rule that we should treat other people the way that we would want them to treat us. I still believe what I was taught in Sunday school, that we are called to be good stewards of God’s creation and good caretakers of our lands and waters and the creatures thereof,” he said. “I still believe, and I will always believe, what I learned growing up on the North Carolina coast, that a neighbor is a neighbor is a neighbor, and we are all in this together. And I believe with all my heart that there are some things worth fighting for, and I believe that the North Carolina coast is one of them.”

​Dozens of carvers, collectors and exhibitors from North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Delaware are planning to make the journey later this month to Ocracoke Island for a two-day celebration of waterfowl carving heritage.

Hosted by the Ocracoke Island Decoy Carvers Guild, the Ocracoke Island Waterfowl Festival is scheduled for 4 to 7 p.m. Friday, April 11, and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, April 12, in the Ocracoke School gym.

In addition to perusing the about 30 booths expected to be set up in the gym, festivalgoers will have the opportunity to bid on silent auction items, purchase locally baked goods, including Ocracoke fig cake, and buy raffle tickets for the canvasback decoy made by the 2025 featured carver, the late Mark Justice of Ocracoke.

The guild was founded in 2018 to “preserve, promote and carry on our waterfowl carving heritage which has been an important part of our island culture. It is our goal to continue the craft of hand carving decoys so our future generations may enjoy the same and that it will not be lost.”

Trudy Austin, founding board member and Ocracoke resident, said that the support the guild has received from the carving community “has been amazing” and that “there is something for every decoy enthusiast” at the festival.

Every year, the board votes on a carver from the community, and selected Justice in April 2024, Austin explained. Justice, who carved for more than three decades, finished the canvasback decoy before his death in October 2024.

Austin said the guild plans to honor Justice and his family, who donated the decoy after his death to be raffled at the festival.

Founding member Vince O’Neal said during an interview that festivalgoers will have an opportunity to learn about the carving traditions that are “a very important part of our history and still is today” and see different types of decoys.

“As we carry this on, this tradition of making decoys, we’re concentrating on the actual art of making the decoys. So we just encourage everybody to come (to the festival) and have a good time,” he said.

O’Neal has been carving for more than 30 years and prefers carving the traditional, working-style hunting decoys, though there are all types of decoys, and every region has its own style.

O’Neal describes Ocracoke decoys as “somewhat primitive, but stylish, and not a whole lot of detail.”

The decoys were rugged, versatile and practical because of the quantity needed for open waters. “You needed a big rig of them to attract the waterfowl as they were flying by,” he said.

He explained that when the country was growing, “bursting at the seams from late 1800s on, waterfowl was on the menu in practically any restaurant you went to — Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, all the cities” and was important for subsistence, a way for locals to put food on the table.

“There weren’t any Food Lions around, right? You had to eat. You ate what was around and the fowl were abundant,” O’Neal said, reiterating that waterfowl was important to the economy and for subsistence, to live.

Long in the works

Established in 2018, the idea to form the guild had been brewing for decades.

“In high school, John Simpson, Vince O’Neal and Scotty Robinson always talked about starting a decoy guild and festival to honor Ocracoke’s decoy heritage. Ocracoke has had many carvers over the years,” Austin said.

O’Neal said that when the guild started seven years ago, a bunch of local carvers and watermen got together and “we decided we needed to celebrate and preserve the history of and carry on the tradition of waterfowling and hunting, mainly, making the decoys for the hunting,” he said. “We wanted to educate the public on the history, how important carving was and still is today. We didn’t want to lose the art of making decoys.”

Simpson, who died November 2024, was president of the guild and the board is adjusting to the loss.

“He was one of our founding members,” O’Neal said. “He was very instrumental in getting (the guild) going. We talked about it for years, and then we decided, well, you know what, we’re going to do it. So we did, and glad we did so it will carry on. John was big in promoting it, and definitely our leader, but he left us in good shape.”

Hunting has been a big part of Ocracoke tradition, Austin said. “Like some of our board members, I am also a ninth-generation descendant. I collected decoys for years. Being part of the guild and serving on the board was very important to me. Preserving the heritage of decoys is our main goal.”

Donations, details

Donations are being accepted for the silent action and should be related to waterfowl and hunting, as well as baked goods. Contact O’Neal at beachbirds@embarqmail.com to find out more about the silent auction. Baked goods donations should be delivered to the gym by 9 a.m. April 12.

The fish fry to benefit Ocracoke Seafood Co. is to begin at 11 a.m. April 12, followed at 1 p.m. by a decoy head carving competition.

Because of limited parking, a shuttle will be available to transport visitors between Ocracoke School and the National Park Service parking lot by the ferry terminal.

Two University of North Carolina Wilmington professors are collaborating this semester on a documentary celebrating community resilience, adding a new perspective to the overall effort of the Down East Resilience Network.

The network, often referred to as DERN, evolved in the years after Hurricane Florence ravaged coastal North Carolina in September 2018. It’s a project of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island, which was hit particularly hard by the slow-moving Category 1 storm.

Museum Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher coordinated the network of government agencies, researchers, residents and nonprofit organizations.

The idea was to connect similar and overlapping research on flooding, saltwater intrusion, infrastructure damage and other risks associated with rising sea levels in the 13 Carteret County communities, and to offer resources to navigate the changes.

“Our DERN partners continue to work in the Down East area with mapping projects, continued flood monitoring, along with journalism and documentary students during spring semester and the 2025 class of interns this summer,” Amspacher told Coastal Review.

The network holds meetings a few times a year to discuss the research and projects that are carried out year-round. The most recent gathering was in late January on Harkers Island.

UNCW’s Jennifer Biddle, associate professor of environmental policy, and Laura Dunn, film studies professor, attended the Jan. 31 meeting — their first.

Biddle told Coastal Review that she and Dunn attended the meeting to identify how they “could plug in,” and after listening to the research and types of projects, she really appreciated the intention of the network, “to help the local people and local communities adapt to all these changes.”

The next morning, during a roundtable discussion, Biddle and Dunn recognized that their original plan to use a short documentary to help raise awareness had been done.

So, they worked with Amspacher on finding a new perspective, to identify what was missing, “and what was missing is the voice of the future — younger people’s voices. What have they heard and learned from the elders that they want to carry forward? And how do they do that in a changing political and economic society, as well as a changing landscape?”

The documentary became about the community’s resilience. It has “weathered a whole lot of big storms. This is just another big storm,” Biddle said.

The spent February organizing the trip then headed to Down East March 3-7 to film interviews. They stayed in a vacation rental on Harkers Island, where it “was so amazing was to be immersed in the community,” and the week provided a chance for the students to bond and meet people, Biddle said.

The 10 students divvied up into three teams. “We affectionately called them Nature, Culture and Resilience,” Biddle said.

The Resilience crew focused on what’s happening in the area, and how the people are resilient, with a focus on the Core Sound museum.

“The museum itself is a kind of hub of social activity,” Biddle said, adding that one morning there they had seen preschoolers learn about commercial and recreational fishing.

While observing a high school shop class build a skiff, Biddle said they asked the students what they saw for themselves for the future.

“They all had an answer. A lot of it was things they wanted to do, but maybe couldn’t do full time, like shrimping and building boats, because there wasn’t a lot of money there.”

Some said they wanted to work at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point and shrimp in the summers, or be a chef and build boats on the side. “They had these cool, but very realistic plans in terms of how they could make a livelihood,” she said.

On the Nature crew’s first day filming, Biddle said they stumbled upon an oyster farmer who had just pulled in bushels of oysters. He explained how he had grown the oysters, and then opened up a few. “We all got to cheers over half-shells that were really delicious.”

Residents and transportation officials talked to the students about the status of the roads, and a scientist gave an interview about visible signs of change, such as ghost forests and marsh migration, Biddle added.

The students met a father-son team and mother-daughter team of decoy carvers. Witnessing the “passing on of these beautiful traditions and the bonds it builds was really touching.”

Biddle said she joined the Culture crew for an interview with a shrimper and his daughter. The old-timer had described how his kin dated back to the 1700s in Carteret County and are a multigeneration commercial fishing family.

“What was really cool, especially for my policy students to hear, was he described how they self-regulated,” Biddle said. “Up until the ’80s, they were self-regulating their catches” by being assigned a night to catch certain fish, and the fish houses would only buy so much.

The man’s daughter had spoken “eloquently but passionately about her love of gigging flounder and how she would go out at night with her sister to spend time together and how impactful the moratorium” on flounder fishing has been, Biddle said. The state has limited or canceled flounder season altogether over the last few years because of overfishing and being overfished.

Seeing how policy affects people is why she takes students out in the field, to witness how rules can have unintended consequences, especially to those being the most impacted, she said.

Coastal and ocean policy graduate student Kennedy Huntsman is part of the documentary team who visited Down East. She said that policy and documentary film “share intrinsic goals.”

They “both serve as powerful tools for translating complex issues, like science, into accessible and meaningful information for the public. But effective science communication requires a deep understanding of the intended audience. Too often, the communities most impacted by these issues are left out of the conversation, their perspectives overlooked,” she said.

Being able to put this into practice Down East “was an invaluable experience, one that simply couldn’t be replicated in a classroom,” Huntsman said.

Abigail Schindler, a senior in the film studies department, said her favorite moment Down East was the boat ride on the last day of filming.

“This was a truly unique and impressive group of people who love the place they live,” she said, adding they had seen the wild horses, “which was such a cool experience.”

Her biggest takeaway from the experience was understanding why the people Down East love their home so much.

“It’s not just about one thing — family, nature, tradition — it’s everything combined about the place. I heard the phrase ‘why would I want to live anywhere else’ several times and by my last day I finally understood. It’s a place with so much natural beauty and land without hotels and chain restaurants covering its landscape,” Schindler said.

The next step for the documentary is to edit.

“We have probably 150 hours of footage,” Biddle said.

The documentary will likely be a series of vignettes focusing on commercial fishing, boatbuilding and decoy carving. The plan is to give the recordings back to the community and the documentary will be available to the museum.

The project is funded through the Seahawks Advancing Interdisciplinary Learning, or SAIL, program to integrate policy-rich content into short documentary films to help educate and raise awareness about the threats facing coastal communities and what can be done to help them adapt.

Another new face at the Jan. 31 meeting was Jenny Adler, who was getting ready for a stint as a visiting professor at the Duke University Marine Lab on in Pivers Island in Beaufort.

“Having never lived in North Carolina, I knew I had a lot to learn before teaching a course in Science Journalism at the Duke Marine Lab this spring,” Adler explained. “I felt confident I could teach the journalism part of the course and help students report on science, but it was unsettling moving to a place where I had no community connections.”

While writing a grant proposal to fund the students’ stories, she said she came across a ton of coverage in Coastal Review and also quite a few pieces by visual creator Ryan Stancil and photographer Baxter Miller, who are both members of the network and have worked extensively Down East.

Adler said she contacted the two, who then told her about the network meeting.

“So, a week before I started teaching, I drove to Harkers Island from Massachusetts and walked into a meeting where I knew nobody,” she said, and the next eight hours “were informative and inspiring.”

She said the connections she made that day held strong.

“Karen (Amspacher) and several other members I met that day have spoken with my class, been interviewed by my students, shared local knowledge, and provided guidance and stories that have made training the next generation of journalists in a new place such an incredible experience,” Adler said.

Haven Cashwell, a postdoctoral research scholar for the State Climate Office at North Carolina State University, has been coordinating communications for the network.

Over the last few months, she and other members have been working on a website. It wasn’t quite ready at publication, but those attending the Jan. 31 meeting had a sneak peek.

“The goal of the website is to have a place where community members and those interested in the Down East Resilience Network can access information about areas of concern,” which include saltwater intrusion and sunny day flooding, Cashwell said in an interview.

Plans for the website include providing resources, such as how to navigate Federal Emergency Management Agency, raising your home, obtaining a fortified roof, and updates about the network.

“We are currently asking researchers about information they think should be included on this website that community members should know about. We hope this will be used in the future by both community members and DERN members,” Cashwell said.

Dr. Kiera O’Donnell, another member of the network, is a postdoctoral associate at Duke University and is working on a study to better understand coastal water quality concerns in North Carolina.

Residents are being asked to fill out a survey “to help us understand the water quality concerns for surface and ground water throughout Carteret County. We are currently taking surface water quality samples to get a snapshot of the water quality throughout Down East and the surrounding areas,” O’Donnell said. “But we are looking for local perspectives and water quality concerns to help inform us about the current issues locals are dealing with and what they care about when it comes to water quality.”

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

As I looked through an extraordinary group of historical photographs at the State Archives in Raleigh, I found a group of old photographs taken during the Second World War that surprised me.

Some of the photographs show local fishermen harvesting seaweed in the waters off Beaufort in the summer of 1944. Others show the inner workings of a factory in Beaufort that was established during the war to process that seaweed into a jelly-like substance called agar.

Produced by extracting polysaccharides from the cell walls of certain species of seaweed in the red algae family (Rhodophyta), agar has dozens of uses today.

Many of them are culinary. Others have to do with the pharmaceutical industry, medical research, and health care.

Agar is even used in the textile industry, food preservation, and brewing.

However, if you are like me, you remember agar for just one of those uses. Like medical researchers and basic scientists around the world, my high school biology teachers used agar as a growth medium for bacteria. The translucent gel that lined the bottom of our petri dishes was agar.

By using agar, we could grow bacterial cultures on our own, and our teachers could help us to understand the basic properties of bacteria, one of the most ubiquitous forms of life on Earth.

In those petri dishes, that thin layer of agar served as a solid, stable, and nutritious surface for the bacteria to grow, and one that would not be eaten up by the bacteria before we could plumb its secrets.

In the photographer’s notes on the agar factory in Beaufort, I was also surprised to see repeated references to Pivers Island, the small island that is just across the channel from Beaufort and is home to the Duke University Marine Laboratory and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Beaufort laboratory.

The notes were rather obscure, but they made clear that scientists on Pivers Island at the Duke marine lab and at the U.S. Government Fisheries Laboratory, a predecessor of NOAA, or both had played a central role in the establishment of the agar factory in Beaufort.

I felt a little chastened that I had not previously heard a single word about the agar industry in Beaufort or Pivers Island.

I grew up only 20 miles from both Beaufort and Pivers Island. I even lived on the Pivers Island for four months back in 1981, when I was a student at the Duke marine lab. I was a history and botany double major at Duke.

My mother even went to school on Pivers Island during the Second World War. She grew up out in a rural part of Carteret County, but she attended Beaufort High School during the Second World War.

She was a senior when the school burned down over the Christmas holidays in 1944.

My mother’s class finished its senior year on Pivers Island. Her classes met in buildings that were usually used by the marine lab’s summer students.

On several occasions, I have done historical research in two libraries on Pivers Island: the Pearse Memorial Library at the Duke Lab and the library next door at what is now called the NCCOS Beaufort Laboratory.

Yet I had somehow never seen any historical accounts of the agar industry. Even after I found these photographs and began to look for articles or books that might have discussed it, I found only a couple of brief accounts that were written 75 years ago by one of the scientists involved in the agar facility.

Needless to say, my curiosity was aroused. As a historian, I have always been interested in the ways that our lives are entangled with the sea and I felt as if I had missed something important.

That curiosity led me on a bit of a deep dive into subjects that I could never have imagined studying: the history of agar, the ecology of seaweed, and the story of the wartime crisis that led to seaweed harvesting and the construction of the agar factory in Beaufort.

* * *

I began my research by learning more about agar and its history. With a little bit of digging, I soon learned that China, Japan, and other East Asian countries had been using seaweeds extensively as food, medicine, and fertilizer since at least the time of Confucious.

The invention of agar came out of that traditional knowledge of seaweeds and their uses.

By all accounts, agar was invented in Japan. The production of agar in Japan was first documented by Western observers around the time of the American Revolution, but it is believed that Japanese cooks had been using agar in soups, desserts, and other foods long before that time.

Agar was the first seaweed product that was traded extensively in international markets.

According to a scientific overview of the agar industry published soon after the Second World War, approximately 500 small factories in Japan were making agar by the turn of the 20th century. By then, Japanese firms were already exporting large quantities of agar to Europe and the Americas.

Scattered over the Japanese main island of Honshu, those factories were what we might call “craft industries” today: local and using traditional, hand-crafted techniques, not reliant on electricity or machinery.

Cooks in Japan first used agar in their kitchens, but agar spread from Japan to cuisines in many parts of East Asia and the Pacific. In fact, the name “agar” comes from a Malay word for red algae, agar-agar.

The first use of agar as a growth medium for bacteria was not in Japan or elsewhere in East Asia, however.

That use for agar first began in Germany in the late 19th century. In the 1880s, scientists in the great German physician and microbiologist Robert Koch’s laboratory first used agar as a growth medium for bacteria.

Using agar, they succeeded in isolating the bacteria that caused tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax for the first time. Discoveries that saved the lives of untold millions.

It was agar’s exceptional ability to serve as a bacterial medium that led to the agar factory in Beaufort.

Prior to 1939, the vast majority of the world’s supply of bacteriological agar came from Japan, where agar was produced mainly from a red seaweed whose scientific name is Gelidium corneum.

With that supply cut off by the war, many U.S. Allies began seeking to develop their own internal sources of agar.

In a time of war, the availability of bacteriological agar was especially important in medicine.

Physicians and microbiologists sometimes relied on agar to grow bacterial cultures in order to identify diseases. More commonly, they relied on agar to produce vaccines and to grow Staphylococcus aureus, one of the leading causes of wound infections, and other bacteria to test the potency of penicillin.

Great Britain was among the first countries that recognized a shortage of agar as a national emergency. Beginning in 1942, British leaders initiated the large-scale harvesting of red seaweeds on England’s west coast and to a lesser extent in Northumberland.

The United States also declared agar a “critical war material” and moved to assure an adequate supply of agar in 1942.

According to an April 1943 AP story, the federal government’s War Production Board, or WPB, froze the nation’s entire stock of agar in 1942, restricting its use to medical and pharmaceutical purposes. In addition, the WPB authorized the creation of a federal stockpile of 750,000 pounds of agar, more than twice what was available in the country at the time.

The AP story also noted that the U.S. had been using approximately 600,000 pounds of agar a year prior to the war, nearly all of it obtained from Japan.

On a quest to develop a domestic supply of agar, the Food and Drug Administration’s E. G. Poindexter seems to have started the inquiry that led to the agar factory on Pivers Island.

On a tour of the southern coast in 1942, Poindexter met with Dr. Harold J. Humm, a young marine scientist at the Duke University Marine Laboratory, which had opened on Pivers Island a few years earlier.

A specialist in marine alga and marine bacteriology, Humm was later the marine lab’s director and eventually founded what is now the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Sciences.

At Pivers Island, Poindexter and Humm discussed the possibilities for locating seaweeds suitable to the production of agar on the East Coast of the United States.

According to an Oct. 5, 1944, Beaufort News article, the War Production Board, based on Poindexter’s recommendation, soon funded Humm to survey sources of red seaweed that could be used to produce agar.

With that support, Dr. Humm explored coastlines from Chesapeake Bay to the Florida Keys and along the Gulf Coast.

He also began experimenting on making agar with seaweeds found in the vicinity of Pivers Island. By June 1942, he was focusing especially on a red seaweed that locals called “red moss” that was common on the area’s beaches at low tide and in local waters up to a depth of about 60 feet.

Dr. Humm described his research on seaweed and agar in an article called “Agar: A Pre-War Japanese Monopoly” that appeared in the journal Economic Botany in 1947.

A few years later, he published a more comprehensive survey of his work on agar and on the history and uses of agar in general in a chapter of a larger scientific work edited by Donald K. Tressler and J. M. Lemon titled Marine Products of Commerce: Their Acquisition, Handling, Biological Aspects, and the Science and Technology of their Preparation and Preservation (1951).

The experiments showed promise. According to Dr. Humm’s findings, two red seaweeds, Gracilaria confervoides and Gracilaria foliifera, both in a genus commonly called “Irish moss,” were available at commercially viable levels in the intertidal zones on that part of the North Carolina coast.

Persuaded by Dr. Humm’s research, a private firm called the Van Sant Co. began recruiting fishermen to harvest the seaweed and also began fashioning a small experimental facility. I am a bit unclear if that temporary facility was located in Beaufort or on Pivers Island.

The company had been established by Harvey G. Van Sant, the driving force behind a biochemical firm called the American Chlorophyll Company that was based in Washington, D.C.

Several years later, in 1947, Harvey G. Van Sant described the American Chlorophyll Company as “a pioneer in the field of processing and refining natural pigments and vitamins” from organic sources for use in “foods, cosmetics, feeds, and pharmaceuticals.” The Palm Beach Post, April 4, 1947.

During the spring and summer of 1943, the Van Sant Co’s scientists also undertook research on seaweed harvesting methods and on the preparation of agar.

That research was done in cooperation with Dr. Humm, as well as with scientists at the U.S. Government Fisheries Laboratory, also on Pivers Island, and other government fishery scientists.

“We Could See Ships Burning”

One of the scientists who supported the company’s agar research was Dr. Herbert Prytherch, the director of the U.S. Government Fisheries Lab. His son later wrote a brief reminiscence of his childhood that gives a sense of what the Second World War was like in Beaufort that is not revealed in our photographs.

In his excellent history of the U.S. Government Fisheries Lab, NOAA scientist Douglas A. Wolfe quoted Herbert Prytherch, Jr.:

“The port terminal at Morehead City [a half-mile west of Pivers Island] afforded safety for a number of ships, and they would stay there until dark of the moon came each month.

“German submarines would lurk offshore, waiting for these ships to leave the harbor. Late at night we would hear the distant thud of torpedoes and depth charges. Next we would hear endless sounds of airplane engines, followed by more explosions. Sometimes on the morning after, we could see ships burning….

“During these days the beaches were black, covered with oil. Many sailor caps were also found, and sometimes bodies.”

By November 1943, the Van Sant Co. had begun to produce commercial agar, though again I am unsure if those first efforts were undertaken somewhere in Beaufort or on Pivers Island.

Soon local fishermen with boats piled high with tons of seaweed were a not uncommon sight on that part of the North Carolina coast.

The fishermen would say that they were going out “mossing.”

“Thousands of unexpected dollars have found their way into fishermen’s pockets and `mossing’ has begun to take its place with clamming, crabbing, fishing, and other industries,” The Beaufort News announced.

Over the course of that fall, the fishermen delivered an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 tons of seaweed to the company’s dock.

For the old salts at least, collecting seaweed was nothing new, though they had never done it anywhere close to that extent. But old timers still used seaweed as a fertilizer in their gardens, and many fishing people used that same red seaweed to stuff the mattresses where they slept at night.

Sometime that fall of 1943, for reasons that are unclear to me, Harvey Van Sant sold the company to a M.W. Stansfield, a businessman who renamed the firm the Beaufort Chemical Co.

Stansfield also purchased a 40-acre waterfront lot a few miles away in Lennoxville, on the far side of Beaufort, and began to build the agar facility that we see in these photographs from the State Archives.

In a Feb. 21, 1943, article in the Raleigh News & Observer, reporter Amy Muse described how the company’s workers followed a method of making agar that was very similar to the traditional methods used in Japan.

“The [sea] grass is spread out to dry and bleach for several days, during which time it is sprinkled at intervals with sea water. Then the cooking: The grass is boiled in a generous supply of water, resulting in a soupy product. This is strained through cloth and poured into shallow pans, where it solidifies like a clear gelatin. It is from this, through a scientific process, that pure bacteriological agar is obtained.”

Muse left out a step or two, a great deal of filtering, dehydrating, freezing, chemical additives, drying, and milling, but that was it in a nutshell.

I have not found historical records on the quantity of seaweed harvested at the company’s plants, or on the quantity of agar produced at them, or of the company’s profits.

However, I do know that the local agar industry was relatively short-lived. With the support of the War Production Board, the Beaufort Chemical Co. seemed to thrive during the war and played an important part in helping the country to overcome its reliance on Japanese agar.

But by the winter of 1945-46, soon after the war’s ghastly ending at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the company’s leaders were already saying that the local supply of Gracilaria confervoides and Gracilaria foliifera, the “red mosses” necessary to make agar, was dwindling.

The company soon shuttered its facility in Lennoxville and relocated its base of operations to the Florida coast. In 1948, the Beaufort Chemical Co.’s directors declared bankruptcy.

At that time, another company, Sperti, Inc., bought the company’s plant in Lennoxville.

Named for its president, a Cincinnati research scientist named Dr. George Sperti, Sperti, Inc. continued to make bacteriological agar and apparently also agar for culinary and other uses for a few more years.

Today Dr. George Sperti is remembered most often for inventing another product connected to the sea– the hemorrhoid treatment Preparation H. The original formulation of Preparation H included shark liver oil as a central ingredient.

Dr. Sperti closed the facility sometime in 1951 or 1952. Then, in the summer of 1953, the company’s main processing plant on Lennoxville Road, abandoned at the time, burned to the ground. The agar industry’s brief moment on the North Carolina coast was over.

* * *

Special thanks to Douglas A. Wolfe for sharing his extensive knowledge of Pivers Island’s history and the work of its marine laboratories with me. 

This is the 2nd in my “Working Lives” series that looks at the stories behind a collection of historical photographs that were taken on the North Carolina coast between 1937 and 1953. 

The photographs were originally taken for a state agency called the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development. Today they are preserved at the State Archives in Raleigh. 

You can’t help but wonder what Reaves Chapel’s first parishioners would think if they were around to see the little church in Navassa today.

Would they marvel at the fact that the chapel they’d built more than a century ago on the bluffs of the Cape Fear River in Brunswick County will serve as a testament to their existence?

Could they begin to comprehend the tens of thousands of dollars it cost to painstakingly restore the church to its former glory?

Perhaps they’d share feelings similar to those of the people who’ve devoted years to seeing a project through to preserve one of the oldest African American buildings in southeastern North Carolina.

“Every time we’ve been there this year and walked in with the new floor in and finished, it’s nothing but full body joy,” said Jesica Blake, North Carolina Coastal Land Trust associate director. “Reaves Chapel and other structures in other places that have ties to the history in African American communities are very few and far between. Time and weather and lack of resources have all come in to play in making it so there’s not a lot there and so it’s really important for this original structure that can tell so many layers of history can be protected. Now it will stand for generations to come.”

The chapel in Navassa is set to be dedicated on Friday, marking the end of a long chapter in the building’s storied history, one that enshrines at least some fraction of the lives of those formerly enslaved at Cedar Hill Plantation.

“In terms of history, what really is good about this facility is that it will be a living tribute to exactly what happened and you can tell a story and you will have a visual,” said Henry Robbins, treasurer of the Cedar Hill/West Bank Heritage Foundation.

It’s a story that one of the church’s former congregants, Al Beatty, spent the better part of the last 15 years of his life fighting to preserve.

Beatty helped form the Cedar Hill/West Bank Foundation in 2011 in an effort to save Reaves Chapel. By that time the church had fallen into dilapidation, its doors long since closed to a congregation that filled its pews donning their Sunday Best.

As Robbins put it, “Al had the idea some years ago of restoring the facility, but he didn’t have the finances to do it.”

So Beatty turned to the Coastal Land Trust in 2015 and, about four years later, the land trust purchased the chapel with money from the Orton Foundation, the North Carolina affiliate of The Moore Charitable Foundation, which supports cultural and historic restoration initiatives in the Cape Fear River Basin.

The project faced what seemed like a myriad of obstacles that kept both Blake and Beatty on an emotional rollercoaster-like ride with climbs of anxiety and plunges of laughter.

After the Coastal Land Trust purchased the chapel in 2019, the first of two stabilization efforts ensued. Beatty and Blake watched in agony as the chapel, by then in a significant state of disrepair, visibly shake as its steeple was removed.

The following year introduced the COVID-19 pandemic, one that ultimately shut down much of the world. Fundraising was hard to do because potential donors could not be ushered to the church. The building materials needed to restore the chapel significantly rose in both cost and demand during that time.

This all slowed the restoration process, leaving the chapel vulnerable to coastal storms and hurricanes.

“The church was degrading quickly,” Blake said. “It wouldn’t have remained standing if we’d had a big storm. It was holding on.”

All told, the project cost doubled to more than $1 million. That price tag includes the church restoration, landscaping, parking lot and detached restrooms on the property.

Blake and Beatty met at the chapel just a couple of weeks ago, near giddy as they strode into the finished product of their longtime labor of love.

Beatty will be noticeably absent at Friday’s dedication. He died Feb. 21. He was 74.

In a 2022 interview with Coastal Review, Beatty shared childhood memories of attending Reaves Chapel with his family. On Easter Sundays, he and the other children had to recite from the pulpit short speeches intertwined with scripture.

By then, the chapel had been relocated by its congregation, using logs and a team of oxen, inland on land Ed Reaves, a former Cedar Hill Plantation slave, donated to the church in 1911. The church eventually became affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal denomination and remained an AME church until its doors closed permanently in the mid-2000s.

Reaves Chapel will not be a regularly functioning church. The heritage foundation and land trust hope the chapel will become a state historic site, one that may be used by the community from time to time.

Beatty was actively planning the upcoming dedication ceremony before his death.

“Really it’s a shame,” Robbins said. “He saw the church come to the conclusion with respect to restoration, but he won’t be able to see the other side of the restoration.”

Blake said she would give anything for Beatty to be there with her Friday.

“But I know he’ll be there anyway,” she said.

The dedication will be part of a series of special events leading up to Leland’s annual North Carolina Rice Festival set for Saturday. For more information visit www.northcarolinaricefestival.org

The Reaves Chapel dedication is invitation-only. Those who would like to reserve a spot at Friday’s ceremony may email Blake at jesica@coastallandtrust.org.

Invitations will be made available on a first-come, first-served basis as limited space is available.

There’s a historic marker by the road as U.S. Highway 64 turns toward Manteo when approaching from the Outer Banks.

“ANDREW CARTWRIGHT Agent of the American Colonization Society in Liberia, founded the A.M.E. Zion churches in Albemarle area. His first church, 1865, near here. NC 345 at US 64/264 southeast of Manteo,” the sign reads.

The sign, though, only hints at the full story, saying very little about Cartwright the man, his efforts to bring the African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion Church to Africa, the American Colonization Society or the times in which he lived.

The consensus is Cartwright was born enslaved in Elizabeth City, probably in 1834, and at some point before the Civil War he escaped and fled north.

“By the beginning of the Civil War, Cartwright and his wife Anna, were living in New England and Andrew had become a minister in the African Methodist Episcopalian Zion Church,” according to the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources account of Cartwright’s life included on the highway marker description website.

Cartwright followed Union forces to North Carolina, and his presence on Roanoke Island is confirmed in an autobiography, “A brief history of the slave life of Rev. L.R. Ferebee.” Ferebee describes coming in contact with Cartwright at the Roanoke Island Freedman’s Colony, writing, “Some time in May, the same year (1864), Rev. Andrew Cartwright lectured the Sabbath School on the subject of Repentance.”

The Roanoke Island church was the first of the AME Zion houses of worship Cartwright founded in northeastern North Carolina. He would go on to organize and build 12 churches in 10 years throughout the region.

He was, however, becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the relationship between races.

“By the end of Reconstruction Cartwright had become disillusioned about his future in America. He served as an agent for the American Colonization Society, and in 1876 accepted their aid to emigrate,” Walter Williams wrote in “Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa.”

In March 1871, Cartwright was named president of the Freedmen’s Emigrant Society. Later that year, the organization’s constitution and its preamble were published in the May edition of the African Repository, the publication of the American Colonization Society.

“Whereas, We, persons of African descent, see no prospect of our race ever enjoying the right that naturally indue to freemen—while we remain in this country,” the preamble begins.

The bylaws lay out the purpose of the organization in stark language, stating, “The design of the members of this Society being to aid each other to obtain a home in Liberia, where, by the help of God, we shall be able to enjoy peace and happiness and all our social rights and privileges, which we despair of ever doing in this country.”

That Cartwright was working with the African Colonization Society was significant. Formed in 1816, the mission of the society was initially to return free people of color to what is now Liberia.

When created, its membership included some of the most prominent white men of the nation. Sens. Henry Clay of Kentucky and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Francis Scott Key, who wrote the words to the “Star-Spangled Banner,” were among its founding members.

The society enjoyed widespread support initially. Presidents Monroe and Madison supported colonization, although they were not members.

In the South, slaveholders saw the organization as a way to rid themselves of free people of color who were an ever-present reminder to their enslaved people that freedom was possible. In the north, abolitionists saw the African colony as a viable way to give free people of color a new start in life and avoid the issue of equality between the races.

Although initially popular and well-funded, the society did not have the resources to support a colonization effort in Africa. Nor were the American immigrants welcomed in Liberia. Compounding the problems, by the 1840s the coalition of abolitionists and slaveholders was falling apart. Abolitionists increasingly saw the society as a way for slaveholders to retain their property and slaveholders were unwilling to free enslaved people and return them to Africa.

Nonetheless, the society remained a viable organization into the 20th century and didn’t dissolve until 1964.

If white America saw the society as a practical solution to racial tensions, most Americans of African descent had no desire to go to a continent they’d never seen. In 1849, Frederick Douglass, writing in the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator observed, “I have as much right in this country as any other man…Our connection with this country is contemporaneous with your own. From the beginning of the existence of this people, as a people, the colored man has had a place upon the American soil.”

Yet there was an undercurrent of support among some African Americans as reconstruction ended and Jim Crow laws began to take effect.

“Despite financial and ideological limitations, sentiment favoring the evangelization of Africa did begin to grow among the black denominations after the late 1870s,” Williams wrote in “The Evangelization of Africa.”

The emigration movement was, Williams noted, “a nonreligious movement that pulled the church leadership into involvement.”

The call to return to Africa for Cartwright was, evidently twofold. He had become convinced that equality between the races was not possible in the United States, and a belief that he would bring the AME Zion church to Africa.

The 1877 annual society report wrote that “twenty-one promising emigrants embarked at New York on the barque ‘Liberia,’ and that … Rev. Andrew Cartwright … expect(s) to join the Liberia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church.”

Initially Cartwright’s missionary work was not done under the authority or supervision of the AME Zion church, nor did the church provide funding for his work.

“Even though he had no financial support or authority from denominational leaders, he organized A.M.E.Z. congregations among the Americo-Liberians,” Williams wrote.

Cartwright was a master at presenting the best picture of his work possible.

“I find the young people take great delight in a church ruled and governed by colored leaders or black bishops,” he told readers of The Star of Zion, the publication of the AME Zion church.

“Rev. Cartwright sent such positive reports back to the denomination moved the 1880 Annual Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion to take permanent action for the support of African missions,” Leroy Fitz wrote in “A history of the African American Church.”

That support was short-lived.

“The intensity of interest among A.M.E.Z. leaders in Africa did not last long, and within a few years Cartwright’s salary was reduced by half, to only four hundred dollars annually…The church’s lack of response toward missions was partly due to Cartwright’s lack of progress in Liberia. He was a poor administrator, and had not expanded the mission,” Williams wrote.

Cartwright’s relationship with the American church leaders was frayed. In 1896 the AME Zion church appointed John Bryan Small Bishop for Africa. His visit to Liberia did not go well.

“Small was not impressed with Andrew Cartwright, and he found the A.M.E.Z. Liberian mission in ‘poor condition,’” Williams wrote.

Reacting to the lack of support and what was apparently a damning report from his superior, Cartwright lashed out in the Nov. 12, 1896, edition of The Star of Zion, a publication of the AME Zion church.

“What has A. Cartwright done to be treated like this, after working so long in America; walking and wading, Winter and Summer, and building so many churches—twelve in ten years—then went to Africa, crossing the ocean eleven times in the interest of Zion. I know better than anyone what I went for,” he wrote.

Cartwright remained in Liberia until his death in 1903.

“Elder Andrew Cartwright fell quietly into the arms of death between twelve and one o’clock p.m., Wednesday January 14, 1903 at his residence in Africa. He was born on March 15, 1834 in Elizabeth City, N.C. and was raised in the same State. He was not an educated man, but had a little learning,” according to his obituary.

From the editor: Kip Tabb, who resides on the Outer Banks and writes for Coastal Review and other regional publications, documented his recent walk along the Freedom Trail at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site.

The Freedom Trail on the north end of Roanoke Island is a beautiful walk through history. A history that is both uplifting and troubling.

Beginning at the visitor center of Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, the trail is an easy 2.5-mile out and back hike through a verdant maritime forest that ends at Freedmen’s Point on Croatan Sound.

Depicting the story of the Freedmen’s Colony on Roanoke Island, interpretive signs along the path give details of what life was like there. Metal silhouette statues stand behind the signs in silent testimony to the tale that is told.

The Freedmen’s Colony is the story of the enslaved people who came to Roanoke Island desperate for freedom and hope.

It is a story that is interwoven with the men and women who came from the North to help an illiterate population learn to live in a free society.

After Union forces seized Roanoke Island in February 1862, enslaved people came by the hundreds and even thousands to the island, seeking refuge and freedom.

At first, the men and women who had escape bondage were called “contraband.” Because the South was in rebellion against the North, any property seized was considered contraband of war.

In the South, enslaved people were considered property and based on that premise, they were not returned.

Even before President Abraham Lincoln’s Jan. 1, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation, enslaved people behind Union lines were considered free people.

In 1863 the Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony was officially established. It was the first in North Carolina and one of the first in the nation. At its peak, according to an 1864 census, it had a population of 3,901.

In 1867 it was disbanded.

About the trail

Along the trail are eight interpretive signs and nine silhouettes that represent individuals who lived and worked at the Freedmen’s Colony on Roanoke Island, according to the National Park Service.

The trail was unveiled June 1, 2024, during a ceremony organized by the National Park Service and the Dare County Trails Commission.

The sign, “Roanoke Island Before 1862,” with silhouettes representing Annice Jackson and her daughters, Marie and Alice in the background, highlights Marie Ferribee Watkins, who “was born enslaved in North Carolina. Through the strong will of her mother Annice Ferribee, she was able to become part of the Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony. After beginning formal education at the colony, she went to present-day Hampton University, becoming a college graduate and eventually an educator,” the National Park Service website states.

The nine silhouettes represent different people who were part of the history of the Freedmen’s Colony on Roanoke Island.

When war came to Roanoke Island, Thomas Robinson who grew up enslaved on Hatteras Island, helped Union forces navigate the local waters.

He never officially was part of the Freedmen’s Colony, but stayed with Gen. Ambrose Burnside throughout the war. Afterwards, records show he moved to Rhode Island.

The thirst for literacy was intense among the residents of the Freedmen’s Colony. During its time on Roanoke Island, 10 schools were established.

“Arriving on Roanoke Island as an illiterate fourteen-year-old boy and leaving three years later as an accomplished scholar and educator, Reverend London L. Ferebee exemplifies how many Freed people used the Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony as a springboard into emancipated life,” according to the park service.

As the colony became established, missionaries from the north came to teach in schools and spread the Gospel. Of particular note was Horace James.

“Horace James was an evangelical minister from Massachusetts who served as a Union Army chaplain and director of the Freedmen’s Colony on Roanoke Island. A graduate of Yale University, James enlisted as Army chaplain of the Twenty-Fifth Massachusetts Volunteers on October 29, 1861. In April, 1863, Major General John G. Foster appointed James “Superintendent of All the Blacks” in the Department of North Carolina. Based in New Bern, James was put in charge of the colony,” according to the park service.

In May 1863 the US Colored Troops was formed and many of the men of the Freedmen’s Colony enlisted, among them were Richard Etheridge, who went on to be the Pea Island Lifesaving Station Keeper and Spencer Gallop.

“Spencer Gallop worked on Roanoke Island cutting down trees for the Union forces after the Battle of Roanoke Island. When the Army began recruiting on the island, Spencer enlisted and served in the 36th U.S.C.T. becoming one of the first official Black soldiers in the U.S. Army,” according to the park service.

Religion was a central part of the Freedmen’s Colony experience. The enslaved people were educated by missionary women from northern churches and African American pastors from the AME and AME Zion churches.

Sarah Freeman stayed on Roanoke Island after the Civil War ended to help the formerly enslaved people navigate a life of freedoms. She left in 1866.

“Despite being one of the oldest teachers at age 51, Sarah Freeman’s remarkable dedication during her time as a teacher at the Freedmen’s Colony of Roanoke Island distinguished her as a resilient and industrious woman. Even when she was stricken with malarial fever and confined to her bed for a period, Freeman persisted in her unwavering efforts, alongside her daughter, to tirelessly distribute food and clothing to the formerly enslaved individuals on the island,” the park service says on the website.

The federal government broke their promises to the people who had come to all Freedmen’s Colonies.

“This colony, similar to others established by the Union army, gave African Americans their first tastes of independence and freedom. However, like other sites, it was short-lived and soon faded from the pages of history,” states the park service website.

Although the government had promised land and farming equipment to the residents of the Freedmen’s Colony, with Andrew Johnson as president, those promises were withdrawn and support for all Freedmen’s Colonies severely curtailed. By 1867 the Roanoke Colony was disbanded.

Clarification: Dr. Smallwood is a descendant of the Tuscarora people, not the Cherokee. During his presentation when he said “we were Cherokees” he was explaining that many Native descendants assumed that Cherokee was their heritage. This story has been updated for clarity.

MOREHEAD CITY — About 50 made their way to Mug Shot Caffeine and Cocktails on a chilly Saturday afternoon in mid-January to hear Dr. Arwin D. Smallwood explain “The History of the Coree and Neusiok Native Americans of Carteret County, North Carolina.”

Smallwood was the first to present for Coastal Carolina Riverwatch’s new initiative, “Cultural Perspectives Series: Coastal Indigenous Communities and Ecological Wisdom.” The nonprofit organization works to protect the water bodies, estuaries and coastline in the White Oak River Basin, mostly in Carteret, Jones, Onslow and Pender counties.

“I’m still just an ol’ country boy from eastern North Carolina, and that’s never left me, and it’s still a part of who I am,” Smallwood began. “I grew up in Bertie County in Indian Woods,” which was the old Tuscarora reservation established in 1717.

Now the dean of the College of Liberal Arts at North Carolina Central University in Durham, Smallwood has spent his career studying the relationships among African Americans, Native Americans and Europeans in eastern North Carolina during the colonial and early antebellum periods.

During his presentation when he said that while growing up in Indian Woods, “we were Cherokees” and “grandma was Cherokee, right?” he was illustrating that many Native descendants assumed their heritage was Cherokee because the Tuscaroras’ history had largely been erased.

Smallwood said that he never fully understood who the Tuscarora and other Native groups in eastern North Carolina were until he was a student at N.C. Central, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

“We didn’t know anything much about our community, other than we’ve always been from there,” he said. “I knew all my family and all my people, but we didn’t know very much about the history of the area beyond our family lore and family stories.”

In a class on state history he read “North Carolina: The History of a Southern State,” written by “two great professors out of Chapel Hill,” Hugh Talmage Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome.

