The Virginia State Lottery was going to hold a drawing on April 25, 1827, for the benefit of the Dismal Swamp Canal Co.

Whole tickets were $4, half-tickets $2, and a quarter-ticket could be purchased for $1. The grand prize was $10,000 and more than $100,000 in prize money was going to be awarded.

The lottery was part of an overall strategy by the company to raise funds to improve the then-22-mile-long Dismal Swamp Canal, a human-made waterway connecting the Albemarle Sound to the Chesapeake Bay that was completed in 1805.

Those improvements included creating the Northwest Canal, which was “built on the line of a waste ditch from the 1820s” and connected the Dismal Swamp Canal with the headwaters of the Northwest River. From there, the river empties into Currituck Sound on the coast, near the Virginia-North Carolina line, a 1973 report from the Canal Society noted.

Water to maintain the needed depth for navigation on the Dismal Swamp Canal and the Northwest River Canal was diverted from Lake Drummond in the Great Dismal Swamp. Those waters had traditionally drained though slow-moving creeks and rivers that emptied into Currituck Sound. That had been the case since opening in 1805.

The canal is often considered to be the oldest operating canal in the United States.

New Currituck Sound closed for the final time in 1828, changing the northern end of Currituck Sound from a saltwater to freshwater estuary, an event largely credited to the changes the Dismal Swamp Canal created in the flow of water.

“In 1828, the Atlantic inlets into the Currituck Sound closed due to the diversion of water in the Dismal Swamp and shifted the sound from salt-water to freshwater, upsetting the oyster and salt water fishing industries and changing commerce in the region,” Lago Mar on the Back Bay posted on their Facebook page on Dec. 31, 2025.

In a 1977 study “Coastal Processes and Resulting Forms of Sediment Accumulations Currituck Spit,” the authors note that “The completion of the Dismal Swamp Canal in 1805 undoubtedly also played a role in the closing of New Currituck Inlet.”

But coastal geologist Dr. Stan Riggs is skeptical that the Dismal Swamp Canal caused the inlet to close. The inlets of Currituck Sound are “ephemeral,” he said.

“They open in a storm, and they’re good for a while, and then they shoal back down,” he told Coastal Review. “It’s not the inside waters like down in the Pamlico. The inside waters there (in the Pamlico) play a big part in controlling the inlets and outlets, but up there (in Currituck Sound), there’s not enough water mass to build any kind of a storm surge on the inside.”

There are other factors arguing against the Dismal Swamp Canal closing the inlet that Riggs points to, as well.

With relatively little volume of water surging through the inlet, “it’s mostly the dynamics from outside that are driving that,” Riggs said. “One storm can move sand south, another storm will come along and move sand north. There’s a push and a pull that’s going on and up there. It’s mostly the dynamics of the ocean that are dictating what’s happening.”

And the ocean is getting sand from “a big sand pile off the mouth of Chesapeake Bay” Riggs said. “One of the reasons that we have so much sand up there in the first place is you have to have a source, and that source is the offshore (sand). That inlet closed because nor’easter storms were driving the Chesapeake sands to the northern barrier island.”

Neither the Old Currituck Inlet that would have been on the border of North Carolina and Virginia, nor the New Currituck Inlet just south of Knotts Island were especially useful for shipping.

There was some traffic through inlets for a short time, but William Byrd wrote in 1728 in his “History of the Dividing Line,” that “Navigation is a little difficult, and fit only for Vessels that draw no more than ten feet Water.”

Currituck County had a customs house to handle shipping arriving through New Currituck Inlet, but as author Meg Malvasi wrote in a 2010 “Historic and Architectural Resources of Currituck County 1790-1958” produced for the National Park Service, “One historian described the port as ‘of little consequence, for the few vessels which put in there were small, and the cargoes inconsiderable.’ Whenever one came to the port to unload goods, the port master would simply be there to greet the vessel.’”

The customs house closed in 1819 when Congress did not fund the location.

Even with either Currituck Inlet open, farmers and merchants in northeastern North Carolina lacked access to major seaports, and a canal linking the Outer Banks sounds with Norfolk, Virginia, had been discussed even before the American Revolution.

The earliest ventures were more concerned with draining the Great Dismal Swamp to create arable land than creating a canal. George Washington was a principal in the Dismal Swamp Co. formed in 1763 “for the purpose of taking up and draining a large Body of Land called the Dismal Swamp.” 

The venture failed, but Washington held on to his shares.

After the American Revolution, he and the other shareholders made a second attempt at draining the Dismal Swamp. That, too, failed. But, now familiar with Lake Drummond and how the waters moved through the swamp, he wrote in 1784 to North Carolina politician Hugh Williamson that “I have been long satisfied of the practicability of opening a communication between the rivers which empty into Albemarle Sound (thro’ Drummonds Pond) & the waters of Elizabeth or Nansemund Rivers.”

A doctor and scientist, Williamson, after the British occupied Philadelphia in 1777, fled to Edenton where he was elected to the state legislature and eventually sent to the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

Edenton was an critical port of entry in the 18th century and, according to a 1969 National Register of Historic Places document, Williamson “owned ships that traded profitably between Edenton and the West Indies.” A canal connecting Elizabeth City on the Pasquotank River with Norfolk would draw trade away from Edenton to the much better ports of Virginia.

Nonetheless, Williamson was “the primary advocate of the canal in North Carolina,” historian Mathew Shaeffer wrote about the Dismal Swamp Canal for the North Carolina History Project.

His support was important. The Dismal Swamp Canal Co. needed permission from Virginia and North Carolina to move the project forward. Virginia chartered the company in 1787, and it took three years for North Carolina to follow suit, but in 1790, the state chartered the company allowing construction to begin.

It took a while.

Work did not begin until 1793 on the poorly funded project to create the canal connecting South Mills in North Carolina and Deep Creek, now part of Chesapeake, Virginia.

Most of the work to cut the canal by hand was almost all done by enslaved laborers.

The conditions to dig a ditch through the tangle of swamp vegetation were horrific: extreme heat, venomous snakes, constant danger of flooding, and ice and cold in the winter.

Because the labor force was predominantly enslaved individuals who were often rented from their owners, there are no known records of the deaths that occurred while the canal was being built.

Originally conceived to be 32 feet wide and 8 feet deep, engineering for the project was primitive, French noble Duke de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt wrote after a visit to the canal.

“What must appear surprising, is that, for this canal which already seems in such a state of forwardness, no levels have been taken. It is not yet known what number of locks may be necessary, and even whether any will be requisite,” he observed.

Even after opening to traffic in 1805, the canal did not match the original concept. When the canal was filled and the water was 8 feet deep, larger boats could not use it, although the water was sufficient for shallow-draft barges.

“That would be enough to let the residents of northeastern North Carolina get their produce and lumber to market,” David Walbert wrote for Anchor, a North Carolina online history resource.

Improvements were made, though. The War of 1812 “increased the desire to have a ‘back door’ shipping route between Virginia and North Carolina,” Shaeffer wrote, noting the canal “was not able to provide an adequate alternative route.”

Before the war ended in 1815, the “canal was expanded, and the first recorded passage of a vessel other than a flatboat occurred in June 1814,” Shaeffer continued.

Improvements continued to be made. On May 13, 1830, the Roanoke Advocate in Halifax wrote, “The interesting spectacle of the launching of a new  boat, was exhibited on Saturday … in Portsmouth. Though small, being only about 65 feet length on deck, the plan and purpose of this boat render her an object no little importance; she is intended to ply between this place and Elizabeth City via the Dismal Swamp Canal, and to admit of her passing through the canal without injury to the banks she is to be propelled by paddles in the rear … The name of this handsome appendage to the navigation of our port is the Lady of the Lake.”

The Lady of the Lake was the first steam-powered boat to ply the waters of the canal.

The Dismal Swamp Canal, though, was facing increased competition. Railroads in North Carolina and Virginia offered faster transportation of goods. In 1859 the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal, or A&C Canal, provided deeper water and a more direct route to Virginia ports for North Carolina goods.

Union and Confederate forces fought for control of the canal during the Civil War, and although the North wrested control from the Confederacy in 1862, the South “did benefit from extensive smuggling via the canal during the rest of the war,” according to the Virginia Places Dismal Swamp Canal webpage.

For a brief period beginning in the 1890s, following upgrades by Lake Drummond Canal & Water Co., which purchased the canal in 1892, the Dismal Swamp Canal carried more freight than the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal. With the federal government purchasing the A&C to create the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, the fate of the Dismal Swamp Canal was sealed.

As with part of the Intracoastal, use of the A&C was free, and the Lake Drummond Canal & Water Co. did not have the resources to maintain its canal as well as the federal government could.

The federal government purchased the Dismal Swamp Canal in 1929 and it is currently maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Today, the canal is part of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway that stretches along the Atlantic and Gulf Coast states, and it measures 19 miles long, 60 feet wide and at a controlling depth of 9 feet, according to the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

New York Times bestselling author Kristy Woodson Harvey returns to the fictional, sleepy, seaside town of Cape Carolina in her newest novel “Summer State of Mind.”

Hitting shelves on Tuesday, the reader meets a burned-out neonatal intensive care unit nurse that crosses paths with an injured former baseball star who finds an abandoned newborn in their tight-knit community, Harvey explained.

A contemporary women’s fiction author, Harvey was on her way home from the Piedmont to Beaufort a few weeks ago when she carved out a few minutes of her day for a chat with Coastal Review.

She said that “Summer State of Mind” is a companion to her “Under the Southern Sky,” a 2021 novel about two childhood friends and neighbors, Parker and Amelia, raised in Cape Carolina, and the book in which she introduces secondary characters, aunt Tilley and Parker’s older brother, Mason.

In “Summer State of Mind,” the “very eccentric” Southern aunt and baseball player Mason are the primary characters along with Daisy, the NICU nurse who is new to the coastal setting, Harvey said.

The plot was inspired by a newspaper article written about an ICU nurse who adopted an abandoned baby, “and it just stuck with me for a long time,” Harvey explained. She mentioned the article to a friend who is an ICU nurse, and the friend shared with Harvey that she knew others with similar experiences. Then a book crossed her desk about nurses who had to make really difficult decisions, “and those kinds of gray areas where sometimes we find ourselves, and (then the novel) all came together.”

Harvey is getting ready to head out Friday to Charleston, South Carolina, to begin her “Summer State of Mind” launch tour. She will be back in eastern North Carolina on Sunday for brunch hosted by the Beaufort Historical Association in Atlantic Beach.

The rest of her tour takes her to Greensboro on Monday, and then on Tuesday, when the book is officially released, she has events in Greenville, South Carolina, and Salisbury, before heading May 6 to Chapel Hill and Raleigh.

Outside of the Carolinas, Harvey has events in Tampa, Florida, on May 7, followed by Franklin, Indiana, on May 8, then Webster Groves, Missouri, on May 9. She heads further west May 10 to Gig Harbor and May 11 to Seattle, both in Washington, and then on May 12 San Diego, California, for two events.

She will return to the east coast for events May 16 in Sneads Ferry and Ocean Isle Beach, and wraps up her tour in South Carolina May 17 for Pawleys Island and Columbia and then Camden on May 18. Tickets and more details are available on her website.

With this book being released in May and then “Falling for Peachtree Bluff,” the fifth installment of her “Peachtree Series” expected to come out in September, the second leg of her 2026 tour will be announced is this fall.

The road to Southern fiction

Harvey grew up in Salisbury, where she said she fell in love with writing when she was a senior year in high school. She was an intern at a “great, small-town daily newspaper.”

“I was actually going to medical school and decided to become a journalist instead, because I just absolutely fell in love with writing for newspapers,” she said.

As an intern at the Salisbury Post, “I just fell in love with writing for newspapers and interviewing people, and so I ended up going to journalism school at UNC and just ate it up. Just loved it,” she said. During that time, she worked on the university’s Blue & White magazine and served as its managing editor.

Harvey explained that when she earned her undergraduate degree in 2007, it was an unusual time in journalism because of increasingly adopted internet service, which “hadn’t really hit its stride yet, and the future of journalism was looking a little questionable.”

She decided to pursue her master’s in literature, with the thought that, if writing doesn’t work out, she can teach. But life sent her on a different path. After grad school, she started working in finance but continued to freelance as a writer.

She also began weaving together storylines. And though she took creative writing classes in college, she never really planned to write fiction.

“I think there was something really perfect about the way that it unfolded, because I started getting these ideas and then decided that I was going to write a book just to see if I could, just for myself,” Harvey said.

When she began writing, it wasn’t with the expectation of publishing or becoming an author, which she said was the right approach for her because there was no pressure in it at all. She wanted to see if this was something she could do.

“And I kept writing, and I kept writing,” and by the time she had her third manuscript, she decided to submit her work to literary agents.

She sold her debut novel “Dear Carolina” to a publishing house in 2014, and the book was out in 2015. Set in Kinston, the work follows the path of two women from different circles who bond over the adoption of a baby girl.

Her second book, “Lies and Other Acts of Love,” is set in her hometown of Salisbury, she said. This standalone 2016 novel delves into family secrets.

Harvey initially planned to set her next project, the Peachtree Bluff series, in Beaufort, but “then I realized how incredibly freeing it was to be able to just make up a town” and build the world to suit the story.

She draws inspiration from the beach communities on the East Coast like Beaufort, calling the fictional towns “loose interpretations” of places she knows, all with the goal to give the readers small southern towns.

“That’s what I know, and also because I think it resonates with readers,” she said, giving them a touchpoint that they can return to again and again.

The “Peachtree Series” launched in 2017, the same year she and her husband decided to try Beaufort out full time.

Harvey explained that they bought their house in Beaufort in 2012 and had spent about 18 months remodeling what they had planned to be their beach house. They had been driving to and from Carteret County, “And when our son was in preschool, we decided to move for one year, and now he’s in eighth grade and we still haven’t left,” she said about their move to Carteret County. By then she had published her third book.

The beauty of Carteret County, aka the “Crystal Coast” in marketing materials, and its residents are special to her.

Being from Salisbury, Harvey’s family was much closer to South Carolina beaches, and with her father being from Wilmington, “When we were going to the beach, we were either going to Wrightsville or Litchfield. And so, it was new for me, and I just fell in love with it right away.”

‘Friends & Fiction’ podcast

Harvey co-hosts “Friends & Fiction” with New York Times bestselling authors Mary Kay Andrews, Kristin Harmel and Patti Callahan Henry.

The podcast launched in 2020 when Andrews texted a handful of authors who had books scheduled to publish, but all their tours had been canceled because of COVID-19, and, “we were really worried about independent bookstores. There was no foot traffic, there was no events.”

While brainstorming about ways to reach their readers and help the small businesses, they decided to go live on Facebook and talk about their new books and remind people to support their independent bookstores.