They mentioned his community, Indian Woods, by name in the first chapter, and “I said to myself, if this is significant enough to be in this book from these two great Carolina scholars, then it must be significant,” Smallwood explained. This inspired him to commit his life to learning and researching as much as possible about Native peoples, particularly Tuscaroras and those in eastern North Carolina.

Smallwood went on to earn his doctorate in early U.S. and African American history from the Ohio State University, and has held positions at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, the University of Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee, and Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois.

Smallwood said that, because he was presenting in Morehead City, he narrowed the focus of his talk to the Coree and Neusiok of Carteret County, who are among several groups in the region of Iroquois origin and have a connection to the Tuscarora whom he studies.

The Iroquois are an ancient people who migrated from Central America and Mexico thousands of years ago, to what is now the Midwest, then to what is now the state of New York. Many moved south from there, following the valleys and rivers, eventually reaching eastern North Carolina.

The Coree, Neusiok, Tuscarora, Meherrin and Nottoway, who straddle the Virginia and North Carolina border, are Iroquois, or the Haudenosaunee people. “We call them Iroquois. It was a name given to them by the French, but their Native name is Haudenosaunee,” or people of the long house.

“The Iroquois said that they had a confederation,” Smallwood continued. “If you attack one of the Iroquois, you attack them all. If you attack the Mohawks, then all of the Haudenosaunee would attack you. If you attack the Tuscarora, all of the Haudenosaunee and the Allies will attack you. They were a family. They were all kin.”

The Tuscaroras were the largest and most powerful group at one time and were scattered all over eastern North Carolina, from Virginia to the Cape Fear River. The population began to decline as early as Spanish contact in the late 1400s and early 1500s. By the start of the Tuscarora War in 1711, disease and conflict caused the once-heavily inhabited region to depopulate.

There were a “host of other Indians in Coastal North Carolina,” Smallwood said, and while some were Algonquian-speaking peoples, they were allied with the Tuscaroras and Corees at the start of the Tuscarora War, “and that war was as much about control of this region.”

After the Tuscarora war in the mid-1710s, “we call it the Tuscarora diaspora,” large numbers scattered all over North Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, eastern Ohio, Pennsylvania into Canada, and many returned to New York.

The Tuscarora had a sophisticated trade network spanning from the Outer Banks to as far south as Florida, as far north as Canada and as far west as Memphis.

The trading paths the Native people created are now the state roadways, like U.S. Highway 70 and N.C. 12, connecting old Native communities that are now North Carolina towns.

One reason the coastal areas were important for trade is the access to seashells. “Native Americans value seashells in the same way that Europeans value gold and silver, diamonds,” and other precious stones. Seashells had great spiritual meaning and were used as currency.

“And to trade, you had to speak Tuscarora. That was the trading language,” he said.

The maps Ralph Lane and John White illustrated when first reaching eastern North Carolina in 1584-85 show a well-established community with religious buildings, houses and gardens.

The Native people knew the land and cultivated for food or medicine different types of crops, many of which were introduced to the settlers and are still grown today. Smallwood gave the example of tobacco, which was originally ceremonial but is now a multibillion-dollar industry, corn, beans and white potatoes.

He recounted traditions from his childhood in Bertie County. Going out at night to fill up the bed of a truck with herring, having wild plums, strawberries, apples, pears and peaches, and watching his mother garden the way her mother did and her mother before her.

“I found that so many traditions and customs that we think are African American or European, are actually Native American and were transferred to us, and we have carried them on — cooking traditions, gardening habits and behaviors,” he said.

“We have passed them on from generation to generation. And we don’t even know why we did these things, but they were transferred somewhere when we were blending cultures,” Smallwood said.

The blending of cultures happened a handful of ways, including early white settlers marrying Native women, and white indentured servants and enslaved African Americans would run away places like the Great Dismal Swamp and intermix with the Native population.

“Our cultures are blended. Native, African and European, and it is what makes us Southern, what makes us American, what makes us North Carolinians,” but, “We’re different here in eastern North Carolina,” he said. “This is home, and we share a culture, and we share an identity, and that identity and that culture has been forged over hundreds of years.”

About the series

Riverwatch Executive Director Lisa Rider told Coastal Review that Smallwood’s “expertise in African American and Native American history, particularly in North Carolina, provides invaluable insights into the often-overlooked narratives that shape our understanding of the coastal communities we serve.”

The organizers launched the series that “recognizes the intertwined histories of African American and Indigenous communities in coastal North Carolina, emphasizing their shared heritage and contributions to ecological stewardship,” and are planning the next installment for this summer.

Secotan Alliance president and founder Gray Michael Parsons is scheduled to be the speaker Saturday, July 12, in Morehead City.

Riverwatch said that the Secotan Alliance’s inaugural symposium, “In the Spirit of Wingina and Beyond” held in May 2024 in Manteo inspired the cultural series. The theme for the 2025 symposium the last weekend in May is “Our Women: Leaders of Indigeneity.”

Parsons is a descendant of the Machapunga-Mattamuskeet people and has focused his efforts on honoring Indigenous leaders and promoting environmental stewardship. He is also the author of “Hope on Hatterask,” a work rooted in his Indigenous heritage.

Parsons founded the alliance “to educate the public on the traditional indigenous principles of the Secotan Alliance under the leadership of Chief Wingina.” The Secotan Alliance was first documented by the English at initial contact in 1584. The alliance territory included Dare, Hyde, Beaufort, Washington and Tyrrell counties. Chief Wingina was beheaded by the English military in June 1586 after an attempt to expand the alliance. 

Parsons told Coastal Review that his focus will be on providing a “functional definition and real world understanding of the ‘Indigenous Earth Ethic’ and the inclusive concept of what I refer to as ‘Indigen-us’.” 

He added that his goal is to empower all to see and understand their own deep indigenous ancestral identity as a part of the natural world.

“In doing so it is my hope that they will embrace and live a more sustainable life and thus one that is in what I call ‘Righteous Relationship with Creation,’” he said.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

This is a special group of photographs that were taken on the Roanoke River, just west of Plymouth in the spring of 1939. Now preserved at the State Archives in Raleigh, they show the last days of two of the oldest herring seine fisheries on the North Carolina coast.

One of the herring fisheries, on the north side of the river, was called Kitty Hawk. The other, on the river’s south bank, was called Slade. They were owned by a local merchant, farmer and banker named W.R. “Roy” Hampton, whose family had operated the two fisheries since the first decade after the Civil War.

This is the first in a series of photo essays I’m writing on working lives on the North Carolina coast just before, during, and after the Second World War. The photographs all come from the N. C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection at the State Archives in Raleigh. 

In an interview with East Carolina University graduate student Charles L. Heath Jr. in 1997, Roy Hampton’s son recalled that the fishermen at his family’s fisheries had historically come from a community called Piney Woods, also known as Free Union, a historic multiracial settlement established by free African Americans and Native Americans in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Over the years, I have written a good bit about the history of the herring fisheries on the Albemarle Sound and on two of its tributaries, the Chowan River, a blackwater stream that flows out of the Great Dismal Swamp, and the Roanoke, which flows out of the Appalachian foothills.

I imagine that the same could be said of all historians who have studied that part of the North Carolina coast in any depth.

For centuries, for millennia really, the herring fisheries were at the very heart of life on those shores.

Yearning to return to the waters where they began their lives, the herring left the Atlantic in the last days of winter and the first days of spring. Since time immemorial, great schools of the fish moved through Outer Banks inlets, passed into Albemarle Sound, and then continued upstream into the rivers and creeks that were their spawning grounds.

In a typical year, millions of fish, maybe billions, made the journey. By the 1840s and 1850s, when thousands of free and enslaved African Americans harvested herring in giant seines a mile or more in length, they sometimes caught 100,000 fish in a single haul and, on rare occasions, as many as half a million.

That was at the great seine fisheries on the Albemarle Sound, which were basically larger versions of the kind of fishery in these photographs from Plymouth. But the silvery little fish were there for one and all. On small creeks and streams, as well as in ditches, even the poorest souls could catch herring with a homemade bow net or a bushel basket.

Despite all I have written about the history of the herring fisheries, these photographs from Plymouth still stood out to me. They may not be as grand and awe-inspiring as some of the photographs, drawings, and paintings I have seen of the seine fisheries that flourished on the Albemarle Sound in earlier times, but I found them at least as compelling.

In the first place, they give us a glimpse at the seine fisheries on the Roanoke. I have previously written a little on the Roanoke’s herring fisheries, but both contemporary accounts and my and the work of other historians has focused far more on the even larger and more eye-opening fisheries that flourished on the Albemarle Sound and the Chowan River in the 19th century.

But African American fishermen, both free and enslaved laborers, were hauling herring seines on the Roanoke all that time as well. Even as late as 1896, several hundred fishermen and women operated eight seine fisheries within 10 miles of Plymouth.

Those fisheries included Kitty Hawk and Slade in Plymouth, two others 10 miles upriver in Jamesville, and four more downriver, between Plymouth and the Cashie River.

Each of those fisheries was the center of a little world. Each had its own history and its own folkways. No doubt each had its own celebrations, for there was no time of year when bellies were likely to be fuller or money more abundant.

No doubt each left its own scars too. The work was hard, the hours long — before sunup to past sundown — and the weather was often brutally cold. If ice had to be broken to make a set, ice was broken.

All of those fisheries were bound to the local history of slavery and plantation life, as well as, in many cases, to African American/Indian communities such as Piney Woods/Free Union.

At the very least, these photographs remind us that the Roanoke was once a place of abundance, and that the lives of its people were once bound inextricably to the natural world.

-2-

I also found these photographs compelling because of when they were taken.

The photographer, who was employed by the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development, took the last of these photographs in the first few days of May 1939.

A few days later, the Kitty Hawk and Slade fisheries closed for the last time. For reasons I will discuss shortly, Roy Hampton had decided that the size of the herring catches had fallen so drastically that he could no longer justify the expense of labor, fishing gear and provisions.

The next winter, for the first time since before the Civil War, no seine fishermen made the journey down to the site of the Hampton family’s fisheries. The fishery’s women workers, the African American women who headed, gutted, and often helped salt the fish, also stayed home.

At least on that part of the Roanoke, the age of fishermen hauling the great herring seines and of raucous crowds gathering to watch them and dine on fried herring dinners was over.

Seen in that light, these photographs mark an historic moment: the end of one way of life, the coming of another, yet unknown.

 -3-

A final compelling feature of these photographs concerns the reason that Roy Hampton closed the two fisheries. He and many other fishermen were convinced that the steep decline in herring catches was due to the construction of a giant pulp mill on the Roanoke in 1937.

A division of a large, national wood and paper products corporation based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the North Carolina Pulp Co. located its mill just upriver of the scenes in these photographs.

Plymouth, a small town of a couple thousands residents at that time, had never seen anything like it. The company’s smokestacks came to dominate the town’s skyline, as did the sulfurous smell of its furnaces. The company quickly bought or leased timberlands in at least five coastal counties, and thousands, many of them desperate to get off tenant farms, flocked to Plymouth to get jobs either in the mill or the company’s logging crews.

The arrival of the pulp mill made Plymouth into a “company town,” with the company being the North Carolina Pulp Co.

According to Hampton, the fishermen at the Slade and Kitty Hawk fisheries began seeing dramatic declines in their catches as soon as the pulp mill began releasing wastes into the Roanoke. The river’s waters smelled of sulfur, they claimed, and some reported fish kills.

At the end of the 1939 herring season, Hampton shuttered the Kitty Hawk and Slade fisheries. He kept them closed in 1940. Then, instead of reopening in 1941, he went to court.

In a pair of state and federal lawsuits, Hampton accused the North Carolina Pulp Co. of dumping untreated or inadequately treated sulphates into the Roanoke, poisoning the river’s waters and destroying the herring fisheries.

In a subsequent federal lawsuit, filed in 1943, Hampton sought $30,000 in damages, an enormous sum in that day. That lawsuit referred to the pulp mill’s wastes as “a wrongful and unlawful trespass and nuisance, destroying the fish inhabiting the water” where his fisheries were located.

At that time, Hampton could do little else. Prior to the Second World War, no state agency had the authority to regulate industrial pollutants or to set standards for pollutants in our waterways.

Federal law also provided very little meaningful regulation of pollutants.

That did not begin to change until the U.S. Congress passed the Federal Water Pollution Act of 1948.

Even then, federal regulation of water quality had little teeth. That did not change until environmental activists succeeded in pushing the Nixon Administration to create the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and prompted Congress to pass the Clean Water Act of 1972.

If the Trump Administration lives up to its promises, the EPA will be dismantled over the next four years. The Clean Water Act of 1972 may or may not continue to exist in name, but the protections that it has provided to our rivers and streams, to our fisheries, and to public health will disappear.

-4-

During the Second World War, Roy Hampton’s attorneys had some success in court, winning on issues of standing at the North Carolina Supreme Court and at the U. S. Court of Appeals in Richmond. For a summary of those court rulings, see Hampton v. N. C. Pulpwood Co.

However, the case does not seem to have gone any further. That may have been because of legal rulings in the lower courts, but it may also have been simply that Hampton lost heart and eventually accepted that the pulp mill, not the fisheries, was Plymouth’s future.

-5-

One by one, the last of the Roanoke’s herring seine fisheries closed. Slade and Kitty Hawk were among the last. I am aware of only one other seine fishery that was still in operation at the end of the Second World War.

That seine fishery was in Jamesville, seven miles upriver of the Kitty Hawk and Slade fisheries.

According to an April 16, 1950, story in the Raleigh News & Observer, that fishery was owned by C.C. Fleming, a businessman and political leader in Jamesville. Gus Hooper, a veteran African American waterman, was the head fisherman and the captain of the fishery’s seine boat.

The Jamesville fishery was still in business in 1955. At that time, the News & Observer April 24, 1955, referred to the seine fishery as “the only one of its type on the entire eastern seaboard.”

That herring season may have been the last for Fleming’s seine fishery. I cannot find any historical references to it after 1955.

Seines versus Bow Nets

I should note that many of the Roanoke’s herring fishermen did not shed tears over the demise of the seine fisheries.

Historically, many of the river’s people believed, probably with good reason, that the big seine fisheries took more than their fair share of herring — and shad, rockfish, perch and other fish to boot. In those people’s eyes, the seine fisheries deprived those of lesser means of food for their dinner tables.

As UNC-Chapel Hill professor Harry Watson showed in a splendid 1996 article in the Journal of American History, the more prosperous owners of seine fisheries and those who lived more hand-to-mouth had battled over access to the migratory fish on that part of the North Carolina coast since the 18th century.

They continued to do so even in the dying days of seine fishing.

C. C. Fleming’s seine fishery in Jamesville was a case in point. In 1952-53, Fleming used his political influence to persuade state legislators to give him a virtual monopoly over herring fishing on a mile-long stretch of the Roanoke.

-6-

Though an ominous sign of things to come, the closing of the seine fisheries in Plymouth and Jamesville did not mean the end of herring fishing on the Roanoke River.

For another half century, the arrival of the herring on the Roanoke remained a festive event. Up and down the river, people continued to catch herring. They just did not use the kinds of large seines, such as the ones in our photographs, that only made financial sense if there was a greater bounty of herring to be had.

Instead, they used a wide variety of lesser gear, including dragnets, bow nets, and even a device called a “fish wheel.”

Over that time, local festivals still celebrated the arrival of the herring. Churches and other community groups marked the season with fried herring dinners. Fresh and salt herring remained staples in local homes.

The herring’s spawning runs continued to decline however. For a time, a herring fishery and cannery was still flourishing 25 miles to the north of Plymouth, on the Chowan River, but even it collapsed in the 1990s.

In response, fishery regulators eventually took the drastic step of banning all herring fishing on North Carolina’s inland waters. They hoped that the herring population would recover some of its health if there was a period of time without any commercial or recreational harvest of the fish.

For the first time in thousands of years, no herring were legally caught on the Albemarle or its tributaries, including the Roanoke, beginning with the spring spawning runs of 2007.

That ban is still in effect. We are still waiting for our waters to be restored. We are still waiting for our rivers to know again an abundance of life. And we are still waiting for the herring to come back home.

-End-

KILL DEVIL HILLS — It speaks to the storytelling talent of National Park Service interpreter and historian Darrell Collins that audiences listening to his talk about the Wright brothers’ aerodynamic breakthrough of roll, pitch and yaw would often have tears welling from their eyes by the end.

Collins, who won numerous national and international awards during his four-decade career with the agency, died in his Manteo home on Dec. 24 at age 69.

As sons of a preacher, with lives absent scandal or even romance, Wilbur and Orville Wright’s story of first flight might seem heavy on aviation physics and difficult to translate in an engaging way, Scott Babinowich, acting deputy superintendent with the National Park Service Outer Banks Group, said during a remembrance for Collins held Saturday at Wright Brothers National Memorial.

“But Darrell had a gift to take those challenging concepts and craft them in a way that’s relatable to everybody,” he told the audience that filled the park’s Flight Room, where Collins had given his talk “thousands of times to hundreds of thousands of visitors.”

“He found a way to blend science and history and art to paint a picture that resonated with everybody that entered this building.”

Babinowich noted that in an agency as large as the park service, “it is rare to find a park ranger who had such a lasting impact in a single park” the way Collins did. With his easygoing approach, Collins had a way of enabling listeners to see themselves in the Wrights’ story, but also to give them a reason to “care and cherish the monumental achievement,” Babinowich said.

After four years of experiments on the Outer Banks, the Wrights achieved the first powered and controlled manned flight on Dec. 17, 1903, at what today is Kill Devil Hills.

A video of a brief portion of a Flight Room talk played during the remembrance shows Collins, wearing white conservator gloves and dressed in his olive-green and tan park service uniform, standing next to a full-size model of the 1903 Wright Flyer. Speaking in a soft Southern accent, he demonstrates how the pitch of the plane was controlled with a stick, which he then starts moving back and forth, accompanied by rhythmic squeaking as parts in the front of the aircraft respond.

Much of Collins’ mastery of his presentation was in his understated style that both moderated and modulated his speech and body language, building from an even cadence and simple demonstrations with his hands to closing with an intensified voice, soaring language and dramatic, sweeping arm gestures. Like a natural storyteller, he never faltered as he spoke. He employed gentle humor. And he used space between words and sentences to create the rhythmic cadence of a preacher.

“The elevator controls the pitch,” he says on the video, pausing as he slowly raises his right arm, “of the machine.”

“Take off and landing.” He slowly drops his arm.

“This motion of an airplane in flight …” he pauses as he moves his arm up faster, “is controlled by the elevator.”

As part of his typical 20- to 30-minute talk, Collins would bring the audience, almost imperceptibly, to seeing the Wrights’ feat in the context of humanity: the men, their family and their country.

He would talk about the intense competitive nature of aviation and science at the turn of the 20th century; of the contributions from the Outer Banks community; of the brilliance, fortitude and ingenuity of the brothers; and of the loyalty the brothers had to one another and their family.

He attributed the Wrights’ success to their willingness to persist, even after numerous disappointments, as well as their high character and extraordinary dedication to solving the mystery of flight.

At this point, Collins would start speaking a bit louder and faster, telling of how dramatically the two publicity-shy brothers from Ohio changed the world that day in 1903 at the sandy outpost on the Outer Banks. Visitors in the Wright Brothers Flight Room could see the exact spot right outside the large windows where the Wrights’ plane first found lift.

Indeed, as Collins would say in closing, it took just 66 years from the brothers’ first 12-second flight until the Apollo landing on the moon. That fact alone makes the Wrights’ invention Earth-shattering. But that’s not all, Collins would remind his rapt audiences.

“Folks, just about everything that flies — satellites, missiles, rockets, space shuttles — use the same fundamental principles,” Collins said in the 2014 Flight Room talk.

“You see,” he would add emphatically, his voice rising, “this is the immortal legacy of the Wright brothers.”

Often, people in the audience would sit quietly for a moment after Collins finished, dabbing their eyes.

Dave Hallac, superintendent of the park service Outer Banks Group, recounted after the remembrance how he had been at an agency event out of the area shortly after arriving on the Outer Banks when he mentioned his connection to the Wright Brothers park. The person he was speaking to responded that she had heard a talk there that had left her in tears. Hallac, who had not yet seen Collins’ presentation, apologized for the ranger upsetting her. But he had misunderstood.

“She said, ‘It was one of the most inspiring talks I’ve ever heard,’” Hallac recalled, adding about Collins: “He’s a legend. His ability to tell the Wright brothers’ story was unparalleled.

A native of Manteo with family roots dating back to the 1863-1867 Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony, a community of formerly enslaved people and free Black people, Collins graduated from Elizabeth City State University with a bachelor’s in geology and history. In 1977, he started work as a seasonal park ranger on the Outer Banks and set his sights on securing a permanent position as a history interpreter.

Early on, Collins had told interviewers that he was influenced by Paul Garber and Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith, both well-known aviation historians and celebrated speakers. Although Collins soon gained acclaim for his speaking skills and as an expert on Wright brothers history, his fame shot up to international levels in the lead-up to the Centennial of First Flight in 2003.

Collins’ secret was that he was just “doing what he loved,” his wife Tonya Collins said after the event.

“It was just his passion for the Wrights, for choosing this place when they did,” she said. “He had a sense of pride in this place and its people. He was proud of the people here and that he was part of these people.”

According to his obituary, Collins was considered as one of the top three Wright brothers historians in the world. Even after retiring in 2017, he continued traveling to give lectures on the Wrights for five years. He was also a regular speaker for 35 years at the “Speakers’ Showcase Series” at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s annual Oshkosh Fly-In in Wisconsin.

His many awards include the Experimental Aircraft Association’s President’s Award, the Freeman Tilden Award as the park service’s top interpretive ranger in 1990, and in 2003, both the Order of the Long Leaf Pine by the North Carolina governor, and the Paul Tissandier Diploma by the National Aeronautic Association.

Collins also served for 18 years on the Manteo Board of Commissioners, filling the same seat on the town board that his mother Dellerva had held for 26 years before her death in 2005. In addition, he was the founder and president of the Pea Island Preservation Society Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to the Pea Island Lifesaving Station, the only all-Black station in the nation.

Collins, who had family connections to Pea Island, had taught the story of Keeper Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers to Dare County fourth graders.

Tonya Collins, who was married to Darrell for 22 years, said that her husband’s modest and friendly demeanor was genuine. Similar to his mother Dellerva, he never got angry, she said.

“He was truly raised by a kind person,” she said. “He came by it quite honestly.”

BUXTON — When the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was rescued 25 years ago from the edge of the Atlantic, the nation’s tallest brick beacon was relocated with just an ordinary airport beacon in its lantern room.

It could be argued that return of the majestic first order Fresnel lens atop the 1870 lighthouse will be nearly as remarkable a feat as moving the 4,800-ton tower about a half-mile inland. But to the man crafting the replica, it’s the apex of a 40-year fascination with the unique lens that began with another lighthouse.

Dan Spinella, owner of Artworks Florida Classic Fresnel Lenses, has been meticulously replicating the design of the original Cape Hatteras Lighthouse lens as part of the current comprehensive lighthouse restoration project. The new prisms, made of a super-strong acrylic, are dyed to exactly match the sea foam green of the glass prisms they’re replacing.

Spinella is likely the only man in the nation, maybe the world, who knows about manufacturing those prisms. But when he visited the 1874 St. Augustine Lighthouse in the 1980s, it was the first time he had been even inside a lighthouse.

“And when I saw the lens, it’s like, ‘Whoa, what the heck is this?’” Spinnella recalled during a recent telephone interview. “I had no idea.”

St. Augustine’s Fresnel lens, the same impressive size as the Hatteras lens, immediately captivated him and set off an unusually productive obsession. Before he knew it, Spinella, who then was and still is employed as an engineer at Walt Disney World, offered to take dimensions and do some drawings to help in the lens restoration.

“Yeah, I went from volunteer to volunteer/business, and it just evolved over the years,” he told Coastal Review, speaking from his Orlando home. “Nothing that I planned; it just kind of worked out.”

The website of the nonprofit St. Augustine Lighthouse and Maritime Museum credits the efforts of the Junior Service League of St. Augustine and others, including Spinella and Joe Cocking, the lampist who had later saved the fixed Fresnel lens atop Bodie Island Lighthouse, for restoring its lens after being damaged by a vandal’s gunshots.

After working on the St. Augustine project for about a year, Spinella, a professed history lover, said he had learned a lot about how Fresnel lenses worked. He started with engineering books from the 1850s he had located that were written by Scottish lighthouse engineer Thomas Stevenson, the father of writer Robert Louis Stevenson.

He found optic formulas that explained the lenses’ ability to refract and reflect light, allowing him to design a cross-section of the lens “perfectly,” he recalled. And while he kept learning, he kept going. Next, he volunteered at Ponce Inlet, Florida, then continued the work by helping to replace parts at other lighthouses. All along, he was experimenting with cast acrylic, machined acrylic.

“I tried several different ways of getting these prisms made,” Spinella said. “Then in 2004, I started making reproductions.”

Around that time, John Havel, then a graphic designer at the Environmental Protection Agency’s campus in the Raleigh area, had developed a fascination with the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. After focusing on its original blueprints and plans and collecting old photographs, Havel recounted in a recent interview, he was soon doggedly researching deep into historic lighthouse archives.

“When you study the lighthouse, you see that it is this magnificent, incredible, amazing example of American Victorian architecture,” said Havel, who is now retired from the EPA and the owner of Havel Research Associates in Salvo, a Hatteras Island village north of Buxton.

The Hatteras lens, as well, is an extraordinary piece of art.

“Every first order lens is different,” he said. “There are no other lenses identical to the Cape Hatteras lens, or to the Bodie Island lens, or to the Currituck Beach Lighthouse lens. Every single factor except the height and circumference of the lens is different.”

There are a total of six orders of Fresnels lens, with the smallest able to be slipped into a purse.

A couple of years into his research, Havel recalled, he was visiting the office of the historian with Cape Hatteras National Seashore and noticed a small prism on his desk.

“And he started telling me about this guy down in Florida who made these lenses and wanted to offer a replicas lens through the park service for Hatteras,” he said.

But it wasn’t until 2015, after speaking about the lighthouse restoration at the Outer Banks Lighthouse Society Keepers Weekend, that Havel flew to Florida meet Spinella.

To put it mildly, Havel was impressed. In the years since, as a member of the Lighthouse Society board, and as a dedicated volunteer, he encouraged the National Park Service to tap Spinella’s expertise. Today, Havel is employed as a historic preservation consultant for Massachusetts-based contractor Stone & Lime Historic Restoration Services Inc., as well as an assistant and consultant for Spinella.

The $19.2 million restoration project, of which Spinella is being paid about $1.25 million, began in early 2024 and is expected to be completed by late spring or early summer 2025.

“He’s doing this entire thing,” Havel said of the skilled lens maker. “He’s doing this by himself, while he has a full-time job at Disney … He’s a genius.”

Initially, the park service was considering the possibility of restoring the original 1853 lens, the remains of which are on loan to the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras, a part of the North Carolina Maritime Museums system, which under the state’s Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

“Yes, we did talk about the option of doing that, and consulted with lampist Jim Woodward,” said National Park Service Deputy Chief of Cultural Resources Jami Lanier in a recent interview. “It was determined that it would probably not be feasible to do that for a couple of reasons (including) some issues with the frame of the lens not being exactly aligned to be able to accept the new prisms. And so it was felt that there could be some potential damage to the frame, or the lens itself, if that was attempted.”

Then there was the cost of replacing all the prisms — only 268 of the 1,000 or so prisms were salvaged — which “would have been astronomical,” she said.

The lens had been removed from the 1853 lighthouse, which was a taller version added to the 1803 tower, and installed in the1870 lighthouse, Lanier said. The lens was removed again in 1949, and in 1953 the lighthouse became part of Cape Hatteras National Seashore. But in the years before and after World War II, the lighthouse was essentially abandoned and the lens was vandalized, she said.

Lanier explained that Woodward and his team had removed the original pedestal from the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in 2006, put it together at the museum with the remains of the lens stored in a park facility on Roanoke Island.

Lanier said that the park service also discussed the potential of retrofitting the original lens with acrylic or glass replacements.

“You know, we went through all those discussions,” she said. “But in the end, it was just decided not to retrofit the original lens either way, and we knew if we were going with the replica that it would be acrylic.”

Indeed, it would cost four to seven times more to make the replica prisms in glass, Spinella said. Some prisms in glass restorations he has done cost $4,000 each, and some were as much as $20,000 each. And multiplied by 1,008 prisms, that could mean millions of dollars. Plus, glass is heavier and would put an additional load on the structure, he said. The original lens weighed 4,500 pounds, while the reproduction will weigh a mere 1,600 pounds.

A first order Fresnel lens, which is shaped like a beehive, is 8 1/2 feet high and 6 feet wide. Not only is the acrylic lighter, Spinella also used anodized aluminum frames that are a third the weight of bronze. Also, the aluminum will not deteriorate or tarnish, but it looks the same as brass except it’s not quite as shiny.

“Polished brass looks absolutely beautiful when I install them, but I can go back a couple months later and they look terrible just because of the humidity and condensation in the lantern room,” he said.

In 2009, Spinella worked with Woodward, who has worked on more than 400 lenses, to measure the lens, and he went back to his workshop and created a 3D model of it. During the intervening years while the park service mulled over having a replica lens, Spinella had continued his experiments, perfecting his acrylic prisms. The initial cast acrylic lacked the quality he wanted, and he eventually settled on optical acrylic.

“It’s a very high-quality acrylic,” he said. “I mean, they use it in fighter jet windows, and it’s UV stable, and it’s easy to machine, sand and polish and it can be tinted.”

Optical acrylic also is clearer than glass and transmits more light, he added. Although it’s strong and durable, it doesn’t last as long as glass.

Importantly, the reflective and refractive ability is nearly the same, with only slight differences.

“It actually bends light a little,” he said. “It’s got a slightly lower index of refraction, so … I’ve adjusted the formulas and adjusted the profile of each prism and shape of curvatures according to the refractive index of acrylic.”

A modern Fresnel-specific LED bulb, installed on a little stand on the pedestal, is hooked up to a sophisticated controller that, at $10,000, costs more than the $8,000 LED, Spinella said. But even with the light source now drastically different than the original kerosene oil lamp, the prisms are in the same arrangement around it.

“That lamp was a flame or omnidirectional light, so it spread 360 degrees spherically in all directions,” Spinella explained. “So that was the purpose of these lenses, to capture as much of that light as possible.”

As Havel noted, another engineering feat that Spinella accomplished was his replication of the lens’ clockwork mechanism, which was based on the 1853 original at the Graveyard museum. There are no known photographs or even descriptions of the lens and its machinery, he said.

“Dan has replicated that with all new gears, metals and whatever (mechanisms) rotated the lens so that it would flash out to sea,” Havel said.

The clockwork had been run by hemp rope, which was extremely strong but messy.

“Hemp sheds,” Havel said. “Dan found synthetic rope that looks the same but isn’t hairy like hemp.”

The rotating beacon’s original flash pattern of every 10 seconds, instead of the former 71/2-second burst, is being restored, and it will continue to be visible for up to 20 miles. As Spinella explained it, each minute the mechanism rotates a quarter turn, a full rotation takes four minutes, “And what that’ll give you is a 10-second flash interval,” he said.

Each lighthouse has its unique flashing characteristic and daymark, which are listed for mariners by the U.S. Coast Guard.

Once Spinella and Woodward reinstall the beacon — probably in June — there will be a day when people who climb to the top of the tower will be able to see for themselves the mesmerizing beauty of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse’s First Order Fresnel Lens.

Spinella said he has modified the lens with modern elements, but he said it’s still correct to consider the lens a replica because it follows the original design. For instance, while the clockwork mechanism and chariot wheels that rotated the lens are still part of it, the real rotation will now come from a 1/3-horsepower electric motor operated by a controller.

“I’ve done some things that make it more durable and more modernized,” he said. “But you really won’t see any of it.”

Tradition is the foundation of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island, as much as it is for the entirety of Down East Carteret County.

Every year, thousands from all over make their way to the museum’s Waterfowl Weekend held in early December to celebrate those traditions — decoy carving, hunting, boatbuilding, commercial fishing, waterfowl and fellowship — the way of life for the 13 unincorporated communities.

The Core Sound Decoy Carvers Guild‘s 36^th annual Core Sound Decoy Festival takes place the same weekend at the Harkers Island School. Hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 7, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 8. The facility is filled to the brim with carvers, crafters and other artists. Competitions are planned throughout both days.

The three-day Waterfowl Weekend set for Dec. 6-8 begins with the Friday Night Chow Down at 5:30 p.m. Friday. Those with tickets for the cooking competition will be able to preview what the vendors, crafters and artisans will have for sale before the facility opens to the public 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. A church service will take place at 8 a.m. before doors open at 10 a.m. Sunday and close at 4 p.m.

“The first weekend of December has grown to be the Island’s homecoming weekend with the Decoy Festival at the school, craft sales all along the way, yard sales, fund-raisers and Down East hospitality every mile of the way,” Waterfowl Weekend organizers said.

Not only will visitors have a chance to meet with artists, carvers and crafters, Waterfowl Weekend is a way many begin their Christmas celebration by walking through the “Gallery of Trees: Telling Our Story,” when families, groups and businesses decorate trees to light up the museum through Jan. 10, and purchase their 2024 holiday ornament.

Johnna Brooks and the Della John

Each year the museum releases a collector’s ornament that celebrates Core Sound culture. This year’s numbered ornament features a painting of the fishing vessel Della John by Harkers Island native Johnna Brooks.

Currently working on her doctorate in biomathematics at North Carolina State University where she studies quantitative fisheries ecology, she has had a passion for art her entire life. Her father built the Della John in 1979, which the family later sold, but Brooks said she’s been painting the vessel on and off for as long as she can remember.

Waterfowl Museum Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher said that the Core Sound ornament has become more than something to hang on the tree.

“It’s a glimpse of Core Sound that many of us hang in a special place all year long.  From decoys and black labs to crab pot trees, these ornaments have told the story of Down East,” Amspacher said. “Each year we have tried to select an artist that shares that deep commitment to our heritage and this year Johnna is that connection to tradition as well as an excellent career in the marine sciences. She’s our future.”

The ornament can be purchased on the website or from the museum’s gift shop.

Brooks graduated as valedictorian from East Carteret High School in 2016 and earned her bachelor’s at North Carolina State University.

Her dad’s side of the family has been on Harkers Island for several generations, spending their days commercial fishing and boatbuilding, Brooks said. The Della John is the first boat that her father built from start to finish. The 50-foot wooden trawler was built in 1979 and her family owned and operated the boat until 2019 when they sold it to another local business, Miss Gina’s Fresh Shrimp. Her father retired from commercial fishing in the 1990s and has been in marine construction since.

She said that she likes to go fishing but not in the way many of her peers do at state’s Center for Marine Sciences and Technology, or CMAST.

“Now, I’m in this marine lab with people who like to fish. I go out with them sometimes, and I think they’re a little bit surprised with how little I know,” about recreational fishing, she said. But she’s been fishing since she was young.

“My granddad, he’s 90 now, but I remember when I was, no older than 10 years old. Pa, he would take me and my little cousin out – he’s younger than me — and we would pull in a mullet net, and it was just me and my kid cousin on one end of the net, and then my 70-something granddad on the other end,” Brooks said. “I’ve been doing that as long as I can remember.”

She said she’s always been strong in math but has enjoyed art just as much, having taken art classes throughout high school. She realized she missed the creative outlet when she was working on her bachelor’s and ended up with a minor in art.

“I’ve always found that math was very concrete, it made sense, it was structured,” Brooks said, and art helped her with her math classes, along the way though she didn’t see it as a viable career option.

When she began her undergraduate, she said she knew she was going to get a degree in math, and that she wanted to stay in Carteret County, “that was the only thing I was sure about.” But she was concerned her career options were limited.

Growing up in the area, she was familiar with all the marine labs in the county, but didn’t personally know anyone who worked there, aside from her grandmother who had worked at the Division of Marine fisheries for many years.

“I thought they dissected dolphins all day,” she laughed about what she thought when she was younger, adding “I can’t use math to dissect dolphins.”

It was her junior year of college when Hurricane Florence was lumbering toward North Carolina, and one of her professors asked if anyone lived at the coast. She and another person raised their hands. Brooks learned that her professor had been a statistician at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Beaufort Marine Lab, and it dawned on her that if scientists are going out to collect data, someone has to do something with that data.

Once it clicked for her that this is a way to stay in Carteret County and use her math degree, she started looking into getting a master’s but was encouraged to work on her doctorate. She initially didn’t want to get a PhD, because she didn’t want to be in her late-20s, still living in Raleigh. “I wanted to come back, start my life, put down roots where I want to live. This is kind of the best of both worlds.”

She spends most of her days doing research for her doctorate on speckled trout management. In what little down time she has, Brooks paints scenes from her childhood on old charts her dad used while he was a commercial fisherman.

“Nobody uses charts anymore,” Brooks said. “I had to get my dad to explain how to use them. This is a whole way of fishing that people did in the past. And just like with the Harkers Island bridge, it’s a thing in the past. It’s not there anymore.”

Her career plans and her art are a way for her to preserve the way of life loved as a child and a way to adapt to how the world around her is changing, which she acknowledges is going to happen, regardless. But she’s trying to preserve the culture and the stories, how things were done, in her own way, she said.

Waterfowl Weekend highlights

For the Friday Night Chow Down, cooks from Down East and neighboring communities will bring several different recipes of stewed shrimp, clam chowder, seafood chowder, stewed redheads, stewed oysters with dumplings, fish stew with cornbread, gumbo and venison chili.

Area bakers will be competing as well for the 2024 “Best Sweet Potato Pie Down East” award during the Friday night event. Seafood market and restaurant chefs from across the state will judge the cooking competition.

Tickets are $35 for members and $45 for nonmembers. Save $10 a ticket by becoming a member now for $30 a year. Tickets are for sale online.  Each ticket includes four cups of your choice. Molasses Creek will perform that evening. There will be a cash bar

In addition to the grounds being covered with vendors, there will be scallop fritters and sweet puppies, online auction, and performances by Molasses Creek at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Saturday. A church service with breakfast begins Sunday’s festivities.

Other highlights include book signings with local authors 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. Raffle tickets are on sale for this year’s quilt, “Core Sound Kaleidoscope” by the Core Sound Quilt Crew, and there’s a Christmas cash giveaway raffle for a chance to win up to $5,000 cash.

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.”

With its international connections, centuries of history and unique attractions, Ocracoke has earned its reputation as a star of the Outer Banks.

Accessible only by ferry or light aircraft, Ocracoke is one of the few inhabited island destinations in the state without a highway connection to the mainland. But those who take the state-run ferry from Cedar Island, Hatteras or Swan Quarter to the isolated village are in for a delight.

Ocracoke is one of North Carolina’s more stable barrier islands. Ocracoke Inlet, at its western end, is the only inlet in the state that has existed since the 16th century. This stability has made Ocracoke a center of marine transportation since the centuries before European arrival. Native Americans used the island as a base for fishing, hunting and navigation.

Beginning in the 17th century, English ship pilots made their home there. One of the earliest settlements on the Outer Banks, Pilot Town was first settled around 1715, and was located where Ocracoke Village is now, according to “The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 1584-1958” by David Stick. Those pilots were predominately white in early years, but by the 19th century there were a considerable number of African Americans, both free and enslaved, piloting ships from Ocracoke.

Ocracoke remained sparsely populated throughout the colonial and early republic period. But its navigational status gave it outsized importance relative to its small population. To that end, the island is the home of one of North Carolina’s oldest lighthouses. Built in 1823, the Ocracoke Lighthouse still stands on the western section of the island.

Ocracoke’s isolation makes it special. It led to the development of islanders’ distinctive brogue, often called “High Tider,” or “Hoi Toider,” that linguists have studied extensively for decades. But isolation also exposed the island to enemy naval attack.

The most notable invasion occurred during the War of 1812, when Ocracoke and Portsmouth were taken over by the forces of British Admiral Sir George Cockburn. The invasion was embarrassing for North Carolina, whose militia took several days to reach the island. After the war, the temporary loss of Ocracoke prompted the state’s government to invest in internal improvements.

The island was once again vulnerable to invasion during the Civil War. It was the site of Fort Ocracoke, the home of hundreds of Confederate forces in the early months of the war. The fort was taken by the Union army without a struggle following the fall of nearby Hatteras Island.

The capture was the beginning of a shift in the island’s focus. It still hosted pilots, but in the late 19th century, the island also became a center for tourism and the location of a village which remains to this day.

The island never lost its connection to naval endeavors, however. During World War II, it was the site of a naval base and close to shipping lanes where many German U-boats hunted British and American ships.

One of these ships, the British HMT Bedfordshire, sank off the coast after a torpedo attack. Four bodies washed up on the shore at Ocracoke. The cemetery where these men are buried is still leased by the British government, one of the few of its kind in the United States.

Over the past 50 years, Ocracoke has experienced both growth and resilience in the face of harsh coastal conditions and historic storms. Hurricane Dorian in 2019 slammed the island with a more-than 7-foot surging wall of water. All aspects of life here were affected. Scars still linger.

Now Ocracoke’s tourist village, shops, motels are thriving again, and there are services including a dog kennel.

The island has more than a dozen restaurants within the mile or so between the ferry terminal and the Ocracoke Airport. In addition to the three vehicular ferries that visit the island, the North Carolina Department of Transportation launched the Ocracoke Express passenger ferry in 2019.

Though there is significant development on the western side of Ocracoke, the eastern side is part of Cape Hatteras National Seashore and is home to horses, nesting sea turtles, and hundreds of species of birds.

Ocracoke has received numerous plaudits over the past two decades, as well.

In 2020, it was named by HGTV as one of the 22 best islands to visit in the United States, with the network describing it as “a peaceful escape to travelers willing to make the trip.”

Ocracoke’s quiet allure brings visitors of varied interests. Andrea Tolson, administrator of the Ocracoke Preservation Society, said she believes that beaches, fishing and history are the main draws for tourists.

Many of the businesses and sources of employment on the island have connections to the historic sites here, from the lighthouse and the museum to a coffee shop located in a historic house, she explained.

The island has successfully kept out chain stores and large-scale commercial businesses, Tolson said. Those wouldn’t be in keeping with the way of life here.

“Things are very self-sustained out here,” Tolson added, “and that’s the way we like it.”

While facing increased threats from climate change and hurricanes, the island has found balance in its unique ecosystem amid the demands of a tourist economy. The snowball’s chance of N.C. Highway 12 ever connecting the island to the mainland with a bridge would likely overwhelm the village and the island’s natural areas with tourists.

“I don’t think most of the community here would like that. It would change the whole face of this island,” Tolson said of a bridge.

One of North Carolina’s most famous mysteries, the “Lost Colony,” is among the more than 30 tales, tragedies and legends from the barrier islands to get lost in — virtually — while using Dare County’s new interactive map, “OBX Folklore: Your gateway to Outer Banks Legends, Ghosts, and Folklore.”

The map allows users to “delve deeper into the many eerie and mysterious occurrences that have taken place over the years and have ultimately become legends that are passed down from generation to generation,” the county said in an announcement earlier this week.

Dare County GIS Specialist Kristen Stilson and county librarians Meaghan Leenaarts Beasley and Theresa Cozart spent the last year collaborating on the website that celebrates Geographic Information Systems Day 2024 on Nov. 20.

“The Outer Banks has a long history full of lore to choose from, from Native American tales to modern day frights. This made for a really diverse set of stories to educate and entertain both the readers and us,” Stilson said in the announcement.

Stilson explained to Coastal Review Tuesday that the county had been creating special maps to celebrate GIS Day since 2019. Past projects include the 2019 Look Back Map, the 2020 Shipwreck Map, the 2021 Trivia Map, the 2022 OBX Days Gone By Map, and the 2023 Pop Culture Map, all available on the Dare County website.

The idea for this year’s map on Outer Banks folklore came about through a conversation they had about a year ago.

Cozart said that when she was hired last November, she and Stilson began talking about the 2023 Pop Culture Map, which had just been released for GIS Day, and of the interesting places in Dare County. 

“Kristen was telling me about all the fun maps she had created and how I should check them out to help me get a feel for the Outer Banks. Kristen’s excitement about these maps was infectious,” Cozart explained.

Coming from Wilmington, Cozart continued, “I started talking about all the ‘haunted’ locations down there and fun ghost tours. Kristen and Meaghan then started telling me about folklore associated with the Outer Banks and I said that sounded like a fun map that everyone would enjoy.”

Stilson said that since she tries to make a fun map for each GIS Day, she drew inspiration from Cozart’s idea and they decided to collaborate on the folklore map.

“It took us a few months to make, with all of us working on it in our spare time and adding a few things here and there,” Stilson said.

The map is best viewed on a desktop for all the effects but will work on all devices. “You can read the stories in any order you like thanks to the dropdown menu but I ordered the stories from North to South,” Stilson added.

The earliest stories date back to the “Lost Colony of Roanoke” and the “Legend of the White Doe,” both late 1500s, Beasley told Coastal Review.

The story of the “Lost Colony” begins in the summer of 1587, when men, women and children attempt to establish Roanoke Colony, the first permanent English outpost in North America. About 115 English settlers arrived at Roanoke Island, welcoming a month later Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World. Later that year, Roanoke Colony’s governor, John White, returned to England for supplies, leaving the colonists behind.

White’s return to North America was delayed by three years because of war with Spain. When he made his way back in 1590, he found the colonists had disappeared and the only clues were “CRO” and “CROATOAN” carved on trees. “Though there are many theories about their fate, the colonists were never found and what happened to them remains a mystery to this day.”

One version of the “Legend of the White Doe” suggests that Virginia Dare was raised among the Croatoan. As she matured, she became a great beauty, drawing the unwanted attention of a young chieftain who, angry at her rejection, tricks her into drinking a potion that turns her into a white doe.

Stilson said in the press release that they chose stories for the map based on ones “we knew growing up or ones that we hadn’t heard that spoke to us.”

Stilson explained in a follow-up interview Tuesday that one of the legends from her youth is about the “goat man,” the most recent tale featured on the map.

The goat man legend began circulating in the 1970s, gaining momentum in the decades that followed. The story goes that a man lived in a yellow shack in Nags Head Woods with just his goats to keep him company. One night, teens vandalized his house while he was away, killing all of his goats. It is rumored that he kidnaps or chases teenagers, the map states.

Stilson continued that when she was growing up, she had always heard the story of the goat man. “Friends and I looked for him in Nags Head Woods.”

One legend Stilson had not heard before is the story of the magic lute, she said, “but for some reason I was really drawn to that one and wanted to write it up.”

The magic lute is a tale from the 1600s about two sisters in Currituck vying for the same man’s affection, and the musician who used strands of the chosen sister’s hair, who was drowned by the rejected sister, to replace the broken strings of his lute.

Cozart moved to Dare County in November 2023 from Wilmington. She said in an interview that she “really enjoyed learning about the local legends” since she’s new to the Outer Banks and “I love a good ghost story.”

She said she is partial to their very own poltergeist in the Kill Devil Hills Library. The branch where she is based opened 34 years ago.  

“I usually get here first thing in the morning and I’ve heard stuff. Usually it’s in the back areas — meeting room and kitchen. I’ve raced back there to see what was making noise and there was nothing there. It’s happened several times,” Cozart said. “Others here say they’ve had books found on the floor that were on the shelves when we closed up the night before. I haven’t experienced that yet, but I’m keeping on the poltergeist’s good side.”

Cozart said her favorite story that she came across is about the Whalehead Club. Built in 1922, the 21,000-square-foot house in Corolla was a winter home until 1933 when the original owners made their last visit. The couple died in 1936. Uneasy feelings are reported at the building and it has been investigated by paranormal researchers.

“So creepy that the original owners just abandoned that huge house,” Cozart added.

For Beasley, the Queen of the Sounds is “a perfect Halloween tale with witches, explosions and ghosts.”

The Queen of the Sounds was a riverboat commissioned after the Civil War that toured through the Currituck and Albemarle sounds. The owner supposedly fell in love with a witch, and their relationship ended when the riverboat exploded on a Sunday, after a ceremony to summon the devil.

Beasley said in a press release that it was a “natural fit” for library staff to work with Stilson on the interactive map.

“Not only do we have physical collections of celebrated folklorists, most notably Charles Harry Whedbee, but we also have little-known Outer Banks authors and locally written pamphlets of eerie tales and legends that often go overlooked,” Beasley continued. “While some of these items reside in our reference collections due to their age or rarity and can only be viewed in our libraries, many are available for checkout by the public.” 

Beasley told Coastal Review that they used about 20 resources, including books and digitized newspapers from the Dare County Library holdings, as well as outside sources such as a photo from the archives of the Outer Banks History Center to build the map. 

“It was a pleasant surprise to find a diversity of sources for these legends in our collections – we’re not a large place geographically but we’ve had some legendary events here,” Beasley said.

In each of the county’s three branches, the resources are on display along with a 24-inch by 36-inch framed poster of the OBX Folklore Map. Patrons can enter the raffle at the branches located in Hatteras, Kill Devil Hills and Manteo between Thursday and Nov. 19. A winner will be selected from each branch Nov. 20, on GIS day.

The Chicamacomico Life-Saving Station completed in October 1874 was the first of seven new stations to be built that year along the North Carolina coast.

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the station opening, the Chicamacomico Historical Association held a two-day event at the site in Rodanthe.

Held Oct. 12-13, the program featured several speakers, including Rear Adm. John “Jay” Vann, commander of the Coast Guard’s Fifth District that includes North Carolina. There were presentations, rescue drill reenactments, and patriotic music performed by the Cape Hatteras Secondary School Band.

Vann called the attention of the about 80 in the audience to the heroism that was part of the job description of the stations’ crew.

He highlighted the Aug. 16, 1918, rescue of the British steamer Mirlo. The rescue resulted in all eight of the crew being awarded a Gold Lifesaving Medal, the Coast Guard’s highest honor.

The Mirlo was carrying gasoline when it struck a German mine and the fuel aboard set the sea on fire.

Vann described the Chicamacomico crew rowing through flaming waters to rescue seamen from an overturned lifeboat.

Rescuers proceeded through the flames to search for a second lifeboat, this one with 19 crewmen aboard, threw a line, and towed lifeboat to shore.

Because of the actions of Chicamacomico Coast Guardsmen, 42 of the 52 crewmen on board the Mirlo were saved.

Those values, Vann noted in his address, are still found in the Coast Guard of today,

“I think that despite the divisiveness we increasingly observe and the doubt some of us had in younger generations,” he told the audience. “You will find that the young American service members in our Coast Guard respect our heritage and those who came before us.”

Station history

When the Chicamacomico Life-saving Station opened in 1874, the maritime rescue response program was a part of the Revenue Marine Division, under the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and was the first to be staffed in the state.

The rescue program became the Life-Saving Service in 1878, and then in 1915, was established as the United States Coast Guard.

Sumner Kimball, who had been appointed supervisor of the Revenue Marine Division in 1871, worked to create a professional lifesaving service because the few lifesaving stations dotting the East Coast were incapable of carrying out an ocean rescue.

“Training and equipment were either poor or non-existent, and many of its ‘lifesavers’ were either incompetent land-lubbers or corrupt political appointees,” the Cape Hatteras National Seashore wrote in 1871 about the conditions.

Even with improvement in personnel and equipment, by 1874 it was apparent there were not enough stations for the Revenue Marine Division to fulfill its lifesaving services.

Kimball convinced legislators to allocate $200,000, around $6.7 million in today’s dollars, to build and staff new lifesaving stations.

Coastal North Carolina was identified as one of the most critical areas needing attention and seven new stations were authorized between Corolla and Avon.

Chicamacomico, went into service in October of 1874, although the official commissioning of the station wasn’t until December.

The building was decommissioned in 1954. In 1974, the nonprofit Chicamacomico Historical Association was founded to preserve the site.

The therapeutic power of gardening has been richly studied and solidly proven, so it was no surprise that a class on how to grow Venus flytraps meandered quickly into something more like group counseling.

Cocktails paired with happy small talk confirmed a safe space to confess what really happened in each student’s own little shop of horrors.  

“I fed my Venus flytrap bacon to keep it alive.”

 “Mine didn’t even have to work. I trapped the bugs!”

“I set up grow lights and everything, but it died anyway.”

The instructor, Franchesca Davis, a certified plant professional, rare plants collector and horticulture degree holder with six different specializations, had heard it all before.

“People will go above and beyond to keep their carnivorous plants alive,” she said. “I’ve heard of cat food … regular fish food instead of raw meat because raw meat stinks over time.”

In “The Little Shop of Horrors,” Audrey II ate Seymour in 10 seconds. Venus flytraps savor their prey over 3 to 5 days. That’s one of the interesting facts attendees learn during Davis’ carnivorous plant classes at Carolina Home & Garden, in western Carteret County.

Around Halloween, interest in Venus flytraps takes off as gardeners of all skill levels imagine their own miniature Audrey II, and Davis provides more than surprisingly simple steps for growing them.

Venus flytraps, native only to an area within about a 75-mile radius of Wilmington, have been around 85 million years. Despite their endurance, native Venus flytrap populations are in trouble. Increasing development razes their habitat and poachers illegally snap up survivors to sell.

Davis said she hopes that helping people understand Venus flytraps will grow greater appreciation of North Carolina’s most famous native plant.

“If we can work as a community to bring awareness to these things and care for them and not use them just as a tourist attraction, then we can probably keep them in the state that they’re most iconic for,” Davis said. “I want people to picture them growing wild…I want people to go home and plant them in the ground.”

Growing tips

Here are some of Davis’ tips for success with Venus flytraps.

Nature copycat containers

Wild Venus flytraps thrive in peat-rich pocosin bogs. The plants draw moisture from below. Therefore, choose a shallow container with at least one substantial hole in the bottom. Rest the planter inside another container that always holds enough water to keep the Venus flytrap constantly damp, as it would be in a bog.

Not just any soil

Forget fertilizer-enriched potting mixes. Enhanced organic mixes won’t work either. That’s because Venus flytraps digest nutrients not from the ground but from the insects they capture. Davis recommended straight peat moss — no added nutrients — or sphagnum peat, free of fertilizers, plus a little pine bark to aerate the sphagnum.

Watering secrets

Rainwater is best, Davis said. Tap, well, bottled and distilled waters are usually too alkaline and mineral rich. If you can’t collect rainwater, Davis suggested trying a pH adjuster like those used for freshwater fish tanks. Assess your water’s pH level and then add the adjuster to achieve a pH in the 5.0 to 5.3 range, Davis said. Outside, flytraps like rainwater that drips from pine trees rather than direct rain, she noted.

Location, location, location

You might think of pocosin bogs that Venus flytraps love as dark places, but flytraps live “on the edge, right on the outskirts of the swamp,” Davis noted.

“They can totally take full sun.” That means at least six hours of sunlight a day. Light intensifies the Venus flytrap’s red colors and ensures the plant’s success after its winter dormancy. Indoors, choose a sunny window. Outside, plant flytraps in well-lit places that are constantly wet, “fingertip-deep wet,” Davis said, like ditch banks and low spots that receive dappled sun, preferably under pine trees. Pine needles allow more sunlight to pass through and help keep the ground below acidic.

Overwinter and forget it

Growers in colder climates have reported ice-covered flytraps in pots coming back strong in spring. The plants need that dormant period so that they don’t exhaust their energy and die.

“They’re pretty prehistoric. Their cycle of energy and how they conserve it is what has been keeping them alive for so doggone long,” Davis said. Slightly damp soil and cold temperatures are all Venus flytraps need for three to six months. They don’t even require light.

Learn more

• Carnivorous Plant Class, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Oct. 22, Carolina Home & Garden, 4778 N.C. Highway 24, Newport; carolinahomegarden.com, 252-393-9004.
• N.C. State Fair, native garden featuring Venus flytraps and other carnivorous plants, last two weeks in October, https://www.ncagr.gov/divisions/ncstatefair.
• N.C. Native Plant Society news, education and events. The organization promotes the enjoyment and conservation of North Carolina’s native plants and their habitats. ncwildflower.org.
• Stanley Rehder Carnivorous Plant Garden, 2025 Independence Blvd., Wilmington, 910-341-7852, wilmingtonnc.gov/Parks-Recreation/Parks-Trails/Piney-Ridge-Nature-Preserve-Stanley-Rehder-Carnivorous-Garden.

ROANOKE ISLAND — While immigration is a hot election-year topic, it’s perhaps notable that speculation continues unabated about the fate of America’s first English immigrants who vanished into the mists of history 437 years ago, with yet another twist in the saga of the real people who became known as the “Lost Colony.”

Could at least a group from the colony that briefly settled on the shores of today’s Roanoke Island, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, have moved, not only 50 miles south or west, as many believe, but simply to the other side of the sound?

According to records, when the colony’s governor John White returned three years after he left for supplies in 1587, the only evidence of the colony’s whereabouts was the word “Croatoan” – once the home of the Croatan Indians on Hatteras Island – carved on a fort palisade, and the letters “CRO” carved in an oak tree. That has been widely interpreted as a signal from the colonists that they moved to Croatoan – that is, Hatteras.

Alternately, there were signs that could have meant they went 50 miles into the mainland, as White said was discussed with the colonists before he departed.

But in a recent research report, “Croatan: The Untold Story,” veteran archaeologist Eric Klingelhofer, vice president of research with the nonprofit First Colony Foundation, says that a review of historic maps indicates that the Croatan tribe who had befriended the Roanoke colonists did not actually live on Hatteras Island; they lived on land across from Roanoke Island at what is now mainland Dare County. So if at least some colonists went to live with the Croatan Indians, they may have had to merely cross the sound.

“Cartographic study therefore suggests that a broad territory was attributed in the historical period to the remnant Croatoans, and that the likely location for their core habitation and Dasemunkepeuc itself lay northwest of Roanoke in the vicinity of modern Mashoes,” Klingelhofer asserts in the report, published on the foundation’s website.

Dasemunkepeuc, an Algonquian village, was located at present-day Mann’s Harbor, near Mashoes. The Croatan and Roanoke were branches of Algonquian Indians.

What his research shows is that the Croatan had left Buxton on Hatteras Island at some point after the arrival of the English in the mid-1580s, and relocated to the mainland where they could grow crops, Klingelhofer, a retired professor of history at Mercer University, told Coastal Review in a recent interview.

“It looks like, from these maps, which were most of the official governmental maps, that the Mashoes area and south of that Manns Harbor area was the land of the Croatoans,” he said, using an alternate name for the Croatan. “The Roanokes, who probably had more problems with disease because they had greater contacts, they may have been there for a while. But then they moved south, maybe because of better resources, or there were more friendly natives that they had relations with, or something like that. And then they don’t know what happened to them beyond the fact that they were no longer in this area.”

Long catnip for charlatans, fabulists and conspiracy dabblers, the disappearance of Sir Walter Raleigh’s colony on Roanoke Island – England’s first attempted settlement in the New World – has been dubbed the “nation’s oldest mystery” for a reason: Only bits of evidence have been found that point to what may have happened to most of the 117 men, women and children who had sailed to Roanoke Island more than four centuries ago.

Perhaps because of its ephemeral intrigue, the Lost Colony, a precursor to Jamestown in 1607, the first permanent English settlement, has been the focus of numerous archaeological surveys and digs – both professional and amateur – for decades. It has sparked a beloved long-running local summer theater production. It has spawned magical fables of a White Doe and of large stones carved with cryptic writing, both linked to Virginia Dare, a colonist’s baby born in 1587. And it has inspired many books, some more authoritative than others, including Klingelhofer’s, “Excavating The Lost Colony Mystery, The Map, the Search the Discovery,” published in 2023 in association with the foundation, which features a collection he edited of research by historians, archaeologists and others.

The foundation has worked closely with pre-colonial experts who have conducted research at Williamsburg and Jamestown in Virginia, as well as at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site on Roanoke Island, which has yielded artifacts but no hints of the colonists’ settlement. In a recent archaeological exploration, the foundation had found evidence of first contact between the English explorers and Native Americans at Fort Raleigh, and also has unearthed artifacts that indicate some Lost Colonists may have lived for a time at riverfront sites in Bertie County, dubbed Site X and Site Y.

Despite the growing volume of information that has been collected over the years, and numerous Indian and English artifacts that have been unearthed, to date no pre-colonial smoking gun has been found that fills in the big blanks about the elusive Lost Colony.

“We don’t know where they started out from,” Charles Ewen, distinguished professor of anthropology at East Carolina University’s Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences, told Coastal Review. “We don’t know where they went. We have sort of the general vicinity and it’s become this wonderful mystery that people are trying to figure out.”

Ewen, more cohort than rival of Klingelhofer, has also recently written a book, with co-author E. Thomson Shields Jr.: “Becoming the Lost Colony, The History, Lore and Popular Culture of the Roanoke Mystery,” published in 2024.

Whatever detritus the colonists left behind may have been lost to erosion along the shores of the Croatan Sound or to decay in the swamps. But there are also unanswered questions about 16^th century people’s choice of living conditions, and Ewen agreed that the mainland could have provided better shelter and more food.

“In fact, I think most archeologists think that the Outer Banks were just seasonally occupied,” Ewen said. “So when they said they were prepared to move 50 miles into the main, I think the Outer Banks during the winter would not have been a terribly hospitable place.”

Deciphering the clues of the Lost Colony, like a 400-year-old board game, is why the mystery of their fate continues to fascinate.

Klingelhofer, a founding member of the First Colony Foundation, a volunteer group of professional archaeologists established in 2003, has explained that their overall mission is finding evidence to fill in the gaps about the 1584-1587 Roanoke Voyages, which ultimately led to early American English colonization. Still, it’s always the Lost Colony story from the 1587 Roanoke Voyage that most ignites the public imagination and spurs continued investigations and research, such as Klingelhofer’s work.

Both Klingelhofer and the foundation, and Ewen and East Carolina University, have a close association with the late archaeologist David Phelps, professor emeritus of anthropology at ECU who died in 2009 at age 79.

An expert on prehistoric and Algonquian archaeology, Phelps was renowned for his work studying Tuscarora Indian sites at Neoheroka in Greene County and Jordan’s Landing in Bertie County. When Hurricane Emily in 1993 exposed vast amounts of pottery sherds and shell midden in Buxton, it was Phelps’ numerous excavations that determined the site had been the Croatan capital that stretched a half-mile from Cape Creek to Buxton village.

Phelps had dated what he called “the Hatteras site” from 1650 to 1720.

Manteo, who had befriended the colonists, had lived in Croatan, and his mother was the tribe’s leader. For that reason, some historians hypothesized that the colonists may have fled there, although most say the Croatan had inadequate food and space to accommodate more than a small number.

An archaeologist who had worked alongside Phelps as a young man, Clay Swindell, is now working with the foundation, Klingelhofer said.

Even though centuries separate our contemporary population from historic colonial explorers, human nature was likely as prone to boasting and deception then as it is now.

Hence, Klingelhofer said it’s worth noting that everyone is presuming what White, the governor who reported the “CRO” letters at the Lost Colony’s fort, actually knew and didn’t know.

“John White wasn’t always trustworthy,” he said. “He assumes a lot of things. He claims a lot of things that are not necessarily fully the truth. A lot of it is his interpretation of particular people and their motives behind the people that he has gotten angry with.”

In other words, White’s account may not be the only version of Lost Colony history to consider.

“But any good historian knows better than to trust a person who’s even an eyewitness to things,” Klingelhofer said. “You need corroboration. And sadly, there isn’t any except for in these maps.”

As Ewen sees the Lost Colony, all of the foundation’s hypotheses could be legitimate, but as he and Klingelhofer agree, it’s all pieces of a puzzle yet to be solved.

“I think it’s very difficult to say with any degree of certainty, until we find some more physical evidence, that we have an idea of what happened,” he said. “We need to find Christian burials from the 16th century, and I think that will really start putting us in the vicinity.”

English burials, he added, would be east-west, with the head at the west end. The clothing items would date to the 16th century, and skeletal analysis would indicate they were European. But archaeologists and historians are by no means ready to throw in the towel in pursuit of the Lost Colony.

“Honestly, I think it’s going to be an accidental discovery,” Ewen said. “Somebody will come across something while they’re developing … (and) stumble upon some of this stuff. And the archeologists will get involved, and then it will be, ‘Oh, OK!’”

As N.C. Highway 32 winds through Washington County, it passes through Skinnersville, an unincorporated township with a population of just over 700.

There isn’t much here; a few homes along the south bank of the Albemarle Sound, but it’s mostly open farmland and forest. Pea Ridge, where the first bridge connecting the south bank of the Albemarle Sound with the north side and Edenton, is about 2 miles to the east. Roper is 8 miles or so west.

There is a historical marker on the north side of the highway that the Division of Archives and History posted in 1974 that reads: “Rehoboth Church — Colonial Anglican congregation known as Skinner’s Chapel. Present church constructed 1850-1853. Now United Methodist.”

Behind the sign, framed by trees and expansive farm fields, is the Rehoboth Methodist Church. A lovingly restored, simple, Greek Revival structure.

The church has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1976. The evaluation of the structure noted, “The simple yet dignified frame church in its picturesque setting in a grove of trees draped with Spanish moss has been preserved through local efforts as a landmark of the county.”

Many of those trees are gone now, lost to time and weather. The restoration was originally done by the Washington County Historical Society, but the more recent work that has recreated the original look and feel of the church has been done by the Rehoboth Church Preservation Society.

Chris Barber, chair of the organization, is one of the founding members of the Rehoboth Church Preservation Society. She had retired from teaching in 2006 and was looking for something to do, had seen the church, knew it needed work, and “I started calling around,” she said.

What she found were the people who had worked on the church in the 1970s and brought it to the attention of the National Park Service, the organization that administers historic places, were, “either dead, moved away, or they were elderly people.”

Two years later in 2008, she and four others founded the Rehoboth Church Preservation Society as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Grants followed — perhaps the most important was the first $32,000 award.

“It enabled us to raise the church, but because it was sinking,” Barber said. “When you looked at the images, it looked like the brick foundations were failing. But actually what was happening is the sills were rotting, and as they rotted, they were twisting the church on the foundation.”

The grant was the first of a number of funding sources that have brought the church back to a more accurate state of restoration. Some of what has been found as the church has been restored has been surprising.

For instance, the windows are original, Barber said.

“There are no records at any time that the windows were ever changed. I wrote a grant to have the windows refurbished and restored,” she said, adding that was in 2019.

Barber, who has written a book about the history of the church and its significance, “The Tie That Binds: Rehoboth Methodist Church and 300 Years of Worship,” points to some of the more fascinating features and pieces of history housed within the church.

When the church was completed in 1853, the structure did not originally have a ceiling.

“We know from some records that they probably put the ceiling in about the 1880s or so. If you look, you’re going to see the prints of hands. The men in the church did it,” she said.

The church is a time capsule in other ways, offering a glimpse of life in antebellum North Carolina.

Occupying 1.75 acres donated in 1850, apparently by Joseph H. Norman, who is described in the National Historic Places evaluation as, “the owner of fifty slaves and was Washington County’s fourth largest slaveholder.”

There are no records indicating who built the church, although the evaluation suggests it was the enslaved people Norman owned who did the work.

“Local tradition has it that these slaves built the church,” the evaluation noted.

The church, because of its mostly original state, features details seen only in the oldest churches, such as its two doors — men entered on one side, women on the other.

The pews are original and are fitted with a separator between the male and female congregants’ seating.

The doors of the church face away from the highway.

“That road (N.C. Highway 32) wasn’t here when they built the church. The main road was there,” Barber said, pointing toward an open field.

Enslaved people were permitted to attend the church, but segregation was enforced. There was also a separate door for the enslaved families that opens to stairs leading to a balcony where the pews are narrower and not as well built, compared to the pews on the main floor.

The balcony itself is significantly angled toward a high balustrade. When looking into the chapel, only the pulpit and pastor would have been visible from here.

For Barber, the church’s importance extends beyond its architectural significance.

“This is the fourth church in a small area of this county,” she said, noting that the county’s first church was built about a mile and a half to 2 miles away. “That was South Shore Chapel, built somewhere between 1715 and 1733.”

The county’s second house of worship was Skinner’s Chapel, built, Barber writes in her book, probably because, “the first chapel … fell into disrepair.”

“No records have been found that give exact dates, but presumably, Skinner’s was built sometime in the mid-18th century,” she writes.

At the end of the 18th century, the Rev. Charles Pettigrew, who was instrumental in bringing the Anglican Church to North Carolina, became aware of Skinner’s Chapel and that the structure was no longer fit to be used.

“In his travels … Pettigrew saw that old Skinner’s Chapel was in poor condition and dangerous for continued use,” Barber noted.

Acting on Pettigrew’s advice, church leaders purchased an acre for a shilling, and “sometime in 1805 the new church (Swain’s Chapel) was completed.”

By the middle of the 19th century, Swain’s Chapel itself had fallen into disrepair and leaders decided to build a new church to higher standards than any of the previous churches. That church is now Rehoboth Methodist Church.

The history of the churches of Washington County reflects broader societal changes happening here during the 18th and 19th centuries, including growing intolerance.

That first south shore chapel was the result of the Vestry Act of 1715, which was in response to the growing influence of the Friend’s Society, or Quakers, in the region.

Writing about the influence of the Vestry Acts, the first was in 1701, the Nahunta Friends Church in Pikeville noted that, “With the planting of the Church of England and the Vestry Acts of 1701 and 1715, religious tolerance was no longer practiced and problems for Friends increased.”

Pettigrew was an Anglican deacon and minister, but after the American Revolution the Anglican Church was in decline. The Protestant faith, including the Methodist Church, based on the reformist drive of John Wesley in England, took root here.

It is unclear whether the third church here, Swain’s Chapel, began as an Anglican or Methodist church, but by the time Rehoboth was completed, the congregation was Methodist.

For perhaps the first 50 or 60 years of its existence, the Rehoboth Methodist Church thrived, but over time, the primitive, sparse nature of the church may have been behind the loss of parishioners to more modern houses of worship.

“They had wooden heat originally,” Barber said. “Probably by the mid-20th century, or just before, they put in kerosene heaters.”

The church did not have electricity until 1965. There is still no indoor plumbing.

“It was like living in the 18th or 19th century when you came to church,” Barber said.

By 1970, the church was no longer listed as part of the United Methodist Church. Today, there’s no congregation, but the church is available for special events by contacting the preservation society.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

I first learned about the Bohemian oyster shuckers who used to work in North Carolina’s oyster canneries almost 40 years ago.

I was living in Swan Quarter that winter, and I still remember how surprised I was when some of the old timers told me how, when they were young, Bohemian immigrants would come from Baltimore and work in a local cannery.

At the time, I wondered how they had come to be there, and what their lives had been like, and where else, besides Swan Quarter, they might have gone.

Many years have passed since those days in Swan Quarter, but I thought maybe it was time to see if I could discover their story.

Here is what I found out.

***

From 1890 until at least 1914, thousands of central and Eastern European immigrants worked in oyster canneries on the North Carolina coast. Typically recruited by “padrones,” or labor agents, in Baltimore, they all came to be known as “Bohemians,” though they had actually immigrated to the United States from many different parts of Europe.

They included men, women and children, all of whom, except for the youngest children, shucked and canned oysters. An unknown number of the men also worked on oyster boats.

Many had actually come from Bohemia, a land of low mountains and plateaus in what is now the Czech Republic. More, however, had left homes in other parts of Europe to come to America.

Among them were especially large numbers of Polish immigrants, but also Serbs, Dalmatians, and other Slavic peoples, Germans, and even Italians. 

For simplicity’s sake, I will also refer to this diverse group of immigrants as “Bohemians,” unless historical sources allow me to identify their nation of origin more precisely. 

By the mid-19th century, Baltimore, Maryland, had become the center of the nation’s oyster industry.

But by the 1880s and 1890s, many of Baltimore’s oyster companies had begun to expand beyond Chesapeake Bay. They began to open canneries both on the North Carolina coast and as far south as Mississippi and Louisiana.

Many of those oyster canneries relied on immigrant laborers who had settled in Fells Point, Camden, and other waterfront neighborhoods in Baltimore, Maryland. Typically, they transported the Bohemian workers south by train, though some also traveled to the North Carolina coast by steamer.

For a time, the Bohemian immigrants seemed to be in every town and village on the North Carolina coast.

In my survey of coastal newspapers, I found the Bohemians working in oyster canneries in Elizabeth City, Swan Quarter, Belhaven, Washington, Morehead City, Beaufort, Marshallberg, Swansboro and Shallotte.

I suspect that the Bohemians worked in other oyster ports on the North Carolina coast as well, but sources are scant — I cannot be sure.

In some other parts of the coastal South, the Bohemians are at least somewhat better remembered. But, on the North Carolina coast, they seem to have been completely forgotten. To my knowledge, no book, article, or museum exhibit — or blog, podcast or anything else — has ever told their story.

Today I hope that I can take at least a small step toward changing that.

By drawing especially on coastal newspapers, and with help from some wonderful librarians, archivists, and museum curators, I will try to sketch the best portrait I can of the Bohemian oyster shuckers and their lives on the North Carolina coast between 1890 and 1914.

At the John Boyle & Co.’s Cannery at Goat Island

One of the best accounts that I found of the Bohemian oyster shuckers here on the North Carolina coast comes from Elizabeth City, a town on the Pasquotank River, just north of Albemarle Sound, that was transformed by the boom in the oyster industry that began in 1890.

In the spring of 1902, an Elizabeth City attorney and newspaper publisher named Walter L. Cohoon wrote an account of his visit to a large group of Bohemian immigrants that were living and working at the John Boyle & Co.’s oyster cannery on Goat Island.

John Boyle & Co. was one of probably half a dozen or more Baltimore companies that had opened oyster canneries in Elizabeth City since 1890. The company had first located in the town’s Riverside neighborhood, then moved to Goat Island, now called Machele Island, which is located just across the Pasquotank from Elizabeth City’s waterfront.

Cohoon and a friend or two crossed the river in a skiff, then tied up at the oyster cannery’s wharf on Goat Island.

Touring the cannery, they discovered a large force of Bohemian oyster shuckers, “four score of them,” as well as many local African Americans, hard at work.

At that time, the John Boyle & Co.’s workers could, at peak capacity, shuck and can 15,000 bushels of oysters a month, which amounted to some 16,000 cans of oysters a day.

In his newspaper, the Tar Heel, Cohoon wrote, “We listened to the songs of the negroes and to the broken English of the foreign element until becoming tired we turned our attention to the Bohemian quarters.”

They then walked next door to the barracks where the Bohemian workers and their families stayed during the oyster season.

“Here,” Cohoon reported, ” … we found one long room with rows of bunks built along the sides of the building.”

Seasonal and migrant labor camps of that kind were not uncommon on the North Carolina coast in that day, but Cohoon does not seem to have visited any of them before.

“The members of a dozen families lay themselves down to sleep with not so much as a thin curtain separating their different births. The sons and daughters of different families cooped up in one small building like so many beasts is a condition of affairs that one can hardly believe, yet such is a fact, and they live peacefully together, never trespassing or intruding upon one another in any other manner.”

‘Two Trainloads of Bohemian Goat Islanders’

The Bohemian oyster shuckers on Goat Island continued to show up in the pages of the Tar Heel for another couple of years.

The very next year, for instance, on April 10, 1903, the Tar Heel referred to the Bohemians while railing against a change in state law that regulated the oyster industry more closely.

In that article, the Tar Heel warned Elizabeth City’s citizens that the new law would have a disastrous impact on the town’s economy.

The headline read:

 “The Oysterman’s Boats are Idle and without Employment. TWO BIG CANNERIES SUSPEND. Several Hundred Bohemians go Home—Colored Laborers are Walking the Streets—and the Oyster Tongers are out of Pocket Money.”

The Tar Heel observed that oyster cannery owners had gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to “send a mass of Bohemian population from Maryland to North Carolina.”

The newspaper then went on to say that local merchants would suffer if the Bohemian oyster shuckers left the North Carolina coast for good:

“In Elizabeth City alone, an entire island colony have migrated to Baltimore this week, whose combined salaries were practically invested here and who might have gone this month into the pockets of our merchants.”

The “entire island colony” was of course a reference to the Bohemian oyster shuckers at Goat Island.

The paper continued:

“The Boyle Oyster Canning Company suspended active business Wednesday the 1^st. Monday April 6^th two train loads of Bohemian Goat Islanders, left Elizabeth City for Baltimore, where they will engage in picking strawberries, or canning sundry goods.”

That was actually typical. When the oyster season ended on the North Carolina coast, usually later in April, the Bohemian immigrants most often returned to Baltimore to work either in canneries there or in the fields of Maryland and Delaware that supplied the city’s canneries with fruits and vegetables.

The Song of the Oyster Shucker

According to newspaper accounts, the first Bohemian immigrants had come to work in Elizabeth City’s oyster industry in the latter part of 1890.

In a December 1890 issue of another Elizabeth City newspaper, the Weekly Economist, I found an article that noted:

“The oyster packing house of Wm. Taylor received 75 Bohemian laborers yesterday from Baltimore with their families…. There are about 25 women and 15 to 20 children.”

At that time, oyster canneries and shucking houses were springing up along the North Carolina coast, but no place more so than in Elizabeth City.

Two years later, the Weekly Economist Oct. 27, 1893, looked back wistfully at the prosperity and excitement that came to Elizabeth City during that first year or two of the state’s oyster boom.

Pondering all of Elizabeth City’s history, the newspaper’s editor declared that he could only compare the impact of the oyster boom on the town to the days after the opening of the Dismal Swamp Canal in 1829.

Referring to the oyster boom, the newspaper observed:

“It was a jolly time—a new revelation. Population and money flowed in a perpetual stream and prosperity was felt in every fibre and pulsation of business.”

On one hand, he seemed anxious about the large influx of immigrants into what had been a relatively quiet southern town.

“New people, new faces, new ways, new manners, almost destroyed the homogeneity of the population,” he wrote.

On the other hand, the newspaper’s editor clearly found something intoxicating in that historical moment.

“The song of the oyster shucker was heard in the land, the refrain of its suggestive melody was joined by Bohemians, Hittites, Hivites, Jebezites, Virginians, Marylandros, and Afro-Americans, in happy harmony and peaceful intercourse.”

“Every Saturday night was a new and upward departure in business,” he exclaimed. “There was money and plenty of it in all hands.”

While the local oyster industry never again reached the heights it did in 1890-91,  Elizabeth City remained home to oyster canneries well into the first decade of the 20^th century, and Bohemian immigrants continued to make the journey from Baltimore to work in the town’s canneries.

The John Boyle & Co. cannery continued to employ Bohemian oyster shuckers at least until 1903. According to the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia, “Bell’s oyster house” in Elizabeth City also employed “a large force of Bohemian oyster workers” in those first years of the 20th century.

Other oyster canneries in Elizabeth City likely employed Bohemian immigrants as well, but I have not found any record of them doing so.

Beaufort, Morehead City and Marshallberg

Another part of the North Carolina coast where “the song of the oyster shucker” could be heard was Beaufort, a small town in Carteret County where local people had always made their livings from the sea.

I found historical references to Bohemians working in Beaufort’s oyster canneries from 1890 to 1914.

In December 1890, for example, The Daily Journal in New Bern reported that a sizable group of Bohemian immigrants had passed through that coastal town on their way to a cannery in Beaufort.

A few weeks later, a second group passed through New Bern. According to The Daily Journal Jan. 15, 1891, they arrived on the steamer, Neuse, then took a train east to Morehead City, where they could board a ferry for Beaufort.

Surveying the Bohemians passing through New Bern, The Daily Journal’s correspondent wrote:

“There were in all about 100 people, about 75 of whom were workers, the remaining 25 being children too small for labor. They were especially Poles and Bohemians, but there were a few Germans among the number. They appear to be quiet, industrious people, who will make desirable citizens.”

Over the years, large numbers of Bohemian shuckers worked in oyster canneries both in Beaufort and in other parts of Carteret County.

For instance, a report in Washington Progress, Feb. 2, 1892, indicated that the North Carolina Packing Co. was employing Bohemians at its oyster cannery in Beaufort.

Six years later, The Daily Journal in New Bern on Dec. 15, 1898, reported that Bohemian oyster shuckers were working at the A.B. Riggin & Co.’s oyster cannery in Marshallberg, a village 8 miles east of Beaufort.

“The steamer Neuse brought in quite a passenger list yesterday, the large number being Bohemians of all ages, from infants in arms to grandmothers. The crowd were from Baltimore…. [and] were engaged by the Oyster Canning Factory at Marshalberg, and will shuck oysters at the factory. There were 48 persons in the party.”

That same month, a Raleigh newspaper, Carolinian, reported Dec. 22, 1898 that “fifty foreigners” were shucking oysters at the Booth Packing Company’s cannery in Morehead City.

Two years later, on Oct. 30, 1900, the New Berne Weekly Journal commented that “about 20 Bohemians” had passed through New Bern on their way to an oyster cannery in Beaufort.

 “They came from Baltimore and were men, women, and children,” the newspaper observed.

Polish Oyster Workers in Swansboro

At least for a time, in 1907 and 1908, Bohemian oyster shuckers were also working and living in Swansboro, an old seaport that is in Onslow County, just across the White Oak River from Carteret County.

In Swansboro, the immigrant laborers worked at a cannery owned by a local merchant named Guy D. Potter.

On Oct. 11, 1907, New Bern’s Daily Journal reported that Potter had gone to Baltimore to recruit “a hundred head of Poles as shuckers.”

Six months later, on March 31, 1908, an article in the New Bern Weekly Journal indicated that Potter employed the Poles not only to shuck oysters, but also to harvest the oysters.

We only know that was the case, unfortunately, because the newspaper reported that one of the Polish immigrants had a tragic accident while returning from the oystering grounds. According to the Weekly Journal, his sail skiff overturned and, unable to swim, he drowned.

The report did not give the Polish oysterman’s name. It did however say that he left a wife and four children in Swansboro.

At Thomas Duncan’s Cannery in Beaufort

The last reference that I found to Bohemian oyster shuckers in Carteret County was in the April 4, 1914, edition of the New Bern Sun Journal.

That article was brief. It indicated only that a Beaufort oyster cannery owner named Thomas Duncan had accompanied a large group of Bohemian immigrants back to Baltimore.

The Bohemians had worked for him that winter and were returning to Baltimore after finishing the oyster season in Beaufort.

The article gave no more details. However, I found it especially interesting because several photographs at the State Archives of North Carolina show interior scenes of Thomas Duncan’s oyster cannery in Beaufort.

One of those photographs, above, shows a group of women wearing dark hats and shawls in the oyster factory’s canning room.

Another photograph, at the top of the post, shows a long view of the cannery’s shucking room.

I cannot say for sure, but I strongly suspect that at least the first photograph, and probably the second, portray Bohemian immigrants, as well as, in the case of the second photograph, African Americans.

If that is correct, they may be our only surviving images of Bohemian oyster shuckers anywhere on the North Carolina coast.

‘Bohemian Headquarters’

Another, very different account of the Bohemian oyster shuckers on the North Carolina coast, comes from the Washington Gazette, a newspaper published in Washington.

On Nov. 6, 1890, at the height of the oyster boom, one of the Gazette’s writers described his visit to what he called Washington’s “Bohemian Headquarters.”

He was referring to an old school building on Third Street that had been converted into a migrant labor camp for the oyster season.

I do not know what the Gazette’s reporter expected to find at “Bohemian Headquarters.” Evidently it was not this:

“It was discovered that a fiddle and a banjo were employed in dispensing sweet music, while about two dozen gushing Bohemian maidens with pale-faced partners were tripping the regular old fandango in high glee.”

He must have gone there on a Saturday evening, after the oyster shuckers finished their shift at a local cannery.

The Gazette’s correspondent apparently enjoyed his visit. He observed that “both men and women seemed courteous and kind.”

He also mentioned in passing that he found some of the young women quite attractive, and he expressed some surprise at how many of the Bohemians were “conversing well in English.”

He then went on to describe their living quarters:

“There are 63 quartered in the building which crowds it to its uttermost capacity…. The only furniture noticed were trunks or chests with one or two bedsteads. The balance of the sleeping paraphernalia consists of bunks in a continuous row from one end of the room to the other. There were four or five stoves placed about the room….”

Most likely, that group of Bohemian immigrants was employed at the J.S. Farren & Co.’s oyster cannery that was located on the town’s waterfront, near what is now the Children’s Park.

Based in Baltimore, J.S. Farren & Co. had opened the cannery earlier that fall.

Another Baltimore firm, the H.J. McGrath Canning Co., also opened an oyster cannery in Washington that winter. However, its workers had not yet arrived from Baltimore at the time that the Gazette’s correspondent wrote his story.

According to another local newspaper, the Washington Progress on Jan. 13, 1891, 100 Bohemian oyster shuckers arrived in Washington a week or two after New Year’s to begin work at the McGrath cannery.

I do not know how many more years the Bohemians came to Washington. The last reference that I found to them in the town’s oyster industry was from the Washington Gazette on Feb 18, 1892.

Anti-immigrant Views

When he visited the “Bohemian Headquarters,” the Washington Gazette’s correspondent seemed to have been rather charmed by the oyster shuckers from Baltimore.

However, I found a much different sentiment expressed in the Gazette the next year.

At that time, an uncredited article on the Gazette’s front page had this to say about the Bohemian immigrants:

“The Bohemians are rapidly developing the innate cussedness of their true nature. They are a nuisance in the sections where they are located and the sooner Washington is rid of this very undesirable acquisition to her population the better pleased many of her citizens will be.”