“The first night we did it, we didn’t think anyone would show up,” she said, but a thousand people tuned in. The bestselling authors decided to go live every Wednesday night for seven weeks, when the hosts’ books would be out. And now, the show is coming up on its six-year anniversary, with 350,000 members.

“It’s just like a nice corner of the internet world where people can talk about books,” Harvey said. “We’re really good friends and we love what we’re doing, and we love supporting authors, and our mission is still to support independent bookstores, and as long as, as long as viewers keep showing up to watch, we’re going to keep going.”

One benefit of the podcast is that it pushes Harvey to read books outside of her preferred genres before interviewing the authors.  

“I’ve read so many things that I never would have read, but I did because the author was going to be a guest,” and through that process, she said she’s discovered new authors, genres and novels that broadened her view in some way. “I do think reading really widely can really help inform our own writing.”

She added that she loves to hear from the authors and the paths they took.

“It’s so cool to me how people just come to the page in such wildly different ways. And everybody has their own journey. Everybody has their own writing process.”

In addition to the two books released this year, “A Happier Life,” her 2024 work set in a historic Beaufort home, is in development for film by MGM/Amazon.

“The Summer of Songbirds,” the 2023 novel about lifelong friends who met as children at summer camp, is in development for television with Hulu, and a handful of other projects are in various stages of option or development for film and television, according to her provided bio. Her work has been Southern Living, Parade, Traditional Home, USA TODAY and other publications.

With more than a decade of full-time writing behind her, Harvey told Coastal Review that she loves watching the story unfold as she writes it.

“I’m so happy that I did it. I always look back and think, ‘What if I’d never done this?’ I never would have known,” she said.

Harvey remains unsure what life will look like in the next five years, but her plan is to focus on “writing my next best book and what’s the next best step.”

PEA ISLAND — Recently I had the pleasure of giving Johnnie Van Willis a tour of the historic Pea Island Cookhouse museum. Johnnie traveled to the museum from his home in Marshallberg, a historic fishing community situated on a peninsula in Carteret County and directly along the shores of the Core Sound.

Marshallberg has been characterized as a sleepy, close-knit village with a rich history of commercial fishing, boatbuilding and family heritage. Johnnie’s great-grandfather was Isaac Van Willis Sr. He’s the surfman sitting in the middle top row in the only known photograph of a “Checkerboard Crew.” This term was used in the U.S. Life-Saving Service, the predecessor to today’s U.S. Coast Guard, to identify racially mixed surfmen crews, crews with both Black and white surfmen, like a checkerboard.

In March 2023, a painting depicting this image was unveiled at the College of the Albemarle – Dare County Campus. Both the photograph and painting are on display at the “Cookhouse,” the shortened name for the museum housed in what once was a building in which surfmen cooked and ate their meals.

As background, Johnnie shares both his middle and last name with his great-grandfather and grandfather, Isaac Van Willis Sr. and Isaac Van Willis Jr. In spring 2018, Johnnie took a road trip with his wife and daughters in search of his great-grandfather’s grave. Through a friend, he had learned it was somewhere near the Marshall and Gussie Collins Trail, a trail named after my grandparents at the Collins homestead. They were part of a small and closely knit community of Black residents of Roanoke Island. It included those connected to the Freedmen’s Colony on Roanoke Island, as well as the rich Native American history here.

Like many Black people in their community, my grandparents were known for their hard work, family, friends, and record of service. They once owned a home and farmland near where the trail is now, including much of the property that surrounds the Dare County Governmental Center and not far from the Virginia Dare Memorial Bridge.

I had noticed when Johnnie and two of his daughters were walking on the trail and struck up a conversation with them. They told me they were searching for the gravesite but couldn’t find it, and they were super excited when I revealed that it was a just a few yards away. Leading them there, I sensed our special connection.

Johnnie did not know much about his great-grandfather, other than that he had worked several years in the Life-Saving Service.

I quickly realized the parallels and differences associated with our two families. My great-grandfather also worked in the service. We both had family members and friends who had lived in small, tightly knit communities and had grown up fishing, oystering, catching crabs, building boats, farming, hunting, and going to church together. Yet, we also shared the understanding that history shows the lives and experiences of our two families were very different, simply because of race. 

Born in January 1873, my great-grandfather, Joseph Hall Berry, began his career initially serving as a “substitute” surfman when the legendary Keeper Richard Etheridge commanded the historic Pea Island Life-Saving Station. He enlisted in February 1902, the same month that my father would do the same 37 years later. My great-grandfather Berry is also the only of several family members who served in both the Life-Saving Service and the Coast Guard. He retired in February 1917 after serving for 15 years.

The trail signage at Isaac Van Willis Sr.’s grave shows he served for 30 years. Given that Life-Saving Service stations that once stretched along coast were spaced about seven miles apart and that our great-grandparents worked at neighboring stations, in all likelihood they knew each other. They could have each lived on Roanoke Island, but I am uncertain where Isaac Van Willis Sr. may have lived. They also likely participated in joint rescues. Before motorized equipment was available, these rescues were especially difficult and dangerous, often requiring the manpower of several stations.

Today, Johnnie still chuckles when he recalls how we met. When I realized who he was, the first thing I told him was to wait a few minutes, that his visit was important and I needed to I grab a pen and piece of paper. Yet, as we stood talking, I realized that, other than knowing his great-grandfather spent several years in the service, Johnnie knew little about him. He died when Johnnie was just a small child.

Johnnie knew more about his grandfather, Isaac Van Willis Jr., had who worked in the U.S. Lighthouse Service at the Cape Lookout Lighthouse.

In 2018, I also knew little about Isaac Van Willis Sr., and the story of Checkerboard Crews. Yet, each time I looked at the gravesite, I sensed he was important. His prominent marker, which includes the Life-Saving Service emblem and information about his wife on the opposite side, has always intrigued me. I was delighted a few days ago to receive a call from one of Johnnie’s daughters telling me that she wanted to bring her father back to Roanoke Island and to visit the Cookhouse. The trip was quickly planned. Johnnie and his daughters were thrilled to see a framed copy of the 1910 photograph and the vibrant oil painting of the same, each showing Isaac Van Willis Sr. They had never seen either image before. The discovery even brought tears to one granddaughter’s eyes.

I also made Johnnie aware of a letter that I had discovered about Isaac Van Willis Sr. several years ago. I promised to search for it in the research material I have collected over the years. At the time he was Surfman No. 1 at the Oregon Inlet station, the position typically next in line to become Keeper. Although I haven’t looked at it for several years now, I still recall being surprised to find Keeper Richard Etheridge’s signature on it. He and several others had signed it in support of Isaac Van Willis Sr.’s desire to become Keeper. Before Johnnie left, I promised to search for it and send him a copy.

Likewise, although Johnnie did not have any pictures of his great-grandfather, he had brought along something very special for me to see. He showed me a cherished framed photograph of Isaac Van Willis Jr., a photograph showing him doing work inside the lantern at the Cape Lookout Lighthouse. He promised to send me a copy of the photo when he returned home.

After a day that began with a seafood lunch, then a long visit at the Cookhouse, and ended with a cherished joint return to the Isaac Van Willis Sr. gravesite, I have concluded that our chance encounter eight years ago was destiny, simply something meant to be.

The broader story of Checkerboard Crews is a planned topic for “Cookhouse Chats,” a new initiative for 2026 that started in February. These periodic chats are to provide information on lesser-known stories associated with the history that the Cookhouse represents. Our next planned chat will be announced soon. 

Despite the utility poles connecting the network of overhead cables along the paved, two-lane road and other obvious signs of the 21^st century, Historic Halifax State Historic Site transported visitors to April 12, 1776, during “Halifax Resolves Days,” a weekend commemoration of North Carolina taking the first step toward freedom.

“Today is a huge day for North Carolina. Two hundred and fifty years ago today, the Fourth Provincial Congress of North Carolina met here in Halifax and adopted the Halifax Resolves, the first official action by any colony to declare independence from the king,” Gov. Josh Stein said Sunday afternoon to the more than 300 gathered for the Halifax Resolves Ceremony.

Held under a sizable party tent near the Colonial Courthouse Site, where the 1760s wooden building once stood, the 250^th anniversary ceremony wrapped up the April 10-12 event. Visitors were able to watch living history reenactments, colonial life demonstrations, musical performances, and a ceremony led by the state-recognized Haliwa-Saponi Indian Tribe based in Halifax and Warren counties.

North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources Secretary Pamela Brewington Cashwell introduced Stein before he took the podium.

During her brief comments, she explained that the department is responsible for organizing America 250 NC, the state’s celebration of the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and Halifax Resolves Days is a signature event of that celebration.

“We will also have a major event at the capitol in Raleigh this Fourth of July titled ‘Capitol 250: North Carolina Freedom Fest.’ We hope that if you don’t have something going on in your local community, that you will join us in Raleigh for another massive event,” she said, then directed the audience to visit the A250 website that details 700 events taking place this year as part of the celebration, from dramatic presentations, festivals, murals that have been painted in various communities.

When Stein welcomed the audience, he encouraged them to see the Halifax Resolves document on display in the new visitor center that officially opened that week. The governor and other state officials made a trip to Halifax April 7 for a ceremonial ribbon-cutting and to view the document that will be on loan from the National Archives until October.

Stein explained that leading up to the delegates meeting in Halifax, there was tension in the colonies between those who wanted to reconcile with the crown and those who wanted to rebel.

Even after the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 9, 1775, a large portion of the colonial population wanted to make accommodation with England. When the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in July of that year, they did not declare independence. Instead, they petitioned the king for more favorable terms. From 1775 to 1776, “the tide began to turn in favor of rebellion, but that path was by no means a certainty,” stein continued.

Then, Thomas Paine published “Common Sense” in January 1776, the pamphlet that Stein said made a “powerful argument for an independent, democratic nation founded on equality. Truly a radical notion.”

Then on Feb. 27, 1776, “a militia of patriots skirmished with loyalist troops at the Battle of Moores Creek Bridge,” located just west of Wilmington. “The Patriots soundly defeated the Loyalists, putting an end to English rule in North Carolina, blocking an English invasion of the south and lighting a flame of liberty within North Carolinians,” Stein continued.

As these events were taking place, North Carolina’s provincial delegates met with residents across the colony, and brought all those perspectives to Halifax in April 1776 when the fourth North Carolina provincial Congress gathered.

The delegates in the Halifax Resolves detailed their neighbors’ grievances, “or in their words, the ‘usurpations and violences’ committed by the king. They wrote that the ‘king and Parliament of Great Britain have usurped the power over the persons and property of the people, unlimited and uncontrolled and disregarding their humble petitions for peace, liberty, and safety. They made diverse legislative acts denouncing war, famine and every species of calamity daily employed in destroying the people and committing the most horrid devastations in the country.’”

By adopting these resolves, Stein said that these 83 delegates “did something radical, something revolutionary, something patriotic. They unanimously empowered North Carolina’s representatives at the Second Continental Congress up in Philadelphia to vote to declare our nation’s independence from the crown,” he said. “With these Halifax Resolves, North Carolina became the first colony to take any action declaring our nation’s independence.”

Though the document set the colonies on a path of expanding freedom in this nation, Stein acknowledged that the resolves were “far from perfect,” but still encouraged reading the text, even though parts will make the reader “feel very uncomfortable.”

“It’s easy, when you look back at history, to assume some sort of inevitability, like of course, it happened, but this historic action and the fact that it was unanimous was by no means a foregone conclusion,” Stein said, noting that rebuking the world’s greatest superpower “would have been considered treason, a crime punishable by death.”

The colonists depended on England for military protection and economic security. “Failure objectively was likely, and failure could have been fatal,” Stein said. “With these stakes and these odds, this vote for independence was brave and truly incredible.”

The British Empire could have easily subdued a “ragtag militia or a single colony, but a united force at least stood a chance.” With every single delegate voting in favor of the Halifax Resolves, “it was a precursor of the unity that the revolution would require.”

Less than three months later, at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, “the 13 British colonies, so incredibly diverse and different from one another, declared that we were no longer 13 separate colonies. We are the United States of America,” Stein said.

And while “250 years ago, internal division was one of the greatest threats to our nation’s success. 250 years later, I would venture that that is still true,” Stein said. “There are so many forces seeking to divide us that profit from our distrust for one another. There are so many forces making the American Dream feel out of reach, telling us that our success requires others to fail, and too often, we hear crudeness, not civility and experience division, not decency. It does not have to be this way.”

Americans can chart a different course, lust like our forebears in Halifax, “After all, we are not red. We are not blue. We are red, white and blue,” Stein said.

“We have so much to gain from bridging our differences, not glossing over them, but having the confidence to find common ground and the patriotism to remember that we are all Americans, that we all love this place,” he concluded. “It is a revolutionary idea, and it is the North Carolina way.”

Rep. Don Davis, R-N.C., who represents the 1st District ecompassing 22 northeastern North Carolina counties, was among the handful of officials who spoke in addition to the governor.

Davis said that the day “shines a light on a true treasure from our great state and nation.”

“Right here in eastern North Carolina, 250 years ago, brave souls took courageous steps towards independence. Their actions remind us of our resilience and grit, illustrating what we can achieve together when we unite for common cause. The Halifax Resolves aren’t just a chapter in our history. They are evidence of hope for our future.”

Reprinted from the Ocracoke Observer

Waterfowl memories are woven throughout Ocracoke native Eddie O’Neal’s life.

He recalls redheads, pintails, teal and great flocks of geese on the Pamlico Sound and winter days in sink boxes with old-timers like Thurston Gaskill.

Because of that history and his skill of turning a block of wood into a work of art, he was named featured carver for this year’s Ocracoke Island Waterfowl Festival from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Friday, and from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday in the Ocracoke School gym.

O’Neal chose the Canada goose as his signature piece, honoring both the bird and the generations of island hunters and carvers who came before him.

“A Canada goose was a real trophy back then,” he said. “Something you showed off with pride and often shared with older neighbors who couldn’t get out to hunt themselves.”

O’Neal graduated from Ocracoke School in 1978 alongside classmates Vince O’Neal and the late John Simpson, two of the founders of the Ocracoke Decoy Carver’s Guild in 2018.

As a boy, O’Neal was constantly on the water.

Like many island youth, by age 12 he was already hunting and fishing around Springer’s Point and on his father’s nearby property.

He fished commercially with his father, Carson, who served in the Coast Guard, and brothers Andy and Albert, working pound nets and gigging flounder.

During his 23 years working for the state of North Carolina, he held a variety of positions: on a dredge crew, building spillways and working heavy equipment from Southport to Knotts Island.

Included in his working career, he also built golf courses, was a truck driver and worked on road paving crews for an asphalt company out of Norfolk, Virginia.

He and his wife Pam also ran the Island Galley restaurant on Ocracoke until damage from Hurricane Isabel (2003) forced them to close.