Where that hostility was born, and why the Gazette’s view of the Bohemian oyster shuckers had changed so profoundly, is far from clear.

Had some incident occurred that colored town leaders’ attitudes toward the immigrants?

Or perhaps that comment reflected anti-immigrant or even anti-Catholic bias, both of which were on the rise in the U.S. at that time? Most of the Bohemians came from predominantly Catholic homelands.

Or had cannery owners courted trouble by employing immigrant laborers instead of hiring local workers?

Those are all possibilities, but I do not have anywhere near enough evidence to say more.

‘Now she now sleeps in quietude’

In that same year, 70 miles away, an even darker view of Washington’s Bohemian immigrants was expressed in the Perquimans Record, a newspaper published in the coastal town of Hertford.

 On March 18, 1891, the Record noted that a train carrying Washington’s Bohemian shuckers back to Baltimore at the end of the oyster season had passed through Hertford.

Referring to Washington, the newspaper’s correspondent wrote, “Our sister town has at last gotten clear of the dirty, ugly tribe, and now she sleeps in quietude.”

I do not know what stirred the Perquimans Record to that level of maliciousness, but clearly some local people greeted the Bohemian oyster shuckers warmly and others did not.

At the Pungo River and Swan Quarter

Bohemian immigrants also worked in oyster canneries in the more remote coastal communities east of Washington.

On Oct. 23, 1903, for instance, the Elizabeth City Tar Heel reported that  “two (train) carloads of Bohemians” were en route to Belhaven, 25 miles east of Washington.

Beginning in the late 19th century, hundreds of oyster shuckers — one government report said as many as a thousand — left their usual homes and created what amounted to a here-today, gone-tomorrow boom town of oystering people there on the banks of the Pungo River.

Another 25 miles east, Bohemians were also shucking oysters in Swan Quarter, a village bordered by seemingly endless plains of salt marsh on the edge of the Pamlico Sound.

I lived in Swan Quarter for a time when I was young, and I remember old-timers then telling stories about the Bohemian immigrants who used to come and shuck oysters there.

However, the only newspaper account I found that mentioned those immigrant laborers concerned a brawl that broke out between them and local oystermen in February 1902.

That story ran in several North Carolina newspapers, including the Kinston Free Press of Feb. 11, 1902:

“Some Bohemians, who are employed at the oyster canneries there, were having a dance, when the crews of several [oyster] dredges came ashore and attempted to take charge of the dance.”

The story continued:

“A general fight ensued, and when the smoke of the battle cleared away it was found that 13 people were wounded, seven of them seriously, four badly cut and three shot.”

Whether that incident was rooted in tensions between locals and immigrants or was just a run-of-the-mill dance hall fight — fights were almost a Saturday night ritual in some coastal villages — I do not know.

All I can say for sure is that if the fight had not made the news, I would not have found any written evidence of Bohemian oyster shuckers ever living and working in Swan Quarter.

By the Calabash River

The last incident involving Bohemian oyster shuckers that I want to mention comes from the quiet salt marsh creeks located below Shallotte, 50 miles southwest of Wilmington.

The exact location of the oyster cannery where the Bohemians worked there is somewhat uncertain, but as best I can tell it was 12 or 13 miles below Shallotte, in the vicinity of the Calabash River.

According to several articles that ran in the Wilmington Morning Star in December 1907, 60 Bohemians — actually Poles, by all accounts — were recruited in Baltimore and transported to the A. B. Riggin & Co.’s oyster cannery on that part of the North Carolina coast. Copies of the articles are in the Brunswick County Historical Society’s newsletter of April 2007.

Things must have been bad at the cannery. Only a few days after arriving there, half of the Polish workers gathered whatever possessions they had and left. According to a Dec. 1, 1907, account, they had found “the pay and conditions” at A.B. Riggin & Co. intolerable.

They did not have an easy time getting back to Baltimore. Some walked all the way to Wilmington. Others somehow got passage to Wilmington aboard a steamer called the Atlantic.

 According to the Wilmington Morning Star, the Poles spoke little or no English, and they seem to have been penniless. When they reached Wilmington, they had no place to stay, so town leaders let them bed down for a few nights first at the police station, then at City Hall.

Many stayed in Wilmington for a time and took temporary jobs at a local lumber mill. Others did farm work. A few chopped wood and did other odd jobs around the seaport.

As best I can tell, they probably worked just long enough to earn passage home to Baltimore.

Four or five other Poles got home by taking passage aboard “the leaking schooner Grace Seymour in exchange for manning the pumps on the voyage North,” a grueling job if ever there was one.

Remembering the Bohemian oyster shuckers

The history of these Bohemians immigrants — these Czechs, these Poles, these Slavs, Italians and others —  is remembered at least somewhat better in other parts of the American South.

To an important degree, that is because of a child labor investigation more than a century ago.

Between 1909 and 1916, a social reformer named Lewis Hine documented “Bohemian” and local children, both Black and white, in oyster and shrimp canneries in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and South Carolina.

Working for the National Child Labor Committee, Hine used his photographs and reports to advocate for stricter child labor laws across the U.S.

His photographs are powerful, and many, particularly those of the youngest workers, are unforgettable. They stunned many people when they first appeared in newspapers, magazines, and books.

Now preserved at the Library of Congress, Hine’s photographs and investigative reports highlighted child labor in the South’s oyster industry.

But they also brought public attention to the low wages, long hours, and often atrocious working conditions that shuckers of all ages, races, and backgrounds experienced in oyster factories at that time.

In the parts of the coastal South that he visited, Hine’s work assured that the Bohemian oyster shuckers, and really all who worked in oyster canneries, would be remembered.

Lewis Hine never visited the North Carolina coast, however.

Without his work to remind us of them, all memory of the Bohemian oyster shuckers — and really all those who worked in North Carolina’s oyster canneries — gradually faded away here, then was lost.

What I hope is that what I have written here today, however incomplete it is, might be the beginning of remembering them.

 *  *  *

For their help with the research for this story, I want to express my deep gratitude to Stephen Farrell at the George H. and Laura E. Brown Library in Washington, N.C.; Ray Midgett of the Historic Port of Washington Project; David Bennett at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort (especially for his work on A.B. Riggin & Co.); and to my old friend Amelia Dees-Killette at the Swansboro Area Heritage Center Museum. 

I also want to extend a special shoutout to my dear friend Bland Simpson for his lyrical evocation of Machele Island in “The Inner Islands: A Carolinian’s Sound Country Chronicle,” one of my favorite books. 

If you want to learn more about the history of the state’s oyster industry, my essay “The Oyster Shucker’s Song.” might be helpful. And if you’d like to read more about the Bohemian immigrants in the South as a whole, I wrote a piece called “Shuckers and Peelers”  for Southern Exposure magazine many years ago that you might find interesting. 

I dedicate this story to the memory of one of my ancestors on the Polish side of my family, my great-uncle Peter, a lobsterman who lost his life at sea. 

Hotels have been a staple of the North Carolina coastal vacation for over a century. There are hundreds along the coast today stretching from the Corolla Village Inn near Virginia to the Continental Motel at Sunset Beach, over 200 miles to the south.

The first famous North Carolina hotels, all open by the early 1900s, included the Lumina Pavilion in Wrightsville Beach, the Atlantic Hotel in Morehead City, and the First Colony Inn in Nags Head. These hotels drew thousands of tourists each year and shaped the landscape around them, with the Lumina giving its name to one of Wrightsville Beach’s main thoroughfares.

But one of the more popular hotels of the early 20th century is almost forgotten. No old ruins survive of the Bayview Hotel in the tiny unincorporated Beaufort County community of Bayview, and there are no historic markers other than an illustration on a small wooden sign.

The Bayview was a unique hotel, a river-based beacon that helped build a tourist center in an area mainly known today for agriculture and fishing.

The tourist hotel boom began in the late 19th and early 20th century. People had visited North Carolina beaches since the early years of the colony, but it took until the late 1800s for railroad construction and growing industrial prosperity to create a steady stream of tourists. Once they had the money and the ability to reach the state’s beaches, North Carolinians and out-of-staters came in droves.

In 1921, a travel writer for the New York Tribune noted, “there is one of the finest white sand beaches at Wrightsville that I know anything about,” and spent the rest of a long article praising the town’s Lumina Pavilion.

Eastern North Carolina tourism during this period was centered on beach travel, as it is today, but there were plenty of other scenic areas near the coast that could become tourist destinations. This thought animated the Bayview Hotel founders, a group that included businessmen from Washington, Wilson and other eastern towns. These men had connections in several different industries, most notably coastal businesses such as seafood processing.

They spent about half of a million dollars to establish their hotel on the Pamlico River 19 miles down from Washington and 3 miles south of Bath. The area had been mostly untouched prior to that point and was known more for hunting than any other pursuit. But it had beautiful views of the water and was a perfect spot for sunbathing, swimming, and lounging away from crowds and cities.

The planners went through every effort to make the Bayview Hotel an attractive destination. They laid out a large boardwalk with concessions and a golf course. Steamships made regular excursions between Washington and Bayview. Once they arrived, guests enjoyed modern plumbing, electric lights, and regular dances held on an expansive pavilion. A 1927 newspaper advertisement showcased Bayview as a center for “bathing, boating, dancing, fishing, and many other amusements.”

The Bayview Hotel thrived for nearly two decades. It hosted a number of dignitaries including longtime Congressman Lindsay Warren, Senate Leader Furnifold Simmons, and the then-former Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, the noted newspaperman and white supremacist.

But the Bayview was subject to the same threats that other hotels of the time had faced, notably fire. Despite the extensive brickwork used in the hotel’s construction, it burned down in 1943, just as the famed Atlantic Hotel had in Morehead City in 1933. The loss hit the area as the country was in the midst of fighting World War II and lacking the resources to rebuild a hotel as large as Bayview.

Following the war, the tourism industry forgot Bayview and other river towns in favor of the beach. Bayview was passed over for interstate highway construction and could only be reached by the two-lane N.C. Highway 92, which is entirely contained within Beaufort County.

The one notable connection that Bayview has today, the ferry across the Pamlico River to Aurora, was built not for tourism but for employees of the Aurora phosphate mine Texas Gulf Sulfur that opened in the 1960s. The hotel was never rebuilt. In subsequent decades, the land where it was became the home of a community, Bayview Townes, which features a painting of the original hotel on its sign.

The Bayview Hotel is a symbol of an earlier time, before the era of highways, roadside motels, and the state’s mountain-beach dichotomy. It was a time when new business ventures could create tourist centers out of swamp and woods. Fueled by railroads and early car travel, the Bayview Hotel was able to carve out a role in the history of state tourism, one that should be remembered by today’s fans of North Carolina waterways.

The morning of Aug. 17, 1899, a Category 3 hurricane plowed across Shackleford Banks, Diamond City and Portsmouth, then-inhabited island communities in Carteret County.

With 2024 being the 125^th anniversary of the storm that forced many of these families to pack up everything – even their homes – and move inland, descendants are planning a reunion for Saturday, Aug. 17, to commemorate the exodus.

The Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island is hosting the daylong Diamond City Homecoming that is held every five years to celebrate “our ancestors of the Shackleford Banks,” in partnership with the Cape Lookout National Seashore and Island Express Ferry.

The first gathering took place in 1999 to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the storms of 1899 that drove folks from the Banks to Harkers Island, Salter Path or the Promise Land, a community between 12^th and 15^th streets near downtown Morehead City.

The day begins with an 8:30 a.m. ferry ride to Shackleford Banks for a wreath-laying ceremony at the Wade’s Shore Cemetery, followed by an afternoon of discussion at the museum. Starting on Thursday and throughout the weekend, descendants will have on display family photos, scrapbooks and artifacts at the museum.

Carteret County native Shannon Adams has helped coordinate the homecoming, held every five years, since 2014.

“The original residents of Diamond City and their descendants were deeply connected to the sea, both because of its constant presence and its role in their livelihoods. They were a close-knit community, characterized by their strong wills, outspoken nature, and warm hearts. Their conversations are marked by a unique brogue,” Adams said.

He explained that Carteret County “has three distinct areas known for its unique mystique, reputation, and ties to Diamond City: Harkers Island, Salter Path, and Promise Land” in Morehead City.

They can trace their roots back to the seafaring folk of the Cape Banks, which are the Outer Banks islands extending west and north from Cape Lookout, including Shackleford Banks.

“Nearly a century after the last of their Ca’e Banker ancestors left these islands, their memories and heritage remain entwined with the land,” he continued. The name derived from Cape Banks, Ca’e Bankers were primarily fishermen, although they spent part of the year whaling.

“They pulled nets teeming with mullet and other fish, supplying both their own needs and the mainland market. The Banks once had abundant fresh water, supporting livestock and gardens, and their maritime forests were lush and widespread,” Adams said.

The shoals along the shoreline were treacherous, making navigation dangerous.

“Many ships ran aground before their crews could react, and the Bankers often launched boats to rescue shipwrecked sailors and salvage any floating cargo, from bananas to furniture, and even the wood from the wrecked ships. One of the most notable shipwrecks in the area was the Crissie Wright, a schooner carrying phosphate, lost off Wade’s Shore, Shackleford Banks, in a frigid January night of 1886,” he said.

Diamond City, the largest settlement on the Cape Banks, was named after the black-and-white diamond pattern of the Cape Lookout Lighthouse on the east end of Shackleford. At one time the population was nearly 500.

A series of devastating hurricanes in 1878, 1879, 1897 and two in 1899 battered the Cape Banks.

“These storms led to the maritime forest’s decline and the sand’s encroachment over the greenery, prompting an exodus from the area. By 1905, Diamond City had become a ghost town,” Adams said.

Adams said he is connected through all three areas tied to the migration from Diamond City.

His seventh great-grandfather was Ebenezer Harker, for whom Harkers Island was named.

“Many ancestors on my paternal side were born on Core Banks,” Adams explained. Bettie Gillikin Adams was a school teacher on Diamond City and moved to Salter Path in the early 1900s, after the storms of 1899. The community of Bettie is named after her.

“She met my great grandfather, Macajah ‘Cagie’ Adams and married him in 1910. They moved to the Promise Land in 1918. Cagie was a well-known boatbuilder in Morehead City in the early 20th century,” Adams said. “My wife, Cecilia, and I now own their original home on Shackleford Street in Morehead City. We purchased it in 2012 to bring it back into our family and my father restored it.”

Adams said it is important to keep this oral history alive.

“Descendants like me have a source of fierce pride and are committed to the preservation of this special place that no longer exists. My focus is The Promise Land since my recently deceased father and aunt were so proud of it and taught me well. It is my calling to keep those stories alive,” he said.

Also, a descendant, Camella Marcom, a resident of Harkers Island, has been helping coordinate the wreath-laying ceremony at Wade’s Shore Cemetery on Shackleford Banks.

Marcom noted that this is the 125^th anniversary of the 1899 storm that “made it necessary to move from that wonderful place.”

The purpose of the homecoming always is to link generations, “to remember those who came before us and help those descendants remember who they are and where they came from. Their strength in the storms and resilience is a legacy we can cherish and hold on to,” Marcom said.

She said her great-great-grandparents moved to Harkers Island from Diamond City in 1899-1900. Their names were Alfonzo “Fonzy” and Alice Hancock Guthrie.

They moved their house with them on two sail skiffs and set it up Harkers Island. They lived in it for years before it was torn down in the 1980s. One of their sons lived in it after they died until his death, Marcom explained. They have numerous descendants literally all over the world but many still here in Carteret County.

Her connection to the cemetery on Wade Share through her grandfather’s first wife Mollie Lewis Willis, who is buried there and is one of the few identified marked graves.

Marcom attended the 2019 homecoming that was rained out.

Scheduled for Aug. 17, of that year, the museum was undergoing repairs from damages associated with the September 2018 Hurricane Florence, but they made due and forged on with the homecoming.

They tried to weather the storm and took the short ferry ride to Shackleford Banks, but when they reached the island that morning, the rain was so coming down so hard, they couldn’t reach the cemetery. The ferries turned around and the ceremony took place in the museum, Marcom said.

“It was an emotional but beautiful day of remembrance when each name from the cemetery was read,” she wrote in a social media post about the ceremony at the museum, adding that though the wreath was damaged in the transport, “it stood as a reminder of the perseverance of those who came before us and our own perseverance we will hand down to the next generation.”

The next day, Sunday, Aug. 18, 2019, the wreath was repaired and taken back out to Wade Shore.

“Today, with the weather changed more favorable for an August day, the wreath got its second trip to Wade Shore. This time the sun was shining and the water was glistening. The cemetery could not have been more beautiful,” she wrote. “The stately cedars, hollies, dogwoods, and oaks with a hint of Spanish Moss stood tall reaching heavenward.”

The names were read and the plots were found. “Some of the tombstones had been broken over the years and the engravings were very difficult to read at best but each memorial still a tribute placed there by loving, grieving family members. We knew we stood on hallow, sacred ground. A place that had been revered for years as the final resting place of these sweet souls — our family,” she continued.

About the homecoming

Based at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island, at 8:30 a.m. ferries at the neighboring Cape Lookout National Seashore visitor center docks will carry passengers to Shackleford Banks. A wreath-laying ceremony is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. at Wade’s Shore Cemetery.

“There will be a new wreath this year and renewed feelings of love and belonging. Connections will be made and remembered,” Marcom said, adding that it only happens during these gatherings that take place every five years.

Ferries will head back to Harkers Island at 10:30 a.m. Reservations are required and can be made through www.CoreSound.com/dc-ferry. Cost is $10 a person. 

The museum and community center will open its doors at 10 a.m. when visitors can view family displays and videos.

A welcome is at 11 a.m. Lunch is from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. by Bring Back the Lights Committee/Harkers Island’s Christmas Decorating Project.

Cost for the barbecue and chicken plate from Fat Fellas is $15 each. Tickets for lunch can be purchased at www.CoreSound.com/dc-lunch. Hot dogs and desserts available for purchase on site.

Panel discussions are to begin at 1 p.m. with Promise Land Memories, followed at 2 p.m. with Stories from Salter Path, and at 3 p.m. the discussion will focus on the Camps of Shackleford Banks.

Those who make their way there can expect to be educated by a fiercely proud group of descendants through oral presentations, slideshows, and videos, Adams added.

The day will close out at 7 p.m. with the Diamond City Community Choir:  Music & Memories of our Shared Heritage at Free Grace Church.

Diamond City 125th homecoming shirts are available for sale on the museum’s website.

The Inner Banks region of North Carolina is home to numerous of the state’s most historic small towns.

Settled early in the 18th century, these communities host famous restaurants, architecturally significant homes, and a wide variety of civic institutions. Some of these places have a reputation that reflects their importance and beauty, with towns such as Edenton and Washington being regionally or even nationally known. On the other hand, there are a number of unsung towns that have not been featured in the New York Times. One of these is Murfreesboro.

This gem on the Meherrin River has attracted civic and educational leaders for the past three centuries and is just as poised for growth today as it was in the colonial period.

Murfreesboro was one of the first areas of North Carolina settled by the British. Its establishment was part of a wave of migration that extended out from the Albemarle Sound region in the early 18th century.

Following the earliest settlements and displacement of Native Americans like the Chowanoac, British settlers continued to seek more land for tobacco. As in Virginia and South Carolina, they moved west, marching across the colony until they reached the falls line in the mid-18th century. In North Carolina, the region closest to the Virginia border was also one of the most prosperous, as its inhabitants could trade with the wealthier Virginians and use their navigable rivers.

One of the rivers that crossed state boundaries was the Meherrin River. Passing through the home of the Meherrin Native Americans, this river provided an outlet to the Chowan River and the Albemarle Sound. Its miles of surrounding fertile farmland gained numerous tobacco plantations throughout the 18th century. By 1707, a small community had formed at a bend on the river.

Murfreesboro was incorporated as a town in 1787 and named for William Murfree, a local landowner and Revolutionary-era politician. The town’s heyday occurred during its first few decades. Architectural historian Catherine Bishir notes that in the early 1800s, the town “enjoyed trade that crowded the streets with wagons bearing produce from as far as the Blue Ridge and brought so many ships to its wharves that ‘one could cross the river on the decks of vessels lying in the stream.’”

The tobacco economy of the Murfreesboro area relied entirely on slavery. The town was a center for plantation agriculture, and enslaved workers constructed its buildings. The proximity of the Virginia border also made Murfreesboro a destination for free African Americans, many of whom were formerly enslaved and had escaped harsher conditions in Virginia. Hertford County, where Murfreesboro is located, had one of the largest populations of free African Americans in the entire state in 1860, according to historian John Hope Franklin.

Murfreesboro still retains a number of buildings from its earliest period as a town. These include nearly a dozen homes built before 1820, as well as at least three homes — Melrose, the Myrick House and the John Wheeler House — built in or around 1805. There is also the William Rea Store, which was built in 1790 and is one of the oldest commercial buildings in the state.

The antebellum period was also the beginning of Murfreesboro’s best-known site. North Carolinians’ zeal for education during the Revolutionary period led to the formation of a number of academies, along with the state university in Chapel Hill.

One of these institutions, Hertford Academy, was established in 1811 in a Murfreesboro home. It was eventually bought by local Baptists and became Chowan Baptist Female Institute, later, in 1910, Chowan College, and in 2006, Chowan University. The institution moved to its present flagship building in 1851. This structure, known as the Columns, is considered an excellent example of Greek Revival architecture and is one of the largest antebellum college buildings in the state.

The Civil War inflicted some damage to Murfreesboro. The town was attacked and looted by Union troops, but it was not burned like Winton, its neighbor to the east. As throughout the South, the war devastated the town’s economy. Tobacco declined in importance for decades. Most importantly, the abolition of slavery erased the forced-labor system upon which the entire region had relied entirely.

Like other towns of the time, Murfreesboro took a middle path as it recovered from the war. It did not embrace — or was not embraced by — industry to the extent that nearby towns such as Ahoskie or Elizabeth City had. Ahoskie, which was formed a century after Murfreesboro, passed the older town in population by the 1910 census. Still, Murfreesboro was eventually able to relax its reliance on cash crops, especially the traditional crop of tobacco. Murfreesboro had become a center for peanut cultivation as well as the home of an iron foundry and manufacturing plant by 1916.

The 20th century in Murfreesboro was defined by the growing importance of both industry and Chowan University. Murfreesboro became the home of Riverside Manufacturing Co., believed to be the world’s largest basket company, in 1927. The plant employed thousands of Murfreesboro residents for the next seven decades.

Outside of baskets, the university is a considerable draw. Chowan College closed for six years in the 1940s, but has prospered since reopening, and it became a four-year institution again in 1992. Chowan graduated a number of its best-known alumni in the late 20th century, including NBA coach Nate McMillan. Chowan counted 1,500 students in 2017, a notable achievement for a town with only about 2,800 full-time residents.

In recent decades, Murfreesboro has remembered its three centuries of history and embraced historic preservation and tourism. The Murfreesboro Historical Association incorporated in 1963 and now owns more than a dozen properties and hosts numerous events and tours each year, most notably a candlelight tour in December.

Murfreesboro is also home to the Brady C. Jefcoat Museum, a nationally known museum dedicated to the sprawling collection of everyday objects, antiques and historic artifacts owned by one man — who happened to have helped build the Memorial Belltower at North Carolina State University and dozens of other Raleigh structures — and displayed in the former high school.

While many small towns in North Carolina have at most one or two historic homes open to the public, Murfreesboro Historical Association James Moore credits the town’s commitment to sharing its history and preserving and promoting the college and the town since 2000. It has become a bedroom community to much larger, more bustling areas nearby. As Moore noted, “You can be in downtown Norfolk in an hour.” And as people continue to move to Murfreesboro, the community bolsters the historical association and provides it with the donations and interest needed to continue its work.

Today, Murfreesboro has carved its niche as a center of both education and tourism in the Inner Banks. It remains the second-largest town in Hertford County and continues to welcome new businesses such as restaurants, tattoo parlors, and recently a “barcade,” Insert Coin Arcade and Bar.

More people visit the town’s museums every year, and the Historical Association says it has the potential to expand its offerings and tours even further. Murfreesboro may not be the size of New Bern or have the prominence of Edenton, but it shows that the past — and historic preservation — can still be the future for North Carolina’s smaller coastal towns.

Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

I would like to share a collection of historical photographs from the National Archives at College Park, Maryland.

They were taken by inspectors and other personnel of the United States Lighthouse Board (1852-1910) and its successor agency, the United States Lighthouse Service (1910-1939), in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Lighthouse Board, and then the Lighthouse Service, had the responsibility for building and maintaining lighthouses in the U.S., but also for placing and tending many other kinds of critically important navigational aids, including range lights, buoys, light beacons, daymarks and others.

Many of those different types of navigational aids can be seen in the selection of photographs that I am featuring here. They are all from the North Carolina coast, and they date to the years 1885-1917.

As you’ll see, they include some of the most iconic historical images of the state’s lighthouses.

However, for me the portraits of lighthouses are not the stars of the show. Even if it’s just because of their rarity and freshness, I was more drawn to many of the lesser-known photographs that I found in College Park.

In particular, I was excited to find so many photographs that highlight the historic use and importance of other, rather less majestic types of navigational aides. In some cases, I had rarely, if ever, seen them discussed in books and articles on North Carolina’s maritime history.

I am thinking, for instance, of the system of range lights that have guided vessels on the Cape Fear River since the early 19th century, or the far from glamorous lens lantern at Wreck Point, just off the point of Cape Lookout, that helped so many pilots find refuge from storms in the Cape’s lee.

Many of the photographs also give us a rare view of the behind-the-scenes work that was necessary to maintain a functional system of navigational aids on the North Carolina coast.

In this case, I am thinking, for example, of several photographs that I found in College Park of the U.S. Lighthouse Service’s buoy depot that was in the port of Washington for more than half a century.

Or, as another example, I might refer you to the handful of photographs that I have included here that feature the U.S. Lighthouse Board’s gas works at Long Point Island on Currituck Sound. At that remote outpost, the U.S. Lighthouse Board’s keepers manufactured the compressed gas that was used in gas buoys over a large swath of the North Carolina coast.

Those photographs may not come with some of the romantic connotations that we so often associate with lighthouses. Yet for me at least, each of them opens a window into an important, unsung part of the state’s maritime history — and helps us to see and understand that coastal world a little bit better.

— 2 —

By most accounts, the history of navigation aids in the U.S. began with the construction of the Boston Light on Little Brewster Island in 1716.

Records of buoys and beacons in colonial America are notoriously sparse, though. According to Amy K. Marshall’s “A History of Buoys and Tenders,” there are records of cask buoys in the Delaware River in 1767 and of spar buoys in Boston Harbor as early as 1780, but not much else.

I suspect that there were at least some local buoys and beacons, and perhaps a great many, on North Carolina waters by that time as well, but the earliest I have found were wooden slats positioned to mark a channel on the Cape Fear River, below Wilmington, in the 1790s.

The framework for a more national system of navigational aids in the U.S. began to take shape around that same time. Soon after Independence, the First Congress passed an An act for the establishment and support of light-houses, beacons, buoys, and public piers that placed the responsibility for navigational aides under the authority of the Treasury Department.

Navigational aids continued to have a largely local character, and often differed widely from place to place, however, until 1848, when the U.S. Congress adopted a system of buoyage with uniform shapes, colors, and numbering — the so-called Lateral System, that, with some minor modifications, is still in use today.

— 3 —

Croatan Lighthouse in the channel between Croatan Sound and Albemarle Sound in 1914.

At that time, the Croatan Light was one of 14 manned lighthouses built on piles on North Carolina waters. The Wade Point, North River, Laurel Point, and Roanoke River lighthouses all stood on the Albemarle Sound or at the mouth of its tributaries.

The Long Shoal, Hatteras Inlet, Bluff Shoal, Gull Shoal, Brant Island, Southwest Point Royal Shoal, and Pamlico Point lighthouses were all located on Pamlico Sound.

The Croatan Lighthouse was northwest of Roanoke Island. Another lighthouse, the Harbor Island Light, was located at the entrance to Core Sound, not far from Portsmouth Island, and the Neuse River Lighthouse stood off Piney Point at the entrance to the Neuse River. According to the U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office, the Croatan Lighthouse had a 4th Order Fresnel Lens, as well as a fog bell that struck every 15 seconds when in use. 

— 4 —

This might be my favorite photograph of a U.S. Lighthouse Service navigational aid on the North Carolina coast. It’s a rather jerry-built back range light situated in a tree in downtown Edenton.

A front range light is evidently somewhere out in Edenton Harbor.

The front and back range lights worked together. When aligned visually, one directly behind the other, range lights indicated the route of safe passage on a river or other body of water. In this case, Edenton Harbor.

To be seen properly, the back range light had to be at least somewhat elevated above the front light, which in this case was achieved with nature’s help.

— 5 —

Debbie Mollycheck, who is the authority on the history of the Cape Fear river lights, recently told me that this photograph was probably taken during the Palmetto’s first inspection tour of the Lower Cape Fear.

The Palmetto had just recently been commissioned a shallow water tender. Ms. Mollycheck also informed me that the gentleman with his hands on his hips was the Palmetto’s master, Emil F. Redell. A family attorney by trade, Ms. Mollycheck is the granddaughter of Franto Mollycheck II, a later keeper of the Cape Fear river lights.

She has done extensive research on the river’s light keepers and is currently writing a history of those keepers and of the 6th Lighthouse District as a whole. You can learn more about her work online.

— 6 —

According to Debbie Mollycheck, Berry was an African American waterman who was born into slavery in Brunswick County in 1855. Her research has shown that Berry had been tending lights on the Lower Cape Fear since 1885.

At the time of this photograph, he had the day-in and day-out responsibility for maintaining the lights along a 14-mile section of the river from Upper Lilliput Channel to the Atlantic. This photograph was taken on the same inspection tour of the Lower Cape Fear that I referenced in the photograph above.

Keeper Berry was presumably guiding Capt. Redell and the Palmetto’s crew on the tour, with his boat being towed by the Palmetto and used when they needed to reach navigational aids on sections of the river too shallow for the Palmetto. You can learn more about Ms. Mollycheck’s research here, and I am hoping that I will be able to share more of her research on Henry Berry here sometime soon.

— 7 —

This is a rare portrait of the U.S. Lighthouse Service buoy depot in Washington March 1914. The depot was one of three or four in the Life-Saving Service’s 5th District, which extended from the Delaware coast to New Inlet, on the central part of the North Carolina coast.

At this site, personnel stored and maintained — painted, rebuilt, sometimes assembled — the buoys and beacons that were used throughout much of the North Carolina coast.

The depot was just below the town’s bridge across the Pamlico River, where its wharf was a popular, if apparently illicit swim spot for local kids. On the righthand side of this photograph, we can see the depot keeper’s house. In 1914, the keeper was Capt. T. F. Smith, a Life-Saving Service veteran who had previously been keeper of the Cape Hatteras Light for 19 years and the Ocracoke Light for 12 years. On the left, a side wheel steamer is docked on the Pamlico.

I can’t be sure — no Life-Saving Service tender was ever based at the depot — but the steamer looks a lot like the Sidewheel Lighthouse Tender Jessamine.

— 8 —

The U.S. Life-Saving Service used several different kinds of buoys to mark the locations of channels to warn of shoals and other dangers, and, in some cases, to indicate anchorage grounds.

Built of iron or steel plates and weighing anywhere from 700 to over 8,000 pounds, buoys such as these were moored to the bottom by a heavy chain attached to a concrete block, stone or cast-iron sinker. A cast-iron ballast ball, tethered directly below the buoy, kept them steady in rough seas and high winds.

Pilots could navigate in and out of a harbor, up or down a river or through another other kind of channel by eyeing the colors, numbers, and shapes of the buoys.

The maintenance and replacement of buoys was one of the U.S. Lifesaving Board and U.S. Lighthouse Service’s most important jobs, and a never-ending one.

As the U.S. Lighthouse Service’s annual report for 1915 said, “buoys are liable to be carried away, dragged, capsized, or sunk, as a result of ice or storm action, collision, and other accidents…, [but] great effort is made … to maintain them on station in an efficient condition, which frequently requires strenuous and hazardous exertions on the part of the vessels charged with this duty.” 

— 9 —

Another view of what I believe is the U.S. Lighthouse Service paddlewheel tender Jessamine tied up at the buoy depot in Washington, March 1914.

Built at the Malster & Reaney shipyard in Baltimore in 1881, the Jessamine was based at the 5th Lighthouse District’s headquarters in Baltimore but her crew built and maintained lighthouses and tended buoys and other navigational aides across much of the North Carolina coast.

Like all U.S. Lighthouse Service tenders, Jessamine was a tough, seaworthy vessel, constructed with a hull, deck framing, and the rest of her superstructure having “a large reserve of strength,” to quote a 1915 U.S. Lighthouse Service report.

Lighthouse tenders had to be capable of handling violent storms on the open ocean, as well as to navigate along shoals where shallow draft and a solid hull, capable of putting up with accidental groundings, was required.

Note the Jessamine’s forward mast, which doubled as a derrick for construction work and for hoisting and lowering buoys. The Jessamine was not, by the way, the only U.S. Lighthouse Service tender with a botanical name.

Since 1867, the U.S. Lighthouse Service had named its lighthouse tenders after trees, flowers, or other plants, generally ones native to the area where a tender operated.

— 10 —

In June 1900, crews from the U.S. Lighthouse Service’s predecessor agency, the U.S. Lighthouse Board, placed lens lantern at Wreck Point to help guide vessels seeking a lee inside Cape Lookout.

Erected at the barb at the point of Cape Lookout Bight, the light was a welcome sight for many a mariner caught offshore in heavy weather. The Wreck Point Light gives some sense of the diversity of navigational aides built and maintained by the U.S. Lighthouse Board and the U.S. Lighthouse Service.

According to The United States Lighthouse Survey for the year 1915, the U.S. Lighthouse Service had 14,554 navigational aides in commission in U.S. waters as of that year. They included lighthouses, so-called “minor lights” that are not tended by resident keepers, light vessels, gas buoys, float lights, and a wide variety of unlighted aids such as bell and whistle buoys, fog signals, and day beacons.

— 11 —

The beacon in this photograph was a temporary replacement for a slatted, 3-pile structure that was crushed by ice in the great freeze of December 1917 to January 1918.

That cold spell devastated both U.S. Lighthouse Service navigational aids and a great deal of maritime infrastructure. The ice cut away wharves and piers, took out beacons, and severely damaged at least two lighthouses. The North River Lighthouse was washed off its foundation after ice shattered its pilings. A buildup of ice also knocked askew the Norfolk & Southern’s railroad bridge across the Albemarle Sound.

According to the Jan. 25, 1918, Daily Advance in Elizabeth City, the weight of the ice made the bridge “as crooked as a snake” and a 1,000-plus foot section of the track fell into the Albemarle. Boats of all kinds were frozen in the ice; some, like the U.S. Coast Survey’s Matchless, were sunk. With no freight boats running, mail and other supplies did not reach Roanoke Island and a large section of the Outer Banks for three to four weeks.

When the ice finally broke up, U.S. Lighthouse Service crews had their hands full replacing and repairing buoys, beacons, and other navigational aids. A freeze that bad was unusual, but losing navigational aids to storms was not and kept the U.S. Lighthouse Service busy. Only a few years earlier, for instance, a 1913 hurricane destroyed 20 post lights on Pamlico and Albemarle Sound, washed out many government wharves and outbuildings, and did serious damage both to the buoy station in Washington, and to nine light stations from Ocracoke Island to Pamlico Point, according to the Washington Progress, Oct. 13, 1913.

— 12 —

The Wade Point Light Station at the mouth of the Pasquotank River was another lighthouse damaged in the great freeze of 1917-18. A screw-pile structure, the light was originally built in 1855 but was rebuilt at least once and maybe twice after Confederate guerrillas burned the superstructure during the Civil War.

It was rebuilt again in the 1890s. The station’s light and 26 x 26 cottage rested on five metal pilings roughly 12 feet above the water. During the freeze, a buildup of ice pushed the pilings to one side and left the superstructure in danger until repairs could be made to stabilize the foundation.

— 13 —

— 14 —

–15–

This is a view looking down from the U.S. Lighthouse Service tender Jessamine at the gas plant that was located at the Long Point Light Station, March 1893. Established in 1879, the station ran the gas plant in order to make the compressed gas that was used to light buoys throughout that part of the North Carolina coast.

At that time, the technology was still quite new. The country’s first gas buoy had only been deployed 12 years earlier, in 1881 at the entrance to New York Bay. Gaslit buoys were the wave of the future however. By 1915, the U.S. Lighthouse Service had more than 500 gas buoys in operation.

By then, all of the U.S. Lighthouse Service’s lighted buoys utilized compressed gas, either oil gas or acetylene. U.S. Lighthouse Service personnel deployed the gas buoys widely to mark the the entrances of rivers, inlets, and canals, as well as to signal shoals, jetties, and other dangers, as well as the paths of channels.

— 16 —

The brick building on the right is the Long Point Light Station’s retort house, where special equipment distilled and compressed the oil gas that was used in the region’s U.S. Lighthouse Board light buoys. On the left, we can see one of the two brick cisterns that were used for storing the gas. The rest of the gas works is in the background. According to research by Currituck Sound teacher and historian (and my friend) Barbara Snowden, the resulting gas was what was typically called at the time “Pintsch gas.”

Named after its inventor, a German tinsmith and manufacturer named Carl Friedrich Julius Pintsch, it was a compressed fuel gas created from distilled naphtha. Pintsch’s firm pioneered its use in buoys in the 1870s, and the U.S. Lighthouse Service used the gas extensively in buoys and other lighted navigational aides through the First World War, when it was largely replaced by acetylene.

Widely used in railroad cars as well, “Pintsch gas” could often light a buoy for a couple months or longer without refilling.

— 17 —

Originally built in 1817, the lighthouse was long a welcome sight to mariners at the entrance to the Cape Fear River. In July 1834, Capt. Henry D. Hunter of the revenue cutter Tanker described the Light as having 15 lamps, being 109 feet above the level of the sea, and showing a fixed light.

On an inspection tour two years later, he reported, “The keeper is an old Revolutionary [War] soldier and is unable from sickness to give the lighthouse his constant personal attention. The light, however, shows well from a distance,” according to the U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office.

— 18 —

The Keeper’s House at the Ocracoke Light Station, May 1893. You can’t see it in this photograph, but the Ocracoke Lighthouse, built in 1823, is just a few feet to the north.

I would expect that the three individuals in the photo are the light station’s keeper at that time, Enoch Ellis Howard, his wife Cordelia, and one of their daughters or granddaughters. According to Ellen Cloud’s book, “Ocracoke Lighthouse,” Enoch Ellis Howard was born on Ocracoke in 1833, became keeper of the light during the Civil War, and died while still serving as the Light Station’s keeper in 1897.

He was one of many Ocracoke Howards who made their livings following the sea one way or the other as ship’s pilots, mariners, coast guardsmen, and in other maritime trades, including, some say, one who was a member of Blackbeard’s crew in the early 1700s. 

Phillip Howard’s Village Craftsmen Journal is a wonderful place to learn more about the history of the Howard family on Ocracoke, as well as much else about the island’s history.

— 19 —

As I mentioned earlier, range lights are a pair of lit beacons placed some distance from one another, with the back light elevated higher than the front light. By lining up the two beacons, ship pilots could identify the channel that would afford safe passage through shallow or dangerous waters. They are sometimes used to fix position as well.

— 21 —

In addition to lighted navigational aids, the U.S. Lighthouse Service also built and maintained thousands of navigational aids that were not lighted– so-called “daymarks” that were only meant to be visible from sunrise to sunset. This 32-foot high structure, for instance, helped pilots get their bearings at the Little River Inlet, roughly 50 miles south of Wilmington.

— 22 —

Cape Lookout Light Station, 1889. I don’t know if I’ve seen a photograph that better captures the austere beauty of the Cape in that day and time. The building on the far right is the original Keeper’s Quarters, built in 1812 and apparently abandoned by this point in time. On both sides of the lighthouse’s base, we can just glimpse the two chimneys of the second Keeper’s Quarters, built in 1873. The two outbuildings to the right of the lighthouse are an oil house and perhaps a coal shed or other storage building.

— 23 —

These are the ruins of the keeper’s dwelling at the Price’s Creek Light Station on the Cape Fear River, just upriver of Southport, June 1917. Built in 1849, the brick dwelling had a wooden lantern that served as one of the range lights that guided vessels through the river’s ship channel.

This structure has since been destroyed by storms, but the ruins of the second range light at Price Creek, a squat 20-foot high brick tower, have survived and can be easily seen from the Southport-Fort Fisher Ferry.

— 24 —

–end–

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

MANTEO — A two-day program held here last week brought together researchers who study the Indigenous people of the late 16th century who lived in what is now northeastern North Carolina.

Held on the College of The Albemarle Dare County Campus, the two-day program, “In the Spirit of Wingina … and beyond,” was sponsored by the nonprofit Secotan Alliance and focused on what happened when the English first encountered the Native peoples of the Albemarle region.

The event’s keynote speaker, Dr. Michael Oberg, distinguished professor of history at the University of New York at Geneseo, is the author of “The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand,” which details the events leading to the death of King or Chief Wingina of the Roanoac.

Wingina was among those to first greet English captains Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe. In their account, the explorers reported to Queen Elizabeth I that “The king is called Wingina, the countrey Wingandacoa.”

The captains’ account makes clear that Wingina was initially friendly to the English.

“Hee made all signes of joy and welcome, striking on his head and his breast and afterwardes on ours to shew wee were all one, smiling and making shewe the best he could of al love, and familiaritie,” the explorers wrote.

By the time of the second English expedition, however, under the military command of Ralph Lane, European disease had begun to ravage the Native populations. Wingina was apparently becoming convinced that there was something spiritually out of balance in the lives of his people.

Oberg noted during his talk that the Roanoke were at the time part of the Algonkin, or Algonquin, people and that they operated, “on a belief that bad things happen for reasons often tied to the failure or the ineffectiveness of rituals or the malevolence of spiritually powerful figures.”

The Roanoac attempted prayer with the English, with Wingina and his people going to great lengths to change the horror of the diseases that were ravaging their villages.

“He (Wingina) and some of his people took the Bible, the most physical manifestation in English ritual … and rubbed the book on his body,” Oberg said.

Nothing worked and so the Native people withdrew from Roanoke Island, but before leaving, Wingina told Lane there was a gathering of tribes at the headwaters of the Albemarle Sound that were planning on attacking and wiping out the English.

Lane headed to the village of Chowanoac, captured the chief, who under duress said that Wingina was the actual plotter.

Lane then returned to Wingina’s village where he requested a meeting over what he claimed was the theft of a silver cup.

On June 15, 1586, Lane and Wingina met.

“After some time talking, Lane yells out the password, ‘Christ our victor,” and they opened fire,” Oberg said of the incident.

Wounded, Wingina ran into the forest with English soldiers in pursuit. Sometime later “… Edward Nugent emerges from the woods with Wingina’s head.”

With that history of deception and violence on the part of the English, the failure of the Roanoke Colony and the 115 to 120 colonists who arrived in 1587 may have seemed preordained.

There were, however, other factors.

Studies of tree rings show that the colonists arrived during a time of extreme drought, when it was all the area Tribal nations could do to feed themselves.

There was also a diplomatic outreach from the governor of the colony, John White, following the killing of colonist George Howe at the hands of a tribal leader, Wanchese.

The attempted diplomacy ended disastrously, with White, who had failed to get what he wanted from the local tribe, attacking a village, where “he kills the wrong people,” Oberg noted.

“And, like all little men and cowards, blame the victims,” Oberg continued. “‘If only they told us they were there, we wouldn’t have killed them.’”

Oberg, who had attended opening night of the outdoor drama, “The Lost Colony,” on Roanoke Island on the night before his lecture, talked about how the drama interpreted historic events.

“If you went to the play, you’ve seen one version of (what happened). I’m certain I don’t know what happened,” he said. “Whatever happened, Indigenous people decided their fate.”

For the Native people, it was the beginning of a period of change that was traumatic and devastating.

Oberg emphasized that there is a tendency to think of the story of the founding of the United States as a seminal event, but to the Native people it may have simply been a continuation of what they had already been experiencing.

“Was it just one chapter in a prolonged era of warfare that ran from the middle of the 18th century through the first quarter of the 19th century, the replacement of one tyrant imperialist, George III, with another, George the First, Washington?” Oberg asked.

Symposium attendees also heard from Dr. Charles Ewen, East Carolina University Harriet College Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, who explained how few contemporaneous accounts exist and that those accounts are from a European perspective.

He pointed in particular to what the Native tribes described as a village that would be the modern equivalent of a “crossroad where there’s a 7-11 and a gas station.”

North Carolina Central University Dean of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities Dr. Arwin Smallwood was reared in Bertie County and is a member of the North Carolina Tuscarora people. He focused on the history of the Tuscarora Nation and the relationship between North Carolina and New York stat,e where many of the Nation moved after the 1711-15 Tuscarora War.

Dr. Gabrielle Tayac shared a description of Powhatan’s Mantle, a decorative garment that has been in England since the middle of the 17th century. Now housed at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, it could be worn, although it is so large and heavy it was doubtful that it would have been.

Consisting of four hides sewn together with sinew and thousands of shells embedded in the fabric, the work that went into the piece is extraordinary, as is its artistry. As an example of the skill and creativity of the people of the coastal area, there may be nothing else quite like it.

Also included during the two-day event were the sounds of Native American song, dance and storytelling performed by solo performer IOSDN.

Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

A few days ago, I gave the keynote address at an extraordinary event held in Plymouth to commemorate the Plymouth Massacre of April 1864. I found the event deeply moving, and I was honored to be there. This is a copy of my remarks.

Thank you for the invitation to say a few words here today. I will do my best not to go on too long, but I do feel as if some things need to be said. I of course will talk about the Plymouth Massacre. But I also want to talk at least briefly about the larger struggle for freedom, and to end slavery, that occurred here in Washington County and across the North Carolina coast during the Civil War.

I think that taking that somewhat broader view will help us to understand better what happened here in Plymouth and will help us to remember, mourn, and honor more fully those who lost their lives here 160 years ago.

In a way, I feel as if this is the funeral, the memorial service, that the victims of the massacre never had. They were unburied, left, by all accounts, where they fell, many of them in swamps where children would find their remains in the following days and weeks. No gravestones marked their passing. No monument has ever been raised to remember them.

We are here, then, to do what should have been done a long time ago. We are here to say words that for too long have not been spoken. We are here to lift prayers that are long overdue.

We are here to make sure that the forgotten will be remembered.

If you will bear with me, I will begin by setting the scene for what happened here in Plymouth.

At the beginning of the Civil War, Plymouth was a small town, quite a bit smaller than it is today. Most of the town’s population was African American, and the large majority of those Black men, women, and children were being held in slavery.

On the outskirts of Plymouth, on the Roanoke River, at Lake Phelps, and here and yon in every direction, thousands of African Americans were being held captive on plantations — slave labor camps, I think we would call them today, a kind of gulag of their time.

As we all know, by the time that the Civil War began in April 1861, white Southerners —and much of the North — had been treating African Americans as property, not as human beings, for more than two centuries. People, including little children, were bought and sold like mules.

That world — that way of life — finally began to crumble here in Washington County in the early part of 1862.

Very early in the Civil War, Union forces captured a long sliver of the North Carolina coast. Even before the first Yankee soldier stepped ashore, enslaved African Americans began to escape from plantations across Eastern North Carolina and move toward the sea.

Hundreds, then thousands, of African American men, women, and children fled from bondage in Confederate territory to freedom in New Bern, Beaufort, Washington, Roanoke Island—and Plymouth. As the Union force’s commanding general said, those communities were “overrun with fugitives from the surrounding towns and plantations.”

A great boatlift to freedom had begun. Across the sound here, on the Chowan River, slaves sailed away while their master shot at them from shore. Another night, a slave woman named Juno gathered her children into a dugout canoe and paddled down the Neuse River to freedom. A little east of here, at Columbia, a large group of African Americans confiscated a schooner and sailed down the Scuppernong and across the Albemarle Sound.

A little to our west, a Black boatman known as “Big Bob” carried 16 slaves down the Tar River to freedom, then turned and went back upriver for more.

Here in Plymouth, a group of slaves “patched until their patches themselves were rags” escaped and sailed through stormy weather and rough seas all the way to Roanoke Island. “How they succeeded is a wonder to us all,” a Yankee soldier exclaimed.

A little southeast of here, in Hyde County, an overseer informed a plantation’s owner that he could no longer control the enslaved men and women on the plantation, no matter what he did. Some had already escaped to Union lines. He said that he had even shot “old Pompey.”

Ten days later, that overseer reported that “something like 100 [slaves had] gone off in the last month,” 35 in a single night.

 “Almost every day negroes are shot … for attempting to run away,” a journalist in Goldsboro reported. One plantation owner, William Loftin, described the situation in letters to his mother. Even before Yankee troops reached Roanoke Island, he wrote that “a good many negroes are running away” and “all of mine are gone from the oldest to the youngest.”

“All that I ever had is gone,” Loftin wrote. Later, in 1863, reality really set in. “My boy Tony came up with the Yankees in full uniform saying he was a U.S. soldier…. He went to J. H. Bryan’s and took his gun away from him. He says he has killed four damned rebels…. He had a rifle strapped to his back.”

William Loftin’s ”boy Tony” was only the beginning. By the spring of 1864, thousands of African Americans on the North Carolina coast had joined the Union army. By war’s end, nearly 180,000 African American men had served or were serving in the Union army. (Forty thousand of them did not survive the war.) Another 19,000 served in the Union navy.

The Civil War here in Plymouth was not much like the one that you or I read about in our history books when we were young (especially if you are my age) or that you may have seen in movies such as “Gone With the Wind” or even in more recent documentaries such as Ken Burns’ “Civil War.”

The large majority of Washington County’s people were opposed to the Confederacy. Half the population, we have to remember, was African American, and large numbers of the county’s white citizens also supported the Union. In fact, in Washington County, roughly as many white men enlisted in the Union army as enlisted in the Confederate army.

The divisions among the county’s white people were deep and bitter. To quote one leading historian, here in Washington County, “Brother fought brother. Neighbor attacked neighbor.”

Prior to the Battle of Plymouth, the low point was probably in December 1862, when, in a quick in-and-out raid, Confederate troops burned most of the town.  (By that time, Plymouth had been in Union hands for months. Town leaders had peacefully handed the town over to the Union army in May 1862.)  According to a local planter, the Rebel troops burned the town to “prevent its affording shelter to the Abolitionists and run away [sic] negroes …”

By that time, a Union private reported, Plymouth had become “a general rendezvous for fugitive slaves.” They escaped from plantations far up the Roanoke, and many got their first taste of freedom on the ground where we stand.

Many of those Black men enlisted in the Union Army. For the first time, many Black families were also able to send their children to schools that had been started here so that they could learn to read and write and do arithmetic. (None of the Confederate states allowed Black children to go to school.)

By the spring of 1864, Plymouth had been held by Union troops for nearly two years. But on April 17th, some 7,000 Rebel troops under Major Gen. Robert F. Hoke lay siege to the town, hoping to take it back from the Union and make it once again part of the slave South.

Every Black man here, both those in uniform and those that were civilians, including many fugitive slaves, understood the danger. If Plymouth fell, they could expect at the very least to be re-enslaved. But by that point in the war, most African Americans understood that, if rebel troops captured them in battle, or found them wounded on the battlefield, they might well be murdered.

By the spring of 1864, relatively well-known Confederate massacres of Black Union soldiers had occurred at Fort Pillow, Tennessee; Fort Wagner, South Carolina; Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana; Poison Springs, Arkansas; and at Saltville, the Crater, and Suffolk, Virginia.

But there were others. Many killings of Black Union prisoners did not make even a ripple in the news. Memory of them was lost in the fog of war, the slowness with which news traveled, and the reluctance, even in the North, to take the accounts of Black witnesses at face value.

The Battle of Olustee was one of those. Early in 1864, reports of a massacre of wounded Black soldiers from the 35^th Regiment, United States Colored Troops, after an especially bloody battle in Olustee, Florida, reached New Bern. (The 35^th had been recruited in and around New Bern.)

After Olustee, Union leaders had grown suspicious because the Confederate commander supplied them with such a short list of Union soldiers wounded or taken prisoner in the battle. But not for some months did they conclude what the surviving Black soldiers had always known, that “most of the wounded colored men were murdered in the field.”

I do not know if the Black men and women here in Plymouth knew that Confederate general Robert Ransom’s soldiers were among the Rebel troops attacking Union positions here in Plymouth. But if they did know, they would have expected the worst. Ransom’s Brigade was one of those Confederate units notorious for not taking Black prisoners alive.

Ransom’s own men wrote about that policy. Only a month earlier, Ransom’s Brigade had taken no prisoners after encountering Black troops of the 2^nd Regiment, United States Colored Calvary, 75 miles from here, at Suffolk, Virginia. “Ransom’s Brigade never takes any negro prisoners,” one of Ransom’s soldiers bragged in a letter to the Charlotte Observer.

Another of Ransom’s soldiers, Pvt. Gabriel Sherrill, echoed those words. In a letter home a few weeks before the Battle of Plymouth, he wrote, referring to Black soldiers, “They will fite,” rather than surrender, “for they know that it is deth eny way if we got hold of them for wee have no quarters for a negroe.”

One of Ransom’s officers, Maj. John W. Graham, said much the same in a letter to his father. (Graham’s father represented North Carolina in the Confederacy’s senate.) In that letter, Maj. Graham said, speaking of Suffolk, the “ladies … were standing at their doors, some waving handkerchiefs, some crying, some praying, and others calling to us to `kill the negroes.’”

He told his father, “Our brigade did not need this to make them give `no quarter,’ as it is understood amongst us that we take no Negro prisoners.”

After a very bloody, four-day siege — one hard on both sides, but with especially heavy Confederate casualties — Hoke’s forces did capture the town of Plymouth on April 20^th, 1864. At that point, Rebel troops were left to ransack the town and the worst fears of the Black people and the white Unionists in the town were realized.

One of the first historians to write about the Plymouth Massacre in any detail was Dr. Wayne Durrill. Durrill earned his Ph.D. in history at the University of North Carolina in 1987, and he is now a professor at the University of Cincinnati. His book “War of Another Kind“ is the fullest scholarly study of the Civil War here in Washington County.

In his book, Professor Durrill quotes the only known account of the Battle of Plymouth given by an African American eyewitness, a man who identified himself as a Union sergeant. “Upon the capture of Plymouth by the rebel forces, all the negroes found in blue uniform, or with any outward marks of a Union soldier upon him, was killed,” he testified.

The Black eyewitness also observed that “some [were] taken into the woods and hung … Others I saw stripped of all their clothing and then stood upon the bank of the river with the faces riverward, and there they were shot … Still others were killed by having their brains beaten out by the butt-end of the muskets in the hands of the rebels.”

Professor Durrill quotes another Union serviceman, a white lieutenant named Alonzo Cooper, of the 12^th New York Volunteers, who reported that “the negro soldiers who had surrendered, were drawn up in line at the breastwork, and shot down as they stood.”

According to another eyewitness, when an unknown number of Black men, probably Union enlistees, saw what was happening and fired at Confederate troops, the Confederates “charged them with every conceivable weapon in their possession, whereupon the negroes [most of whom were unarmed] ran, taking refuge in Coneby Creek swamp and the flats beyond, scarcely a mile away.”

According to that account, the Rebels followed them into the swamp and “slaughtered” them “like rats.” Lt. Cooper, recalled, “the crack, crack of muskets down in the swamp where the negroes had fled to escape capture,” and reported that the Blacks were “hunted like squirrels or rabbits.”

Years later, B. D. Latham, who was a 12-year-old boy at the time, remembered that he and some other local white boys went into the swamp the Sunday morning after the battle. Professor Durrill wrote: “There they saw `hundreds of slain negro troops,’ their bodies having been left to decay for four days.”

Soon after Professor Durrill’s book was published, two highly respected Civil War historians, Weymouth T. Jordan and Gerald W. Thomas, undertook a far more exhaustive and in-depth study of the Battle of Plymouth’s aftermath. Deeply knowledgeable of the Civil War, both had, and have, reputations for being conservative, judicious, and diligent scholars.

Their goal was first to determine if what happened in Plymouth should truly be called a “massacre” and — if a massacre did occur here — how many people were killed.

At the time of their study, Jordan was the head of the Civil War Roster Project at the N.C. Division of Archives and History. Thomas, a native of Bertie County, had nearly finished his book “Divided Allegiances: Bertie County during the Civil War,” but took a break to assist Jordan to get to the bottom of what happened in Plymouth.

Together they sifted through thousands of pages of historical evidence. They then presented their results in a 72-page article called “Massacre at Plymouth:  April 20, 1864.” That article was published in the North Carolina Historical Review, the state’s foremost historical journal, in the spring of 1995. To this day, it remains the definitive study of what happened here in Plymouth.

Theirs was a very cautious approach. They did not accept evidence that could not be corroborated, and they looked askance at evidence if the individual that was the source of that evidence had any reason to exaggerate or be dismissive of claims of a massacre.

At times, when I reviewed their research, I personally felt that they may have been too cautious and leant over backwards too far for the sake of wanting their research to be utterly beyond reproach.

In their article, Jordan and Thomas acknowledged that we will probably never know every detail of what happened here on those April days in 1864, or know the exact number of people that lost their lives here. Yet their findings were unambiguous. In their conclusion, they wrote, “it is clear that blacks and Buffaloes [white Unionists] were killed at Plymouth under circumstances that merit the appellation `massacre’….”

They concluded that Confederate troops, mainly Ransom’s Brigade and cavalrymen led by Col. James Dearing, executed approximately 25 Black prisoners in the first days after the Battle of Plymouth. “Some blacks captured in uniform were shot out of hand…. [S]ome were dispatched later, [and] some black male civilians were murdered also….”

They went on to say: “The number of blacks, uniformed and otherwise, who were murdered in Plymouth on April 20 was probably no more than 10. Fifteen more may have been executed on April 23 or 24…. Forty were killed as they fled the battlefield, [and] 40 were hunted down and dispatched in the swamps.” Others died in combat, hundreds of others managed to escape, and “approximately 400, including a few uniformed soldiers and many women and children, were captured and taken prisoner.”

At least a handful of “Buffaloes” — the white Unionists — were also killed either in town or in the swamps.

To me one of the war’s most remarkable phenomenon was the courage and determination that African Americans soldiers and sailors displayed even though they knew that this kind of treatment could well be their fate whenever, and wherever, they fell into Rebel hands.

“We have fought … where captivity meant cool murder on the field, by fire, sword, and halter; and yet no black man ever flinched,” African American delegates — including North Carolina’s Abraham Galloway — declared at a convention of African American leaders in 1864.

Here in Plymouth, as well as on distant battlefields, America’s Black soldiers held onto a prophetic vision of the Civil War that in their eyes justified their hardships and sacrifices.

We have to remember: their courage, and their willingness to fight and die, was rooted in something bigger than themselves and far more personal than the Union cause. Their Civil War — the slaves’ Civil War — was grounded in the love of their wives and children, their brothers and sisters, their mothers and grandmothers, their yet-to-be-born grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all of whom, if they prevailed, would be free.

If they prevailed, they knew, a child of theirs might one day go to school. A son might not be whipped to his last breath. A daughter could be raised in safety. Husbands and wives would know that they could grow old together.

If they prevailed, the unspeakable fear that a child could be taken away from them at any age, and at any moment, of any day, would disappear forever. A man or woman’s work would be their own.

A Black Union sergeant named Charles Brown expressed the prevailing sentiment among the country’s Black soldiers as well as anyone in the ranks.

While encamped near New Bern, Sgt. Brown weighed the dangers that his company faced from Confederate soldiers, as well as the discrimination that his men faced within the Union army due to their race.

And yet he wrote: “I feel more inclined daily, to press the army on further and further; and, let my opposition be in life what it will, I do firmly vow that I will fight as long as a star can be seen, and if it should be my lot to be cut down in battle, I do believe… that my soul will be forever at rest.”

As his regiment marched into battle, Brown said, they sang:

We are the gallant first 
Who slightly have been tried, 
Who ordered to a battle, 
Take Jesus for our guide.

May all of their souls forever be at rest. May they all be remembered. May we all find hope in the stars as they did.

Note: Photographer Sharon C. Bryant is the African American Outreach Coordinator at Tryon Palace in New Bern, and she prepared extensive educational materials on the history of the 35th USCT that were displayed at the encampment in Plymouth.

HATTERAS — Following last week’s private tours and state officials doing the honors at a ribbon-cutting ceremony, the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum reopened to the public Monday with a brand-new exhibit gallery that artfully illustrates the sweep of four centuries of some of the most dramatic maritime history in the world.

“I have a question for you,” said North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources Secretary Reid Wilson during his remarks Thursday. “The last five letters of the word history — what do those letters spell? Story.”

And that is the value of museums: telling the human story, he told a large crowd gathered for the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Understanding where we were, he added, is the only way we move forward.

“We should not be scared of our history,” he said. “We should learn from it.”

For the island community, the celebration is more than the museum reopening; the celebration is that it is completed. It took 38 years of persistence from stubborn Hatteras Villagers to get there. But that’s another story.

“Goodness gracious, I hardly know where to begin to thank the hundreds of individuals and entities who this important cultural facility would not be possible without them and their sacrifices both personal and in their livelihoods,” said Danny Couch, president of the nonprofit Friends of the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum, in his remarks Thursday.

Couch, a Hatteras Island native, is one of those who stuck it out for decades, never letting go of the idea that Hatteras had to have a maritime museum.

“Raleigh (officials) said it should be in Manteo or Nags Head,” he told Coastal Review in a later interview. “Which is the last thing you want to tell a Hatterasman.”

Standing at the entrance in front of a huge digital measuring stick showing current weather conditions and past hurricane details, Wilson applauded the new state-of-the-art exhibits that include features such as touchscreens, holographic historic people and a huge dynamic sculpture of lifesavers rowing a surfboat through a stormy sea.

The Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum harbors a motherlode of maritime stories unique to the Outer Banks, from colonial exploration to piracy to heroic lifesaving service rescues to vicious U-boat attacks to premier boatbuilding.

Situated off the treacherous Diamond Shoals, which squeezed vessels transiting the Atlantic shipping lane close to Cape Hatteras, the Outer Banks has the largest number of the 2,000 shipwrecks scattered along the North Carolina coast.

Today, shipwrecks are only part of subject at the museum, but their significant role on the Outer Banks was the spark that ignited the idea for the museum in Hatteras Village and villagers’ minds. Some islanders have compared a shipwreck off the beach in the old days to a Walmart store spilling its contents today.

Couch remembers the seed first germinating, back in 1973 when a team on the Research Vessel Eastward from Duke University’s Marine Laboratory in Beaufort discovered the long-sought Civil War-era ironclad U.S.S. Monitor 16 miles off the Hatteras coast, where it sank in a storm on New Year’s Eve, 1862.

“Literally, when the Eastward was over top, we saw it as a tremendous opportunity,” he said. “We thought it was a great way to bring in people and a great way to tell our history here.”

There was no place to house even a few artifacts, but villagers wanted to find funding to build a museum. The Monitor was designated as a National Marine Sanctuary, the nation’s first, in 1975. It was to be managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In 1987, The Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, was chosen as the principal repository for more than 210 tons of artifacts recovered from the wreck site.

Villagers were disappointed, but they knew they were up against strong competition.

“A lot of it is the isolation out here,” Couch said about being passed over.

But a year before the Virginia museum was selected, local representatives from the National Park Service and Congress encouraged the nonprofit Hatteras Village Civic Association to compete for the artifacts. Thanks largely to Rep. Walter Jones Sr., a Democrat who represented the Outer Banks at the time, Congress in 1988 passed a bill that funded a feasibility and design-development plan. Jones also made sure that any future Hatteras museum would get a share of Monitor artifacts.

The museum was formally incorporated the next year and designated a nonprofit educational organization in 1991. The National Park Service agreed for a nominal fee to lease the museum 7 acres near the Hatteras docks.

Cathy Parsons, one of the original museum board members, during a chat in the gallery after the ribbon-cutting, remembered the then-Cape Hatteras National Seashore superintendent’s excitement.

“Tom Hartman came running up to us and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a plan!’” she recounted about the superintendent, who was especially supportive of the museum idea. “He said, ‘Y’all should pull something together and put a bid in for the artifacts.’ We did that.”

Along with Belinda Willis and Katie Oden, Parsons is one of the original group of villagers who somehow pulled together the support and money to build the museum.

“It was a group effort,” she said. “They did all the work. All I did was the money part.”

Willis said that the museum originally was going to be small — about 6,500 square feet — and would look like an old Coast Guard station. She described interviewing to find a director, a fundraiser and the architect. Money started coming in: $1 million from NOAA, $800,000 from the state.

Before long, the museum building and its concept expanded.

“It just was mushrooming and mushrooming until we realized that we had a tiger by the tail,” Couch said.

From 1995 to December 1999, additional state and federal support rolled in, and construction began Dec. 10, 1999. The nearly 19,000-square-foot museum, with its imposing ship-like exterior, opened in 2002, with its interior partially completed.

Joseph Schwarzer, who retired in March, was hired as the museum’s executive director in 1995, and he later became director of all three state maritime museums.

Along with Schwarzer’s yeoman work at the helm, the three women who still live in Hatteras also gave credit to their late fellow board member Dale Burrus, who mastered dealing with the political aspects and reveled in talking about the island’s maritime history and the importance of the museum in its telling. Then there was dedication of other late advocates, Richard Jones with the Hatteras Monitor and the late Irene Nolan, then-editor of the Island Breeze and later the founder and editor of the Island Free Press, who volunteered for the museum and kept the islanders informed about the project.

Over the years, continued contributions of charitable funds and grants, including from the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau, allowed slow progress on the museum, which had been transferred to the state in 2007.

The museum proved to be a popular public attraction, despite its limited exhibits. But to the frustration of the island community — and Schwarzer — funding always seemed to fall short of finishing the gallery and the exhibits.

There were plenty of times they wanted to give up, the women agreed.

“Lots of times,” Willis said. “Then something would happen and we’d get a little push forward.

“We wrote many a letter.”

Meanwhile, as Willis put it, “the community lost faith in us.” Added Oden: “For 20 years, they’d keep hearing how close we’re getting, how close we’re getting. When we finally opened up, none of this was here. They would be shocked.”

In 2021, money was provided for renovations, and in 2022, contractor Riggs Ward Design started work on the exhibit design.

In addition to the Monomoy surf boat in the center of the gallery area, a first-order Fresnel lens that had once been atop the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse dominates the exhibits, which include numerous artifacts ranging from Native Americans here, early English settlements, wars and shipwrecks, including U-boats.

As visitors step into the museum, they’re greeted with a huge video screen with scenes that thrust them into the ocean with lifesavers and fishers and sailors and that carries them over the barrier islands for a bird’s-eye view. All doors open automatically in the middle like those on Star Trek to ensure temperature control. And the Meekins Chandlery Gift Shop now has entrances from the lobby and the museum.

“This is where the state of North Carolina — as a colony — began to develop, to lead us where we are today,” North Carolina Office of Archives and History Deputy Secretary Darin Waters told attendees before the ribbon-cutting. “And I’m so proud of the fact that you are going to see all of that told within this museum.”

North Carolina Maritime Museums System Interim Director Maria Vann, who joined the project in 2023, said the gallery “has been re-imaged as a treasure chest filled with this region’s unique tales of tragedy and triumph.”

Vann said in a later interview that the selection of a new director is underway, but she is not involved.

“The department will make the decision,” she said. “That decision is not mine.”

Now that the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum is actually completed, the former board members said they believe that villagers will be more supportive and start pulling out their old shipwreck artifacts from under the bed to donate to the museum.

“Finally — after all these years!” the women exclaimed in unison.

“This is our vision: a world-class museum that can be enjoyed by everyone,” Willis added.

“It’s a national museum. It’s a peoples’ museum.”

A nonprofit organization founded late last year honors the Secotan leader, Chief Wingina, who was beheaded by the English in June 1586.

Wingina was chief of the tribes that inhabited modern-day Roanoke Island and the mainland across the Albemarle and Croatan sounds. Wingina was first documented by the English during their initial contact in 1584, according to the “Secotan Alliance … and Beyond” website.

A respected regional leader in the Algonquian tribe, early on, Wingina and the tribe helped the English, but soon they realized that the colonists intended to take over the land. Wingina then began using the name Pemisapan out of regret over having invited the English to settle here.

He started working with other tribal leaders to drive the colony away from Roanoke, but the English had learned from an Algonquian hostage of Wingina’s plan to unite the tribes. As a result, he was murdered, one of the earliest documented in North America, according to state documents.

Gray Parsons of Frisco, a descendant of the Machapunga-Mattamuskeet people of the North Carolina inner banks, had the idea to form the nonprofit, “The Secotan Alliance … and beyond” after spending several years “wondering how to create a way to show proper historical respect to Chief Wingina and his Secotan Alliance people, who had been historically marginalized. And also, I wanted to share his traditional indigenous values in a modern-day world that, in my opinion, was sorely in need of it.”

Parsons, who grew up in Washington, graduated from East Carolina University in 1972 with a degree in parks, outdoor recreation and conservation. He spent his career in various fields, including human services, medical sales and marketing, and the organic and natural foods industry.

Now retired, Parsons, in addition to heading up the Secotan Alliance organization, is on the Friends of the Outer Banks History Center board of directors, a volunteer at the Frisco Native American Museum and Natural History Center, and is vice president of the Pitt-GAP chapter of Epsilon Chi Nu Inc., the first Native American fraternity in the U.S. He is the author of the book, “Hope on Hatterask,” published in 2013.

Parsons explained that he launched the nonprofit with the help of Joyce Bornfriend, director of the Frisco Native American Museum, which was approved for IRS 501(c)(3) status in late September 2023.

“Although I had founded and managed my own business for many years before retirement, I had never created nor managed a nonprofit. It’s not an exaggeration to say that without her help and support (the alliance) would likely still be a fantasy rather than a reality,” Parsons said.

Parsons said the focus of the organization is “the indigenous Earth ethic of balance and sustainability, both of which are reflected in the alliance’s dual mission statement.”

After getting the nonprofit started, Parsons has been directing his attention over the last several months to coordinating “In the Spirit of Wingina … and beyond,” the alliance’s inaugural event scheduled for May 30-31.

The symposium is two full days of discussion with professors, environmental groups and authors and is to take place at The College of the Albemarle’s Dare Campus in Manteo. There is no charge to attend but Parsons asks that those who want to attend reserve a seat ahead of time.

“We hope this program accomplishes the initial stages of our missions with a myriad of leaders and grassroots workers from the Outer Banks and Inner Banks … and beyond,” Parsons said, “And that they will be motivated to share what they learn over the packed schedule of this two-day event.”

A kick-off event is set for 4-6 p.m. May 29 at the Frisco Native American Museum with two of the speakers. Seating is limited.

Discussion on the first day of the session will focus on “the consequential (yet often marginalized) life of Chief Wingina/Pemisapan and his Secotan Alliance during early contact with English expeditioners, the English military and the effects of his death on the failed colonization attempt … and beyond,” according to the event webpage.

The second day is to transition from history to Wingina’s and the alliance’s longstanding Earth ethic and a traditional Indigenous approach to modern-day environmentalism. Several area and regional environmental organizations and indigenous people are expected to be on hand.

The symposium has been designed, Parsons explained, to “offer a unique indigenous and ‘indigen-us’ approach to reaching the everyday citizen in terms of modifying our collective behavior in protecting our Mother Earth.  We hope to learn and teach each other in that regard.”

Parsons said the symposium was made possible through grants from the Outer Banks Community Foundation, Dare Arts and a handful of people who are dedicated to making it happen.

Outer Banks History Center Executive Director Tammy Woodward will be joining Parsons as a moderator for the event.

Woodward explained that when Parsons started the nonprofit, he approached the center for feedback.

“When he decided to do this event, he was looking for volunteers to help with some of the duties,” she said, including announcing the speakers, and she volunteered to help. Also, by being director of the history center, she can help answer questions about what records are available locally.

“I think, us being a part of it also lends credibility because Gray’s nonprofit is fairly new. We believe in his mission and we support his highlighting this era of history,” she said. “I’m really excited about this symposium,” adding she’s looking forward to hearing the different perspectives.

The keynote speaker for the two-day discussion is Dr. Michael Leroy Oberg, distinguished professor of history at State University of New York Geneseo, and author of “The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand, Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians” published in 2010.

“Dr. Oberg’s book tells the story of Chief Wingina instead of subjugating him to a secondary and relatively inconsequential character in the often-told story of ‘The Lost Colony,’” Parsons said, explaining that Oberg did not ignore the events during that chaotic period regarding the role of the English colonists. 

“He simply told the story accurately with balance, including the perspective of both the indigenous population as well as the early civilian and military English expeditioners and colonists. And it was done within the constraints of the academic world as per appropriate citation and peer reviewed scrutiny,” Parsons continued, explaining that this is the only academically accepted work he’s aware of that gave equal time to both the English and Indigenous perspectives in that period.

“From that moment forward, Dr. Oberg became somewhat of a hero to me personally and thus the obvious choice as our keynote and primary speaker at our first event,” Parsons said.

Parsons said that Dr. Charles Ewen, Harriot College distinguished professor of Anthropology at East Carolina University, also is expected to speak May 30.  

Ewen will discuss methods and techniques of how archaeological artifacts are gathered, identified and pieced together in the coastal environment to help better understand parts of the various aspects of culture. 

Dr. Arwin Smallwood, Dean of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at North Carolina Central University, and descendant of the Tuscarora people of North Carolina, will speak on the relationship between the state’s Tuscarora and the Algonquin people of The Secotan Alliance before, during and after English contact.

Dr. Gabrielle Tayac is associate professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, as well as its faculty adviser for the Native American Student Association. She is a member of the Piscataway Nation, consulting curator for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and a contributing author on “Native Prospects: Indigeneity and landscapes. Speaking Sovereignty: Powhatan’s Mantle.”

Parsons said Tayac will present “The Indigenous Atlantic: Ancestors Rising,” focusing on land and water ethics, drawing from both her formal and indigenous traditional education models to discuss examples and how they are still relevant today.

The panel planned for the afternoon of the first day is to include representatives from the indigenous tribes, museums and general indigenous diaspora in eastern North Carolina, including the Roanoke Hatterask Tribe, the Machapunga/Mattamuskeet Tribe, the Chowanoke Tribe, Frisco Native American Museum, The Piscataway Nation and other indigenous individuals, Parsons said.

Muddy Sneakers Outdoor Classroom Executive Director David Webb, award-winning author of “The Spanish Seminole” and lifelong environmental activist and director of environmental non-profits from Florida to New York state, will be on hand May 31.

The panel discussion for the second day is to include representatives of Sound Rivers, Peace Garden Project, Coastal Carolina Riverwatch, Frisco Native American Museum, North Carolina Coastal Federation, Hatteras Island Wildlife Rescue, North Carolina Oyster Trail, Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership, Ban Balloon Release NC, and from indigenous groups and individuals.

Aio Sifu, Cherokee descendant, will perform with indigenous flute, storytelling and a Women’s Eastern Blanket Dance demo at 5 p.m. May 31.

Parsons said the hope is attendees “walk away knowing that Chief Wingina was the first indigenous leader on the continent to give his life in resistance to the English destruction of a beautiful indigenous culture and their natural resources, and that Chief Wingina’s Secotan Alliance Earth ethic functioned sustainably for thousands of years and merits strong consideration for mainstream adoption.”

Since 2013 Steve and Sally Gudas have been organizing and hosting a Flat Top Cottage tour in Southern Shores, giving people a chance to see and experience, if for a brief time, an iconic part of Outer Banks architectural history.

This year, that tour was Saturday, and more than 1,000 came out — a record attendance, the Gudases said. It was 1,013 to be exact, compared to 2022, “when we had 722,” Sally Gudas told Coastal Review Wednesday.

Built over a 15-year span beginning in the late 1940s, the houses were simple structures. Designed for a summer vacation, the homes were concrete block construction. There was no foundation really, just a concrete floor on sand. And there was no insulation.

“When, we come in here when it’s cold, it takes one full day to get it warm, including the fireplace. Thank God for that,” Steve Gudas said Sunday, having been too busy to chat during the tour.

The houses were designed by Frank Stick, an artist, real estate developer and, to many, a visionary with a knack for self-promotion. In 1946, Stick had just purchased the 2,600 acres that now comprise Southern Shores, and he had the idea that to sell each lot and home for one flat price.

But to do that, he needed something that was easy to build and used as much locally sourced material as he could get his hands on. The sand came from Outer Banks beaches, until the federal government made that illegal in 1955. The structural beams, the cabinets — any interior wood — were all juniper, which at the time was readily available and the cheapest wood to be had.

Frank Stick also, as his son, David, wrote, “… introduced a completely new cottage style for the Outer Banks … What he came up with was flat-top structures of varying sizes and shapes, using concrete blocks as the primary building material.”

Related: Frank Stick finds success, designs signature Banks cottage

Tours of the homes were held this past weekend and revealed just how varied the flat-top design could be, and how the structures – each uniquely named – evolved over the decades.

Sea Breezes, built in 1956, was originally a duplex, but the common wall was removed some time after it was built, and a sliding pocket wall was put into place. This modification allowed the house to be used as either two, two-bedroom cottages or a single, four-bedroom home.

Pink Perfection, built in 1952, is a rambling four-bedroom Flat Top. Unlike almost all of other Flat Tops, it was neither designed nor built by Frank Stick.

Aside from the obvious design element, there are among the Flat Tops several similarities. Among them, in almost every house, the original juniper beams and trim have been retained. Outside, almost all have wide soffits.

Very few are still in the original owners’ hands. Ashbel Falconer is an exception. The Falconer Cottage his parents purchased in 1955 when he was 4 is situated on a side street, atop a low rise that, at one time, had an unobstructed view of the ocean. Not anymore. Live oaks and other houses block that view now.

“The only thing that was here was sea oats and sand spurs,” Falconer told Coastal Review recently. “It was all sand.”

The tidy homes are a labor of love for the owners, as Falconer noted with a laugh.

“They are maintenance hogs.”

Steve Gudas shares that sentiment. “When you own it, you’re just invested in it,” he said.

Preserving a legacy

Matt Neal, owner of Neal Contracting of Kitty Hawk, has been in love with Flat Tops since his family lived in one when he was a child.

“In the late ’80s, early ’90s, we lived in one for a period of time in Kill Devil Hills, and so it’s always been a childhood memory of mine,” Neal said recently.

He now owns a Flat Top built in the 1950s in Southern Shores, although he describes it as “full-flat roof —  a low, sloped, single shed-style roof.”

His experience in restoring reflected the challenges other owners know from simply maintaining one. “It’s a challenge,” Neal said.

“It was fun in a way,” he said.

“I would take juniper out of the interior closets and use it to refurbish the cabinets. And I had to take the juniper off the wall in the bathroom to update the wiring and then put it back,” Neal explained. “That house had a slab (floor) that had no vapor barrier. We were able to get the old linoleum up, put a vapor barrier on top of the slab (and) put cork flooring down and keep … original doors and hardware. And it still has the original windows.”

The homes are also vanishing. While unclear how many there were originally, some estimate as many as 300, Sally Gudas told Coastal Review that number seems high.

“I don’t think it’s 300,” she said. “I’ve been asked that question. I just really don’t know. But I am working on it.”

She has a reasonable guess as to how many are still standing in Southern Shores.

“I think we’ve identified 25,” she said.

There are attempts to preserve the structures. The town of Southern Shores created a Historic Landmarks Commission that evaluates homes more than 50 years old. If a house meets the criteria, property owners get a reduction in their town property tax.

To date, there have been five Flat Tops added to the program, although additional property owners have submitted applications.

Tax incentives alone, however, are not enough to save the buildings. With property values in the millions along the oceanfront, the economics of preservation may not add up when a property is passed to two or three sibling heirs.

There is increasing concern that the Flat Top legacy will be lost.

Architect Chris Nason of the Kill Devil Hills-based Beacon Architecture and Design is a Southern Shores resident who has for the past seven or eight years been documenting Flat Tops in town.

“It was just a first impulse,” he told Coastal Review. “So we’ve got this moment in time. Let’s just measure it, take pictures.”

Initially Nason wasn’t sure what he would do with his documentation, but since he began the project, it has become a historic record and teaching tool for his interns.

“It was a good learning experience for them. You can learn to take measurements on a small house. It’s a perfect learning experience,” Nason said.

As an architect, Nason would like to see as many of the houses saved as possible, but he acknowledged that it can’t always happen.

“I am both realistic and aspirational about encouraging folks to keep them,” he said. “These things don’t meet any codes. They’re oftentimes too low. They don’t meet the flood zone. There’s all sorts of reasons not to keep them, but that doesn’t mean we don’t try, and where we can’t keep it, it’s great to come back with something that is inspired by what was there,” he said.

To date, Nason has measured and created elevations for 34 homes, many of them no longer exist. He has created a website documenting his work, and is hoping more can be done with it.

“Eventually our goal is to do a book on it and put these plans in a book and do some photography with it. That’s still in the works,” he said.

Neal, in addition to restoring the home he owns, is also working to preserve the legacy and has built three homes based on the Flat Top design.

He characterizes the concept as Usonian, which is a Frank Lloyd Wright term to describe a single-story, flat-roofed home with wide eaves using as many locally sourced building materials as possible.

Building a home for the 21st century meant taking the original concept and bringing it to modern standards and efficiency.

“It’s always astonishing to me what people were willing to accept back then, but they’re not willing to accept it this time,” he said. “But it works. I’s very functional and very utilitarian. It’s a throwback to the quietness in sort of a more out-there living of the Outer Banks.”

Post has been updated.

North Carolina Maritime Museum officials and staff are set to welcome visitors to the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras for the first time in two years.

Also in the coming month, officials with the museum system’s are planning to welcome back watercraft enthusiasts for its 48th annual Wooden Boat Show May 4 in Beaufort; and at the Southport museum, staff are preparing to launch a new program May 29.

The Hatteras facility has been closed since 2022 for a complete renovation. A ribbon-cutting ceremony is scheduled for 10 a.m. Monday, May 20, when the overhauled facility reopens to the public.

First opened in 2002, the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum is named after the thousands of shipwrecks off the state’s coast.

Public information officer Cyndi Brown told Coastal Review that the Hatteras museum has undergone a “major transformation, with a completely redesigned lobby and a new gallery space with state-of-the-art features and interactive elements that bring our coastal history to life.”

Exhibits cover from precolonial times to the present and offer a comprehensive journey through the region’s history.

Inside, visitors will find interactive experiences, from touch screens to holographic video displays, “providing visitors with engaging ways to delve into the region’s maritime heritage,” Brown said. She added that children, in particular, can enjoy scavenger hunts and programs designed to both educate and entertain.

There is a Monomoy-class life-saving surfboat, a first-order Fresnel lens from Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, and displays showing shipwrecks off the coast, Brown added.

Special programs and activities are scheduled for the week the museum opens, Brown said.

Following the museum opening at 10 a.m. Monday, May 20, there will be a program at 11 a.m. on the “U.S. Life Saving Service Operations along the North Carolina Coast” with Beaufort museum’s Education Curator Benjamin Wunderly. He will share the history of U.S. Life-Saving Service operations, the precursor to the Coast Guard.

“The History of the Oldest NC State Law Enforcement — 200 Years of Service (1822-2022)” is at 1 p.m. May 20 with N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries Marine Patrol Capt. Christopher Lee. Visitors can hear about the state’s longest-serving law enforcement agency, which can trace its roots back to 1822 when the North Carolina General Assembly enacted legislation to impose gear restrictions on oyster harvest.

“Brigadier General Billy Mitchell: Father of the U.S. Air Force and Hatteras Hero” is scheduled for 2 p.m. May 20 with area historian Danny Couch. Mitchell is often regarded as the father of the U.S. Air Force. Aviation experts often question why Mitchell chose to conduct his historic strategic bombing experiments at Hatteras, and the answer is simple: He liked to fish, according to the museum.

“North Carolina Whales: Diversity, Distribution and Conservation” will begin at 11 a.m. Tuesday, May 21. Beaufort museum Associate Education Curator and Bonehenge Whale Center Director Keith Rittmaster will talk about the whales most commonly spotted off the coast and show related display items.

Learn about “John Rollinson: Hero of Hatteras Island” 2 p.m. Tuesday, May 21, with Couch. Rollinson (1827-1906), was Hatteras’ first paid schoolteacher, collector of the Port of Hatteras and reluctant Civil War outlaw.

“Women in Whaling” is at 11 a.m. Friday, May 22, with Beaufort museum’s Associate Education Curator Christine Brin.

A talk on the “Lost Colony” is at 11 a.m. Saturday, May 23, with Hatteras native Scott Dawson. Hear Dawson’s take on the English who attempted to colonize the New World in 1587 and the mystery surrounding their disappearance.

North Carolina Aquariums’ Aquatic Wildlife Inhabiting Shipwrecks will take place May 20 to May 24. Staff with the Roanoke facility will be on site with this hands-on activities.

The museum will operate on a new schedule after reopening. Hours will be 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday-Friday and will be closed Saturdays and Sundays.

There is no admission but donations are appreciated and directly support museum operations, Brown said.

48th annual Wooden Boat Show in Beaufort

The Beaufort museum has set aside one Saturday a year for almost 50 years for enthusiasts to celebrate traditional wooden boatbuilding.