Although he appreciated decoys, he didn’t start carving as a hobby until around 2008 while living in Virginia Beach. Over time, that hobby “morphed into a full-time job.”

Among his fond memories are watching Wilbur and Clinton Gaskill, older Ocracoke carvers, who turned out small geese flyers and decoys at an astonishing pace. Wilbur could make 15 to 20 decoys a day and sell every one of them on a summer day when the island was far quieter than it is now.

His second cousin, Dave O’Neal, a retired Coast Guard man and renowned carver, has been an important influence offering tips on the techniques and tools of the craft.

Preferring to focus on his own carvings, O’Neal doesn’t collect or trade in other people’s decoys.

When he and Pam retired several years ago, they moved back to Ocracoke, and his carving became a daily practice.

Today, O’Neal does most of his carvings for the Island Ragpicker shop, run by his siblings Stephanie and Albert.

Not just decoys — he crafts shore birds, small flyers, fish, and a variety of decorative pieces that keep the shelves full and his hands busy.

Carving is his “therapy room” — something that keeps him grounded in retirement and balances time with his grandchildren Carter, Kyler, Amaya, Johnny and Angel.

He rarely sells pieces directly, except at some island events.

He prefers to stock the shop or donate carvings to local fundraisers like the Ocracoke Firemen’s Ball auction where his works have helped raise significant financial support over the years.

For materials, O’Neal favors northern white cedar, which he hauls back from a sawmill near Egg Harbor, New Jersey.

He also uses tupelo, sourced from a Mennonite mill near Pink Hill, and some pine.

Large decoys are almost always cedar, while smaller items, like flyers, often come from scrap wood he picks up from around the island, such as from the school that was torn down.

He appreciates cedar’s similarity to local juniper and its fine, aromatic grain. O’Neal shapes his birds with an angle grinder for the rough form, then refines them with a Dremel and extensive sanding, especially on the delicate heads and bills of shore birds.

He draws most of his own patterns by hand and also enjoys building furniture, having made tables and household pieces for family members from barn oak and other reclaimed woods.

This story is provided courtesy of the Ocracoke Observer, a newspaper covering Ocracoke Island. Coastal Review partners with the Ocracoke Observer to provide readers with more environmental and lifestyle stories of interest along our coast.

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

As the United States recognizes the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence July 4, 1776, Dare County is celebrating its unique role in American history Saturday with “Liberty, Legacy, and Lift Off in the Land of Beginnings.”

The Dare A250 Faire is a two-event celebration, with the first scheduled for 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday in downtown Manteo. The Star Spangled Spectacular is scheduled for that afternoon from 3:30-7 p.m. at Roanoke Island Festival Park.

“Rooted in a place known as the ‘Land of Beginnings,’ this milestone event honors Dare County’s unique role in America’s story — from the earliest English settlement attempts to the birthplace of powered flight. With a spirit of innovation, discovery and freedom woven throughout, the Dare A250 Faire promises a vibrant and meaningful tribute to 250 years of American history,” according to the county.

Both celebrations are no charge for the public, though the evening program requires those who wish to attend to reserve a spot through the online portal. As of publication, the tickets were all claimed. Those who wish to attend can continue to check the online portal to see if a seat has come available due to a cancelation.

Dare County is the “Land of Beginnings” because it is the location of England’s first attempt to establish a colony in 1587, now known as the “Lost Colony” because more than 100 settlers vanished from the site between arriving and 1590, and the birthplace of Virginia Dare. Dare was the first English child born in the Americas in 1587. The county is also the site of the Wright Brothers’ flight in 1903, the first controlled and powered heavier-than-air flight.

Dorothy Hester, co-chair of the Dare County A250 Committee, explained to Coastal Review that visitors can expect a full day of family-friendly fun in a festive, patriotic atmosphere.

“Downtown Manteo will come alive with a street festival featuring live music, street performers, storytelling, arts and crafts vendors, nonprofit exhibits, and several food vendors,” Hester said. “The celebration continues into the evening at Roanoke Island Festival Park with the Star-Spangled Spectacular, which has officially sold out–an exciting reflection of the strong community interest and support for this event.”

Hester said that the committee has been meeting for more than a year “to thoughtfully plan how our community would mark this historic milestone.”

The Dare A250 Faire emerged as the cornerstone event of that effort, which she said was designed to bring residents and visitors together in a meaningful and memorable way.

“What began as an idea has grown into a true community-wide collaboration among Dare County, local partners, local organizations, businesses, volunteers and sponsors,” Hester said.

Related: Dare County begins America’s 250th commemoration

The Dare A250 Faire was originally scheduled at the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kill Devil Hills, but was relocated to Manteo and Roanoke Island Festival Park “to allow all aspects of the planning committee’s vision to be included in the celebration,” organizers said in a press release in late February. The park “highlights the area’s rich history as the ‘Birthplace of America,’ with the historic Elizabeth II serving as a meaningful backdrop to the festivities.”

The Elizabeth II is a representational 16th-century English merchant ship from the 1585 Roanoke voyage berthed at the park, where a settlement site illustrates an English military colony from the era.

Hester urged those interested in attending the celebrations to visit DareA250.org/faire for full event details, as well as information about other A250 initiatives, including the interactive map, and additional events taking place throughout the year.

The Dare County committee organizes events under the umbrella of the state’s official celebration, America 250 NC, an initiative of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

The celebration committee launched earlier this year a passport program and an interactive online map to share the county’s history.

Musical performances

Entertainment begins at 11:10 a.m. Saturday at the All-American Stage in downtown Manteo with Cypress Society Singers & Dancers, representing the Lumbee and Kahtehnuaka Tuscarora Eastern Woodland Native nations.

An opening ceremony follows at 11:45 a.m., then attendees can listen to live music throughout the afternoon, including a jazz performance by Connected, Ruth Wyand to perform roots Americana and the Daniel Jordan Band to play Southern country-rock.

The Dare County All-American Award Ceremony starts at 3 p.m. The ceremony will recognize participants in a variety of categories, including patriotic attire, patriotic pet, most decorated business and boat displays, as well as Dare A250 Scholarship Awards. Participants should report behind the stage at 2:30 p.m. for judging.

Performances scheduled for the Magnolia Freedom Stage feature Ascension Music Academy, Shiloh and Enrique with the Mustang Music Outreach Program, and the OBX Jazzmen.

Street entertainment

Roving patriotic performers will wander throughout downtown Manteo from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., including stilt walkers, a bubble artist, a juggler and a hula hooper.

Historical interpreters from The Lost Colony, Roanoke Island Festival Park and Chicamacomico Lifesaving Station and more than 60 local artisans and community organizations will be on-site. Several local businesses and restaurants will offer special events and discounts. A list of visitors is available on the event website.

Student musicians from First Flight Middle School and Manteo Middle School will perform on Sir Walter Raleigh Street at noon.

Storytelling stage

The historic Pioneer Theater, 109 Budleigh St., Manteo, is hosting a storytelling series highlighting the people, traditions and defining moments of the Outer Banks.

Moderated by Miles Daniels, the program organizers are billing as “a marquee element of the Dare A250 Faire,” will feature the following four distinguished speakers sharing personal insights and historical perspectives:

• 11:30 a.m. Clark Twiddy: “Vision, Risk, and Reinvention: How the Outer Banks Became a Destination.”
• 12:30 p.m. Robin Daniels Holt: “The Families Who Stayed: Generational Memory and Cultural Continuity.”
• 1:30 p.m. Nancy Gray: “Water, Work, and Survival: The Working Coast of the Outer Banks.”
• 2:30 p.m. Ken Mann: “Stories of the Outer Banks: Voices, Characters, and Coastal Memory.”

Archival film and video presentations will be shown between speakers.

For young artists

Children can add their own touch from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. to a large patriotic painting. Local painter Brad Price is to enhance the artwork before going on permanent display at the Outer Banks Community Foundation. 

Families can also enjoy coloring a rendering of the first governor of an English colony in America, called a “Flat John White,” and festive tablecloths. Placemats that can be colored will be available at participating businesses throughout Manteo. 

Star-Spangled Spectacular Finale

The Star-Spangled Spectacular performances at Roanoke Island Festival Park will begin at 3:30 p.m. with Just Playing Dixieland, followed by an opening ceremony at 4:15 p.m. and an Earth, Wind & Fire tribute by the Ray Howard Band at 4:30 p.m.

The day will conclude with the Dare A250 Grand Finale at 6:15 p.m. with a multimedia patriotic production with a community choir and tribute.

Volunteers needed

With the committee expecting thousands to visit downtown Manteo and Roanoke Island Festival Park for the two events Saturday, there’s a need for volunteers to help oversee parking areas, serve as a friendly point of contact for guests, and to ensure everything runs smoothly in each designated lot, according to the county.

“No special experience is required, just a welcoming attitude and a willingness to help,” and volunteering is a way to “be part of a once-in-a-generation community celebration,” organizers said.

Volunteers can register online for any of the multiple shifts and activities or contact contact Patty O’Sullivan at patricia.o’sullivan@darenc.gov.

Dare County, Manteo, Outer Banks Visitors Bureau, Southern Bank, The Don & Catharine Bryan Cultural Series and Roanoke Island Festival Park are sponsors of the celebration.

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.

I first listened to a special group of interviews with African American community elders in Pamlico County almost 20 years ago, but I have never forgotten them. They helped me to see history as more than dates and wars, the rise and fall of the powerful, and the stuff of headlines.

They helped me to understand that history is all those things, but it is also the paths of our souls and the life of the spirit.

The oral history project was called “Preserving the African American Experience in Pamlico County, North Carolina.”

The project was led by Ms. Linda Simmons-Henry, a scholar, archivist and public historian whom I have known and admired for many years.

Ms. Simmons-Henry was uniquely well prepared to lead the project. At that time, she was the director of special collections and the senior archivist at Saint Augustine’s College in Raleigh.

She is currently the dean of the library and archives at Texas College, a historically Black colleges and universities in Tyler, Texas.

She is also a native of New Bern and has always remained deeply attached to the African American community there and in Pamlico County, just to the east of New Bern.

Over the spring and summer of 2007, Ms. Simmons-Henry and a talented team of local volunteers conducted oral history interviews with 20 of Pamlico County’s African American elders.

I found the interviews to be a rare treasure. Taken together, they are a compelling and intimate portrait of African American life in Pamlico County over most of the 20th century.

The whole tenor of the interviews is special. When you listen to them, you can tell that the project’s volunteers and the elders were people who knew and cared for one another.

In the voices of the project’s volunteers, I heard respect and reverence for the elders whom they were interviewing. I also heard a yearning to learn from their wisdom and experience.

In the voices of the elders, I heard a special kind of care. They talk about history, but they also sound like wise grandparents gently sharing love and guidance with those of a younger generation whom they know will need all the help they can get in this fragile, broken world of ours.

* * *

I first listened to the interviews back in 2007. The project’s volunteers had organized a banquet to celebrate and honor the community elders who had so graciously shared their stories with them.

I had been invited to say a few words at that banquet. To help me to prepare for the occasion, Ms. Simmons-Henry made a copy of the interviews for me.

At that time, the project’s volunteers had not yet transcribed the audio tapes, so I could not read transcripts of them. In a way, it was nicer: it meant that I had to listen to them, which I did, and it was a delight.

It made me feel as if I was sitting down with the elders and listening to their stories along with the project’s volunteers.

The interviews and transcripts are now available both at the New Bern-Craven County Public Library in New Bern and in the Southern Oral History Program’s collection at the Southern Historical Collection at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

* * *

The project’s oldest interviewee was a woman named Annie Rachel Squires. She was born in a little community called Maribel, on the Bay River, in 1908. At the time of her interview, she was 99 years old.

Ms. Squires and the other community elders shared stories about many different parts of Pamlico County’s history.

They talked about their teachers and schools. They spoke of childhood joys. They remembered long, brutally hard days of digging in potato fields and shucking oysters in the local canneries.

“All I know about my life was work, work, work,” I remember one woman saying, I believe in Vandemere, a small village in Pamlico County.

The community elders also recounted tales of the local struggle for voting rights and racial justice in Pamlico County.

Some remembered the landmark school desegregation lawsuit that black citizens in the coastal town of Oriental filed in 1951. Two or three recalled incidents involving the Ku Klux Klan.

Others told stories about serving in the Second World War and the Vietnam War. Yet others remembered the Great Depression.

My curiosity encompassed all of those historical subjects, but they are not what I remember most about the interviews.

What struck me most deeply about the elders’ words when I first listened to them back in 2007, and what I still find most unforgettable about them now, is how much they are a history of faith and the spirit.

* * *

For instance, I will never forget the project’s interview with the Rev. Kenneth M. Bell Sr., who at that time was still the minister at the Green Hill Missionary Baptist Church in Bayboro.

He was the only church pastor whom the project’s volunteers interviewed, but when it came to matters of the spirit, his words were very similar to most of the other elderly men and women that were interviewed.

Like Rev. Bell, they spoke of their faith and their struggles to know and understand God more fully.

They shared stories of Sunday schools and Bible study groups. They described a hunger to understand more fully what Scripture had to teach them about our purpose here on Earth, the nature of our existence, and what we are called to do for one another.

Rev. Bell was interviewed by Ms. Sandra Mae Hawkins, one of the project’s most devoted volunteers. At one point in the interview, she asked Rev. Bell what he considered the most important event in his life.

He did not hesitate for even a second.

He said it was the day in his boyhood that Mrs. N.F. Harper sang “Pass Me Not O Gentle Savior” at Green Hill Missionary Baptist Church and he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and savior.

* * *

When Rev. Bell spoke of Mrs. Harper singing “Pass Me Not O Gentle Savior,” he was remembering a worship service 60 or 70 years earlier.

Born in Bayboro in 1941, he was the youngest of 12 children.

When Sandra Made Hawkins talked with him, he explained that he had grown up in hard times. However, he did not linger on his family’s hardships or the things they did without.

Instead, he talked about his father, who was a farmer and a devout member of the local African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

His father was not the pastor of the church, but he had been a missionary. Rev. Bell explained that when his father was not in his fields, he strove to live the Bible’s teachings.

He visited the sick, lonely, and down and out. He cut firewood for elderly neighbors. After hog killings, he shared the meat with those who had none.

In the interview, Rev. Bell recalled that his father’s face had been disfigured in a hunting accident when he was a boy.

When I heard that part of his life story, I wondered if his father’s malformity had helped to teach him, and maybe his son too, to look at people’s souls, not on that which is only skin deep.

Rev. Bell remembered that people in Pamlico County often referred to his father as a prophet. He said that his father understood how to listen for God’s word, and again and again, God spoke to him. God made him promises, and those promises, Rev. Bell said, came true.

He was not describing the world that we watch on TV or read about in the New York Times: he was describing a world where miracles happened.

 “He never talked much to us except about the Bible,” Rev. Bell recalled.

He spoke with great admiration and appreciation for his father. On the other hand, listening to his interview, I also got the feeling that he felt as if his father may have left some important things unsaid.

* * *

I was also taken with the project’s interview with a gentleman named Charlie Styron. Mr. Styron was born in Oriental in 1933.

I wish I had known him. He spoke with a beautiful voice, full of kindness.

In reflecting on his life, Mr. Styron described how he had always worked with his hands. Listening to him talk about his life, I got the impression that there was not much that he could not do with those hands.

For many years, he had worked at a sawmill and a veneer plant. But at different times, he explained, he had made his living as a heavy equipment operator, a bricklayer, a carpenter, and an electrician.

After he retired, he said, he found his greatest joy in playing with his grandchildren. He kept active, too. At the time of the interview, he was still operating a lawn mower repair business out of his home.

Passersby often saw him singing hymns and praying while he worked on the lawnmowers.

Sandra Mae Hawkins was also the project interviewer who spoke with Mr. Styron.

When she asked him, “What have been some important events of your life?” he, like Rev. Bell, did not hesitate even for a moment: “Well, to be born from above, that was the most important event,” he told her.

* * *

The project’s interview with a woman named Eula Felton Monk also stood out to me. Ms. Monk had grown up in Mesic, a rural, predominantly African American community on the Bay River.

I had a good friend there when I was young, Ed Credle, who was Mesic’s first mayor. Listening to Ms. Monk’s stories gave me a special joy because they brought back memories of Ed and his neighbors whom I got to know in Mesic back in those days, good people, all.

When Ms. Monk was a girl, she recounted, her father had been the captain of a shrimp trawler. He worked on the Bay River and out in Pamlico Sound, but he also followed the shrimp as far south as Key West.

At the time of her interview, Mrs. Monk had been a teacher for 43 years. She had retired from teaching full-time, but she was still working part time as a substitute teacher in the local public schools.

When asked about her childhood, she recalled long days of working in the fields: chopping cotton, digging potatoes, picking tobacco.

Her family worked on local farms, but also traveled to fields as far away as Merritt, Arapahoe and Aurora.

She spoke of her schoolteachers with great reverence. She had endless admiration for how they did so much, and cared so much for their students, back in those days of Jim Crow when Pamlico County’s schools were segregated by race and so little was given to the African American schools.

Mrs. Monk said that she would never forget the great debt that she owed those teachers.

When the interviewer asked her if she was religious, she, too, was matter of fact:

“I believe in God and I believe in being a doer of His word…, (and I) try very hard to do those things daily that He says that I should do in His world.”

The interviewer then asked a question with a kind of directness with respect to faith and religion that I do not often see in oral history projects.

She asked if Mrs. Monk believed in Jesus Christ.

Mrs. Monk was not caught off guard by the question in the least, and her reply was direct:

 “Oh, yes I do, as my Lord and my Savior. He is my Savior. Yes.”

When the interviewer asked her how she put her faith into action in her daily life — another question I do not often hear in oral history interviews — Mrs. Monk turned to Scripture.

“Second Timothy 2:15 says to study to show thyself approved of God, not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. I study the word of God, and then I pray.”

She also said:

“And the Bible says we should visit the sick…, the Bible says that we should reach out to those who are less fortunate than we are… and to love thy neighbor as thyself.”

She said that she strove to do all those things, though of course she acknowledged that she was far from perfect.

Then she said:

“I love God with all my heart and all my mind, and all my soul. And I would like to say, the greatest point in my life, the most important event in my life, is when I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior, when I became saved.”

* * *

As I listened to their voices, I found a comforting sense of familiarity in the way that the lives of the Pamlico County elders were entwined so tightly and so seamlessly with their faith and their churches.

I grew up just across the river from Pamlico County, and I found that their voices reminded me again and again of home and the lives of my family and the people around whom I was raised.

* * *

There was a kind of cadence to the stories of their lives, like a gentle heartbeat, held steady by their knowledge of themselves as spiritual beings and kept in time by daily prayer, Bible study, worship services, Sunday school, church suppers, choir practices, baptism, weddings and funerals.

So many little things in these interviews caught my attention, and they did so in a way that, even all these years later, they remained fixed in my memory.

Listening to the interview with Annie Squires, the 99-year-old woman I mentioned earlier, I could feel how her heart filled with joy when she played the piano at her church in Maribel.

She told the young woman who interviewed her that she had been the church’s pianist for more than half a century.

Likewise, in my mind’s eye, I could see Roosevelt Stokes Jr., another of the interviewees, as he made his weekly rounds among the frail and sick in Grantsboro’s nursing home.

He had never been a pastor or a missionary at a church, but he had his own ministry visiting those people who lived in the nursing home.

On the days of his nursing home visits, Mr. Stokes would stop and read the Bible to any of the patients who desired him to do so.

He would hold their hand, and often they would pray together. Sometimes one of the nurses would join them.

His words brought back memories for me, and maybe helped me appreciate what it was like for Mr. Stokes to read the Bible by those bedsides, and how much it might have meant to those who lay there. Because, now and then, I have been called on to read the Bible at a bedside, too.

* * *

I know these are just little moments, but even some of the passing comments in the interviews made a deep impression on me.

For instance, another of the interviewees, Emma Bell, recalled how, when she was a small child, her mother began every day by giving a Bible verse to her and to each of her brothers and sisters.

They would read the Bible passage at breakfast.

I could see them: a mother and her children, early in the mornings of what I am sure were busy days, taking a few minutes to recite Bible verses before going out into this stormy world of ours.

I also loved a little something that one of the other interviewees, Sabia Ruth Gibbs, said.

Ms. Gibbs grew up in Maribel. Way up in her 90s, she was one of the oldest people who shared her life story with the project’s volunteers.

All the same, when she was asked to pause for a moment and think about the long span of her life, one of the first things she did was reach far back in time, as if to another world, and describe the joy of singing in the choir at St. Galilee Missionary Baptist Church when she was a girl.

She remembered it like it was yesterday.

It was a memory, in her telling of it, that seemed to be made of pure light.

* * *

I doubt that I am much different from anyone else. When I am driving through the countryside, as I did last night, on my way to my family’s homeplace on state Highway 101, I go by all the homes and see the lights on and I wonder how the people that live there are doing, and do they feel loved, and, if they pray, what they pray for at night before they fall asleep.

I wonder about their prayers, and all that goes unsaid in life, and the whispered words we have between us and our maker.

At those times, I think about the quiet joys for which we show gratitude at that late night hour. I think too of the fears that go unsaid everywhere else, the dreams that we keep to ourselves, the hungers that can’t be put into words.

The interviews in “Preserving the African American Experience in Pamlico County, North Carolina” are an invaluable historical record of life on the North Carolina coast throughout the 20th century.

The more times that passes, the more special they will seem, the more important they will be.

I cherish them for that reason but also because they help me to remember that our path through life, our history, is partly what can be seen and heard and touched, and partly what cannot.

This year, the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor wanted to shake things up, get away from what has been their traditional meeting formula, and instead offer an up-close and personal, historically engaging experience.

The nonprofit’s North Carolina Summit invites you to take part in the “Black Church Crawl,” an immersive tour celebrating the history of Black churches that have housed decades of congregants in Brunswick and New Hanover counties.

Scheduled from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. April 18, the tour will allow participants to step within the walls of three historic Black churches, where speakers will delve into the stories of how these cultural landmarks came to be and their significance as spaces of faith, fellowship and community.

“Although you might live in a certain area, you might not be really invested in what’s going on,” said Nora Williams, Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor public relations and marketing campaign coordinator. “We wanted something that was happening in their community and something that they also could get involved in. Of course, anyone is allowed to participate, but we felt like this would be a great way for people to learn more about themselves and their history and the culture.”

The summit in North Carolina kicks off the first of four meetings the commission-led nonprofit holds annually in each of the states in which the corridor spans.

The corridor is one of the largest of the 62 designated national heritage areas in the country, encompassing about 2,200 miles through coastal counties from Florida to southeastern North Carolina.

“We’re one of the ones that primarily focus on people,” Williams said.

The Gullah Geechee are the descendants of West and Central Africans ripped from their native land and shipped to America, where they were enslaved to work on the coastal rice, Sea Island cotton and indigo plantations of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.

Their enslavement on isolated coastal plantations and barrier islands helped them retain many of their indigenous African traditions, which remain today through spiritual traditions, arts and crafts, and food.

They even created their own language, Gullah, a mixture of West African dialects and English that is not spoken anywhere else in the world.

Congress enacted the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor and the commission established to oversee it on Oct. 12, 2006, through the National Heritage Act of 2006 with the aim of recognizing, sustaining, and celebrating the Gullah Geechee’s contributions to American culture and history.

The nonprofit assists the four state governments and local governments within those states in interpreting the Gullah Geechee’s story and preserving historic sites, data and artifacts associated with its people and culture.

One of those sites sits just off Cedar Hill Road in Navassa, the first stop of the church crawl, an event that will feature public historian, performance artist and Gullah Geechee’s own Tyanna Parker-West, Wilmington native and WilmingtoNColor founder Cedric Harrison, and Pastor Derrick Parker.

Just last year, a multiyear, more than $1 million effort to restore Reaves Chapel, a one-room church built on the bluffs of the Cape Fear River in Brunswick County by people formerly enslaved at Cedar Hill Plantation more than a century ago, was completed.

The little chapel in Navassa was eventually 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.

Today, it is a tangible testament to those who built it, maintained it, and worshiped in it.

The crawl will continue across the Cape Fear River to downtown Wilmington, where Chestnut Street Presbyterian Church, the oldest African American presbyterian church in North Carolina, and St. Stephen African Methodist Episcopal Church continue to welcome congregants.

Services have been held at Chestnut Street Presbyterian Church for more than 150 years since it was erected during the third great awakening, a time in the United States of religious activism and social reform that occurred from the late 1850s to the early 20^th century.

Roughly a third of a mile away, congregants have filled the pews in St. Stephen AME Church’s current sanctuary since its completion in 1886. The building that stands at 501 Red Cross Street today replaced the original, simple wooden chapel whose members, about 1,500 by 1879, had outgrown its sanctuary.

“The congregation of the popular church was a powerful influence on the community and the state,” according to the North Carolina Department of Cultural and Natural Resources.

When President William Howard Taft visited Wilmington in 1909, he stopped at the church to make a speech to African American schoolchildren.

Williams said in a telephone interview last week that heritage corridor officials chose to hold the church crawl in the Wilmington area because the nonprofit organization wants to preserve and celebrate the Gullah Geechee community in New Hanover and Brunswick counties.

“We understand that Wilmington and the surrounding area is growing very fast,” she said. “Our goal as the corridor is to preserve and amplify the Gullah Geechee community in these areas, so we felt like this was a great time to highlight that community.”

Registration for the Black Church Crawl is $25, which includes transportation and a lunch featuring the culinary flare of two-time James Beard nominee Chef Keith Rhodes, owner of the wildly popular Catch in Wilmington and Voyce Bistro, his newest restaurant featuring coastal cuisine infused with Caribbean flavors.

“We would love for it to fill up and have as many people as possible,” Williams said of the church crawl. “We’re flexible and we have the ability to provide more transportation if more people are interested.”

She anticipates the organization will hold future events as part of its state summits, adding “We do see this growing and being a more interactive experience as opposed to you come in and it’s a presentation. I think we really want people to experience these spaces, experience the people.”

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

When Halifax was founded in 1760 on the south bank of the Roanoke River, the town became a thriving commercial and social hub, largely because of its access to the Albemarle Sound, but as the American Revolution took hold in the 1770s, the town found itself at the epicenter of North Carolina’s move from British rule to independence.

North Carolina’s Fourth Provincial Congress met in Halifax in the spring of 1776, when delegates from across the colony unanimously adopted a document recommending freedom from England that was later called the “Halifax Resolves,” according to state historians.

“North Carolina played a significant role in winning America’s independence,” Gov. Josh Stein said in a statement. “The creation and adoption of the Halifax Resolves on April 12, 1776 was the first official action by any colony calling for independence from Great Britain, forever cementing North Carolina’s place in history as ‘First in Freedom.’”

The state will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the document with “Prelude to Revolution: Halifax Resolves Days,” at the Historic Halifax State Historic Site in Halifax County.

Scheduled for 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday through Sunday, there will be living history vignettes, lectures, live colonial music, Tryon Palace Fife and Drum Corps performances, historic trades and weapons demonstrations, a military parade, food trucks, vendors, exhibits, tours and themed photo booths.

The site, which holds a smaller-scale observation each year in April, features several authentically restored and furnished buildings including the 1838 Jail, the 1790 Eagle Tavern and the Underground Railroad Trail. 

Halifax Resolves Days is a signature event for America 250 NC, the state’s official initiative led by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and celebrate the state’s role in the American Revolution.

Signature events like this “honor our state’s pivotal role in shaping the American story. From historic reenactments to cultural festivals, these events will inspire, educate, and unite communities across the state.”

N.C. Department of Natural & Cultural Resources Assistant Communications Director Michele Walker told Coastal Review that some event highlights include a ceremony with the state-recognized Haliwa-Saponi Indian Tribe, a living history reenactment of the Provincial delegates debating independence, the annual Halifax Resolves Day Ceremony April 12 at the colonial courthouse site, and live music and a drone show at dark on King Street.

A full schedule is available on the event website.

As part of “Halifax Resolves Days,” the state will officially open Historic Halifax State Historic Site’s newly renovated visitor center at 25 St. David St., “unveiling a modern facility and a new exhibit detailing Halifax’s significant role in the state’s history,” according to the release.

Starting Friday and continuing through Oct. 6, visitors to the center will have the unique opportunity to view the Halifax Resolves document on loan from the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

This is the first time the Resolves document – the only known copy to exist — is believed to be returning to Halifax since it was sent to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1776. The State Archives of North Carolina holds the journal copy of the Resolves that will be displayed in Halifax this fall, the state said.

“The opportunity to view this 250-year-old document in the place where it was created is a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience,” N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources Secretary Pamela B. Cashwell said in a statement. “The Halifax Resolves is one of the most important pieces of our state’s story — its date is emblazoned on our state flag — and we’re so excited for North Carolinians to see it in person.”

Halifax’s role in the American Revolution

The Roanoke River, which is one of the five largest rivers in the Southeast that flows from the foothills of the Appalachian into the Atlantic Ocean, begins in Montgomery County, Virginia, enters North Carolina in Warren County and flows through Halifax, Northampton, Bertie, Martin, Washington counties, before emptying into Batchelor’s Bay of Albemarle Sound, according to state documents.

English colonists from Virginia in the early 18^th century settled in the Roanoke River Valley and began farming the fertile land. In the following decades, a plantation system evolved that relied on slave labor to grow wheat, corn, peas, tobacco, and other staple crops for markets outside of the colony.