The 48th annual Wooden Boat Show scheduled for 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, May 4, will again bring to the coastal town dozens of wooden vessels, ranging from classic, vintage sailboats to modern power boats.

Grant Caraway, director of the wooden boat show, told Coastal Review that the annual show has been a mainstay for those in the antique and wooden boat community.

There will be many attractions this year, including dozens of classic restored boats and motors, a pirate encampment, and kid’s activities like face painting and toy boatbuilding, Caraway continued.

Plus, Caraway said, there will be public sailboat rides offered from 1-3 p.m.

In addition to the wooden boats, for the second year there will be miniature vintage outboards on display.

“We’ll have outboards on both sides of the street,” Caraway said in a statement. “These miniature outboard motors are really cool. While most people think they’re toys, they were actually used by manufacturers as a marketing tool.”

Brown said Monday morning that though online registration closes Tuesday, boats can register up until the day of the show by calling 252-504-7758. “We will always make room for more boats,” she said. “Right now we have 35 registered.”

Registration for a first vessel is $30 and includes an event T-shirt. Additional boats are $5 each. Register on the website by April 30 or by phone at 252-504-7758 until the day before the show.

Also on the grounds will be knot-tying demonstrations, a book sale, vendors, maritime art, boating skills virtual trainer, sailboat races and more, all offered at no charge.

While most activities are at the museum, the in-water boat show will be a few blocks away at the Beaufort Docks.

“We award 16 different categories with handmade wooden awards made here at the Maritime Museum,” Caraway said for the judge’s selections.

Attendees will be able to choose their favorite by voting for the People’s Choice winner and for the model expo.

An opening reception with refreshments and entertainment is set for 5-7 p.m. Friday, May 3, at the museum’s Harvey W. Smith Watercraft Center across the street. There is no charge to attend. The kickoff is being held at the same time as the museum’s Spring First Friday, which celebrates featured artists at the museum’s Port of Call Museum Store.

‘Anchors Aweigh’ in Southport

The North Carolina Maritime Museum at Southport is launching its new program,
“Anchors Aweigh,” on May 29.

The drop-in style program offered from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day its scheduled features hands-on activities that focus on a specific part of Lower Cape Fear and North Carolina history.

The debut activity is “Anchors Aweigh: Got the Blues?” an indigo-dying program from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Several “Anchors Aweigh” events are scheduled throughout the summer, as well.

The program June 12 will be on map reading and orienteering, on June 26, declaring independence, July 10 “Wash it up! Laundry in the Age of Sail,” July 10, flags in history July 24, and cyphers and codes Aug. 14.

More Maritime Museum events

Beaufort museum

The Cape Lookout Lighthouse — 11 a.m. May 2 will focus on the history of the Carteret County landmark. The presentation will cover both the destroyed 1812 tower, and the still-standing 1859 tower, as well as some lesser-known facts about the “Diamond” tower. No charge to attend the Maritime Heritage Series program.

Kids’ Cove — 9-11 a.m. May 8 and again 11 a.m.-1 p.m. May 12. This free-play program is designed for children up to 5 years and their caregivers. There is a different maritime-themed craft and wiggle activity each month. This is screen-free program begins an hour before the museum opens to the public. To register, call 252-504-7758 or visit the website.

Kayak the Salt Marsh — 9 a.m.-noon May 9. A member of the education team will give a basic kayak instruction and safety lessons on shore then lead a 1.5-mile paddle through the salt marsh. The program is recommended for ages 12 and up, though anyone under 18 must be accompanied by an adult. Participants must know how to swim; some kayak experience is recommended. Cost is $35 or $30 if you bring your own kayak. Register online by noon May 8 at 252-504-7758 or on the website.

Museum’s Most Wanted: Conservation Basics-Identifying and Dealing with Museum Pests — 11 a.m. May 9. Museum conservator Michelle Crepeau will identify common museum pests, their impact on collections, and both historical and modern methods of mitigation and prevention. The program offered at no charge is part of the Maritime Heritage Series.

Exploring Coastal Habitats on the Rachel Carson Reserve — 9 a.m.-noon May 15. The guided hike will take visitors through the different habitats and the sandy, muddy, and wet terrain found on Town Marsh and Bird Shoal in the Beaufort area. The program is recommended for ages 12 and up, but all participants under 18 must be accompanied by an adult. Cost is $25. Register online or by calling 252-504-7758 by noon May 14.

Behind the scenes at the Whale Center — 10 a.m. May 17. The 40-minute, behind-the-scenes look shows how marine mammal skeletons are prepared for educational display and the mammals found in area waters. The Bonehenge Whale Center operates as a partnership between the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources and the Carolina Cay Maritime Foundation. Register online or by calling 252-504-7758 by noon May 16.

Sea Turtles in North Carolina — 11 a.m. May 23. Program for World Turtle Day will focus on different species of sea turtles and the trials they face before they even emerge from their sandy nest. No charge for the program through the Maritime Heritage Series.

Southport museum

Skippers Crew: Mullet Over — 10 a.m.- 3p.m. May 4. Designed for all ages, but specifically geared toward younger patrons, this activity features hands-on activities and crafts focusing on combining arts and history. Lights will be dimmed and interactives muted during the first two hours to provide a calmer environment for those with sensory sensitivities. No charge to participate.

Deep Dive into History — drop-in series 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, May 18. Madline Spencer of the state’s Underwater Archaeology Branch based at Fort Fisher State Historic Site will explain the tools of the trade of an archaeologist, how they preserve what they find, and how they help us understand the past during the program, “Digging for the Past.” Designed for all ages, the series gives visitors a deeper understanding of our shared past through costumed interpreters and artifacts. Being offered at no charge, registration is not required.

Third Tuesday: “Silent Sentinels” — noon May 21 with the North Carolina Military History Society. Part of the museum’s Third Tuesday lecture series held at the Southport Community Building, 223 E. Bay St. Lectures are geared for ages 16 years and older. No charge to attend, but registration is requested because seating is limited. Call -910-477-5151 or visit the website.

Living on the Outer Banks “requires you to be very much in touch with weather and Mother Nature,” says commercial fisherman Vince O’Neal.

The lifelong Ocracoke resident and owner of the Pony Island Restaurant told Coastal Review recently that his family has been on the barrier island, which is only accessible by boat or plane, for generations.

Many of the first settlers on the coast were watermen and what they did that day “depended on the weather and the hand they were dealt.” The velocity and the direction of the wind and tides determined if you were going on the water or if you were going to spend the day working on nets, boats, gear, or your hunting rig of decoys.

“Waterfowling was a big part of life on the Outer Banks as a way of income and for food on the table,” O’Neal said, as much as hand carving was in a waterfowler’s life.

“Growing up on Ocracoke Island as a kid, you were exposed to the natives making decoys all around the island,” O’Neal said, with some working in their backyard sheds and others carving or whittling while hanging out at the local stores or other gathering places.

“By the time that I came along,” O’Neal added, many of the old-time carvers were making decoys for the tourist trade versus using them as working decoys.

To keep the village’s decoy carving traditions alive, he and a group of other carvers formed the Ocracoke Island Decoy Carvers Guild in January 2018 with the goal to “preserve, promote and carry on” the village’s waterfowl carving heritage, according to its Facebook.

That year, the guild hosted its first Waterfowl Festival and are carrying on that success. The organization is readying for its sixth festival, which has been expanded to two days this year, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, April 20, and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday, April 21, in the Ocracoke School gym.

There is no charge to attend the festival that will feature dozens of booths featuring carvers, collectors, exhibitors and demonstrations from North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Delaware.

New this year will be a fish fry hosted by Ocracoke Seafood Co. starting at 11 a.m. Saturday, April 20, and a bake sale with baked goodies and treats, including Ocracoke fig cake. Saturday events include a decoy head carving competition at 1 p.m. and a silent auction that ends at 3 p.m.

O’Neal, who is this year’s featured carver for the festival, explained that the methods of carving have been passed down through the generations and continue today.

“It is important that crafts such as this be preserved and taught to the younger islanders as it is part of their heritage, history and livelihoods,” he said.

Guild President John Simpson, who also grew up on the island, told Coastal Review that the festival is for all ages. Last year they had around 800 visitors attend.

As of Monday, Simpson said there were 27 different carvers, vendors and other artisans signed up to have a booth at the festival. Simpson is asking anyone who wants to be a vendor to let him know by April 14 for logistical purposes. Vendors can secure a table at $75 for both days.

He mentioned that in addition to the bake sale, there will be merchandise like T-shirts and sweatshirts, and a raffle on Saturday.

First place for the raffle is the decoy featured on the poster and shirts. O’Neal created that decoy in his role as the festival’s featured carver.

Recent organization, old tradition

Simpson said that the movement behind establishing a guild began several years ago. The carving tradition can be found generations deep in Outer Banks communities and especially in Ocracoke.

“There’s a lot of decoy makers,” Simpson explained, adding that one of his distant family members, Gary Bragg, who was alive 1881 to 1954, was a well-known carver on the island who “got a little bit of notoriety.”

Simpson said that he and some of his former classmates had been talking for a while about holding a festival like the Core Sound Decoy Carvers Guild’s festival held the first weekend of December on Harkers Island, a Down East Carteret County community.

So, Simpson, Vince O’Neal, his brother Dave O’Neal, and Scotty Robinson met in a friend’s living room in December 2017 and formed the Ocracoke Island Decoy Carvers Guild. “The first meeting we ever had was in January of 2018,” and the group continues to meet the first Thursday of the month.

Simpson said they started the guild to promote Ocracoke’s heritage and the tradition of decoy carving as art.

“We all enjoy it, all of us that are on board,” Simpson said. “We all love it. We’re trying to promote it, and especially get the younger folks involved because it is a dying art. As much as I hate to say it, it is a dying art.”

“We made it simple. Anybody could join,” Simpson said of the guild.

When the group was establishing guidelines, they also decided to have a festival. “We scrambled around and did our first festival that year, 2018, on the third weekend in April,” Simpson said, and the group has tried to keep it that same weekend.

In April 2018 and 2019, the festival was at the school, and in 2020, they had to cancel the festival because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Because Hurricane Dorian in late 2019 destroyed the school, the festival was held at Berkley Barn outdoor pavilion in 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Simpson said the festival is returning to the school now that it has reopened because the event is for the students and the school. The guild offers scholarships to graduating students from Ocracoke School.

Simpson urged those who want to attend to go ahead and line up their lodging, which fills up quickly, and make sure to reserve a spot on the North Carolina Department of Transportation ferry to Ocracoke from either Cedar Island or Swan Quarter.

With parking being limited at Ocracoke School, there will be a shuttle to transport visitors from the National Park Service parking lot by the ferry terminal to the school during show hours.

Getting to what remains of Buffalo City on the Dare County mainland isn’t easy.

Walking to the site where there’s not much left but is surprisingly intact, requires hip boots at least, though waders are a better choice, and being in reasonable physical condition since it’s a little bit more than a mile hike — or slosh — through what is truly trackless swamp.

It’s a good idea to go with someone who knows where they’re going, too, and, for good measure, go on a cool or cold day. Water moccasins are prolific in the swamp and there’s a reason the area is called Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge.

Related: As timber declined, Buffalo City loggers made ’shine

Buffalo City gained notoriety for its moonshine production during Prohibition, but there’s more to the now-abandoned town’s story than just logging and liquor. The remnants of two buildings where the mill town once stood are extant evidence of a wildly expensive insurance company fraud case during the 1910s.

Bill Barber of Columbia, in Tyrrell County, is the guide, leading this reporter to what remains of Buffalo City. He’s a retired forester with 40 years of experience, most of his career with Weyerhaeuser.

“I had several hundred thousand acres of land that was under my management,” he said, referring to his time with Weyerhaeuser. “I thoroughly enjoyed my career with them.”

No longer working in forestry, he has since had a chance to follow up on stories he had been told for years. Barber told Coastal Review that his mother had family who lived in East Lake and Buffalo City.

“There’s a lot of legends and a lot of lore about what went on at Buffalo City,” he said. “When I retired, I thought I just need to check into this, to really figure out what the story is. So, I started doing research on it.”

With about seven years’ worth of research behind him, Barber has published three books on the history of the lumber industry in northeastern North Carolina.

“Timber, Land & Railroads: A History of the John L. Roper Lumber Company” is an account of the timber boom following the Civil War; “Tyrrell Timber: A History of the Branning Manufacturing Company and Richmond Cedar Works” chronicles timbering operation in Tyrrell County; and “Buffalo City and the Blount Patent: A History of Logging the Dare Mainland” is history of land use by entrepreneurs and speculators on mainland Dare County.

With Barber leading, we come out of the swamp onto what passes for high ground.

There are the remnants of a substantial concrete building. A series of blocks rest on top of a solid concrete base with metal bolts still anchored to the concrete.

About 50 yards past that is what remains of a brick building. Vines grow up its sides and trees have taken root in what was once the floor.

The brick building was at one time a pulp mill and the concrete building was once a coal-fired generator that powered the mill. The only visible remnants of Buffalo City, they appear incongruous in the setting.

What was once a thriving, if small, lumbering town has vanished.

A map drawn from memory by one-time resident Jesse Basnight depicts about 35 homes, a post office, country store and hotel. The 1910 census records 548 residents in East Lake Township. It is possible some workers were missed if they were in a lumbering camp, but it’s doubtful if there were ever more than 600 people living there.

Every building in the town was wooden and as the town died, Barber said, people took the wood with them. What wasn’t taken, has been swallowed by the swamp. Except for the generating plant and pulp mill, there is almost no evidence it ever existed.

It’s doubtful if Buffalo City would have survived no matter what. It was becoming harder to find good quality trees to harvest immediately after the first World War, then the country went into a recession.

The recession “was very severe and lasted a long time for the lumber industry … over 18 months, and it put a lot of people out of business,” Barber told Coastal Review. “Then by 1920, there was a lot of lumber coming in from the Pacific Northwest … because of the improvements in the railroad.”

By June 1920, the proceeds of the Dare Lumber Co., the company that owned the timber rights to the land, were being sold off. Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. bought everything for $900,000.

The reason an insurance company paid the equivalent of $14.7 million in modern dollars for 167,000 acres of swamp is the final, unseemly chapter in the story of what really happened to Buffalo City.

In 1912 there were two lumbering companies operating on the Dare County mainland: East Lake Lumber and Dare Lumber Co. With quality timber getting harder to find, both were ready to get out of the business and agreed to a joint sale of the companies to single buyer.

What would become one of the largest life insurance company scams in U.S. history began with George Montgomery of Jacksonville, Florida, who offered to purchase the companies on what was known as an operating contract. Under the proposed deal, Montgomery would manage the companies and, over time, purchase them using the proceeds.

The offer was rejected.

Undaunted, Montgomery offered a New York City apartment building as collateral and some cash — also rejected.

He then moved to New York City and partnered with New York attorney Clarence Birdseye in a scheme that would shake the insurance industry.

Montgomery had been buying shares of Dare Lumber and “On March 26, 1917, George Montgomery bought enough shares of Dare Lumber Company to gain control of the company,” Barber wrote in “Buffalo City and the Blount Patent.”

Now in control of the company, Montgomery and Birdseye immediately turned to also buy East Lake Lumber Co. The combined holdings of the two lumber companies were more than 167,000 acres and covered all of mainland Dare County.

The price for the two companies was $1.1 million. Then on March 28, 1917, Montgomery and Birdseye issued 600 $1,000 bonds — six times the value of what had been paid for Dare Lumber.

March 28, 1917, was an active day for the partners. That was the day they convinced the board of directors of the Pittsburgh Life Insurance and Trust Co. to sell them the company, offering them a price of $80 per share, $15 to $25 more than the going rate.

The agreement was that the board would receive $10 per share upon acceptance of the offer with the balance to be paid later.

The board agreed to the terms and the partners went to a friendly bank, Commercial Trust of New York, where they were given a $120,000 collateral-free loan. The money was deposited in a Pittsburgh bank, the board was paid off, and a new board was installed composed of Montgomery and Birdseye cronies.

What followed was the quick theft of the $24 million, or around $582 million today, in Pittsburgh Life assets with the proceeds deposited with Commercial Trust. There was $379,000 in cash reserves that went to the Commercial Trust account. The Pittsburgh Life board sold the Washington Life Building that the company owned in New York City for almost $4 million. Although Dare Lumber Co. had been purchased for only $1.1 million earlier in the year, the Pittsburgh Life board accepted a $3 million mortgage on the property.

It was during this time the generating site and pulp mill were built at Buffalo City. Barber noted when looking at the ruins that the partners needed to show something tangible, that there was at least some investment in their properties.

“The problem was keeping both Dare Lumber and Pittsburgh Life solvent for long enough to avoid scrutiny of financial regulators,” Barber wrote in his book.

But the stripping of Pittsburgh Life’s assets was so rapacious and swift that in less than two months the company was insolvent and forced to declare bankruptcy.

Financial regulators reacted quickly with investigations into Birdseye and Montgomery making national news. Referencing the reports, New York City District Attorney Edward Swann planned to investigate what happened, according to the May 3, 1917, New York Tribune story with the headline, “Swann Probes Purchase of Insurance Company.”

The reporting included a statement from Jesse Phillips, superintendent of the New York Insurance Department, describing what his department had found.

“No funds were used for the purchase of the capital stock of the company or for the acquisition of the lumber company except what was the assets of the lumber company,” Phillips told the paper.

It took almost two years for the case to go to trial, but according to a Nov. 22, 1919, New York Times article, the Nov. 21 jury reached guilty verdicts.

“Clarence F. Birdseye, Kellogg Birdseye (Clarence Birdseye’s son) and George F. Montgomery, all of New York, who were placed on trial in criminal court before Judge Ambrose B. Reid on Nov. 10, charged with conspiring to defraud the stockholders and policy holders of the Pittsburgh Life and Trust, and with wrecking that organization, were found guilty as indicted today,” the Times reported.

Metropolitan Life’s purchase of the land and everything else Birdseye and Montgomery had owned, including a sawmill in Elizabeth City, may have been as much self-preservation as it was investment strategy. Pittsburgh Life at that time was one of the largest life insurance companies in the nation.

“MetLife bailed them out, just to keep the life insurance business alive,” Barber said.

For Buffalo City, the end was slow in coming but inevitable. Metropolitan Life sold Dare Lumber Co. to the Dare Corp. of Dover, Delaware, in January 1940. Dare Corp. had hoped to use lumbering as a way to finance developing farmland in the vast holding.

Much of mainland Dare is swamp and unsuitable for farming, and that disadvantage was compounded by a nonexistent transportation network. There were no roads connecting mainland Dare with the outside world in 1940.

“The lack of roads could only be remedied with a massive amount of capital investment dedicated to developing a basic infrastructure,” Barber wrote.

In May of 1954 the Coastland Times reported the final curtain for Buffalo City under the headline “Cedar Mill at Buffalo City Finishing Work.”

“The Buffalo Cedar Mill, which has been operating from Buffalo City since 1949, has about two weeks of work left before their operations will be completed,” the newspaper reported. “At that time, it is reported by C. C. Duvall, the company will move their operations to Lake Drummond in the Dismal Swamp … This takes away from Buffalo City the last of the big milling businesses.”

Now uninhabited and listed on the National Register of Historic Places and part of Cape Lookout National Seashore, the 250-acre Portsmouth Village established in 1753 was the largest settlement on the Outer Banks by 1770. 

As the former port town’s bustling industry declined and the Civil War forced islanders to leave, the island’s population dwindled from 685 in 1860 to a mere 17 by 1956. After the death of Henry Pigott in 1971, Portsmouth’s last two residents, Marion Babb and Elma Dixon, moved inland.

Though the village just south of Ocracoke doesn’t see much foot traffic these days, hundreds will be showing up by boat – the only way to get there – Saturday, April 27, for the Portsmouth Homecoming. Coordinated by Friends of Portsmouth Island and Cape Lookout, the homecoming is held every two years.

Friends of Portsmouth Island Vice President Connie Mason said that this year’s homecoming will highlight the 130th anniversary of the U.S. Life-Saving Service Station, which was established here in 1894 and closed in 1937.

There will be an area for descendants to share family photos and scrapbooks, the post office will be open, as well as the school house, Annie and Theodore Salter House and Visitor Center, Methodist Church and the U.S. Life-Saving Station, which features exhibits of rescue methods.

“We have a hymn sing in the church about an hour before a program under the tent and then a covered dish lunch on the grounds after the program. Plates and utensils are provided by the Friends, so bring something yummy to share,” Mason said.

Friends member David Quinn is the grandson of the late Dot Salter Willis, one of the last people born on Portsmouth Island. He has been a history professor at Carteret Community College for the last 23 years and since 2022, has served as county commissioner representing the western part of Carteret.

His favorite part of the homecoming: “Getting to see friends and extended family members that I only get to see while they’re at the homecoming. Unfortunately, you just don’t get to see them except for that particular occasion. Getting reconnected with my family history and just being on Portsmouth Island itself is just an absolute joy.”

Quinn said he assumed the role of what he called “unofficial historian of homecoming” when his grandmother, who had recounted the history, died in September 2010.

Since 2012, Quinn has shared the history of the island from its earliest settlement during the Colonial period until it was taken over by the National Park Service in 1976.

Quinn said it seems like life was hard for the people of Portsmouth, but he doesn’t think they viewed their lives that way.

“In speaking with my grandmother, even having lived all the way until 2010 — she was born in 1922 — she yearned to return to Portsmouth,” Quinn said. He often includes her in his presentations on Portsmouth history, “and she would get very upset with anybody that referred to Portsmouth Village as a ghost town. She hated to hear people say that. She’d say, ‘No, no, Portsmouth is not a ghost town, it is still alive.”

This year, Quinn said his role is going to be slightly different.

Quinn was asked to fill the role of emcee upon the unexpected death of author and Portsmouth descendent Jim White. He also has brought in his sons to help.

He said his youngest, 16, led the Pledge of Allegiance at the 2022 program and is to deliver a portion of the history this year, and he thinks his older son will lead the Pledge of Allegiance.

About the homecoming, Friends of Portsmouth

Quinn told Coastal Review that he’s attended every homecoming since it was just a family gathering in the late 1970s, when he was very young, before it became an official event.

Mason explained that the Park Service held a homecoming in the early ’80s but the organizer was transferred to a different park, and no more where held. 

“That was one impetus for the need for a Friends of Portsmouth Island group,” Mason said.

Mason said she served as oral historian for Cape Lookout National Seashore from 1980 to 1988.

“My area of collection was Portsmouth Village,” she said. “I could not have done a good job without the friendship and respect of the former residents who trusted me with the telling of their family histories and about their lifestyles on an isolated island.”

After leaving the park service to become curator of collections at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort, “I wanted to do more to help preserve Portsmouth” and began working with descendants, community leaders and others who love the village, Mason said. 

The nonprofit Friends group formed in 1989 under the sponsorship of the Carteret County Historical Society and with the assistance and support from Jack Goodwin and Kay Hewitt, both now deceased, Feb. 23, 1990, became its “birthday.”

In 1991, the Friends began the campaign to reach more people and to build its membership by having booths at area festivals manned by devoted members. “Since those early days membership has grown,” Mason said.

Planning for the Homecoming

Quinn recommended that those who plan to stay in Ocracoke make overnight accommodations as soon as possible.

Visitors will also need to make ferry reservations starting in early April to travel from Ocracoke to the island with Rudy Austin at 252-928-4361. Cost is $25 per person, round trip.

Attendees can take the state ferry to Ocracoke from Cedar Island, or from Hatteras the morning of, and then catch the passenger ferry to Portsmouth from the same dock.

“The easiest way to come is to catch the earliest ferry from Cedar Island as a passenger only. No reservations required. Once at Ocracoke Rudy picks you up just as you get off state ferry, so there is no need to bring your car,” she said.

Mason added that there will be golf carts to tote coolers and those with difficulty walking. 

Cape Lookout National Seashore Superintendent Jeff West encouraged dressing for the weather.

“It can be hot or cold and wet in April. The wind may be blowing. It usually does,” West explained. “Insect repellent can be important if it is not cold or windy. It may be muddy. You will have to be able to endure a 20-minute boat ride, climb out of the boat, and walk down the dock.”

West reiterated that there will be walking, even with the transportation from the dock to the event. “Comfortable shoes are important.”

From the superintendent

West said preserving areas like Portsmouth is important, and the reasons vary.

Park service professionals will likely say they’re legally bound to preserve and protect cultural and historical artifacts, and “it is the very foundation of the National Park Service mission to preserve unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values” for the “enjoyment, education, and inspiration” for this and future generations.

“Most of us were attracted to the NPS in the first place by the mission, and most of us come to love and care personally about the areas we care for,” West said.

Historians will tell you that Portsmouth “was one of the most important ports of entry” in the state from about 1780 to 1860, and “maritime activities and development led in a major way to the success and importance of the state and in no small way to the emergence of the United States as a world power.”

Historians can point to the commerce generated to support this, from wood for shipbuilding, turpentine production, the trade in human beings, cotton, the list goes on and on. And, the fact that a marine hospital was built there, an early life saving station, a customs house was established, and so forth, West continued.

“They will also tell you it relates the story of a violent and harsh existence of people on a barrier island — the suffering and constant storms with little warning people endured, and they will tell you the history can teach us how to survive today,” West said. “They will tell you what came before us matters so that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past, and perhaps help us cope with our own struggles today — shared human experiences are a strong measure of humanity.”

From a descendant’s perspective, they will say Portsmouth is “about ‘place’ and capturing a piece of where they are from in their hearts and minds. Being able to walk the same paths, experiencing the same environment, seeing many of the same scenes provides that connection for many — a human connection that cannot be equaled by a passage in a book, or a video clip, or a family story handed down through time. We have the ability to go to Portsmouth and pretty much see it as it was … I think maybe that is why people appreciate it so much.”

West said the village is still recovering from Hurricane Dorian that hit the area in August 2019.

“Every structure in Portsmouth and four cemeteries were damaged by the storm, and several structures were destroyed,” he said. “It takes a great effort, many resources, and money to recover from a devastating storm like Dorian, especially in a remote place like Portsmouth.”

West explained that the national seashore has a dedicated historic preservation team “that has worked miracles to rehabilitate and harden the structures — hopefully making them more resilient for future storms.”

Hard decisions were made in the process, such as choosing what buildings could be saved with the limited resources at hand. They considered relative importance of the structures both historically and functionally, the condition and estimated costs of repair, the vulnerability of the buildings and what resiliency measures could be taken to help protect them from future storm impacts.

“And, then there is climate change,” West said. “Monthly flooding without storms continues to become more pronounced and frequent. All of these things figured in the equation.”

Only the Armtec House was completely destroyed by the storm, West said. The Frank Gaskill House will likely have to come down because it is too exposed and too badly damaged. The Mason-Dixon house, and the Wallace House are still awaiting repairs.

As a ranger, West said he looks forward to talking to and interacting with family and visitors.  “Nothing like folks sharing personal stories and the meaning of the island — it adds the human connection.”

There was little doubt that North Carolina would vote to support the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.”

The state had been dry since 1908. The first Southern state to go dry.

It was the Volstead Act passed into law in 1919 that allowed enforcement of the amendment. The law was challenged in the courts, and on Jan. 5, 1920, when the Supreme Court handed down its ruling upholding the act, prohibitionists were overjoyed.

“Supreme Court’s Action Hailed as a Sweeping Victory,” exclaimed the headline in the Jan. 6 Wilmington Morning Star, with a subhead telling readers, “Dry Forces Jubilant at Upholding of Volstead Prohibition Enforcement Act.”

If the dry forces of the state saw Prohibition as the dawn of a new and healthier society for farmers and lumber workers in northeastern North Carolina, who often lived in remote and barely accessibly areas, Prohibition offered something entirely different.

It was for them, a government-sponsored golden parachute. The once seemingly inexhaustible supply of lumber had, in fact, been exhausted. In 1920, farm income was roughly equivalent to household incomes nationwide, but over the next decade and into the 1930s, as commodity prices fell and foreign competition became more robust, farm income lagged even further behind the rest of the country.

It’s unclear how much moonshine liquor was being distilled in northeastern North Carolina before the Volstead Act. Following a 1919 raid in Currituck County, W.O. Saunders, publisher of the Elizabeth City Independent wrote, “Prior to the inauguration of Bone-Dry prohibition the illicit manufacture of liquor in the Elizabeth City territory was unknown. The news in this paper last week telling of the capture of stills in Camden and Currituck counties came as a shock to the thousands who had a vague idea that ‘moonshining’ belonged to the mountain fastnesses of western North Carolina.”

The rare discovery of a still in these parts seems to have become more regular after the Volstead Act took effect, although it was not solely the Volstead Act that created the change.

Chris Barber, whose book “When Ghosts Made Moonshine: Prohibition in the Albemarle,” examines Prohibition in northeastern North Carolina, recently told Coastal Review about the factors involved and how the illegal practice may have started here.

“This was just making a little bit of money to feed their families originally,” she said. “There was a small depression following World War I when soldiers came back. So people needed to make money,” and Buffalo City, a logging town near East Lake in Dare County long since lost to the forest, “that was a remote location.”

Barber’s title was drawn from a 1931 New York Herald Tribune article, “A Ghost That Makes Booze,” by Ben Dixon MacNeill. The story was picked up by a number of papers including the Independent where the story ran with the headline, “Buffalo City Written up in N.Y. Newspaper.”

“The ghost makes liquor,” MacNeill writes. “Makes liquor with a prodigality and completeness that is without parallel anywhere else in this country, and liquor of an exceedingly high and desirable quality.”

By 1931, the East Lake area had become a thriving center of liquor production — mostly rye whiskey, but corn whiskey, as well.

Back in 1920, production had been small and distribution limited, although that would soon change. The federal government was unprepared to enforce the new law.

“The government provided funds for only 1,500 agents at first to enforce Prohibition across the country. They were issued guns and given access to vehicles, but many had little or no training,” the Mob Museum in Las Vegas notes on its Prohibition webpage.

Although there would eventually be more agents assigned to the area, when Robert Tuttle, the first federal Prohibition agent, arrived in Elizabeth City in February 1920, he was alone covering all of northeastern North Carolina. 

Even after more agents arrived, it remained clear how ill-prepared the government was.

“The government paid them poorly,” Barber said, referring to the work that needed to be done. Cars were not provided.

In order to raid a suspected site in Camden County that borders Elizabeth City, agents had to hire jitney drivers, the equivalent a taxi. When the they arrived at the location, “It was obvious that the people they were going to raid knew it,” Barber said.

What was happening in counties close by Elizabeth City and Pasquotank County was dwarfed by what was happening on the Dare County mainland.

In the 1920s, there were no roads in the East Lake District. The main connection with the outside world was a dock at Buffalo City on Milltail Creek. The area was a virtually impenetrable swamp and sparsely populated. The people who lived there were self-sufficient and tightknit, and they had one other advantage — a well-established connection to Elizabeth City, at that time a transportation hub.

In her 2019 Eastern Carolina University master’s thesis in marine archeology, Reconstructing Buffalo City (1887-1986), Sara Mackenzie Parkin, points to the remoteness of the location and a well-established transportation network as key to an explosive growth in bootleg whiskey production.

“The strategic advantage of their remote location coupled with the proximity of well-traveled trade routes lent itself well to the illegal manufacturing and sale of Buffalo City’s newest trade good,” she wrote.

Federal Prohibition agents were aware of East Lake and in June 1922, with the help of the Coast Guard, they made their first raid.

“By nine o’clock Saturday morning they captured two sixty-gallon corn whiskey plants and destroyed nine hundred gallons of mash at East Lake. They arrested no one,” Barber wrote in her book.

Less than a year later, they agents returned. Again they arrested no one, but Barber writes, “They discovered buildings and equipment. This was more than a still; it was a large, well-organized operation.”

The agents found a still capable, they estimated, of producing 100 gallons of whiskey a day and 7,500 gallons of beer in containers ready to be shipped.

A pattern was emerging. As more federal agents arrived in Elizabeth City working with county sheriffs, they were often able to surprise bootleggers at their stills in areas accessible by car.

“Local Sheriff Found Still Running,” announced the headline in the Sept. 22, 1922, edition of the Independent. The article goes on to report the arrest of “Bruce Burgess, Henry Hughes and a 19-year-old boy named Jones.”

But at East Lake, although the agents could often seize equipment, the men who possessed the knowledge and expertise required to make whiskey were never there.

“Part of the story is the underground network and spies and informants. So agents could rarely go to East Lake and surprise anybody. It was just not possible because (East Lake residents) already knew,” Barber said.

The spies were not always successful, though. To get to East Lake, federal agents had to rely on the Coast Guard for water transportation. The AB-21, the 65-foot-long boat the Coast Guard used to cross Albemarle Sound from Elizabeth City, had a top speed of 6.5 knots, or about 7.5 mph. Almost any motorboat would be able to get to East Lake before it did.

But in August 1927 the AB-21 left after dark and anchored off Durant Island off the north end of East Lake, waiting for daylight. The strategy paid off.

“Sudden Federal Raid at East Lake Brings in Men and Liquor” according to the Aug. 27, 1927, Elizabeth City Daily Advance headline.

In the two-day raid, agents were able to arrest three men and seize “distilling equipment and supplies valued at $33,000 to $36,000.” That would be $585,000 to $638,000 in today’s dollars.

It was apparent that what was happening on mainland Dare County was distinct from anything happening in other areas of northeastern North Carolina.

“Eastlake (and) Buffalo City, liquor became more of an industrial style production. They had bunkhouses left over from timber days,” Barber said. And sometimes, “they had generators and they ran stills around the clock.”

To sustain production on that level, there had to be a way to get the product to market and the product had to be good enough to create demand. East Lake whiskey, apparently, checked both boxes. From Elizabeth City north up the East Coast to New York City, East Lake whiskey was renowned.

“Its smoothness and quality allegedly drove up demand for the product,” Parkin wrote.

This distribution network’s success relied on the active collusion of law enforcement officials here and elsewhere.

The city manager of Norfolk, Virginia, I. Walk Truxton, had learned that honest city officials were seemingly being intimidated by dishonest police and bootleggers and in 1926 he took his suspicions to Prohibition Officer Leighton Blood.

Blood came up with the idea of opening a speakeasy in Norfolk, buying illegal booze from bootleggers there. His plan did snare some 22 people, according to Barber in her book, but the speakeasy was only phase one of the plan.

Agent David Mayne came from upstate New York and he was tasked with breaking up the distribution network. To do that he set up his own still and bootlegging operation at Pierceville in Camden County. Mayne, however, was working from the Virginia Prohibition office. North Carolina Prohibition officers did not know his still had been bought and paid for with federal funds or that it was producing whiskey as part of an ongoing investigation.

On Sept. 15, 1926, North Carolina agents raided the still.

As facts emerged of what the Prohibition agents had been doing, the public was outraged.

“Facts Support Startling Charges That Government Dry Agents Had Moonshine Still Near This City,” read the front-page Daily Advance headline on Jan. 14, 1927.

The outrage, though, was not confined to local papers. Rep. Fiorello Henry LaGuardia, the prominent New York Republican, brought the actions of the agents to the attention of Congress.

On Jan. 10, 1927, Sen. James Read of Missouri introduced a measure demanding that Internal Revenue Commissioner David H. Blair, and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Lincoln C. Andrews furnish to the Senate “copies of all orders and correspondence relative to the employment of what is known as undercover agents employed in the enforcement of the prohibition statutes.”

Included in Read’s resolution was an article in the Washington Star Ledger describing in detail the agents’ actions.

In Congress there was growing uncertainty about Prohibition. As early as 1924, Samuel Gompers, head of the powerful American Federation of Labor, sent a letter to Congress. Citing, “the lawless vender of forbidden liquor on the one side, and the lawless enforcement officer on the other, the public has suffered irreparable damage,” Gompers declared. He asked for a modification of the Volstead Act.

A 1931 congressional report showed the failure of Prohibition operations over the previous decade, concluding that, “The evidence before us tends to show a great increase in the number of stills and a universality of operating extending all over the country. The amount of moonshine liquor in this country per year can not be estimated within reasonable bounds.”

In late 1932, with newly elected Franklin Roosevelt about to be sworn in as president, Congress bowed to the inevitable. Both the Democratic and Republican party platforms called for the end of Prohibition. Support in Congress grew for a joint resolution to repeal the 18th Amendment, which the 21^st Amendment did the following year.

Lifelong Ocracoke resident Alton Ballance can trace ancestors on both sides of his family back to the barrier island’s first settlers, he writes in the preface of his 255-page book, “Ocracokers.”

The book that is about “Ocracoke and Ocracokers, past and present, and how both have adapted to the changes that have taken place within the last few years” was published in 1989 by UNC Press.

His parents both grew up on Ocracoke, with roots going back generations to the 1700s. “We were related to so many people,” he told Coastal Review recently.

His late father, Lawrence, worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and his mother Vera, was “an Island girl” who was born in 1918 in the house where Alton Ballance lives today. “And she lived over 77 years there and died there,” he explained.

Ballance said that he remembers his childhood fondly “because of the connection to the outdoors, the families and the voices, the stories, the humor.”

Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s in the island village “was a time when you had immediate contact with people like grandparents, who had themselves grown up in the age of sail and in homes without running water or electricity and they depended on sailing across the sound to trade or go to Carteret County” to shop or get medical care.

Ballance will be taking the same Pamlico Sound route his ancestors likely took to Carteret County on Friday, Feb. 23, when he visits Harkers Island — one of the 13 unincorporated, tight-knit communities north of Beaufort referred to as Down East. He’ll be the guest speaker for the winter Taste of Core Sound.

The annual fundraising dinner at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center includes a family-style feast and two auctions. Located at the end of Island Road, the center is next to the Cape Lookout National Seashore visitor center.

Previously a teacher at Ocracoke’s K-12 school and staff at North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching on the island, Ballance has owned The Crews Inn on Back Road since 1989, served on Hyde County Board of Commissioners from 1984 to 1992 and was on the state’s Coastal Resources Commission, which establishes rules for coastal development, from 1996 to 2002. He has two daughters, Emma Reese, 11, who lives with her mother in High Point, and Vera, 23, who lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Ballance explained that the book is in three parts. The first is the history of Ocracoke through World War II, including the island’s geological formation. The second part focuses on the Ocracokers themselves, those who represent the island when he was growing up, and finally, what “launched us into where we are today,” including the National Park Service, tourism, and school.

He acknowledges in the preface that some of the people in the book have died or don’t do what they used to since he started writing the book in the late 1970s, but “this difference doesn’t bother me too much because the book really is about the past, about the people and events who have made Ocracoke what it is today. For all that might happen to the island in time to come, it will always have its past – a past full of rich history, some of it alive today.”

Ballance began working on the book in the late 1970s and it took to the late 1980s, to get it done. “It took me a while.”

The book went through through several revisions as it was transferred from handwritten pages, to manual typewriter, to electronic typewriter and finally, a computer.

The idea for the book happened shortly after Ballance graduated from high school.

He attended University of North Carolina Asheville for a few years — hitchhiking across the state the day before Thanksgiving one year to surprise his family — before transferring to UNC Chapel Hill.

At Chapel Hill, he discovered the library’s North Carolina collection and became interested in trying to record the stories of Ocracoke’s past and its people, which eventually became the core of “Ocracokers,” he explained.

He did much of the work after graduating from UNC and going back to Ocracoke around 1980. “I spent a year fishing with these old guys that I portray in the book,” he said, and writing, interviewing and keeping journal.

He said he took his first teaching job in Hillsborough after that year but moved back home to teach at Ocracoke School. He taught at the kindergarten through 12th grade school from 1982 to 2003. He also worked on his master’s through Middlebury College in Vermont, where he could take summer classes.

He became interested in village politics because of the Anchorage Inn being built on Ocracoke at the time and decided to run as the village’s representative for the Hyde County Board of Commissioners. This was in 1984.

He described the Anchorage Inn as a “brick building, like a roadside interstate hotel that had been jammed on a residential lot,” adding it was “Only 3 or 4 feet from the highway” and at some point, a ladder had to be on the highway to finish the project.

“So, I was interested in introducing the island’s first development ordinance. I wrote it myself in 1985 and so what got introduced was height limit, and setbacks and parking and things like that,” he said.

Before that, there were no development rules. “That wasn’t easy. To go from nothing to something, and most people, I think, were supportive,” he said.

While teaching, he heard about the program, North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching, or NCCAT, where teachers could take seminars in Cullowhee. He made his way there in the mid-1990s and the director at the time approached him about expanding the program to Ocracoke.

The first program they developed on the island was held in 1995 and took place a few times a year. Then one day, Ballance said they were heading over to historic Portsmouth Village, now protected as part of Cape Lookout National Seashore, and were discussing how the Coast Guard was downsizing and leaving Ocracoke. As well as its World War II-era station on the shore of Silver Lake empty.

“We had a dream to make the old station an eastern campus for NCCAT, he said.

“It took an act of Congress — literally and figuratively — for them to give the building to the state (for NCCAT) and we came very close in the late 90s to getting it,” he said, “But then Hurricane Floyd and a few other things put the brakes on the funding.”

When the effort reignited in 2003, he stepped away from teaching and began working to get NCCAT eastern campus to Ocracoke, which he succeeded in doing and it is still in operation today.

Though not offered anymore, one of the most popular seminars was called “Salty Dogs.” Groups of teachers would spend the day on commercial fishing boats. They would clean what they helped catch and then cook the seafood in Ballance’s backyard.

The teachers after that experience “would never look at seafood the same way again because of the complexities,” from having to be your own lawyer and accountant to having to take the risks. “I’ve seen my two nephews, who are commercial fishermen, you know, they make zero one day because they lost gear, and the next day make $10,000, so you’ve got to be really in tune to a lot change.”

Ballance led seminars at NCCAT until 2018, when he decided to spend more time at The Crews Inn.

“I’ve spent my time renovating. I’m kind of a do-it-yourself person, so after Hurricane Dorian (in 2019) I had rebuilt whole first floor of the inn, and my house, and The Crews Inn cottage,” he said.

Ballance told Coastal Review that he feels like Ocracoke and Down East are both kind of “at the end of the road,” the center’s slogan, and are “kindred spirits” for their coastal connection and concerns with when storms come along.

“You have to learn to be resilient if you’re going to keep living there. You’ve got to get used to pushing sand around, you’ve got to get used to being flooded, you’ve got to get used to having your roof blown off, trees down, and your backyards growing wetter,” he said. “We’ve got some of the same sort of concerns.”

About Taste of Core Sound

Taste of Core Sound begins at 6 p.m. Feb. 23 with a reception that includes oysters on the half shell.

The dinner, served at 7 p.m., is to include “Hancock Salad” with homemade poppy seed dressing, venison bites, stewed conchs, assorted fruits and cheese, oyster dressing, shrimp and grits, scallop fritters, redhead ducks and rutabagas, Ocracoke pork tenderloin, winter collards, sweet potato pudding, squash casserole and light rolls. For dessert, culinary students at East Carteret and West Carteret high schools are baking Down East fig cakes.