At the behest of the merchants, Halifax was founded in 1757 to use to their advantage the river’s access to the Albemarle Sound and its ports. Though a smallpox epidemic in 1758 stalled settlement, the town was settled in 1760 as the seat of Halifax County, which was designated Jan. 1, 1759. There were nearly 60 houses and public buildings at the time.

“This new town was at a major crossroads between North-South trading paths between the American colonies and West-East trading paths between the coast and the interior of the state. With this advantage, the small town quickly became a major trading center and river port for good moving between the backcountry, the plantations, and Virginia,” the state continues.

Not long after, the town became the backdrop for monumental political events during the American Revolution.

After the patriot victory Feb. 28, 1776, at Moores Creek Bridge in Pender County, the battle that effectively ended British rule in the colony, 83 delegates met in Halifax April 4, 1776, for the Fourth Provincial Congress of North Carolina.

Related: Rainy remembrance marks Revolution’s first decisive win

The delegates unanimously adopted on April 12, 1776, the document now called the “Halifax Resolves.”

“The Halifax Resolves were the first official action by any of the 13 colonies to call for independence from Great Britain. It is acknowledged as an important precursor to the Declaration of Independence,” Walker told Coastal Review.

The document gave William Hooper, Joseph Hewes and John Penn, the state’s representatives to the Second Continental Congress, authority to vote for independence. The Second Continental Congress was the governing body for the colonial governments that coordinated resistance to British rule during the American Revolution.

The Fourth Provincial Congress adjourned on May 15, 1776, after appointing a single Council of Safety to rule the entire colony. While the council was meeting in Halifax on July 22, 1776, the group learned that the Declaration of Independence had been signed in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.

“The council adopted a resolution declaring North Carolinians ‘absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown’,” according to the historic site’s webpage.

Cornelius Harnett, a resident and Revolutionary patriot, was selected for the North Carolina’s first public reading of the Declaration of Independence to the town of Halifax Aug. 1, 1776.

The Fifth Provincial Congress assembled in Halifax that November, and by Dec. 18, the delegation had approved the new state’s first constitution. As its last official act Dec. 23, 1776, the congress appointed Richard Caswell as the first governor of the State of North Carolina.

“This one small town of Halifax saw the adoption for national independence, the first state constitution and the election of the first governor after colonial rule. Clearly Halifax was a front runner for the independence movement in not only North Carolina, but the entire nation as well,” according to the site.

Walker said that this was the state’s big moment in Revolutionary history, and Historic Halifax State Historic Site preserves this important action for all North Carolinians.

Visitor center renovation

Division of State Historic Sites Public Information Officer Terra Schramm told Coastal Review that in 1976, during the nation’s Bicentennial, this visitor center first opened its doors to welcome guests to Historic Halifax State Historic Site, which was established in 1965.

The North Carolina General Assembly appropriated $5.2 million to renovate the visitor center in 2022 and to complete the restoration of the William R. Davie House, a part of the historic site, in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary this year, she continued.

“The renovation of this building is now complete the interior has been thoroughly replaced, new climate control systems installed, the building foundation sealed, a clerestory added to light the lobby, and the conditioned interior space expanded from 4,900 square feet to just over 6,000 square feet,” Schramm said.

Of note, is a specially designed document display case that has been built to meet security and environmental control standards outlined by the National Archives and Records Administration.

“The case will be used to exhibit a rotation of significant historical documents, starting (appropriately) with the Halifax Resolves,” Schramm explained in her email response.

Clearscapes of Raleigh was hired to design and oversee the work, with Calvin Davinport Inc. of Rocky Mount serving as the general contractor. New historical exhibits for the building were designed by Design Dimensions of Raleigh, she 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 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.

-5-

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.”

-6-

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.

-7-

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.

A powerhouse in the marine science and coastal management community, Dr. B.J. Copeland, 89, died Wednesday, Jan. 14.

Copeland left a lasting impact on the state as the director of North Carolina Sea Grant, a N.C. State University professor, and through his work with the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership. He served on the Marine Fisheries Commission, and was on the committee that drafted what is now the Fisheries Reform Act of 1997.

Copeland spent his childhood, along with his three siblings, on the family farm in rural Oklahoma. He earned his master’s and doctorate at Oklahoma State University, where he met his wife of more than 60 years, Jean Van Nortwick. They married Jan. 26, 1963.

He relocated to Texas in 1962 where he was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Texas Marine Science Laboratory at Port Aransas.

In a 2016 interview for the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center’s Coastal Voices Project, Copeland said his “Ph.D. degree is in Limnology, the study of fresh water. So, I went to the University of Texas to see if salt water was the same as fresh water and indeed it is, except for a little bit of salt!”

He moved to Raleigh in 1970 for an associate professor position at N.C. State. Copeland said in the Q&A that he moved to North Carolina mainly because of the beginning of a marine science program jointly between N.C. State, the universities of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wilmington, and Duke University.

“We were trying to start a graduate program in Marine Science and so I was a researcher and a professor in the Zoology Department, Botany Department, and the new Marine Sciences program,” he said, adding that the new marine sciences program eventually became the Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences at N.C. State. 

In 1973, he took on a new role as the director for what was then the North Carolina Sea Grant institutional program, explains an article on the 25^th anniversary of the program in the October 2001 issue of N.C. Sea Grant’s Coastwatch magazine.

Congress established the program in 1966, and began awarding grants in 1968. Sea Grant then became part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, that was formed in 1970. UNC Chapel Hill administered the Sea Grant institutional program from 1970 to when Copeland took over and relocated the program to Raleigh.

“In truth, if Sea Grant wasn’t invented in 1966, someone would invent it today. People depend on Sea Grant for good information and to help them survive,” Copeland said in the 2001 article. “You can’t argue with priorities when they are to improve the quality of life and enhance economic opportunities. That’s what Sea Grant is all about.”

Copeland said that in the early days of trying to gather input on research and extensions needs, he talked with a man who working his eel pots and crab pots. Copeland said he asked the waterman what the program could do for him and the man responded, “’Sounds like you guys are just looking for something to do.’”

Copeland got the message, though. For Sea Grant to be accepted, the program would need to be relevant and deliver good information, he said in the article.

He began hiring staff who brought in their own experiences, leading the program to marine advisory work, promoting shellfish culture, addressing seafood processing issues, developing seafood recipes, outreach efforts, and research.

When Copeland took over the program in 1973, his goal was to elevate N.C. Sea Grant from an institutional program to be designated a Sea Grant College Program, which happened in July 1976. The program also got a budget of $1 million.

The federal-state partnership was supported with $2 in federal funds for each $1 in state funding, but in 1980, Sea Grant was zeroed out of the federal budget, leading to Copeland spending many days in Washington getting the Sea Grant message out, according to the 2001 article.

He said at the time that it wasn’t a stretch to show that Sea Grant was worth something and worth keeping.

“The direct impact was evident in the growth of the extension program. Initial work in fisheries and marine education were soon joined by aquaculture and mariculture. Coastal processes work increased, as did coastal law and policy efforts,” the article explains.

Copeland left Sea Grant in 1996 and began serving as graduate administrator for the Zoology Department at N.C. State. He retired from the university in 2002.

Current N.C. Sea Grant Executive Director Susan White told Coastal Review that she was fortunate have had Copeland as an early and regular mentor when she joined the North Carolina Sea Grant program as director in 2012.

“We had great lunches together, sometimes here in Raleigh sometimes closer to his home, and his knowledge of the intricacies of a statewide program that evolves regularly with the pressing needs of the times was relevant and timely as I was still learning the many paths for NC Sea Grant,” White said.

“B.J. always had great stories to tell about his time with NC Sea Grant, the challenges of federal funding support ebbing and flowing, the great characters of each of the team members, and his enjoyment of his time with the program. B.J. joined us for retirement parties and program reviews throughout the past decade, keeping his finger on the pulse. His practical advice, and huge laughs, were wonderful to be on the receiving end of,” she continued.

Copeland’s work with what is now Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuarine Program predates his time with Sea Grant and, once he began directing Sea Grant, his partnership with APNEP grew.

Copeland said in a Q&A with the program that he “was involved with APNEP before it was APNEP – before it even existed, in fact.” APNEP is an effort to understand, protect, and restore natural resources of the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system in North Carolina and Virginia, its website explains.

The only National Estuary Program in the 1960s was the Chesapeake Bay. In the late 1960s, “somebody got the happy idea that Congress ought to have an annual or biannual report on the status of the nation’s estuaries, so they commissioned one,” Copeland explained.

He went to Chapel Hill in 1968 to work on a report on the nation’s estuaries. He and the late Dr. Howard Odom wrote “Coastal Ecological Systems of the United States.”

“To do research for it, we went to every state and gathered material that had been written up or stuck in a drawer, and we took that data on coastal systems and turned it into a book. It was the first work on the status of the nation’s estuaries,” Copeland said.

A handful of Congressmen in the 1970s, including Walter Jones from North Carolina, who was chair of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, pointed out that there’s an estuary in North Carolina.

Copeland continued that the whole setup of the National Estuary Program was changed to include not only Chesapeake Bay, but also other estuarine systems. The Albemarle-Pamlico system “includes a lot of water and a lot of territory – we were known as the second-largest ecosystem on the East Coast.”

In the early 1980s, work began on establishing the Albemarle-Pamlico as a National Estuary Program, and he helped form the first technical committee. “In 1987, we got the first grant for the program – for the Albemarle-Pamlico Estuarine Study (APES). We were a part of the National Estuary Program, authorized by Congress earlier that same year,” he said.

At the time, there were water quality problems that he described as “astronomical,” with algal blooms in the Chowan River, Albemarle Sound and Pamlico River. The Neuse River had fish kills.

“We had a crisis. You couldn’t sell seafood for a year, so we had to solve this problem. You’ve got to turn this thing around or the seafood industry is going to go down the tubes – that’s the reason for the program. But what people sometimes forget is that you can’t do all this at once. You’ve got to prioritize, you’ve get something understood and you find out it’s really connected to something else over here – it’s not easy,” Copeland told APNEP. “And so, we began to work. We had technical committees and proposals for projects and for priority research, and things began to trickle into state policies and state government.”

After the technical committee completed the Albemarle-Pamlico Estuarine Study and produced the Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan for the region in 1994, the project was renamed as the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuarine Program. In 2012, program was changed to partnership.

Southern Environmental Law Center Senior Attorney Derb S. Carter Jr. told Coastal Review that Copeland was leading the state’s Sea Grant program when the Coastal Area Management Act was enacted in 1974 and when the Albemarle Pamlico Estuarine Program launched. 

“Effective environmental and natural resource programs must be based on sound science.  We are all fortunate that B.J. was passionate about ensuring programs to manage our coastal resources incorporate the best science,” Carter said.

It was also in the 1980s when Copeland was appointed the first time to the Marine Fisheries Commission, and eventually helped draft the Marine Fisheries Reform Act in the 1990s.

In the 2016 Q&A for Carolina Coastal Voices project, Copeland said he became involved with fisheries management because Sea Grant has programs on commercial fishery, recreational fishing, interactions, management of fisheries, how things worked, and could translate research into management.

“And I got into fisheries management for real when I was appointed to the Marine Fisheries Commission in the 1980s, under the so-called, ah, Egghead Commission,” he explained, adding he served on the commission for four or five years before it dissolved.

“I mean, the state government decided that commissions weren’t really the way to go, so the Marine Fisheries Commission was actually dissolved and they started over again. And so there was legislative action to create a new commission, which kept getting things added to, and added to, and added to until we have a 19-member Marine Fisheries Commission,” he explained. This was in the mid-1980s.

“And that was also a disaster, because 19 people can’t make any kind of decision,” Copeland said.

The committee argued a lot and “what happened with the Fisheries Moratorium Act, I mean–that was one of the factors, that we had an unwieldy commission — no way to get there — we had regulations right and left, none of which were related to others. People were kind of fed up with the whole idea,” Copeland said. The fisheries moratorium “came because they wanted to stop, look, consider, and really come up with something. And so, we had a three-year moratorium on anything; on any regulation, on any activity, any new activity. And that resulted in the Fisheries Reform Act.”

The North Carolina General Assembly approved in 1994 the moratorium on selling any new commercial fishing licenses and established the 19-member Fisheries Moratorium Steering Committee to study the state’s coastal fisheries management process and recommend improvements.

The committee issued a draft report in late summer 1996, held 19 public meetings statewide, and adopted a final report in October 1996 that formed the basis for the Fisheries Reform Act, which was signed into law Aug. 14, 1997, according to the oral history project, calling it the “most significant fisheries legislation in NC history.”

Copeland was on the moratorium steering committee and as director of Sea Grant, he said he represented the research and information side.

As part of the moratorium, Copeland said, funds were appropriated for research that was administered through N.C. Sea Grant college program, and “I think I knew about all of the players. So, communication and interaction amongst the players was also important, and Sea Grant played a role in that, as well.”

Another part of Sea Grant’s role was to get the information out broadly and quickly, Copeland said they did that through a network “and we traded on two very important elements: one of them was the truth. If you’re a bearer of the truth, you usually get along pretty well. And so we had a reputation for doing that. And secondly, we thought that information was a necessary ingredient for anything we did. And so, we were doing that, too. It was kind of a natural fit.”

The committee was tasked with creating parameters for a Marine Fisheries Commission that “could actually function,” Copeland said, trimming it down from 19 to nine. The commission has three people from the commercial interests, three people from recreational interests, and three at large, all appointed by the governor. He served on the newly structured commission for 12 years.

Copeland said in the Q&A that “we were purveyors of the truth. We had a reputation of, you know, you can come and ask Sea Grant a question, you were going to get an honest answer. And so we could be a player without taking a side. And that was really important, because most people take sides somewhere, sometime. And so we worked very hard at not taking a side.”

He lamented that fisheries is going to take a hit because of misinformation, in the 2016 interview.

“Some of these environmental issues, which are going to get scuttled because of some misinformed position, somebody who’s more powerful than somebody else will get their way and so on. I mean, they practice the Golden Rule, you know: them what’s got the gold, rules. So, you know, I think things are going to get worse before they get better. I keep thinking that, one of these days the general public’s going to wake up and say, ‘We need to get rid of this bunch!’ but that’s not happening,” he said.

After the Fisheries Reform Act, Copeland said in an interview that he went back to the academic department at N.C. State and taught a couple of courses, retiring in 2002.

North Carolina Coastal Federation founder Todd Miller told Coastal Review that Copeland influenced the direction of coastal science and management in North Carolina for more than half a century.

“After ‘retirement,’ he continued to shape coastal policy and practice as a member of the N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission, an active participant in the Albemarle–Pamlico Estuarine Partnership, the Coastal Habitat Protection Plan process, and numerous other civic efforts,” Miller continued. “He built a Sea Grant program in North Carolina that earned international respect and, importantly, translated coastal research into practical solutions for real-world management challenges. Through his leadership and service, he profoundly influenced efforts to protect and restore the North Carolina coast and left it stronger for future generations.”

He and his wife owned a farm near Apex from 1978 until 2002 and later a farm near Pittsboro, according to his obituary, and he found joy in gardening and farming.

“For many who knew and loved him, B.J.’s deep voice and his loud belly laugh will always be remembered. His excellent memory and quick wit made him an entertaining teller of stories and jokes. We can only hope that some of us can tell them as well as he did. B.J. will long be remembered with gratitude, admiration, love and a big smile,” his obituary states.

His memorial is at 2 p.m. Friday at Pleasant Hill United Methodist Church in Siler City.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in memory of B.J. Copeland to: Boys & Girls Homes of North Carolina, P.O. Box 127, Lake Waccamaw, NC 28450, or Pleasant Hill United Methodist Church at P.O. Box 1322, Pittsboro, NC 27312. Arrangements are by Donaldson Funeral Home and Crematory.

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.”

At first glance, the four, multi-colored snakes might be crawling across the cover of the long out-of-print paperback.

The chilling dead-eyes, the intricately patterned scales, the pointed heads and slender bodies are practically lifelike illustrations drawn by Donald R. Brothers, the same man who wrote “An Introduction to Snakes of the Dismal Swamp Region of North Carolina and Virginia” in 1992.

But what was then another modest nature guidebook, is now a remarkable collection of precise drawings created by a self-taught artist, a professional natural scientist and lifelong snake lover raised on the edge of the Dismal Swamp.

“Everyone that would see it would say, ‘Oh, man, this is so good to have,’” George Jackson, Brothers’ first cousin, said from his family’s cottage in Kill Devil Hills. As he showed off an old copy of the book, he added, “That’s what led to me pushing him to do it again.”

Jackson, 76, grew up with his older cousin in Elizabeth City, where Jackson still lives with his wife Blair. Brothers, 88, who is now retired and resides in Boise, Idaho, where he spent much of this career, was initially reluctant to do an update because of health issues.

“I said, I’ll do all the legwork. All you have to do is say yes, and I’ll make it happen,” Jackson recalled, adding he was relieved when his cousin agreed.

“I think one of the real jewels of this is that it’s written by a guy who was born here, lived here throughout his high school years, and this is when he developed this fascination with snakes.”

What’s also so impressive about his cousin, Jackson added, is that he had failed three years of school before he finally managed to graduate from high school, and it was only years later that he was diagnosed with dyslexia. Even more surprising to Jackson, he never saw his cousin draw, and had no idea he was such a talented artist. To him, the drawings provide the most unique value.

“If you’re trying to get straight on snakes, by looking at something — rather than it being a shot of a snake in the wild — it is from someone like Donald who just spent hours and hours and hours with a specimen, looking at it and drawing it,” Jackson said. “But there is an art form here that is important,” he added, not just for art’s sake, but as a depiction of nature as viewed by the artist.

When the Virginia state herpetologist J.D. Kleopfer, with the Virginia Division of Wildlife Resources, saw the drawings, he told him that he was amazed at Brothers’ accuracy in his illustrations. In fact, he said he had counted every scale on one of the snake drawings, and it was completely accurate.

In an interview, Kleopfer agrees that the book shines the most thanks to Brothers’ hand-drawn artwork.

“Biological illustrations are a kind of a thing of the past,” he said. “They’re a dying art form.” Elaborating on what he had conveyed to Jackson, Kleopfer was impressed at the beauty of the drawings.

“There’s such incredible detail with the scale count or the scale pattern on the head and on the belly and on the animal itself,” he said. “That’s really finite detail to have as a biological illustrator, and because photography, basically, you know, took over.”

After consulting with Kleopfer and other herpetologists, Jackson made relatively minor updates on species and taxonomy.

Although the information is accurate, the book, then and now, is intended for nonprofessional readers, or as the revision says, “a cultural artifact that provides a snapshot” of the snakes in the region, and the author’s relationship to them. Two appendices are included with details on snake name changes and identifying shed snake skins.

The 2025 book was published in August, with a suggested retail cost of $24 from select outlets or tidaltalebooks@gmail.com.

But Jackson, who is a semi-retired lawyer, admits he doesn’t particularly like snakes, and still remembers his revulsion as a kid when Donald Ray, as he was known then — the oldest of his eight cousins — had asked him to carry a burlap sack filled with live water snakes. And then there was his bedroom, smelling of formaldehyde, lined with big, snake-filled jars.

“At that age, snakes are like monsters,” he said. “But I just remember my grandparents letting me go in there and you didn’t have to be told ‘Don’t touch anything.’ I didn’t.”

Still, Jackson said he appreciates the importance of snakes in the natural world, and the value of a guide book on snakes in the region to all the nonscientific folks who enjoy the outdoors, or are curious about the snakes in their yard.

The guide is as thorough as any nonscientist could want or need. There’s information about the appearance, habitat, diet, behavior and even reproduction of numerous regional snakes, from worm snakes to rattlesnakes, and whether they’re venomous and how to identify them.

Brothers, who has six children, 24 grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren has been married to his wife Judy for close to 50 years. In addition to a full career in various natural sciences positions, the author, along with his wife, also managed to build a passive solar-powered home with a huge garden and numerous livestock they raised for food.

“We did the forming, framing, glazing, roofing, painting, plumbing, electrical, interior work and cabinets,” Brothers wrote on his website. “Only pouring the concrete, countertops and carpeting were done by others. Our home would be one of the first thermal envelope home build in Idaho.” 

As he described his youth, Brothers said he grew up about a 10-minute bicycle ride from the southernmost edge of the swamp — “a fine place to study snakes.”

In an earlier memoir Brothers wrote, “Swamp Water in My Veins,” he told how he began collecting articles about snakes when he was young and writing things down. But he continued to struggle in school, with one teacher reporting that “Donald is interested in snakes and not much else.”

“Dispelling false popular beliefs about snakes was one of the primary objectives of the book,” Brothers wrote, explaining why he wrote the 1992 guide. “This was important because such beliefs contribute greatly to anxiety and fear.”

A partial list: snakes are slimy, they can jump, their tongues can sting, they can hypnotize their prey, they don’t die till sunset, the hiss of a snake is poisonous and some can crawl as fast as horse can run.

“More education is needed to dispel false popular beliefs and appreciate these interesting and important creatures of the animal kingdom,” he said.

As someone who also loves snakes, Kleopfer, who has served as Virginia’s state herpetologist for 20 years, agrees that snakes are misunderstood.

“You know, snakes can be very polarizing,” he said. “Of course, you have the whole Garden of Eden story, which doesn’t help. There’s probably no other animal, group of animals that has more misinformation and folklore about it than snakes.”

But snakes eat lots of things we don’t want to deal with — such as carrion, he said.

“Snakes play an incredible role in the ecology of our ecosystems and controlling rodents and pests and stuff like that,” he said. “They’re also food for other animals as well.”

And snakes want nothing to do with people, so the best thing is to accept them and let them be.

“I always said that resolves 99% of all wildlife interactions, particularly with snakes,” Kleopfer said. “Just follow those four easy words: ‘Just leave it alone.’”

Even venomous snakes are not nearly as sinister as their reputations have them.

“Cottonmouths, or water moccasins, have a curiosity factor about them, but those things are big babies,” he said. “I mean, you really have to do something extraordinarily stupid to get bit by one. Yeah, they’re venomous, but they’re quite reluctant to strike.”

But all the better if Brothers’ well-illustrated book helps educate people about the value of snakes and basic science of herpetology.

It’s just a very cool historic document,” Kleopfer said. “It would be a nice addition to anybody’s literary collection if they’re into that kind of natural history or regional type of history.”

Though sleek and beautiful as they may be, he conceded, snakes fall short of the cute and winsome appeal of other animals that share their neighborhoods.

“They’re never going to be embraced like our furry and feathered friends are.”

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).

Jean Beasley was one of those people seemingly born to lead, happy to work in the trenches with a fervor and tenacity that magnetized others to her.

It was her charisma, her penchant to teach others about sea turtles, her drive to protect the iconic ocean dwellers, and her determination to carry out her daughter’s vision that led to the founding of the beloved Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center on Topsail Island.

Beasley died early Tuesday morning “in the company of loved ones,” according to a center Facebook post. She was 90.

As word has spread of her passing, the center has received an outpouring from former interns expressing how Beasley’s passion and guidance shaped not only their career paths, but also their lives.

“I can attest to that because my life was completely changed after I met her,” Terry Meyer, the center’s deputy and conservation director and Beasley’s longtime friend, said Wednesday morning.

Meyer was introduced to Beasley in 1995 at Topsail Beach’s annual Autumn With Topsail Festival. Tucked somewhere among booths featuring handmade arts and crafts was Beasley’s stand, where she explained the Topsail Turtle Project Nesting Program to any interested passersby.

“She mentioned that there was a nest in front of her house if we wanted to go look at it. She lives about a block away from my house so I did walk down there, and she came charging out of the house in a very protective mode, which I would later learn the turtle people do,” Meyer said.

Those initial, brief encounters would later prompt Meyer to attend a volunteer meeting of the Topsail Turtle Project.

“She’s so charismatic. When I left that meeting, I thought protecting sea turtles was the most important, noble thing I could do with my life. I mean, she’s just, it was like three hours of brainwashing, and I never looked back,” Meyer laughed.

By that time, Beasley had long established a home in Surf City.

The native North Carolinian grew up in Henderson, a small town a little more than 40 miles northeast of Raleigh. She was awarded a full scholarship to Duke University, where she earned a degree and received her teacher certification in 1958.

She first moved to Topsail Island with her husband, Fred, after he received orders to Camp Lejeune, according to a 2005 report in the Wilmington Star-News.

The couple lived on the island two short years before Fred Beasley got out of the Marine Corps and took a job in Ohio, where they lived for 20 years. There, they raised sons, Barney and Kevin, and daughter, Karen.

Each year, the family would vacation in Topsail Island. Jean and Fred returned to Topsail Island to live full time in the early 1980s after he retired.

Less than 10 years after their move to Surf City, Karen, 29, died in 1991 from leukemia. Jean picked up the torch and carried forward Karen’s plans for the turtle project.

Within five years of Karen’s death, Jean struck up a deal with Topsail Beach to lease a small, waterfront lot nestled along Banks Channel and just behind town hall for $1 a year.

The new sea turtle hospital opened in 1997.

“A lot of groundbreaking, excellent work went on in that 900-square-foot building and that’s where our heart was,” Meyer said. “When I tell people we literally fished off the end of the dock to feed the turtles, that is a true story. Those are our humble beginnings. It was all running on a dream and it was running on Jean’s charisma.”

Beasley “had a big smile, and she had a hug for everybody, but she also had an iron will and she ran the program from a position of strength,” Meyer said.

Patient demand pushed the hospital to capacity, and then some, on a recurring basis, and, in 2013, a new, 13,000-square-foot center was opened on Surf City’s mainland.

“Our success over the years and being in this building today is because of Jean’s stewardship and leadership and our ability to properly manage our funds while saving hundreds of turtles,” Meyer said.

As of Wednesday, the hospital had cared for “at least” 1,701 turtles, she said. Of those, 1,290 had been rehabilitated and released.

In its Facebook post announcing Jean’s death, center officials thanked her “for sharing your dreams with us.”

“You inspired us to create a better world – for the turtles, for Mother Ocean, and for all. We will do our best to carry forward your legacy. Swim in Peace.”

Beasley was awarded Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sea Turtle Society in 2017.

She stepped down as the center’s executive director in 2021 and later moved to Tennessee to live with one of her sons and daughters-in-law, Meyer said.

Up until this year, Jean would return in the summers to visit the center.

“It was very important to us and to her to have her meet with our interns and just impart some stories and some history,” Meyer said. “We followed her because she demonstrated every day what it took to save sea turtles because she did the work. She was down and dirty doing the work every day, and she didn’t shy away from any task. I watched her – from medical treatments on sea turtles to gluing PVC together, to repairing a pump – she did all things and she led by example. You know, it’s like she was our beating heart.”

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.

A group of volunteers spent peak visitor season this year under the blistering sun and swarmed by thick clouds of flying insects, all to make sure the wild horses, including the newborn foals, inhabiting Cape Lookout National Seashore and Rachel Carson Reserve were undisturbed by the thousands who make their way to the barrier islands that are only accessible by boat.

The volunteers are part of the Pony Patrol program, which trains the “Pony Patrollers,” as they’re called, to share with visitors how to safely observe the two herds. One herd is on Shackleford Banks, the national seashore’s southernmost island, and the other is on the reserve site that is across Taylors Creek from downtown Beaufort.

The National Park Service, Foundation for Shackleford Horses and reserve staff organize the outreach effort that just wrapped up its third year. The foundation is the federally designated co-manager with the park service of the herd.  

Rich Rehm, a volunteer who leads the program for Cape Lookout, explained that the goal of Pony Patrol for the park service is twofold. First is to make sure guests on Shackleford Island stay at least 50 feet from the horses and keep their dogs leashed. Second, as representatives of the National Park Service, is to answer questions visitors may have about the horses, the island, or the seashore.

Paula Gillikin, stewardship coordinator for the 10 reserve sites, has been the longtime manager for the herd at Rachel Carson Reserve, one of 10 protected sites along the coast managed by the North Carolina Coastal Reserve and National Estuarine Research Reserve, under North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality.

“The Pony Patrol plays a vital role in supporting the Rachel Carson Reserve and our partners by helping us educate the public about the wild horse population that makes the reserve such a unique part of North Carolina’s coastal heritage,” Gillikin said. “When the public understands what the horses need to survive and be healthy, they are more likely to give the horses the space they need to thrive. This understanding also keeps our visitors safe.”

Foundation President Margaret Poindexter told Coastal Review that the 2025 season had been the largest “and undoubtedly our most successful,” despite its “very difficult start.”

What made 2025 special, she continued, was the determination and resolve of the close to 50 volunteers.

The rocky start began when the first foal of the year from either herd was born at the Rachel Carson Reserve in early May, Poindexter said.

“Her presence was immediately known — lots of eyeballs in Beaufort are constantly on that herd. Just a few days after her birth, and within days of the Pony Patrol season launching, a group of visitors got too close to the foal, the anxious stallion gathered up his mare to get away from them, and the foal was stranded on the oyster rocks unable to keep up with its mama,” she explained.

Though the reserve staff was able to intervene and reunite the two, the Pony Patrollers “were very disappointed that something so potentially tragic could happen so early into the season, before the real rush of visitors even started,” Poindexter said.

Then, on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, a newborn foal was found alone on the east end of Shackleford, on the oceanside. The foundation “made the difficult decision to remove it in order to save its life. Again, the Pony Patrollers were discouraged, afraid that perhaps human intervention had caused the foal to be separated from its mother,” she continued. 