Ballance, who is slated to start his talk around 8 p.m. after dinner is served, will also be on hand to sign copies of his book throughout the event.

Visitors will have a chance to bid on decoys, collectibles and waterfowl art during live and silent auctions.

Davis Springle carved this year’s contemporary decoy for the live auction.

He said that both of his grandfathers started taking carving classes at the community college after retiring “so when I was growing up I was always helping them sand a decoy head or painting ‘abstract’ decoys,” he said.

He began carving decoys while in college, after joining his grandfather, Clinton Barnes, at the Core Sound Decoy Carvers Guild and have been carving since. “I usually carve Core Sound style decoys but will occasionally carve and paint a more decorative bird. I enjoy carving wood ducks the most but have carved most of the birds local to our area.”

A vintage decoy will also be auctioned.

Tickets are $100 per member or $125 each for nonmembers, and that includes an annual membership. There’s also the option to reserve a table with seating for 10 for $1,000. Call the museum at 252-725-1500 or visit www.coresound.com/wintertaste or at the giftshop in downtown Morehead City.

It may be hard to overstate the influence, creativity and genius of Max Roach.

The famous coastal North Carolina native’s instrument was the drums, but calling him a drummer is roughly akin to comparing the Atlantic Ocean to a pond.

The subject of a PBS documentary that premiered in October 2023, Max Roach was born in 1924 in Newland Township, about 12 or 13 miles north of Elizabeth City. It might be a stretch, though, to claim Roach as a product of North Carolina. His family moved to New York when he was just 4.

If he didn’t grow up in North Carolina, it does appear as though he maintained his connection to the area.

“He wasn’t raised here. He wasn’t educated here. But he has cousins that are still here, and my understanding is that he would come back every once in a while, and they’d have a big family party out in Newland,” said Douglas Jackson, professor of music at Elizabeth City State University.

Jackson was keynote speaker at the centennial celebration of Roach’s birthday Jan. 10 at the Museum of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City. Jackson, who plays trumpet, was aware of Roach, but as he went deeper into researching him, his appreciation grew.

“I started listening to more of his recordings and what people were writing and saying about … the influence on how he maintained tempo, his cymbal technique, where he’s he’s feathering the cymbal, and it’s so fast and it’s always so consistent,” Jackson said. “People were referring to him as a lyrical drummer. He used all of the different pieces of the drum set to complement the musicians, but he never got in the way.”

Roach died in 2007 at his home in Manhattan, but during his lifetime, he received a number of accolades. These include a MacArthur Genius Grant in 1988, Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 1989 and the International Percussive Art Society’s Hall of Fame and the DownBeat Hall of Fame. In 2009 he was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame.

Roach was a musical prodigy. In an interview recorded in 1984 at Howard University, he described growing up in Brooklyn and his earliest musical experiences.

“When I was about 8 years old, I joined the marching band in Concord Baptist Church,” he said. “My first instrument in that band was a bugle. And I had a problem with that and later switched to the marching drum.”

Roach had an aunt who taught him to play piano and read music, but his love was always the drums, and by the time he graduated from high school in 1942, he was already in demand when a drummer was needed in New York City.

At age 17 he sat in with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, perhaps one of the most accomplished jazz orchestras of its day. Ellington’s regular drummer, Sonny Greer, was sick and a substitute was needed.

But, as he told NPR’s Terry Gross, host of “Fresh Air,” in a 1987 interview, Greer played by ear and by watching what was happening around him.

“I couldn’t play by ear at that time. I was about 17,” Roach said. “So Mr. Ellington, before the curtain came up, he looked at me and saw the fright of fear in my face and said keep one eye on me and one eye on the acts on the stage. And I made it through.”

That night, in spite of the fear, was also a defining moment for Roach.

“I made up my mind I wanted to be in this area of music because Duke had (it) all, the theater and the drama and the pageantry was just surrounding him when he presented a show. And that’s when I really decided that was what I wanted to do,” he told Gross.

The big-band era was coming to an end, however. There were a number of factors that led to that, but a World War II tax in particular may have been the death knell as Roach recounted in his Howard University interview.

“The Second World War, we had an extra 20% cabaret taxes,” he explained, pointing to already existing federal, state and city taxes. “On top of that (a club owner) had to pay a 20% government tax called entertainment tax. If he had a singer, if he had public dancing or dancing on a stage or a comedian, this really heralded the demise of big bands during that time.”

What did not face the cabaret tax, however, were small improvisational groups. It was a time when some of the finest jazz musicians in the world were gravitating to New York, and Roach was in the middle of it.

“Right after high school, of course, I went into New York and started working with people like Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet) and (saxophonists) Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins,” he recalled in his Howard University interview.

The improvisational sound of the small groups had challenges, Roach told Terry Gross.

“When you played in a small band, more was required of you because there were less people. It was like playing in a string quartet is vis-a-vis symphony orchestras,” he said. “You heard more drums, you heard more piano, you heard more this then that and the other to fill it out.”

He was 18 and 19 when he first began playing with Gillespie and Hawkins and sometimes Parker. From those sessions a new form of jazz music emerged that continues to influence how jazz is performed.

“What we hear in clubs today is a manifestation that came out of the whole bebop period, when small bands took the place of big bands and people came into these smaller clubs, sat down and listened to instrumentalists perform,” he said in his Howard university interview.

One of the most distinctive features of bebop is how the cymbal is used to keep time instead of the kick drum — it was a technique the Roach pioneered. In his first recordings in the late 1940s and 50s, there is almost no bass drum at all, but in an article written for the Percussive Arts Society, Roach is quoted from an interview published in the 1998 book “The Drummer’s Time” in which he clarified why the bass drum wasn’t heard.

“We played the bass drum, but the engineers would cover it up because it would cause distortion due to the technology at the time. There were never any mics near our feet; they would have one mic above the drum set, and that was all,” he said.

Over his career Roach went far beyond the sounds of bebop.

“The creative mind is always turning and Max had a creative mind and he kept it turning,” Jackson said, and that creative mind led to some intriguing and compelling use of percussion instruments. His 1980 album, “M’Boom,” features only percussion instruments — no stringed instruments, brass or woodwinds. The sound is complex, haunting and at times surprisingly melodic.

Music does not exist in a vacuum, Roach commented in a number of interviews, and he specifically saw jazz as an expression of the Black experience in America, and that experience is very much a part of the fabric of life in this country.

“When I look around and listen to most anybody… they have been touched by, and I mean profoundly touched, by what came out of the Black community culturally. That’s what America is,” he told his Howard University interviewer. “It reflects the whole democratic aspect, improvisation. Collective improvisation is democratic.”

He was also a powerful advocate for civil rights and African American equality. In 1960 he released “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite” featuring his wife Abby Lincoln as vocalist and Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax, with lyrics by Oscar Brown. In 2022 the album was selected into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry.

Writing about the album for the Library of Congress, writer Christa Gammage noted the album was not widely praised when it debuted.

“The album received mixed reviews; some critics claimed the album displayed a ‘bitter mood’ and felt it was ‘new-frontier club stuff and most likely a little too far out in uncut timber for most tastes,’” Gammage wrote.

Asked by Gross in the NPR interview if the album was a result of the growing Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Roach drew attention to the music Black artists had already been performing.

“I go back to Bessie Smith with “Black Mountain Blues” and then to Duke Ellington with his “Black, Brown And Beige.” It’s always been there,” he said.

He went on to tell Gross that the inspiration for his activism was what the future would hold for his children.

“You’re always thinking about … their future as well,” he said. “If they’re going to come up and be responsible human beings, they have to have education and the things like everyone else has. And the society has to accommodate that.”

Though the downtown is now a collection of mostly 20th century buildings, Elizabeth City, the center of Pasquotank County government and trade, has roots going back to the earliest years of the Colony.

The area around Elizabeth City, originally home to the Chowan and Weapemeoc, was one of the first settled by the English in North Carolina.

Its recorded past can be traced back to one of the founding acts of the Colony in 1665, when a group met at Halls Creek and established North Carolina’s original legislative assembly.

This group acted prior to the 1669 Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, the founding government document of the Carolinas that is now attributed to philosopher John Locke.

Though many of the Colony’s 1665 laws changed drastically in the decades that followed, today’s state government can be linked to this meeting on a knoll just 6 miles from today’s downtown Elizabeth City.

In 1910, the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a marker at what they believed to be the site.

The area that would become Elizabeth City remained small and rural throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Nixonton, one of the first towns in North Carolina located on the Little River, was a commercial meeting place nearby.

Pasquotank County, founded in 1668, had a courthouse located at different points in the county before settling at Nixonton in the late 18th century.

Elizabeth City’s importance to the region can be traced to 1795 when a hurricane hit Albemarle Sound and silted up Edenton’s access to the Albemarle. Edenton depended on the Albemarle, but Elizabeth City took advantage of the newly constructed Dismal Swamp Canal and became a center for local and coastal trade.

Elizabeth City began to thrive as the town’s population grew in the years after its 1793 incorporation.

This population included a number of free African Americans who moved to the area to escape harsher legal treatment in Virginia.

The city hosted a number of artisanal shops, cabinet makers, and other features of a growing Southern town, making the city an early target during the Civil War.

It was vulnerable to Ambrose Burnside’s force from Roanoke Island. Citizens set the town on fire prior to the Union Army’s advance and fled on foot, leaving it a “dead town … dead as a graveyard,” as a Union Army officer described it.

Elizabeth City’s burning in 1862 contributed to its current cityscape.

Instead of having large surviving stretches of antebellum buildings like nearby Edenton or Hertford, Elizabeth City’s historical architecture is dominated by its late 19th century rebuilding.

The city is home to a considerable collection of Victorian dwellings. They line Main Street and can be found on Church and Road streets as well.

Author Catherine Bishir, curator of Architectural Records Special Collections at North Carolina State University Libraries, describes West Main Street as containing “a remarkably solid, varied, and intact grouping of closely placed late 19th- and early 20th-c. homes,” where at one point “a rhythmic row of multigabled Queen Anne dwellings nearly abuts the sidewalk.”

This rebuilding was powered by the city’s continued position as a center of trade and industry.

By 1896, Elizabeth City was home to 14 mills, three newspapers, 10 boarding houses and hotels, and a textile factory.

These businesses, along with the growth of peanut farming, helped push the city to become a center of economic and industrial prosperity in the region.

In the 20th century, Elizabeth City became a social and cultural center as well as an economic one.

Home to the Albemarle’s only historically Black university, Elizabeth City State University was founded in 1891 as a teacher’s college for Black men and women.

Elizabeth City State has since become an influential educational institution, training thousands of teachers and graduating distinguished alumni.

One of its earliest presidents, Harold Trigg, became the first Black member of the state Board of Education in 1949. In 1960, Elizabeth City also became the home of the College of the Albemarle, one of the state’s oldest community colleges. 

Like many other eastern towns, Elizabeth City was not immune to the economic forces of deindustrialization in the late 20th century. Its population stagnated between 1960 and 2000. Many of the town’s mills closed, and its downtown emptied.

Lori Meads, education coordinator at the Museum of the Albemarle, has lived in Elizabeth City her entire life. She remembers frequent visits in her childhood to the multiple department stores downtown, all of which have closed.

Despite these challenges, Elizabeth City’s embrace of education and tourism earlier in the 20th century have helped keep it vibrant and successful into the 21st. There is some debate over the future of this vibrancy, however, specifically whether or not Elizabeth City will become a suburb of the sprawling Hampton Roads region.

Residents can certainly see the allure of Norfolk, Portsmouth, and other major nearby cities.

“Of course, people go up to Hampton Roads,” Meads said. “They have Top Golf.”

But, Meads emphasized, Elizabeth City has done enough work to offer amenities, businesses, and attractions within the city limits to keep people in town and prevent it from becoming just another bedroom community.

Taken on its own, the city has a number of attractive features to both old and potential new residents. It is a college town, with its two institutions of higher learning with a combined population of around 7,000 students, and many of its old buildings are being renovated and filled with coffee shops and boutiques.

There are museums, breweries and events like the Potato Festival, which takes over the city every May.

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

These photographs were taken at a Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC, camp on Bell Island in Hyde County in 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression.

Now preserved at the State Archives in Raleigh, they were taken by one of the young men who served at Bell Island. The young man’s full name was Anthony Troy Elliott — he went by Troy — and had grown up on a small farm in Perquimans County, 70 miles to the north.

Born in 1914, Elliott was one of the 200 men ages 17 to 25 who made up Co. 424 when it was at Bell Island.

Young Elliott’s photographs may not be the most artful, but I am especially fond of them because they are so full of life and yet also give us a glimpse at a part of the Great Depression on the North Carolina coast that we rarely see elsewhere.

View from the pier that Co. 424 built on Rose Bay looking back to the camp’s tents, 1935. The camp’s first enrollees came from Brunswick, Durham, Granville, Halifax, New Hanover, Onslow, and Wilson counties. Within the year, a healthy contingent of the camp’s young men also came from Hyde County, where Bell Island is located. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

Troy Elliott and his companions at Bell Island were creating what is now the Swanquarter National Wildlife Refuge, a critically important wintering ground for migratory waterfowl.

The CCC’s Co. 424, the top photo, was based on Bell Island from 1933 to 1937. In the autumn of 1937, the camp was closed and the company was relocated to a new site at New Holland, 14 miles to the east on the shores of Lake Mattamuskeet.

At New Holland, CCC Co. 424 did much of the work necessary to create the Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge. That work included transforming an abandoned pumping station into one of the state’s most iconic landmarks, the Mattamuskeet Lodge.

The members of Co. 424 were among 3 million young, single, unemployed men of all colors and races, whose families got through the Great Depression with the help of the CCC.

A pair of friends posing by their quarters, Bell Island, 1935. By the end of 1933, approximately 1,500 CCC camps had been built in the U.S. and its territories. Between that time and the CCC’s termination in 1942, more than 100 CCC camps were located in North Carolina. They were all segregated by race, and that number included nine camps set aside for African Americans, as well as six for World War I veterans, four for white veterans, two for Black veterans. As was the case with nearly all of the state’s anti-poverty programs in the first half of the 20th century, CCC funds were spent disproportionately for the benefit of the state’s white citizens. In the case of the CCC, the agency’s administrators maintained strict quotas on the participation of Black and Native American men. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

Created by the Emergency Conservation Work Act of 1933, the CCC was one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs aimed at helping American citizens survive the poverty and unemployment that plagued the United States during the Great Depression.

In addition to earning wages, CCC laborers also addressed some of the nation’s most fundamental needs: building infrastructure, preserving wildlife habitat, and restoring soil, forests, and other parts of our natural heritage that in many cases had been devastated by generations of unhindered exploitation.

In the words of the Act, the purpose of the CCC was to relieve “the acute condition of widespread distress and unemployment” and “to provide for the restoration of the country’s depleted natural resources and the advancement of an orderly program of useful public works.”

The mission of the CCC laborers at Bell Island was to create what is now known as the Swanquarter National Wildlife Refuge, a 42,000-acre wetlands that provides shelter and feeding grounds for migratory waterfowl. Their work included building fire towers, fire lanes, ditching, a long pier into Rose Bay, a keeper’s house, fishermen’s camps, and a raised, mile-long road — we can see its path being cleared here — across the swamplands north of the camp that connected Bell Island to the mainland a few miles west of Swan Quarter. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

The CCCers built roads and bridges, fought forest fires, planted some 3 billion trees, carried out major erosion control projects, and built national parks, state parks and wildlife refuges.

In North Carolina, they built, or helped build, many of the state’s most cherished landmarks, parks and historic sites.

Those CCC projects included the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Fort Macon State Park, the Pisgah National Forest, the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge, and Waterside Theater, where “The Lost Colony” is performed, among many others.

The mosquitoes of Hyde County were and still are legendary, and one of the first newspaper reports that I found on the Bell Island camp focused on them. Appearing in the Elizabeth City Independent July 23, 1933, the article began, “Over on Bell Island 200 youthful members of the Civilian Conservation Corps are making war on mosquitoes.” Evidently much of the camp’s early work focused on mosquito control, which at that time usually meant a great deal of ditch digging in salt marshes and swamplands. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

A pair of young men fishing, hunting or just “proggin’” on one of the ditches that Co. 424 had dug at Bell Island 1935. The mosquitoes were no fun, but Co. 424’s single hardest moment was probably the great hurricane of September 1933. I know few details about the damage caused by the storm on that part of Rose Bay, but news reports indicated that the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Pamlico answered a distress call from the CCC camp and rushed there with food and supplies. Bell Island is only a few feet above sea level and the hurricane’s storm surge inevitably flooded the camp and cut off the road that the CCC work crews were building to the mainland. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

When Co 424’s camp was built at Bell Island, a quarter of all men in the United States were unemployed. Record numbers of farmers had lost their land. Across the nation, the wages of those who still had jobs had fallen on average by almost half since 1929.

In much of the rural South, the number of down and out was even higher. Nearly half of families in Dare County, for instance, just down the road from Bell Island, were on state or county relief, though it amounted to next to nothing at that time.

In the early years of the Great Depression, there was no national safety net: no Social Security, no unemployment insurance, and no federal programs to aid mothers, children, the elderly or the disabled who were in need of food, shelter or health care.

CCCers on the roadbed that they were building between Bell Island and the mainland, 1935. At the beginning, the CCC camp at Bell Island fell under the command of a Capt. Gervais of the U.S. Army’s 4th Field Artillery. That was not unusual. In 1933, regular Army officers led all CCC camps. However, by the summer of 1934, or thereabouts, they were replaced with officers from the Army Reserves. Civilians made up most of a CCC camp’s staff. At Bell Island, much of Co. 424’s original civilian staff — a clerk, a steward, medics, one of the work foremen, etc.– had been recruited in Wilson County, 100 miles to the west. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

Later in the 1930s, the Roosevelt Administration and the U.S. Congress created many of the federal programs that we now have to address those needs. Along with new legal protections for workers organizing labor unions, they made up the New Deal.

Disillusionment with capitalism and the power of banks and industry had rarely if ever been higher in American history. At the time, the nation’s business leaders widely credited the New Deal with staving off popular uprising, anarchy and even revolution.

A trio of cooks outside the mess hall on Bell Island, 1935. I do not think that I am exaggerating if I say that the opportunity to have three square meals a day was one of the most compelling reasons that young men in eastern North Carolina enrolled in the CCC. Hunger stalked the land during the Great Depression, and many of the region’s people did not have that same opportunity. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

Neil Howell, who grew up near Kinston, was 17 years old when he enrolled in Co. 424. At a reunion in 1993, he remembered his first days in Hyde County. “I was scared,” he told an AP reporter. “I had never been away from home before.” Howell soon got over his homesickness though. “We had a good bunch of people,” he remembered. Quote is from the the Greensboro News & Record, June 7, 1993. In this photo, we can see the camp’s enrollees lining up outside the mess hall at Bell Island. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

For many on the North Carolina coast, the CCC was the first tangible benefit that they received from the New Deal.

In the CCC, the young men worked for a dollar day and most considered themselves lucky. They were permitted to keep a few dollars a month for themselves, but the CCC sent the bulk of their wages to their families to help meet their most basic needs.

In addition to building the migratory waterfowl refuge, the CCC enrollees at Bell Island often continued their educations. For many, that was a rare second chance. Many dropped out of school by the age of 12 or 13, or even earlier, so that they could go to work and help support their families. In the spring of 1934, Forest Humphrey, a CCC enrollee from Jacksonville, reported that Co. 424’s civilian staff were offering classes in boat building, first aid, and in basic subjects such as reading, writing, and arithmetic. See the Belhaven Times and Hyde County Record, April 27,1934. Many years later, another CCC veteran recalled that he learned the electrician’s trade while in Co. 424. He apparently made his living as an electrician for the rest of his life. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

For many families, those wages proved the difference between abject poverty and getting by.

A $25 a month check from the CCC would not solve all problems, and a young man’s service in the CCC was limited to two years. But at least for a time, their CCC wages might stave off hunger, save a family farm, or make it possible to buy clothes so that younger brothers and sisters could go to school, among much else.

Reflecting the status of women in American society at that time, the CCC was not open to women. However, having a son in the CCC was often especially important to female heads of households who had been widowed, abandoned by husbands, or had a disabled husband, all of which were far more common situations at that time than is generally appreciated.

This photo may have been taken on Mother’s Day, 1935. A year earlier, when Mother’s Day fell on May 13, the camp’s commander at the time, Capt. Watts Cooke, had made a special request for the young men at Bell Island to write letters to their mothers “as an expression of love and appreciation.” He also authorized them to invite their mothers to visit the camp on that day, which about 30 of the boys’ mothers did. Belhaven Times and Hyde County Record, April 27, 1934. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

Interviewed in his 70s, one of Co. 424’s veterans, Ed Biggs, came from one of those families.

“Mama had a big garden and some livestock, but that’s all they had to depend on,” he told a reporter covering a Co. 424 reunion that was held at Lake Mattamuskeet in 1993.

One of the most popular pastimes at Bell Island was baseball. The camp’s correspondent, Forest Humphrey, reported that his mates had organized eight teams by the spring of 1934, as well as put together a camp team to play teams in the two nearest towns, Swan Quarter and Belhaven. The Belhaven Times and Hyde County Record in Belhaven occasionally reported on their games. A July 6, 1934 article, for instance, noted that “the Bell Island baseball team played the Pungo River team here last week.” The article went on to say, “the boys have shown great spirit and took defeat from the Pungo boys– score 6-1– with a grin. The Bell Island team hopes to even up the score later on.” Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

CCC Co. 424 held dances in the rec hall at Bell Island. In the April 13, 1934, edition of the Belhaven Times and Hyde County Record, I found a notice of a dance that was held in honor a group of the young men who were finishing their CCC service and headed home. Refreshments were served. Halett Deans’ orchestra, from Belhaven, played. And the revelry lasted until midnight. With a wink to high society gossip columns of the day, Forest Humphrey gushed that the dance “turned out to be the outstanding social event of the spring season.” The CCC camp hosted another dance only a month later, on the fourth of May. The CCCers advertised the dance in Belhaven’s newspaper, and they used the proceeds from the cover charge to buy equipment and uniforms for their baseball club. From Belhaven Times and the Hyde County Record, Belhaven, April 27, 1934

Troy Elliott, fifth from left, at an ice cream social with a crowd of local friends in Hyde County, 1935. The back of the photograph identifies the group, from left, as Edward Gibbs, Hilda Midgett, Audrey Cahoon, Sybil Midgett, Troy Elliott, Eva Gray Berry, Belton Midgett, and an unidentified young woman, with Cecil Gibbs kneeling with the ice cream maker. The young men may have been among the Hyde County enrollees who served with Troy Elliott at Bell Island. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

I am sure to no one’s surprise, Co. 424 was not at Bell Island long before romance was in the air. At Co. 424’s Christmas dance on Dec. 23, 1933, a pair of weddings between the camp’s servicemen and local women were announced. Sgt. Harold D. Hampton, of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, had married Ila Mae Lee of Swan Quarter, and Cpl. Oscar Ramness, of Ada, Minnesota, had married Alice Lee Harris, also of Swan Quarter. A Rev. Lowe had performed both weddings at the Methodist church’s parsonage in Swan Quarter. Of other loves, including ones perhaps not as sanctioned, the historical record is silent. See Belhaven Times and Hyde County Record, Jan. 5, 1934. Photo courtesy, N.C. State Archives

The young men of Co. 424 were based at Bell Island for a little more than four years. Then, on Oct. 25, 1937, the CCC transferred the company to the new site in another part of Hyde County.

That new site was in New Holland, a village on the south side of Lake Mattamuskeet.

In New Holland, Co. 424’s members developed the Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge. They built waterfowl impoundments, roads, and fire breaks, as well as transformed an old pumping station into the Mattamuskeet Lodge, a three-story inn with a 120-foot viewing tower.

Through their efforts, the wildlife refuge became one of the nation’s great wintering grounds for tundra swans, snow geese, and other migratory waterfowl.

In the summer of 1993, Co. 424 held a reunion at the Mattamuskeet Lodge. One of my favorite quotes from newspaper coverage of the event was from a local woman who lived near the CCC camp when it was at New Holland. “We used to go to the dances with the CCC boys at the Barber Shanty dance hall up the road,” she recalled. “One of them was my first love, but I’m not going to tell you any names because he’s here.” Photo by Jim Bounds/AP. From the Greensboro News & Record, June 7, 1993.

Over the years, when I drive east on U.S. 264, I have turned many times onto that mile-long gravel road that leads to Bell Island and that I now know was built by Co. 424 during the Great Depression.

At those times, I always follow the road down to its end and park by the long pier that reaches out into Rose Bay.

My favorite time of year to be there is winter, even though the wind often sweeps down across the bay and chills my bones something fierce. But on those days, I am usually on my own there, or perhaps I only have to share the pier with a stubborn fisherman or two, and I am left with my own thoughts and the beauty of the place.

I can look out across the salt marshes and the bay, listen to the wild geese overhead, and, if I have timed it right, take in the glory of the sunrise or sunset.

And of course when I am there, I always think of Troy Elliott and the other young men of Co. 424 who made a home there for that brief moment back in the 1930s.

I think about the lives they left behind, and what it must have been like to be together there, and how different it must have been to everything they had known before.

I think about how it must have seemed like a stolen season, a refuge from the worst travails of the Depression years. I imagine some of them even found it a chance to glory in being young in a way that their old lives had not allowed them.

They had grown up in the Great Depression, that age of hardship, loss, and doing without. And much like our world today, their world seemed to be falling apart around them.

Many of them, including Troy Elliott, would soon find themselves in camps that did not look that much different than the one on Rose Bay, except they’d be in distant lands where bombs were dropping and cities burning and death was running riot through the streets.

When I look at Elliott’s photographs, I love seeing the happiness on their faces when they were at Bell Island.

As I stand on the pier, looking back toward the old site of the CCC camp, I never forget to think about them. I am sure they were a handful, as most of us are at that age, but when I am there I always imagine them safe and sound in their tents on a winter night.

I picture them there beneath the stars, a few lights still burning, a whisper here and there, a prayer or two, some laughter, and of course all around them the murmur of the wild geese and tundra swans.

The First Colony Foundation has published a book tracing what the nonprofit group has learned since forming in April 2003 about the fate of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony.

Edited by the foundation’s Vice President of Research, Dr. Eric Klingelhofer, “Excavating the Lost Colony Mystery: The Map, the Search, the Discovery” is a compilation of essays and writings intended to bring the significance of the “La Virginea Pars” map and Site X into perspective. Klingelhofer is professor emeritus of history at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia.

Published by the foundation and the University of North Carolina Press, the book that includes contributions by historians, archaeologists and other experts is an exploration of science, research and history.

By design, “Excavating the Lost Colony Mystery” is intended to be read by everyone, Klingelhofer told Coastal Review.

“(The book) is not a collection of symposium papers for an audience of scholars,” he wrote in an email. “I chose those papers that most fit the story of what we did, why, and how, and the context of that story. I told each author about this, and that I would be editing all for the general public to follow. No footnotes to be used.”

For Sir Walter Raleigh, the New World represented economic opportunity and an opportunity for scientific discovery. Thomas Harriot, a mathematician and scientist, and artist John White were part of the scientific exploration of the new lands, and the pair created the Pars map, more properly Virginea Pars map, in 1585 during the second expedition to the North Carolina coast.

In 2012, a request by the foundation to the British Museum where the map is housed was made to examine two paper patches on the map. What researchers found was the symbol for a fort under one of the patches — what has now become known as Site X.

Located at the confluence of Salmon Creek and Chowan River in Bertie County, the Site X finding has led to a series of discoveries and new information about the more than 100 English men, women and children who disappeared from Roanoke Island sometime between 1587 and 1590, when the long overdue relief ship returned to find the site abandoned.

The only clue to their disappearance was the word “CROATOAN” carved into a tree.

In “Excavating the Lost Colony Mystery,” Klingelhofer takes the reader on a well-organized journey of discovery, beginning with Phillip Evans’ contribution, “The search for Raleigh’s Colony,” which gives an overview of known factual information, the false starts, pseudohistory and hucksters who have laid claim to certain knowledge of the fate of the Lost Colony.

The reader hears from the British Museum’s Curator of British Drawings and Watercolours Kim Sloan about when she realized how important what was hiding beneath that patch of paper could be, and foundation member, archaeologist Nicholas Lucketti in “The Prima Facie Case for Site X” chapter that details why there is good reason to think some, but not all, of the Colonists settled on the bluffs at Salmon Creek.

What adds to the story is the very human reaction even the most dedicated scientists and researchers share in the book.

Here is Sloan on realizing the significance of what she found beneath that patch of paper.

“I could see that the marking resembled what I thought to be the symbol for a fort. I said to Alice (Alice Rugheimer, a paper conservator at the British Museum), ‘I think we just discovered the intended site for the ‘Cittie of Ralegh’, the colony that John White was sent to Virginia to found.’ And then I think I swore,” she wrote.

In Lucketti’s introduction for “The Prima Facie Case for Site X,” he highlights the sensationalism of the press.

“Bold headlines and excited press reports in 2016 told the public about the First Colony Foundation’s amazing discoveries at Site X — equal to finding the Ark of the Covenant or Jimmy Hoffa’s body,” he wrote.

Like the Ark of the Covenant or Hoffa, the union activist who disappeared in the mid-1970s, what ultimately happened to the Lost Colony may remain unsolved, something Klingelhofer acknowledged, while also noting that the research may yet hold the answer.

“And yet the story of Raleigh’s colony continued to stir the public’s imagination. National Geographic Magazine had recently published (2013) One Hundred Greatest Mysteries, listing the Lost Colony among them. Site X and Mettaquem (the Native American village adjacent to Site X) would prove to hold important new clues toward a resolution of that mystery,” Klingelhofer wrote in his chapter “Science in the Search,” introducing the science behind the hunt for the fate of the Colonists of Roanoke Island.

The book does not provide definitive answers, and the writers go to some length to make it clear nothing conclusive has been discovered.

“We do not have a smoking gun — no artifacts undeniably of sixteenth-century European origin,” Luccketti wrote. “No features from English buildings, no burials. We did not find a fort. Nor did we claim that we had found the site of the main group’s relocation …”

What researchers did find suggests that the colonists left in small groups and coexisted with Native residents, especially the Chowanoke Nation who occupied much of what is now Gates, Hertford, Bertie, and Chowan counties. Site X is well within the boundaries of what would have been the Chowanoke Nation.

Asked in an email if it is reasonable to conclude that the Roanoke settlement broke up into small group, Klingelhofer answered, “Yes, that is exactly what we think, though do remember that the book only covers Site X. We are not ones for puerile speculation.”

“Excavating the Lost Colony Mystery” is a detailed chronology of how the conclusion that the Colonists left in small groups was reached and the discoveries along the way.

For example, the reproductions of White’s paintings are depicted as dull, almost two-tone images. But originally, the paintings were not dull at all, Sloan writes while describing the research British Museum Department of Conservation and Scientific Research Janet Ayers uncovered.

The point Janet Ayers made in her article was about John White’s use of gold and silver in his work. “Fish, for example when they are alive are iridescent, and in order to capture this, John White used these precious pigments,” Sloan wrote.

The historical research that the writers recount brings the men who explored the Albemarle region of what they had designated Virginia into focus.

Capt. Ralph Lane served as governor for the first attempt at a colony in 1586. Soldiers under his command beheaded King Wingina, the ruler of the Algonquian Indians on Roanoke Island. That action is often seen as a primary reason the closest Native nation to the colony would not help the colonists.

“Roanoke Colonies Illuminated” in East Carolina University’s Digital Collection, notes that although Lane returned to England in 1586, his actions impacted the 1587 attempt to settle Roanoke Island.

“It is likely that the bad blood fostered by Lane did not work much in the favor of Raleigh’s subsequent Roanoke expeditions,” the website points out.

But, James Horn, in his chapter, “Into the Maine: Why They Went West,” seems to question if Lane had complete control of the soldiers under his command in 1585-86, citing Lane’s description of them as ‘wylde men … whose unrulynes (was) suche as not to gyve leasure to the goovenour.’”

And according to Horn, who is president of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation and on the board of directors for the First Colony Foundation, Harriot confirmed that observation.

“They killed Indians, he wrote, ‘upon causes that on our part, might easily enough have been borne,’” Horn recorded Harriot as writing.

Yet for all the detail there is a feeling as though the book has barely scratched the surface of what has been learned and is still to come.

It is, as Sloan writes at the end of her “Paper Patches” recounting of how Site X was identified, “the best kind of historical quest, one that just keeps asking us to try to find further truths about the past in order to learn from it for the future.”

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

~

I have recently been absorbed by a photograph album that the staff at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Office of History discovered in their historical collections a few years ago.

The name of the photographer who took the photographs in the album is unknown, but they are a treasure.

Dating from 1930 to 1932, the album’s photographs make up a rare, up-close portrait of Army Corps of Engineers’ dredging crews and dredge boats engaged in maintaining and improving navigation on the hundreds of miles of coastal waterways between Norfolk, Virginia, and Beaufort.

That 200-mile stretch of coastline composed the Army Corps’ “Norfolk District,” headquartered in Norfolk.

The whole album is fascinating. However, my favorite scenes are probably a series of photographs from the Scuppernong River in the spring of 1931. They chronicle the crew of one of the Army Corps’ derrick barges clearing snags, dynamiting obstructions, and straightening the banks along the narrow, upper reaches of the river.

Dredging on a small, remote, out-of-the-way blackwater river such as the Scuppernong was a bread and butter job for Army Corps in those early years of the Great Depression. However, I can’t remember ever seeing that kind of work captured so fully in photographs.

Overall, the photographs are quite varied. The album even includes, for instance, a half-dozen photographs of Army Corps’ big pipeline dredge Currituck barreling through Beaufort Inlet on its way to build a new section of the Intracoastal Waterway.

In my experience, those of us who study maritime history rarely give much attention to dredging crews and their watercraft.

Working on a dredge boat was hard, dirty work. A bit like being a sailor, a bit like being a miner, a bit like being a heavy equipment operator, and a bit like being a pipe fitter and a mechanic, too.

The crews often lived on their boats for months at a time. They were not getting rich, and they moved from work site to work site, getting home, if they had a home, when they could.

Throughout the 20th century, many dredging crews all over the East Coast came from villages on the North Carolina coast.

They came from some coastal communities more than others. At Ocracoke Island, on the Outer Banks, for instance, or in Otway, in the Down East part of Carteret County, you would have been hard pressed to find a single family that did not have a father or a son who had not worked on a dredge boat at one time or another.

The Army Corps’ Norfolk District Photo Album, 1931-32 includes 99 photographs in all. You can now find them all online at Army Corps’ Digital Library.

I have picked out a selection of the photographs to highlight here. You will find them below, along with my annotations about the places, people, and activities depicted in them.

I have also included an especially striking photograph taken on the deck of the dredge Currituck that I found at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia.

It is an up-close view of the Currituck’s cutterhead, the mammoth dredging tool that her crew used to dig much of the Intracoastal Waterway along the North Carolina coast.

The Mariners Museum, by the way, has copies of the Army Crops photographs in its library. You can access them online.

I don’t think this is the time to discuss the overall historical impact of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the North Carolina coast, either for the good or the bad.

However, I think that I should note that few entities of any kind have shaped either the geography or economy of the North Carolina coast more over the last 150 years.

Resting in the hands of the Army Corps’ dredging crews and those of its private contractors has been the very shape of our coastline and the character of much of maritime life and work.

That has included the depths and commercial viability of our harbors; the fate of our seaports; how far our rivers can be navigated; which inlets are navigable and which are not; where ferries can run, and where they cannot; where boats can find refuge; how vulnerable, or not, coastal towns are to hurricanes; and where, if at all, our commercial fishing fleets can get to sea, among much else.

In those same hands, again for better and for worse, has been the fates of whole coastal ecosystems.

Yet in all my years of studying the history of the North Carolina coast, I have never seen a book, a museum exhibit, or a historical marker about that part of our maritime heritage.

Many a time I have looked out onto a harbor or an inlet and watched a dredging crew at work and wondered what their lives were like, and how they do what they do, and what it is like to endeavor to shape and bend the sea and shore against nature’s will.

Of course, the photographs in the Army Corps’ Norfolk District Photo Album, 1931-32 are far from the full story.

They only show us a brief moment in history, and just a few waterways. But to me they are still invaluable. At the very least, they give us a glimpse of this usually unseen part of our maritime history and leave us with a yearning to know more.

* * *

The following is a selection of the album’s photographs and a little background on what is happening.

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There are wild cranberries along the highway, U.S. 264, as it passes Stumpy Point in Dare County heading west to Engelhard. 

It is a small patch, according to Bob Glennon, retired Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge planner, and largely inaccessible without hip boots and a guide to find them.

“The cranberries are on the part of the refuge with the deepest muck soil,” he wrote in an email. “The site has very deep organic soil that will not support a person’s weight.”

The cranberries that exist in the pocosin are Vaccinium macrocarpon, the same botanical name given to the cranberry that has become a part of Thanksgiving and holiday traditions. They’re smaller than their cultivar cousins, but it’s the same cranberry. 

The first European settlers did not mention cranberries, but Glennon is confident the plants were there.

“Because they are present where there is very deep organic soil, I would guess that they have been there for centuries, just as other plant communities in extreme environmental conditions … have existed for centuries,” he wrote.

What may be one of the most remarkable features of where the cranberries are found is that the area does not seem to have changed much at all.

“Stumpy Pointers on Excursion” the headline reads in the Nov. 13, 1914, Elizabeth City Advance. The excursion — a cranberry picking expedition that included crossing open water and hiking through pocosin — is described in detail.

“After a twenty minute row across the lake and a hundreds yard hike through dense woods, the party came to an open savanna which must needs be crossed before the cranberries were reached,” the paper reported.

That description is remarkably similar to how Michael Schafale, North Carolina Natural Heritage Program terrestrial ecologist, got to the site.

“That 1914 description really fits,” he wrote in an email. “Lake Wirth, near Stumpy Point, is on the edge of that low pocosin. I went in that way once, walking around the lake rather than rowing across it.  It is not too far to low pocosin that way, though the ‘hike through dense woods’ and ‘savanna’ is understated.”

It does not appear as though the earliest Colonists left a record of the fruit, but North Carolina newspapers’ reporting on the crop dates back to the 19th century. 

The headline on page two of the Oct. 30, 1883, Elizabeth City Economist simply reads “Cranberries” and tells readers that the Massachusetts cranberry harvest was not very good in 1883 and “that the price will probably be higher than any time in recent years.” 

The observation was followed by advice for Dare County residents.

“We hope it will be appreciated by our friends at East Lake and other cranberry sections of Dare County. The dwellers in Dare County by the side of the wild cranberry ponds have no idea of the mine of wealth around them, and which they can so easily gather,” the paper noted.

Knowledge of the potential wealth of the bogs seemed to come and go. If the East Lake cranberries were well enough known in Elizabeth City in 1883 to note their abundance, by the 1930s they seem to have been forgotten.

A July 1, 1938, Dare County Times full page spread extolling the wonders of Dare County as the first show of the second year of “The Lost Colony” theatrical production neared, seems to indicate the existence of the cranberries has just been discovered.

The article describes the bogs with what may be hyperbole, writing that what exists between Alligator River and Stumpy Point “surprisingly enough, constitute the greatest cranberry bog in America.”

The next paragraph then describes how the cranberries had just been discovered.

“Nobody knew very much about the cranberry bog until they began to excavate a road through the unexplored jungle … that lie between the Croatan (Sound) and Alligator (River).”

That road today is U.S. Highway 264, but according to a History of Stumpy Point published in NCGenWeb Project, that road was created in the 1920s. The NCGenWeb Project is part of the national USGenWeb Project and a volunteer-collected genealogical and historical content repository for each of state’s 100 counties.

“One of the biggest milestones in the history of Stumpy Point was the creation of the roads connecting the town to Engelhard and Manns Harbor. The first was the road to Engelhard in 1926, built for Dare County by the H. C. Lawrence Dredging Company,” Harold Lee Wise, the story’s author wrote.

The cranberries seem to have been a good quality crop. Theodore Meekins, a Dare County resident, entered the cranberries in a statewide horticulture competition in 1908 and took home a bronze medal. In November 1939, according to the Dare County Times, Theodore Meekins “suggested that cranberries be cultivated on the Dare County Mainland.”

What is not clear is the extent of the commercial cultivation of the cranberries.

Alan Weakley, director of the University of North Carolina Herbarium at the North Carolina Botanical Garden, responded in an email that if a commercial harvest did exist, it was probably taking advantage of natural conditions. 

“I’m quite strongly inclined to think this was at most commercial exploitation of a natural local population,” he noted. “Maybe they manipulated the habitat some. But I find it really hard to believe that Dare County folks would have the idea of planting cranberries in pocosin habitats in Dare County, where they actually grow naturally and natively, and acquired plants or seeds and set them out.”

Newspaper accounts would seem to confirm Weakley’s opinion. By 1952, according to a Coastland Times article from Dec. 12 of that year, there was no commercial harvest of cranberries in Dare County.

“There was a time when gathering wild cranberries was a profitable venture for persons living in the bogland of the Dare Coast,” the paper reported.

In that same article, the harvest of the cranberries is then described in detail.

“Thomas Hunter Midgett is one person who still gathers wild cranberries in the same method as his parents and grandparents harvested them from the boglands many years ago,” the article noted. “The wooden scoop he uses is one his grandfather used.”

Charles Brantley “Aycock” Brown (1904-1984) was an Outer Banks resident and journalist.

Coastal Review will not publish Thursday and Friday in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday.

Coastal Review features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast.

***

Note from the author: I have written this as kind of an online history exhibit. The story starts with a short introduction, then features more than 40 annotated photographs and other images illustrating the last decades of an ancient swamp forest that was once located on the North Carolina coast. 

***

For quite some time, I have been collecting historical photographs, maps, and manuscripts that document the lumber boomtowns and logging camps of the Pungo River and its hinterlands in the late 19th century and the early part of the 20th century.

After the Civil War, lumber companies bought thousands of square miles of forestlands on the North Carolina coast. As if out of nowhere, scores of lumber mill towns sprang up virtually overnight (only to vanish, most of them, when the forest was gone).

The lumber companies reshaped the land, our most important towns, and even some of our most remote islands.

Logging camps seemed to be everywhere. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles of railroads were built to move logging machinery into even the most remote swamp forests, to haul logs to mills, and to carry lumber after it was milled to northern seaports.

Canals were built to drain swamp forests. Lumber barges and schooners crowded local waterways.

For the sake of building America, coastal forests that had stood for centuries, and sometimes millennia, vanished.

I do not know to what I can compare that part of North Carolina’s coastal history. It was a frontier world, often almost lawless, dangerous, destructive, and, for some, liberating, all at once.

Thousands of people left farms and fishing boats and their old lives to make a go of it in the mills and logwoods.