Another foal on Shackleford was separated from its mother 10 days later, found in the mud on the sound side, likely as the result of a stallion fight. It too was removed to save its life, Poindexter said.

Volunteers Margo Hickman and Laura Palazzolo, both Carteret County residents, agreed it was particularly heartbreaking to see the foals removed from the island earlier this summer. Hickman said it was uncertain if they would survive.

“’The Americas’ TV episode about Shackleford was beautiful, but it drew a lot of attention — and with that came more pressure on the horses,” Palazzolo said. The first episode, “The Atlantic Coast,” of the NBC series dated Feb. 23 began with the wild horses at Cape Lookout.

“There were multiple incidents of visitors getting too close, trying to take selfies, or even attempting to pet the ponies,” Palazzolo explained. “We can’t say for sure why two foals were abandoned on the east end, but human interference could certainly have played a part.”

Poindexter continued that “Shortly after those incidents, a filly was born on the west end of Shackleford, in an area that receives significant visitation because of its close proximity to the ferry drop and the crossover to the beach. The Pony Patrollers committed themselves to ensuring the safety and survival of this little girl.”

The volunteers scheduled regular tours in the area around the pair and reported to each other after their shift about the whereabouts and well-being of the foal and her mother. “They intercepted numerous visitors who were curious about her, moving them away from her so as not to interfere with her nursing and nap times, but sharing insider information about her and her harem to create a unique and enhanced visitor experience,” Poindexter said.

Some of the volunteers that have been with the program since the first season, including retirees Hickman and Deb Walker, have been captivated by the filly.

Walker, who grew up in Newport and returned after retiring in 2015 from several decades as an educator in Mississippi, said a major highlight for her this summer was the newborn filly.

Hickman called the filly’s birth “the icing on the cake” for her. “We all became part of her family as her honorary aunts. We weathered heat and humidity and some god-awful mosquitoes daily to check on her.”

Fellow Pony Patroller Cindy K. Smith, who began volunteering in 2024, was the first of the group to spot the filly.

Smith, a Straits resident, said she was fortunate to be leading a tour that day in June when she spotted the foal shortly after birth. “Her little legs wobbled to steady herself against her Mama.”

Smith is photographer, naturalist and guide who has been visiting Shackleford and Rachael Carson for 30-plus years and joined Pony Patrol because, like so many others, she has a “fascination with the ‘ponies.’”

Smith said once realized the foal was a newborn, she began calling seashore staff and other patrollers.

“We were all elated,” Smith continued, adding that knowing that the Fourth of July week, and the associated influx of visitors, was near, the volunteers knew extra precautions would be needed to keep her safe and at a distance from human interaction.

The volunteers were given guidance from seashore and foundation staff to developed a plan to quietly watch from afar, Palazzolo said, adding they always kept a respectful distance. “At least one Patroller was stationed on the dunes, watching and ready to gently intervene if visitors wandered too close.”

Smith reiterated that the volunteers “went over and above for this little girl, perching on dunes, hiding behind bushes or whatever it took to make sure she would not be approached. Individuals went out on their own and watched over her even when it was not a shift. I think this camaraderie bonded us in a way that made each of us better and as a whole, a more cohesive unit.”

The foal is thriving now, Palazzolo explained, and along the way, “visitors got to experience something really special. We’d share what we’d learned from our reports — her habits, her routine — and people would sit quietly to watch. We’d tell them, ‘If you stay back and give her space, you’ll see her nurse, nap, or maybe even get the zoomies.’ It became this magical moment of connection — respectful and joyful all at once.”

How Pony Patrol began

Poindexter explained that the first year in 2023 was truly a pilot, and began with around 30 participants.

“We only sent volunteers to Shackleford that first season. Rich Rehm, one of the seasoned volunteers at Cape Lookout National Seashore, stepped up and offered to be the program coordinator. Truly, without his willingness to fill that role, the program likely would never have gotten off the ground,” Poindexter said.

Rehm retired as an environmental consultant in the Research Triangle Park area and moved to in 2016 to Merrimon with his wife. He began volunteering with the seashore in 2017.

When Rehm was asked in 2019 to coordinate the program for the National Park Service, he said he passed on the opportunity. Then, the program was put on hold because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, he decided he would take up the role.

After that first year in 2023, the seashore “was pleased with the success of the program and we expanded the program to include Rachel Carson Reserve,” Rehm said. “In 2025, we expanded the program again to include the east end of Shackleford Island.”

Though the 2025 season wrapped up in late September, a call for volunteers will likely go out in the coming months from both the National Park Service and Rachel Carson Reserve ahead of the 2026 season. Gillikin, with the reserve, said Pony Patrol applications for both herds will likely be launched in January or February.

Poindexter said that those interested in joining the Pony Patrol should know that conditions are rough. “Walking over dunes, in sand, through mud and marsh, often in extreme heat and humidity, while being besieged by mosquitoes,” she said.

Despite the challenges like the heat, the bugs, the mud, and the occasional rude visitor, Palazzolo said the horses make it all worth it.

“There’s nothing like standing on those dunes, watching them go about their day. It reminds you that wildness still exists — and that it’s fragile,” she said. “I’m looking forward to checking on her this winter — and jumping right back in next summer.”

Rehm added, “If you can put up with the heat, the humidity, the bugs, and the storms by all means you should volunteer.”

Coastal Review will not publish Tuesday in observation of Veterans Day.

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 along 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.” 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.

This is a photograph of Ms. Neva Adams at work in the stitching room at the Morehead City Garment Co. in Morehead City, 1942.

Chartered in the fall of 1938, the “Shirt Factory” was first located on the second floor of a brick building a block from Bogue Sound. At the time, the Great Depression still lingered. Hoping to attract a textile company, the town’s leaders had invested in the space, the machinery, and a training program for workers.

By the time of this photograph, the company, which was started by a couple from Pennsylvania, had moved to a new building across the railroad tracks. The original building was later home to the Webb Memorial Library in downtown Morehead City.

In a way, the company’s arrival in town was an historic event. The work was hard, the hours long and, in its early years, workers were rather scandalously not even paid the legal minimum wage.

Nonetheless, a job at the Shirt Factory offered a singular opportunity for hundreds of women just before, during, and after World War II. For many, it was their first chance to do what used to be called “public work,” a catch-all phrase for any job not in the home or on the farm.

They came from near and far to the Shirt Factory. Scores of women commuted in the back of farm trucks.

Others walked from the Promise Land, the neighborhood of largely fishing families that bordered the Shirt Factory.

Some women even caught rides on the school bus from Salter Path, a fishing village all the way out on Bogue Banks.

Neva Adams, in this photo, resided in Morehead City, probably in the Promise Land. She was already a grandmother when she started working at the Shirt Factory, but she had lost her husband just before the war and was on her own.

For women like her, the Shirt Factory often seemed a godsend. To a large part, that was because of the income, of course.

But over the years, when I have been talking to women who worked at the Shirt Factory back in those days, they have often told me how much it meant to them to be part of a community of women who laughed a lot, shared stories, and supported one another.

Being with those women, they would say, was a balm for grief and loneliness and all the hurts that happen in life.

–2–

This is Ella Pittman, another of the Morehead City Garment Co.’s machine operators, at work in the stitching room in 1942.

Ms. Pittman was just the kind of woman that went to work at the Shirt Factory during the Second World War.

Born on Cedar Island in 1894, she had grown up in that remotest corner of the North Carolina coast long before bridges connected the local villages to the mainland.

Her father, Francis Marion Goodwin, was a fisherman all his life. A passel of Ms. Ella’s brothers, nephews, and cousins worked on the water as well– many of them on menhaden fishing boats.

Old timers still remember her brother, Capt. Leroy Goodwin, who was killed when a tugboat collided with his menhaden boat, the Barnegat, in 1960.

By the time that Ms. Pittman went to work at the Shirt Factory, she had come a long way in her life.

As a girl and young woman on Cedar Island, she had cooked on a wood stove or over a hearth. She had done laundry in a tin wash pot, salted barrels of fish every autumn, and had been unacquainted with electricity and indoor plumbing.

In all likelihood, she grew up helping her mother in a garden resplendent in collard greens, shallots, and sweet potatoes.

She was quite likely already well acquainted with needle and twine before coming to the Shirt Factory. Many a Cedar Island home had two hooks in the family’s kitchen walls, like the ones you might hang a hammock from, but they were put there for stitching fishing nets.

That way the women in the family could work on the family’s fishing nets In between their kitchen chores.

As a young woman, Ms. Ella married Luther Pittman, a Cedar Island fisherman. Like so many other Down East families in that day, they soon left their island home and moved into Beaufort.

When young Ella and Luther moved into town, they settled in Lennoxville, a community largely of fishing families that was actually a few miles east of Beaufort’s town limits.

Many years later, when Ella Pittman went to work at the Shirt Factory, she was probably in her 50s.

She was a mother of four, and she was likely the first woman in her extended family to do “public work” unless one of her daughters or nieces had gotten a wartime job at the Naval Section Base in Morehead City or at the big Marine Corps installation that was being built near Havelock.

The hours and working conditions at the Shirt Factory would seem grueling to many of us today.

However — and while I hate to make broad generalizations, I’m going to do it here anyway — a woman that grew up on Cedar Island in the early 1900s was used to hard work and long hours.

Even so, combining a daily shift at the Shirt Factory with a housewife’s duties could not have been easy.

Working at the Shirt Factory also posed challenges for many of those women that we might not consider today.

When I was younger, for instance, I often spoke with local women, including some of the women in my own family, who had gone from a fishing or farm life to a job at a factory or other public work during World War II.

For some, and especially older women workers, it took some getting used to, and some never did get used to it and did not last long.

Though accustomed to hard work, many said that it was a whole other thing to work by the clock, to be indoors all day, to do repetitive tasks day after day, and to have a boss with the power to tell them what to do, when to do it, when they could take breaks, and all the rest.

By all accounts, the Shirt Factory had a somewhat tumultuous first year.

Convicted on 25 counts of violating the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, including a failure to pay the minimum wage of 25 cents an hour, the company closed temporarily in May 1939. I am not sure how long the factory was idle, but the closure left more than 300 workers without a paycheck for a time.

Later in the 1940s, the company was also the scene of a bitter union drive.

During the union drive, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the company’s owners had violated the National Labor Relations Act by firing pro-union activists and intimidating workers prior to the union election. A copy of the ruling is online.

-3-

During the Second World War, a considerable part of the company’s production was for the United States Government, including in 1941, a $25,000 contract for military-issue khaki shirts, according to a March 15, 1914, report in the Asheville Times.

-4-

Here we get a more expansive view of the women in the company’s stitching room.

In my younger days, I had several elderly cousins and a great-uncle who had retired from long careers at the Shirt Factory.

I remember that when my cousins, all women, reminisced about their days at the Shirt Factory, they talked mainly about their friends there. They spoke of the feeling of sisterhood at the plant.

Long after they retired, they remained close to those women.

I did not get as much chance to be around my great-uncle Leo Simpson, and I don’t remember him speaking of the Shirt Factory, though he must have. He was married to my grandmother’s sister, Hilda.

However, I know that Great-Uncle Leo began working at the Shirt Factory in the late 1930s, soon after it first opened. For most of his career, he was the head of the factory’s cutting room.

My wonderful cousin Doug, one of Leo and Hilda’s sons, believes that his father likely met the company’s owners while he was helping to build the company’s new factory building in 1939 or ’40.

Doug was around the Shirt Factory from the time he was a small child. And when he got a little older, he had summer jobs there, before he went off and became a distinguished college professor and a leading authority on the great American educational philosopher John Dewey.

When I talked with Doug the other day, he recalled the company’s owners, Mr. and Mrs. Jackson, as being “kind, gracious people.”

He told me that Mrs. Jackson worked alongside her husband at the factory. She was, he said, a tall, imposing woman who always dressed very nicely.

Cousin Doug was not around her husband as much, but he did remember Mr. Jackson’s fierce anti-unionism.

On the other hand, he also recalled Mr. Jackson’s support for racial integration and his commitment to employing African Americans throughout the Shirt Factory. Such a policy was very out of keeping with the region’s other textile plants, and it was apparently controversial in Morehead City when first implemented at the Shirt Factory.

Judging from these photographs, the Shirt Factory had not yet opened its stitching room’s doors to Black women in 1942.

-5-

In this last photograph from the Shirt Factory’s stitching room, we meet an 18-year-old machine operator named Annie Grace Benton, about whom I also did a bit of research on her background.

I discovered that, in a way, young Ms. Benton represented another kind of woman that was drawn to wartime jobs such as those at the Shirt Factory.

According to my research, she had grown up on a farm in Seven Springs, a rural hamlet 90 miles west of Morehead City.

She had evidently just left home for the first time.

For many young women such as her, a job at the Shirt Factory meant a chance to help their families. Many a time, their wages might even have helped keep their family’s farm afloat or enabled a younger brother or sister to go to college.

For many of the young women, the Shirt Factory and other public jobs were also an opportunity to put the Great Depression behind them and to free themselves from the provincialism of farm life, and most especially from the limited roles for women that had historically existed in the farming communities of eastern North Carolina.

Military boom towns such as Morehead City were particularly exciting during World War II. The town was bustling with a Naval section base that operated there, and Army patrols were in and out constantly.

A busy USO and other local businesses catered to servicemen and women on leave from the many military installations, army outposts, and airfields that were being built on that part of the North Carolina coast in the early part of the war.

The largest were the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station, originally Cunningham Field, in Havelock and Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville.

Boardinghouses had sprung up all over Morehead City to cater to military wives and girlfriends, as well as to young farm women like Annie Grace Benton who were away from home for the first time.

Wherever Ms. Benton lived in Morehead City, probably in a boardinghouse, she was also around legions of other young women who had moved from other parts of the country to fill jobs at Cherry Point.

Those women were no ordinary lot either. At Cherry Point, they ranged from aircraft painters to flight instructors, jobs for which women, because so many men were overseas, were welcome for the first time.

Not only did many farm women, including, presumably Ms. Benton, welcome the financial independence offered by that kind of “public work,” but many also relished the liberty of being someplace where everyone did not know them, and the excitement of being liberated, however briefly, from the old mores — economic, social, and sexual — that governed women’s lives back home.

-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. 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.

-2-

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.

-3-

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.

-4-

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.

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Saturday evening was one of celebrating coastal stewards, supporters and volunteers during North Carolina Coastal Federation’s annual Pelican Awards and Taste of the Coast fundraising event.

The nonprofit organization that publishes Coastal Review was established in 1982 with the mission to protect and preserve the state’s coast and has offices on the Outer Banks, the central coast and Cape Fear region.