And they came from all over, not just from local towns and villages, but Appalachian hollows, Great Lakes logging camps, and New York City tenement houses.

They included men and women with the scars of slavery still on their backs, Outer Banks fishing families, and immigrants fresh from Ellis Island, many of them speaking barely a word of English — all made their way to the lumber mill towns and logging camps.

In this collection of historical images today, I am focusing on the lumber boom in just one corner of the North Carolina coast, the Pungo and the forests within about 15 miles of its shores.

But I hope that by so doing, we can at least get a glimpse of the size and scale of the lumber boom throughout the North Carolina coast, what it was like for the people who lived through it, and how it transformed our communities, as well as our land and waters.

Rising in the central part of Washington County, in the remnants of what local people today often call the “Big Swamp,” the Pungo, an Algonquin Indian word, is only 35 miles long.

In its northernmost reaches, the river flows today through a canal that was dug in the 1950s to drain the farmlands west of Pungo Lake and what is now the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.

But then the river grows wild again. It meanders south, passing along breathtakingly beautiful cane brakes and marshlands until it opens up into a broad bay, an estuary really, that eventually folds itself into the Pamlico River and the Pamlico Sound.

Today it is a quiet, peaceful place. Belhaven, the only town on the river, has a population of less than 1,500. Pantego (another Algonquin name), the only town on any of the river’s tributaries, has maybe a few more than 200 residents.

It is a place of rural byways and little crossroads: when you leave Belhaven, you can go 25 miles in any direction — east, west, north, or south — and never hit a stoplight.

But as you will see here, the Pungo was once a very different place.

As you look through these old photographs and yellowed maps, please know that I am, as people sometimes say, a “lifetime learner.” I would always welcome hearing from anyone who might know more about any of these images.

In studying the Pungo’s lumber boom, one thing is very clear to me though: whatever other stories I tell, anything I write will also be an elegy. It just has to be.

The Pungo River was once the heart of one of America’s great natural wonders. When you left the river’s shores, you entered a vast wilderness, a swamp forest that covered hundreds of square miles and was so large and so foreboding that it had long been a refuge for the local Algonquin people, fugitive slaves, and other outcasts.

For those who care about our natural heritage, it was a marvel: the East Dismal Swamp, as I am going to call it,  was home to ancient and majestic groves of bald cypress, some of the country’s largest stands of Atlantic white cedar (juniper), and pocosin wetlands of a size and grandeur found in few other places on Earth.

But especially between 1880 and 1920, the logging companies and land developers did not just log the Pungo’s old-growth forests: they erased them.

Using railroads and new kinds of machinery, they logged even the most remote corners of the East Dismal. Then, especially in the pocosins, they dug great canals and vast networks of ditches to drain the land. When the peat soils dried out, they then burned what was left of the forest and the peat beds again and again.

They did that until the East Dismal Swamp — or whatever you want to call that great swamp wilderness — was gone.

If you visit the site of the East Dismal today, you will find only a broad, open plain and seeming endless farm fields, stretching, in many places almost treeless, as far as the eye can see.

You might think that you were in Kansas or Nebraska, if it were not for the miles and miles of canals and ditches.

History is for me, when all is said and done, about remembrance and recalling the ancestors.

And through them, coming to know ourselves.

But there are also times when I think that we should remember lost places, out of respect for them and maybe for our own good, too. I think that this is one of those times.

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***

Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

As the overwhelming firepower of the 40 boats of the Union Navy in the Roanoke Sound approached Feb. 10, 1862, Midshipman J.L. Tayloe, captain of the CSS Fanny, left his command and blew up the ship at Cobb Point, just south of Elizabeth City.

It was an ignominious end to a small but valiant vessel that had served forces on both sides of the Civil War.

Fanny’s time with Southern forces was short-lived. The ship had been captured by Confederate forces mere months before on Oct. 4, 1861, at Loggerhead Inlet, a now-dry strand of beach about a mile north of Rodanthe.

At the time, Union forces had secured their first significant victory of the Civil War when they wrested Hatteras and Ocracoke inlets from Confederate control in late August 1861.

Soon after securing the inlets, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler, who led the expedition, returned to his headquarters at Fort Monroe, leaving command of the Hatteras garrison in the hands of Col. Rush Hawkins, commander of the 9th New York Zouaves.

By late September, it was apparent that Confederate forces were growing in number on Roanoke Island. Writing in his 2018 East Carolina University master’s thesis, “Detecting Archeological Signatures in Shallow Water: A study of the Chicamacomico Races,” James Kinsella describes Hawkins’ reaction to the news that enemy troop strength had increased to his north.

“In response to the capture of Hatteras and Ocracoke Inlets, the Confederate Army sent reinforcements to Roanoke Island. Hawkins, hoping to counter the threat from the north, sent the 20th Indiana Regiment to Chicamacomico (Rodanthe) to counter the move,” he writes.

The plan to move the regiment 40 miles north to what the documents of the time referred to as Loggerhead Inlet was flawed. The USS Spaulding, a troop transport ship, was given the task of moving the regiment. But the Spaulding’s draft was too deep for Pamlico Sound and most of the men had to be transferred to smaller vessels. Although the men were transferred, the supplies they needed to operate 40 miles from their own lines did not go with them.

“Three armed steamers (the Fanny, the General Putnam and the Ceres) were ordered to take them from Hatteras to Chicamacomico. All but 75 men were transferred to the armed steamers. They arrived at Chicamacomico with few tents and only two days’ food and supplies,” Kinsella wrote.

Hoping to quickly resupply the Indiana Regiment, the Fanny was rapidly loaded with supplies – food, ammunition, medicine and clothing – and sent to Chicamacomico.

“I left in the steamer Fanny at 6 a.m. for Chickamicomico or Logger Head Inlet arriving there at 1 p.m. We anchored in about 8 feet of water and waited there two hours and a half before we got communication from shore,” the civilian captain of the Fanny, Master J..H. Morrison, wrote to Gideon Wells, Secretary of the Navy.

That two-and-a-half-hour delay in unloading the Fanny was critical and may ultimately have been the reason Confederate forces were able to capture the vessel.

Christopher Olson, in his April 2006 article, “The Curlew: The Life and Death of a North Carolina Steamboat, 1856-1862 ” written for the North Carolina Historical Review, describes the reaction to the Fanny on Roanoke Island.

“Word of the Union steamer’s appearance reached the Confederate commanders at Roanoke Island. After loading 150 men of the Third Georgia Regiment on the Curlew and two other Confederate gunboats, the fleet sailed against the Union outpost. The Confederate fleet surprised the Fanny at anchor at 4:00 P.M,” he wrote.

Under the command of Commodore William F. Lynch, the three boats of the Confederate fleet, the CSS Curlew, Raleigh, and Junaluski, moved quickly into position.

“The Curlew arrived first and steered to cut off any escape attempt,” Olson wrote.

On the Fanny, the 20th Indiana had finally made it to the boat and had just taken off the first load of provisions when the enemy fleet was first seen.

“When the boat had shoved off and got about two thirds of the way on shore we saw a steamboat to the westward about 4 p.m which proved to be one of the enemy. She was standing to cut off our retreat and in a short time two more appeared steering directly for us. The first one then stood in and commenced firing upon us and as soon as the other two came up they did the same,” Morrison wrote to Wells.

Leased for service in the war by the federal government, the Fanny was no warship, as Morrison recounted in a letter published in the Oct. 18, 1861, edition of the Cincinnati Daily Press.

“The powder I had on freight was stored in a house on deck forward of the boiler, and a shell exploding into it would have blown the vessel to atoms. Besides this, my boiler was on deck and insufficiently protected against shot from cannon,” he wrote.

There were other problems as well.

“Sending supplies aboard Fanny was a risky venture as there was a shortage of capable navy men and officers,” Kinsella notes.

That shortage led to the Fanny being crewed by Army personnel who were unfamiliar with the armament on board, as Morrison’s letter in the Daily Press made clear.

“The gun crew knew nothing of gunnery, and I think the Indiana troops on board knew little better,” he wrote.

The commanding Union officer on the boat was Quartermaster Isaac Hart of the 20th Indiana Regiment, who had made the decision to surrender, according to Morrison. As that decision was being made, there seems to have been considerable confusion onboard the Fanny.

“The mate of the boat and a few soldiers turned to and threw over board some thirty cases of ammunition and Captain Hart forbade them to throw any more overboard. We likewise requested the sergeant major to throw the cannon overboard which he refused to do saying it would be worse for them if they were taken prisoners,” Morrison told Wells.

Hart ordered the boat run aground and by 5 p.m., the Fanny was in Confederate hands with most of the crew prisoners. Morrison and his first mate, who were civilian employees of the U.S. Navy, escaped in a skiff. Also on the skiff was Morrison’s son, who was, Morrison wrote, ill and in his berth at the time of the attack. There were no casualties in the engagement.

In his report to Wells, Morrison was critical of the slow response of the 20th Indiana, writing, “… they had plenty of time from our arrival to that of the enemy’s boats to have got everything on shore from the Fanny…”

In his letter published in the Daily Press he was even more critical.

“We had enough time from one o’clock to half-past four to have discharged every portion of the cargo of the Fanny … had we received assistance from the Indianians on shore. I cannot but feel that it was their neglect to assist us that the loss of the Fanny may be attributed,” he wrote.

The slow response of the Indiana regiment to unload its supplies is but one part of a larger picture leading to the capture of the boat.

The USS General Putnam was a 103-foot, sidewheel gunboat that met the Fanny off Loggerhead Inlet. One of the Fanny’s guns was transferred to the Putnam, evidently because the Putnam was part of the Croatan Sound blockade force.

“Fanny was at a further disadvantage as its Sawyer gun was transferred to the USS General Putnam. General Putnam was ordered to stay in Croatan Sound to enforce a blockade, leaving Fanny vulnerable and without naval support,” Kinsella wrote.

But according to the report by Cmdr. S.C. Rowan, captain of the sloop of war USS Pawnee, the Fanny should never have been left alone.

“The Putnam, that should have been there to give countenance and support to these panic stricken people, left her station on the arrival of the Fanny and arrived at the bulkhead at sundown the same evening where she grounded for the night. I asked Captain Hotchkiss why he left without orders. He replied that he came down for coal. I told him he could have obtained coal from the Fanny,” he wrote.

Precursor to modern aircraft carrier

If the capture of the USS Fanny was perhaps inglorious, it stands in contrast to its earlier service in the war.

The Fanny could be the first true precursor to the modern aircraft carrier.

Writing for the U.S. Naval Institute, W.T. Adams, in his article “The Birth of the Aircraft Carrier,” suggests the Fanny may hold the distinction of being the first watercraft to serve as a platform for aerial observation of the enemy.

“The veteran and daring balloonist J. LaMountain has been at Fortress Monroe making ascensions and examinations of the secessionists’ positions in that vicinity. On the 3rd instant he tried a new scheme in aerial scouting, by taking his balloon on board of the steamboat Fanny, and went out in the middle of the river ascended 2,000 feet, with the balloon secured by a rope to a windlass,” Adams wrote.

There is one more twist to the story. According to Morrison, the Fanny that the Confederacy captured was not the original Fanny that the U.S. Navy had leased.

He writes that after “… various expeditions … she became disabled and her crew was transferred to the P.T. Hart. As it was advisable to retain the prestige of the Fanny’s name, the sign upon her stern was transferred to the P.T. Hart. and she afterward sailed under the name of the Fanny — so in reality it was the P.T. Hart, and not the Fanny that was captured.”

A Civil War-era community in Craven County, where thousands of formerly enslaved people found sanctuary, will be the first “site of significance” for the new African American Heritage Tour of eastern North Carolina. 

Still in the early stages, the tour to highlight the area’s African American heritage is a partnership of the nonprofit Eastern Carolina Foundation for Equity and Equality and the National Park Service.

“During the Civil War, more than 10,000 refugees from slavery came to Union-occupied New Bern seeking freedom,” according to the James City Historical Society, which was founded in 1991 to honor this community and act as caregivers for the onsite cemetery and mid-19^th century slave quarters.

“By 1865, there were nearly 3,000 formerly enslaved people living in the Trent River Settlement opposite New Bern in Craven County. The community was renamed James City, after Rev. Horace James, Superintendent of Negro Affairs for the North Carolina District. In the decades to come, James City residents created a proud history of fighting for self-determination,” the society website states.

Planners of the African American Heritage Tour have scheduled an official site of significance dedication for the James City settlement at 11 a.m. Saturday at 911 Howell Road, New Bern. The ceremony should last about 45 minutes and will be followed by a reception and time to visit the grounds.

At the James City Historic Site, there is the 1850 slave quarters that was renovated and moved from its original location on an antebellum farm, now the intersection of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Neuse boulevards.

The society also cares for the Far Cemetery, used by freedmen in the area during the Civil War. “The Far Cemetery was used by freedmen in the area during the Civil War. Its location is marked on an 1866 U.S. map as quite large, and burials continued until 1930. An archaeological investigation in 1979 revealed the location of 522 graves – about half belonging to children under the age of 13,” the society states.

James City Historic Site is the first to be dedicated as part of the African American Heritage Tour, Eastern Carolina Foundation for Equity and Equality Executive Director Heather Walker told Coastal Review. 

Society Chairperson William Hollowell said that having the African American Heritage Tour begin at James City is in line with the organization’s mission to preserve the history and legacy of the community.

“This is something big,” he said, adding that with so much history in the New Bern area, he hopes more markers for the tour will be established in the vicinity.

The tour partners have gathered enough data and research for 20 sites to add to the trail. These will likely be established in Beaufort, Edenton, Elizabeth City, New Bern, Plymouth, Portsmouth Village, Washington, Wilmington and other coastal towns.

“We’ve actually been collaborating with different sites for about two years now,” Walker said, and everyone’s energized and ready to kick the project off. 

The plan is to have tour markers along the entire coast, both on the mainland and on the barrier islands, Walker explained. Once more sites are dedicated, a website with tour information will be launched and there will be maps available. 

Walker said that the Eastern Carolina Foundation for Equity and Equality organization began a few years ago to get support to install a marker in Beaufort indicating that town was a Middle Passage arrival site. 

The marker dedicated in October 2021 at Topsail Marine Memorial Park on Front Street in Beaufort is part of the Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project, which honors the 2 million captive Africans who perished during the transatlantic crossing known as the Middle Passage and the 10 million who survived to build the Americas.

The foundation was also the momentum behind a Middle Passage marker at Portsmouth Village, a now preserved, historic site that is part of Cape Lookout National Seashore.

Related: Event marks Portsmouth Village’s role in Middle Passage

“We started the nonprofit as a way of getting some community engagement, some input and some contributions. And then so from there, it just kind of became a mission to continue to mark significant places,” Walker explained.  

Walker learned about James City’s significance when she began researching eastern North Carolina’s African American history. It was the first site she visited, which will always have a “special place” in her heart. 

Now on the board of directors for the James City Historical Society, Walker said the organization has installed an exhibit with artifacts and furniture inside the slave quarters. While the building has been restored, and not everything is original, “it’s a very special cabin” because it had a wood plank floor, not dirt. 

And at the fireplace hearth, you can put your hand right in the same place where the enslaved person who made the bricks actually left their handprint. 

“It’s an amazing experience. You can kind of live the history for just a minute,” she said.

Walker said her interest in African American history was inspired by her youngest son while he was still in kindergarten.

“He’s mixed, Black and white, and he came home from school one day and he was angry because the Thanksgiving program that they were doing, they wouldn’t allow him to be a pilgrim, and so they made him an Indian because of the color of his skin,” Walker said. “He was angry. He threw his little feather cap down and he said ‘I want to be one of the good guys’ and so I had to have a hard conversation with my 6-year-old at that time, and say listen, just because someone’s skin is lighter, it doesn’t mean they’re better. And from that moment on, I thought it was very important that I fulfill my obligation as a parent to let my children know from whom they came.”

Not only that, she continued, “but also for them to be proud of their ancestors, regardless of the color of their skin. Because there are stories of strength and resilience and hope in those situations that our children need to know so they can kind of push through today.”

Walker said the partnership with Cape Lookout National Seashore began a couple years ago when she shared with the previous chief of interpretation, B.G. Horvat, that she had been researching the region’s African American heritage. Since then, highlighting that history has been a joint effort of the seashore and foundation.  

Cape Lookout Chief of Interpretation & Education Nate Toering, who took on the role after Horvat, told Coastal Review that the National Park Service helped with the Middle Passage marker effort in Beaufort because “it is absolutely relevant to our story, with Beaufort being one of the primary access points for visitors headed to Cape Lookout” and the more recent marker established at Portsmouth Village this June.

The Portsmouth Village marker was the result of research by the foundation that proved through a historic newspaper clipping the longstanding assumption that Portsmouth had participated in the Transatlantic Human Trade. 

This new endeavor, he said of the African American Heritage Tour, stretches farther outside park boundaries but absolutely aligns with Cape Lookout’s historic sphere of influence. 

“James City and the New Bern area were historically fed supplies via the Neuse River during the age of sail. Large shipping vessels docked in and around Ocracoke Inlet and their supplies were offloaded onto ‘lightering’ vessels for transport inland,” he said. “Those supplies were piloted through shallow water in small crafts, often captained by enslaved Black sea captains based out of Portsmouth Village and departing on their way to towns like New Bern and Edenton.”

In addition to the local and park significance, there is national significance. 

The “America 250” National Park Service draft plan for interpreting the agency’s 250th anniversary as a country aims to advance equality and justice for all, acknowledge and honor people of African descent, advance educational experiences, spark lasting connections with youth, and unlock the power of place, which includes establishing new and improving existing park facilities and interpretive infrastructure.

The National Park Service shares America’s stories, Toering said, and these stories don’t end neatly at the borders of the country’s national parks. 

“Partnering with organizations like these allows us to expand and interpret the story of American history in the spaces where it is most important and relevant,” he said, which is an example of one of the anniversary’s themes, Unlocking the Power of Places. 

Additionally, these partnerships allow for National Park Service educators, specialists like those at the foundation and community organizations like the James City Historic Society to come together.  

“Ultimately, the goal is to turn a series of unaffiliated historic sites into a much larger linked cultural corridor, and hopefully share the incredibly moving stories captured within each of these sides to a larger audience,” he said. “Many of these stories are historically under told if not intentionally excluded. If we can share them thematically and accurately to a broader audience, we’ll be doing a great thing, even if it takes a while to get there.”

Contact Walker for questions or to nominate sites of significance at equalityforenc@gmail.com.

Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast.

More than 50 years ago, a beloved high school history teacher named Morgan Harris went in search of the abandoned lumber mill towns of Hyde County.

Mr. Harris passed away a couple years ago, but I remember him well. He was kind enough to meet with me two or three times when I was writing my book “Along Freedom Road,” which was about the history of the civil rights movement on that part of the North Carolina coast.

He was very helpful to me, and he taught me a great deal about Hyde County’s history.

The maps that I am featuring here grew out of his history classes at Mattamuskeet High School. While researching local history, he and his students produced four, hand-drawn maps of lumber mill villages that had been built in Hyde County in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and later disappeared.

Harris knew that other lumber mill boomtowns had also existed in Hyde County. However, he and his students could only find enough information to draw maps of four of them.

He later published those maps in his excellent book, “Hyde Yesterdays: A History of Hyde County.”

I think those maps are a treasure worth sharing. Every county on the North Carolina coast once had similar lumber mill boomtowns in them, and some quite a few. They are a window into a part of North Carolina’s coastal history that is rarely remembered.

Most of those old lumber mill villages vanished long ago, and now all memory of them is vanishing, too. However, thanks to Morgan Harris and his students, we can at least get a feeling for a few of them.

I am not sure why the mere knowledge of their existence matters so much to me, but it does: I sometimes fear that I am getting a bit like poor Noah, trying to get everybody on the ark before the flood.

As for the rest — the substance of the mill villagers’ lives, their love stories and broken hearts, their struggles for a better life, the songs they sang, the aromas of their camp kitchens and all the other things that really matter in our lives– that is left to our imaginations.

Rotersville: On the Ridge Northeast of Lake Mattamuskeet

This is Morgan Harris’s map of a sawmill boomtown called Rotersville. It was located in a remote community known as Deep Woods, which occupied a sandy ridge on the northeast side of Lake Mattamuskeet. It stood on the edge of what was at that time a great swampy wilderness that reached all the way north to the Alligator River.

Established sometime in the 1920s, the little village included the Rotersville Lumber Co.’s sawmill, a machine shop, commissary, and a cluster of 12 or 14 houses.

According to Harris’s sources, the people of Deep Woods had no other stores in the area, so they often traded at Rotersville’s company’s store even if they did not work for the lumber company.

One old-timer also remembered seeing convict laborers shopping at the company’s store, though he did not say how they came to be there or what currency they might have used.

Morgan Harris’s sources indicated that the railroad on the map was a logging road that led from Rotersville to the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, a distance of about 7.5 miles. The company’s train apparently transported lumber to the waterway, where it was loaded onto barges and shipped north.

Next to Lake Mattamuskeet, the Rotersville Lumber Co.’s black workers bunked down nights in a group of railroad boxcars.

See Roy T. Sawyer’s fascinating article in the spring 2008 issue of Tyrrell Branches for more on the construction of that part of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.

Hydeland: A Village on Juniper Bay

The second of Morgan Harris’s maps gives us a glimpse at a lumber mill boomtown roughly 15 miles southwest of Rotersville, down close to the shores of the Pamlico Sound.

Financed by a pair of wealthy Virginia lumbermen, the Hydeland Lumber Co. built a mill village that came to be known as “Hydeland” south of Lake Mattamuskeet in or about 1917.

The site was located just inland of Juniper Bay, a broad, marshy bay on the Pamlico Sound, 5 miles east of the current state ferry landing in Swan Quarter.

Around the time of the First World War, the Hydeland Lumber Co. accumulated thousands of acres of swamp forest between Juniper Bay and West Bluff Bay.

Evidently, the company also bought at least timber rights to forests — principally cypress, gum and juniper stands, I would think — on the southeast side of Lake Mattamuskeet. In the lower right corner of Harris’s map, we can see that a logging railroad once ran from Lake Landing to the company’s mill in Hydeland.

By 1919, according to Harris, the company’s workers were cutting approximately 52,000 board feet of lumber a day. They had also dredged a canal from Juniper Bay into Hydeland so that barges could carry the company’s lumber south into the Pamlico Sound and then west to the Norfolk & Southern’s railhead in Belhaven.

As you can see on the map, Hydeland had two hotels/boardinghouses, one for whites on the west side of the canal and one for African Americans on the canal’s east side. Will Spencer and his wife “Miss Benie” ran the former; Artie Gaylord, the latter.

Black millworkers and loggers stayed in quarters on the east side of the canal. The company’s white workers stayed in housing on the west side of the canal. Two, one or two-room schools, one for white children, one for black children, were just up the road.

Hydeland was a bustling little town in the early 1920s. Local people recalled that community events — dances, medicine shows, and the like — were often held at the company’s store there.

They recalled that the James Adams Floating Theater even visited Hydeland on at least one occasion.

They also remembered local farmers selling produce to the company’s workers, and the line of local people’s fishing boats that used to tie up at the company’s wharf.

When Morgan Harris explored the former site of Hydeland some years ago, all he could find of its former glory was the canal and the sunken remains of one of the company’s lumber barges.

Burrell: In the Headwaters of the Pungo River

This is the third of Morgan Harris’s maps. It shows the lumber mill town of Burrell, which was located in what at that time was still the headwaters of the Pungo River.

The mill village’s location was approximately a mile west of what is now the main entrance to the Pungo Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, in a section of northwest Hyde County known as Grassy Ridge.

As you can see on Morgan Harris’s map, Burrell was built on the New Holland, Higginsport & Mount Vernon Railroad, a 35-mile-long branch line that ran from Wenona, in southern Washington County, to the pumping station at Lake Mattamuskeet in Hyde County.

The Burrell Lumber Co. heavily logged local swamp forests all the way from Pungo Lake to Alligator Lake, 10 miles to the east. That area included some of the most majestic stands of old-growth Atlantic white cedar (juniper) forest anywhere in the world.

As you can see on the map, Burrell included, besides the company’s mill, a company store, a railroad station, and a large barracks for housing mill workers and loggers.

According to local lore, Davis Landing, shown on the map just below the Burrell mill store and barracks, was the site of an Algonquin village late into the 19th century. The village seemed to vanish with the forest.

To my knowledge, no trace of Burrell has survived to the present day, unless we count the railroad bed. The New Holland, Higginsport & Mount Vernon Railroad is long gone, but the old railroad bed is now the foundation for N.C. Highway 45, at least in that part of Hyde County.

Berkley: A Shanty Town on Scranton Creek

This is the last of Morgan Harris’s maps. It shows the shanty town of Berkley, which was located on Scranton Creek on the east side of the Lower Pungo River, in the southwest corner of Hyde County.

When Harris visited with them, local old-timers remembered Berkley as a hard-drinking, hard-living place and as a refuge for drifters and the dispossessed.

The inhabitants of Berkley, the men at least, worked for the Scranton Land and Lumber Co., which had been chartered in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1889. According to news reports at the time, the company’s holdings in Hyde County exceeded 100,000 acres of woodlands on that east side of the Pungo River. (Scranton Republican, Sept. 16, 1892)

Most of the company’s workers were African American. As we can see on the map, their little settlement grew up around what is now called the Cat Town Road, just across Scranton Creek from the Scranton Land and Lumber Co.’s mill.

According to Morgan Harris’s sources, Berkley burnt to the ground after a not especially sober customer at one of the settlement’s liquor houses accidentally started a fire that got out of control.

Makleyville: A Village on Slade Creek

Another lumber mill village, Makleyville, which was mentioned but not mapped by Morgan Harris, was located at the mouth of Slade Creek, a lovely stream that flows into the Pungo River five miles south of Belhaven. A wealthy Edenton merchant named Metrah Makely first established a sawmill there in the 1880s.

(Metrah Makely was the little community’s namesake, but I always see its name spelled slightly different: Makleyville.)

By 1891-92, however, Makleyville and its sawmill were purchased by the Scranton Land and Lumber Co.

The Makleyville Hotel was the village’s center. In addition to providing rooms for visitors, the hotel served as the Makleyville’s post office and company store.

According to a 1949 article in the Belhaven Times written by Ethel Ayers Gibbs, the daughter of the hotel’s former managers, the hotel also served as a boardinghouse.

In that article, Ms. Gibbs recalled that “drummers, as traveling salesmen were called in those days, came by boat to Makleyville.” The drummers stayed in the hotel and, she recalled, two local men, W. J. Harris of Swan Quarter and Will Harris of Leechville, carried them and their wares around that part of Hyde County.

The village of Makleyville included sawmills, dry kilns, living quarters for the workers, a pair of warehouses, and a long wharf that reached into the Pungo River. Most of the buildings were built over the water, boosted up by sawdust and pilings.

In her article in the Belhaven Times, Ms. Gibbs recalled that “Makleyville at its peak had around 200 population and men from outlaying farms [also] worked at odd times at the mill.”

She noted that she had “seen as many as six and eight big barges from Baltimore up at the mill loading at one time.”

Wharf Pilings and Sawdust

Everything — towns, railroads, shipping traffic, and the old-growth forests themselves — seemed to come and go quickly during the lumber industry’s heyday on the North Carolina coast.

The fate of those lumber mill villages on the east side of the Lower Pungo River was typical.

The Scranton Lumber and Land Co. sold its holdings in Hyde County in 1895, evidently after the last of the most profitable timber — the old-growth cypress, gum and juniper — had been cut. A new company, the Allegheny Lumber Co., also out of Pennsylvania, took over the operation, but itself sold out to the John L. Roper Lumber Co. sometime between 1902 and 1905.

The Roper Lumber Co. was one of the largest lumber companies in the American South. However, by 1905, its managers saw little profit in the largely deforested glades on that side of the Pungo River. Instead, the company took the bleak cutover lands that were left and began to sell them in smaller parcels.

Most were either cleared, drained, and turned into farmland or, down the road, into pine plantations.

The lumber mill on Scranton Creek shut down. About 14 or 15 miles farther down the Pungo, the company’s mill at the mouth of Slade Creek closed as well, sealing Makleyville’s fate.

The Makleyville Hotel hung on awhile, but eventually shuts its doors, too. Workers drifted away. Drummers stopped coming. Lumber barges from Baltimore were no longer seen on Slade Creek. I have not seen them myself, but I have heard that heaps of sawdust and the pilings of the mill village’s old wharf are all that is left of Makleyville.

***

Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

I recently read a fascinating Ph.D. dissertation that was completed at the University of North Carolina Greensboro in 2011. Written by Dr. Susan Thomas, the dissertation is titled “Chain Gangs, Roads, and Reform in North Carolina, 1900-1935.”

I found it to be a powerful and important work of scholarship. In a series of splendidly researched chapters, Dr. Thomas’ dissertation examines the history of the largely African American chain gangs that built so many of North Carolina’s public roads in the early 20^th century.

Inspired by Dr. Thomas’ work, I requested her permission to share an excerpt of her dissertation here. To my good fortune, she graciously granted me that permission.

The excerpt that I have chosen is about a brief strike that occurred at a convict labor camp in Woodville, a rural community in Perquimans County, N.C., in April 1935.

I chose this passage because I think it gives us a rare glimpse inside a convict labor camp, but also because Dr. Thomas’s dissertation demonstrates how important prisoner protests were to reforming conditions on chain gangs in the early 20th century.

In the case of the Woodville prison camp, she chronicles how the strike played a key role in ending the practice of flogging on chain gangs and in prisons throughout North Carolina.

In our email correspondence, Dr. Thomas noted that the story “highlights the very loosely regulated county structure of the chain gangs. Each county, and sometimes each camp, had been left to do their own thing, leading to much abuse and misuse of power.”

Dr. Thomas is now a lecturer in American history at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. With her permission, I have made minor edits to help make the passage work better in this format.

* * *

From Susan Thomas, “Chain Gangs, Roads, and Reform in North Carolina, 1900-1935,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina-Greensboro, 2011.

The trouble at the Woodville convict labor camp began in the middle of the afternoon of April 3, [1935] when prisoner James Howell stopped working and, according to later testimony, declared loudly enough for all to hear that “he was not going to work anymore, he didn’t have to work, and Capt. Jesse Johnson [the guard and camp foreman] could not make him.”

Two other men soon joined Howell in refusing to work, stating they were sick. Johnson, the guard, later claimed that Howell “sassed” him, for which he ordered him to stand next to the other men as the convicts continued working the remainder of the day.

When the chain gang returned to camp, Johnson reported the incident to camp Superintendent J. M. Tolar, who ordered Howell and the two sick prisoners to report to the camp doctor. All three prisoners refused to obey Tolar, and instead, filed into their quarters with the other men to await dinner.

Again one of the guards ordered Howell and the others to go to the doctor, but once more they refused, cursing and saying, “They had wanted [a doctor] in the afternoon, and if they couldn’t get him then, they didn’t want him at all.”

When the cook blew the supper whistle, 20 men sharing the same quarters with Howell refused to come out to eat. Tolar did not attempt to force the men out, choosing instead to try to persuade them to cooperate and avoid trouble. Seven men gave in and exited the quarters, but the remaining 13 insisted they were striking and refused to yield.

Unable to resolve the dispute that night, Tolar locked the men away. By the following morning, the number of strikers had more than doubled as they had gained sympathizers among their fellow prisoners. Now a group of 27 men refused to join the other prisoners for breakfast and began to settle in for the duration of the strike …

The Woodville camp contained 180 convicts, making it significantly larger than most others in the state. Only 27 convicts participated in the strike, leaving a sufficient number of men to carry on the work without the prisoners involved in the dispute. The superintendent might have chosen to wait the convicts out, … (but he was) determined to take control of the situation and bring an end to the strike as soon as possible, perhaps to show the remaining convicts the futility of such an action.

Realizing that he was at an impasse with the striking convicts, Tolar sent for a gas revolver and some tear gas cartridges from Sheriff Charles M. Carmine of the nearby Elizabeth City Police Department. While Tolar waited, he tried once more to talk the striking men out of the building, but the prisoners refused to listen.

According to camp officials, the strikers yelled at him and became “defiant and profane in their language.” Some of the convicts told Tolar that “they already had life terms, no one could add more time,” and that he “could not make them come out…no one could make them.”

The prisoners did agree to allow the camp’s road supervisor to enter and talk with some of the men he knew, but he reportedly found them all committed to holding out against Tolar and his armed guards.

As the situation escalated, the tear gas arrived and Tolar decided to end the standoff by driving out the strikers with the gas. To everyone’s surprise, the gas was ineffective — so much so that the striking prisoners ridiculed Tolar for the feeble attempt. There was nothing for Tolar to do but send to Elizabeth City for another tear gas gun and more gas, which Sheriff Carmine delivered personally.

By the time the sheriff arrived, the strikers had reportedly become “positively defiant and riotous.” They had broken legs from the heating stoves and from the beds to use for self-defense and to attack any guard who came close enough. They had also somehow managed to acquire a small cache of bricks, which they used as missiles whenever anyone came too close to the building.

To ensure the effectiveness of the new batch of gas, Tolar ordered his guards to go inside the stockade and close the windows. The guards attempted to obey, but they found that the prisoners were so threatening they could not gain access to the building.

Unable to seal up the stockade, Tolar then declared the area within three to four feet of the windows the “dead zone.” He ordered the guards to shoot anyone seen near the windows trying to get fresh air once gas started filling the building, but to be sure to “shoot low and not at close range.”

Tolar also warned the prisoners to stay clear of the windows or risk being shot. Emboldened by the failure of the tear gas dud and their unity of purpose, the prisoners mocked and chided the guards, telling them they “didn’t have the nerve to shoot.” Tolar then shot eight shells of tear gas into the building and waited for it to take effect.

None of the prisoners inside the stockade laughed this time. The dense fog of gas forced the strikers to enter the dead zone as they sought out the open windows, gasping for air. Seeing the convicts coming to the windows, guards complied with Tolar’s orders, shooting and wounding two convicts who tried to escape the noxious fumes by running out the door. The agitated prisoners managed to drag the wounded men back inside and threatened to attack anyone who attempted to come in and remove them, but they eventually relented and allowed guards to carry them out to the doctor. Twenty-five convicts remained inside the stockade, stubbornly refusing to give up their fight, despite the debilitating effects of the tear gas.

Around 3 o’clock that afternoon, the district prison supervisor, P.E. Mallison, arrived from Rocky Mount with more tear gas…. New to the scene and determined to end the confrontation, Mallison threatened to use the gas to drive the convicts out of the building if they chose to continue their resistance. The convicts knew they could not tolerate another bombardment of tear gas. Defeated, they filed out of the stockade, walking in pairs, hands raised above their heads in surrender.

Mallison assumed control and ordered guards to handcuff the men and detain them for questioning. Twenty-four hours after prisoner James Howell told Capt. Johnson he would not work, the first phase of the ordeal was over.

Reporters for Elizabeth City’s newspapers, The Daily Advance and The Independent, had arrived at the camp just after the shotgun wounding of the two prisoners who had tried to escape the tear gas. They were no doubt aware of the events through the participation of Elizabeth City’s sheriff in providing the two batches of tear gas Tolar used on the prisoners.

Word of the strike spread quickly, and soon [Asst. Superintendent of Prisons] L.G. Whitley … was phoning to speak with Tolar. Prison camp officials and law enforcement officers from surrounding counties, curious to find out what was happening, trickled into the Perquimans site to offer assistance and observe the situation first-hand.

Within hours of the strike’s conclusion, prison supervisor Mallison, the highest-ranking prison official on site, held an informal hearing to investigate the cause of the strike, assess guilt, and determine punishment …

After he finished interviewing the prisoners, Mallison instructed Tolar to “get the leaders and whip them if he thought it necessary to enforce discipline.” Tolar responded by selecting the 13 men he deemed most responsible for the strike, likely those who initially refused to exit their quarters for dinner.

He instructed the guards to remove the offenders to the dining area, where they ordered the convicts to strip to their underwear and lie face down on mattresses placed on the floor for the occasion. Tolar chose Pitt County’s prison camp superintendent to administer the whippings because, as he later told investigators, “He had less biases” than the men who worked in the Woodville camp.

Delegating a supposed outsider to punish the striking men was Tolar’s way of protecting himself from future reproach. Tolar later admitted allowing Johnson, the target of the strike, and another guard from the Woodville camp to participate in the whipping.

Each prisoner received from 10 to 25 lashes with a two-inch leather strap. Although witnesses, including those who had come from other camps, confirmed that the flogging drew blood out of all 13 prisoners, Tolar informed reporters that the whippings were not brutal and, as required by regulations, the camp doctor had been in attendance.

Had there only been the matter of the brief strike, the Woodville episode might have ended there. However, despite Tolar’s caution in selecting men to administer punishment, the floggings became a magnet for criticism and drew a rapid response from across the state.

Tolar’s attempt to deal with his “rebellious prisoners” by flogging sparked a round of equivocation from those in authority over the state’s prison camps. The resulting discourse exposed longstanding fence straddling that had characterized official attempts to regulate or banish flogging on both the county chain gangs and in the state penitentiary.

For the previous two decades, whenever flogging became newsworthy, the judicial system, legislature, county officials, and penal reformers addressed questions such as whether to flog prisoners, and if so, then when and how to administer the punishment and who should be in charge of it.

At several points over the years, the public understood that the legislature and even several governors had banned flogging…. Only after a questionable incident became known, as in the case of the Woodville strike, did it become clear that those who had periodically attempted to eliminate flogging and declared it illegal either had no control or had failed to enforce the purported ban.

With the unification of the penal system into a department within the state government, the debate over acceptable forms of punishment emerged once more.

State Board of Charities and Public Welfare, or SBC, files do not contain records that documented the number of floggings or the offenses that warranted the lash, but media coverage shows that throughout the 1930s prison officials were still using this method to punish prisoners.

In 1931, the same year the state created a unified penal system that included all county convicts, officials in one of Wake County’s prison camps administered a number of floggings that quickly renewed the debate over use of the lash.

The SBC and the governor established a temporary ban on flogging in September 1931 but did not settle on rules until April 1932. The regulations limited methods of punishment to reduction in grade, restricted diet, or solitary confinement. There was no mention of flogging.

As questions arose about the legality of flogging the Woodville prisoners, penal authorities began pointing fingers at one another rather than clarifying state policy.

Meanwhile, the Raleigh press reminded North Carolinians that in both 1923 and 1925, a full ten years earlier, Governor Cameron Morrison had issued an executive order forbidding whipping prisoners in the state penal system. He had acted in the wake of trials concerning mistreatment of prisoners in the county chain gangs….

Confusion surrounded the investigations [that] various state bodies launched into the strike and Tolar’s response to it. Apparently, they concluded, no one was legally accountable for the policy that enabled Tolar to order the floggings.

Before the Perquimans strike, a committee working to revise regulations for the state’s prison camps was poised to recommend the continued use of the lash. After the floggings at Perquimans, the committee reassessed its position.

The new guidelines the group submitted the week following its investigation of the strike and the floggings stipulated that there should be “no further use of corporal punishment without definite formal instructions from Raleigh before the fact.” Any prison employee violating the regulations would be subject to removal.

The penal committee intended for the new regulations to limit severely the use of corporal punishment, while providing for stricter oversight and a clear chain of command.

Some of the men who went on strike in Woodville paid a painful price for their actions, but they also accomplished the outcome for which they had hoped. By the third week of April, barely two weeks after the strike, all camp guards had resigned, including Jesse Johnson, the man the convicts had targeted….

The Elizabeth City Independent placed the story on the front page of the paper and began the article with the statement, “The effects of revolts, strikes, and rebellions are seldom fully realized until sometime after they occur.”

This reporter interpreted the guards’ resignation as a victory for the convicts, and surely for the men in the Woodville camp, this was indeed true. Through their resistance, James Howell and his fellow prisoners participated in framing the political debate over chain gang labor and helped bring the power of the state to bear on the abusive treatment they endured.

You can find the full account of the Woodville convict labor strike as well as the rest of Dr. Thomas’ dissertation, including her footnotes, online here. I want to thank Dr. Thomas again for allowing me to excerpt this part of her dissertation.

* * *

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

I discovered another forgotten chapter in eastern North Carolina’s history while I was exploring the Farm Security Administration, or FSA, photographs at the Library of Congress. It is a story about the migrant farm workers that harvested the region’s crops in the 1930s and ’40s.

An FSA photographer named Jack Delano took the photographs that caught my eye. He’s the same photographer that took the photographs of the migrant construction workers at Fort Bragg that I discussed here.

A talented photographer and composer, Delano was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who had come to the U.S. with his family in 1923, when he was 9 years old. All of his photographs show a warmth and sympathy for others and a special concern for the down and out.

He was one of an extraordinary group of photographers that worked for the FSA during the Great Depression and the Second World War. They included figures such as Dorothy Lange, Gordon Parks and Marion Post Walcott that are now icons in the history of documentary photography.

Delano took the photographs of migrant construction workers at Fort Bragg in March of 1941. But nine months earlier, when the FSA was still focused on the economic turmoil of the Great Depression, he had spent time with other migrant workers in a different part of eastern North Carolina.

In the summer of 1940, he took a remarkable series of photographs of the migrant laborers that harvested and packed potatoes in a group of counties not far from the Outer Banks.

Traveling up and down the East Coast, those men, women and children worked in orchards and fields from Florida to New Jersey.

In the wintertime, most worked in the citrus groves and vegetable fields of South Florida. They lived in sprawling camps of laborers in places such as Belle Meade, Immokalee and Homestead.

When they finished the harvest in Florida, they worked their way up the East Coast. The farm laborers in Delano’s photographs harvested potatoes here in North Carolina in June and July, then headed to jobs further north. Delano reported that they traveled next to Onley, a village on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, and to Cranbury, a small town in southern New Jersey.

That summer of 1940, Delano photographed migrant farm workers in Shawboro in Currituck County, N.C., and in Camden, Belcross, Shiloh, and Old Trap a few miles away in Camden County, N.C.

He also photographed migrant laborers grading and packing potatoes in Elizabeth City, in Pasquotank County, N.C. That town of roughly 11,000 people had the closest freight depot to those other communities.

By 1940 migrant laborers had harvested crops in that area and in many other parts of eastern North Carolina for decades. Some had originally come from other parts of eastern North Carolina. Some came from other southern states.

Many had also come to the U.S. from at least half a dozen countries in the the Caribbean, as well as from Mexico.

Hiring migrant workers was one of the ways that farmers replaced the enslaved laborers that had harvested local crops before the Civil War.

During the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of seasonal migrant laborers harvested crops in the U.S.

Those migrants moved across the country, one place to the next, swept up by the Great Depression as if in a great whirlwind and making do until they could get a toehold somewhere.

Today approximately 150,000 migrant farm laborers and their dependents come to North Carolina every growing season. Most were born in Mexico, though quite a few are also from Central America.