Held in Carteret Community College’s Joslyn Hall, the staff presented 15 Pelican Awards to those who have shared “their time and talents, through leadership, education, hands-on projects, and volunteer efforts, to inspire others and create lasting change,” according to the organization.

The Taste of the Coast fundraising celebration followed the ceremony next door in the Crystal Coast Civic Center, where there was food, live music and a silent auction.

This is the 22nd year that the organization has recognized “exceptional contributions” with Pelican Awards.

Federation Board of Directors Vice President Kenneth Chestnut told the roughly 200 in the audience that the Pelican Awards annually “recognize and celebrate the organizations, agencies, partners and the extraordinary people who work together for a healthy coast.”

He continued that the awards are “about partnerships and coming together for a common cause, and that’s the protection and restoration of our beautiful coast.”

Federation Executive Director Braxton Davis presented one of the two Lifetime Achievement Awards this year to Dr. Hans Paerl, “For a Distinguished Career Dedicated to Coastal Research, Protection, and Restoration.”

Paerl, who recently retired after 47 years, is a Kenan Professor of Marine Environmental Sciences at University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City.

“Paerl has spent decades uncovering the secret of healthy waterways and applying that knowledge to protect the coast,” Davis said.

Paerl’s accomplishments include establishing the FerryMon program, where he turned state ferries into long-term water quality monitoring stations for the Albemarle and Pamlico sounds.

“His groundbreaking research has shown how nutrients and climate affect water quality, how harmful algal blooms form, and most importantly, what we can do to safeguard our estuaries and coastal waters for future generations,” Davis said of Paerl, whose work has appeared in 600 scientific publications. His many honors include the 2003 G. Evelyn Hutchinson Award for work in oceanography, the 2011 Odom Award in estuarine science, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Harmful Algal Bloom committee.

Paerl took the podium with ease and explained to the crowd that he was thrilled to be able to talk about the scientific achievements made in the state to help protect its waters, particularly going way back to the phosphate detergent ban enacted in the 1980s, and the establishment of a total maximum daily nitrogen load for the Neuse River, “which has been effective, and I’m glad to say that we’re seeing some really good results from that now.”

But, Paerl continued, “more importantly, I think I’d like to share this award with all the students, technicians, faculty and collaborators that have worked with me.” He called himself “more of a facilitator” who knocks on doors in the legislature to point “out that good science brings good management and good decisions.”

Though he’s retired, Paerl said he is indebted to those he has worked with and hasn’t stopped knocking on doors and talking to folks and collaborating.

“I’m still showing up at work, and we’re all dedicated — I’m really speaking for all the folks that I’ve worked with — we’re all dedicated, from the science perspective,” Paerl said, to make North Carolina an example for other states, the country and the world, “in terms of using science to really make a difference, in terms of protecting our environment, saving it and making sure it’s sustainable for the long run.”

Federation Coastal Management Program Director Kerri Allen of the Wrightsville Beach office presented to David Cignotti a Lifetime Achievement Award “For Outstanding Community Leadership, Collaboration, and Dedication to Coastal Stewardship.”

Cignotti is someone “who embodies the heart and soul of this community,” Allen said, and “is one of those rare people who leads a quiet strength, deep humility and a genuine love for nature that you can feel in everything he does.”

A lifelong educator, former mayor of Wrightsville Beach and dedicated steward of the Coastal Federation, he helped launch a membership drive that brought in more than 60 new families, has been a site coordinator with an international coastal cleanup effort for at least a decade, and is a cofounder of Save Our Seas NC. Cignotti also served on the Coastal Federation’s southeast advisory committee, its board of directors, and he chaired the audit committee.

“When the coast needs a voice, he speaks up,” Allen said, whether that’s bringing attention to the use of bird poison on Wrightsville Beach, protecting trees from unnecessary clearcutting, or making sure local businesses have a say in offshore drilling proposals.

Cignotti expressed his gratitude, adding that he couldn’t think of another organization with more than 40 years of advocacy for the coastal environment, and “cannot imagine getting an award that I would cherish more than what I’m getting tonight.”

He continued that one of his favorite quotes is from Jacques Cousteau, “that people protect what they love. And I think that pretty much sums up what we’re doing here tonight. Everybody that came tonight loves North Carolina’s coast and is here to support the coastal Federation’s mission.”

Northeast region awards

Alyson Flynn, coastal advocate at the Coastal Federation’s Wanchese office, presented three awards for the Outer Banks area.

“All three of our recipients in the Northeast embody the spirit of the Pelican Award in their own unique way, from on the ground restoration work to grassroots volunteerism, to forward thinking leadership that shapes the future of our coast,” Flynn said.

Volunteer Donnie Sellers was recognized “For Exceptional Contributions and Stewardship of Our Coast.”

Sellers said he appreciates what the Coastal Federation does and all the hard work of the staff, which he says he sees firsthand at the northeast office, “but mostly I’m grateful for how generous and kind they are, because that’s — It’s probably not what I should say — but that’s really what keeps me coming back.”

Volunteer Leonard “Len” Schmitz was awarded “For Outstanding Volunteer Efforts to Advance Oyster Shell Recycling.”

Schmitz told the audience he wanted to share the award with his fellow recyclers on the Outer Banks, adding “we couldn’t do this without the help of the restaurants.”

National Park Service’s Outer Banks Group Superintendent David Hallac was honored “For Leadership and Dedication to Coastal Protection, Recreation and Cultural Resources.”

The group includes Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Wright Brothers National Memorial and Fort Raleigh National Historic Site.

Flynn explained that Hallac had since 2015 managed one of the most iconic and dynamic barrier island systems in our nation and faces regular challenges, such as rising seas, chronic erosion, collapsing homes, petroleum contamination and increasing fragility of N.C. 12, the state highway, all while welcoming over 3 million visitors each year.

“From 1985 until 1999 I came from a small town right outside of New York City to the Outer Banks,” Hallac said as he accepted his award.

“I spent the entire year dreaming about coming to the beach there. I had no idea I would end up managing the three lighthouses there and 80 miles of beaches and 200 miles of incredible coastal marshes, it’s been just absolutely amazing,” Hallac continued. “It’s a little bit ironic at the same time that all of the things that shape these beautiful places, sometimes it appears we’re fighting against it. And so it’s my goal. It’s our goal, to find ways to change, to adapt to the things that are shaping our coastline, to be able to coexist in these places and also to preserve them for future generations.”

Central Coast awards

The nonprofit Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail received a Pelican Award “For Dedicated Partnership to Protect and Restore Coastal Water Quality and Habitats.”

Water Quality Program Director Bree Charron, based in Carteret County, explained that the Friends group has, over the past five years, worked to secure and help purchase 787 acres to create an 11-mile-long trail through the North River Wetlands Preserve in Carteret County. The Friends supports the trail that connects Jockey’s Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains.

Ben Jones, a project manager with the Friends group, said its members were excited to help restore and showcase the preserve.

“There’s lots of land we still need for the trail anyway,” he said, “and I hope this is just the beginning, too, because it’s really important for us to provide access for people to these special places that we’re protecting.”

Jessica Guilianelli with Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point was recognized “For Supporting, Promoting, and Advancing the Use of Living Shorelines.”

April Hall is with the salt marsh program and said when she joined the Coastal Federation staff a few years ago she took over a living shoreline project along the Neuse River at Cherry Point.

“At the time, the Federation had secured funding to support construction of roughly 2,000 feet of a much larger 12,000-foot living shoreline project led by Jessica Guilianelli,” Hall said. “And in case anyone is trying to do the math, 12,000 feet is about 2.3 miles. So to say this was an ambitious project would be an understatement.”

The site had experienced severe shoreline erosion, losing more than 100 feet in some areas since 1994, and worsened by Hurricane Florence in 2018.

Under Guilianelli’s management, air station brass committed to a hybrid solution to repair critical bulkheads while incorporating living shorelines and native marsh plants to reduce wave energy and restore natural shoreline functions.

“I’m in a really, really interesting position as natural resources manager for the Marine Corps,” Guilianelli said, adding it’s a balance that challenges her daily. “It’s such a cool thing to be able to balance our military mission with conservation, and I’m grateful to be in that role.”

Lauren Johnson and Tamarr Moore, who recently earned their master’s degrees from N.C. Central University, were recognized “For Partnership and Inspiration to Advance the Next Generation of Coastal Professionals.”

Coastal Educator Rachel Bisesi of the Coastal Federation’s Newport office noted that the two women are the first graduates of a new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration program under their adviser, Dr. Caressa Gerald. The NOAA program supports students of color in environmental sciences.

“Lauren and Tamar have shown remarkable courage and resilience entering scientific spaces where representation is still far too limited. They broke barriers and paved the way for students of color to pursue coastal research. Their work has inspired others and opened the door for the next generation of environmental professionals and I can’t wait to see where their journey leads them, Bisesi said.

The graduates both thanked their parents and adviser, Gerald, who Moore said “opened a lot of doors for me and put me in many rooms that I would not have otherwise been in.” Johnson added that she was “very grateful to be in this room right now, along with other professionals” with the same drive and motivation.

Southeast region awards

Photographer Alan Cradick was honored “For Outstanding Volunteer Service to Our Coast.”

Coastal Education Coordinator Bonnie Mitchell explained that Cradick has been behind the camera “quietly and generously donating his time, energy and professional photography skills to help us tell the story of our work.”

Cradick, in accepting his award, said that it’s a privilege to be recognized, but that’s not why he volunteers. “I do it because I just love photography. I love the coast. I love working with professionals and professional volunteers who do so much wonderful things for the coast and for advancing the health of the of the ecosystems.”

Feletia Lee and Anna Reh-Gingerich were honored “For Dedicated Partnership and Commitment to Advance Watershed Restoration.”

Reh-Gingerich, watershed coordinator of Wilmington’s Heal Our Waterways Program, and Lee, chief sustainability officer at University of North Carolina Wilmington, have been working with the Coastal Federation on stormwater pollution in the Bradley and Hewlett creeks watershed.

Over the years, the project has resulted in rain gardens being installed and the use of permeable materials that absorb rain to retrofit parking lot drainage systems. The sites also serve as living classrooms, Coastal Federation Special Projects Manager Lauren Kolodij explained.

Reh-Gingerich said that she and Lee were honored to be recognized and thanked the Coastal Federation for supporting the effort. “This work is really easy to do when you have great partners to do them with.”

Paddling organization We the Water was honored for “For Excellence in Community Education and Inspiration for Coastal Protection and Restoration.”

The Wrightsville Beach Outrigger Canoe Club’s members paddled the state’s entire coast to advocate for clean water. The team paddled more than 340 miles along the coast over the course of three summers to raise awareness about the importance of clean water and raised more than $50,000 for the Coastal Federation, Kolodij said.

The Coastal Federation’s Kerri Allen, who is part of the outrigger club, accepted the award on behalf of the entire team.

“Every stroke counts, and when you get it right, you move as one, as a single force gliding through the waves,” Allen said, adding that “it’s a perfect metaphor for protecting our coast, we’re all on the same boat. Literally and figuratively, the threats and challenges we face are considerable, but we go farther and stronger when we move as one.”

Statewide awards

The N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries Habitat Enhancement Section was recognized “For Dedicated Service and Collaboration for Oyster Habitat Creation.”

Marine Debris Program Director Ted Wilgis of the Coastal Federation’s Wrightsville Beach office, said that the division’s habitat enhancement section had since 1996 built almost 800 acres of oyster sanctuary and a cultch-planting program, where oysters can be harvested.

Jason Peters, program supervisor for restoration work, said he and Enhancement Section Chief Zach Harrison were accepting the award on behalf of all of the dedicated and hardworking state employees who are involved.

“We’ve got a crew of vessel operators, equipment operators, divers, field biologists, supervisors all play an integral role in this work. And we’re just, we’re very fortunate to have such great staff,” Peters said.

Harrison added that he and his team were “honored and humbled to be just a small cog in such a big machine driving the North Carolina coast forward and environmentalism in the U.S. forward.”

Worth Creech of the firm Native Shorelines was honored for “For Advancing Community Oyster Shell Recycling and Coastal Restoration”

Coastal Resiliency Manager Sarah Bodin said Creech “has been an absolute transformative force in the world of oyster shell recycling and coastal restoration through tireless dedication, community engagement and innovative thinking.”

He did this by building public awareness, and relationships with restaurants, volunteers and restoration professionals. “His efforts have directly contributed to restoring oyster habitats, enhancing biodiversity and protecting shorelines from erosion,” Bodin said.

Creech told the crowd that you never know what you’ll get a passion for in life, and “you certainly don’t know whether it’s going to be something as stinky as oyster shells, but it happened to me with Native Shorelines,” adding he’s always “inspired by those who did this hard work before me.”

The Kenan Fellows Program for Teacher Leadership was recognized “For Cultivating Coastal Collaboration and Empowering Educators”

Bisesi said the program empowers “educators to lead in both the classroom and the community, and provide immersive experiences and professional development by equipping teachers to with the tools they need to inspire the next generation.”

Associate Director Mark Townley told the audience that since connecting eight years ago with the organization, “I can honestly say that the Coastal Federation is an exemplar of what a partnership should and can look like to really make a huge impact with K-through-12 public school education in the state of North Carolina.”

Attorney John Harris was recognized “For Outstanding Business and Community Collaboration to Advance Coastal Stewardship”

Coastal Federation founder and Senior Adviser to the Executive Director Todd Miller, said that Harris began working with the organization in 1997 on the Hoop Pole Creek project in Atlantic Beach. Harris is a partner in the Wyatt, Early, Harris, Wheeler firm’s Morehead City office.

“John’s legal work made it possible for the Coastal Federation to buy out a condominium and marina development and permanently protect 30 acres of rare maritime forests,” Miller said, adding that it was the first property ever purchased in the state using the North Carolina Clean Water Management Trust Fund.

“Since then, John has finally helped us conserve nearly 15,000 acres of coastal lands, forests, marshes, creeks, all protected because he made sure every deal was done right,” Miller added.

Harris told the crowd that he was “honored to be able to preserve clean water in our wetlands and to help them purchase land for our grandchildren and generations to come to enjoy what we have Here at the coast.”

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.

The historic Whalehead Club in Corolla, a Currituck Banks landmark, will turn 100 years old next month and ticketed events commemorating the centennial are on sale.

Completed in 1925, the Whalehead Club, the majestic 21,000-square-foot art nouveau mansion and centerpiece of Historic Corolla Park, was completed after three years of construction. Its $383,000 price tag at the time is about $7.1 million in 2025 dollars.

The 33 years that Currituck County has owned the property is the longest period it has gone without changing hands.

After more than three years of negotiations, the county purchased Whalehead in November 1992 from Howco Residential Development Inc., which had foreclosed on the property in 1989. That was after the failure of two savings and loan institutions, which had previously owned the property, according to a 1992 report in the Coastland Times.

Although Whalehead is now again a symbol of wealth and opulence on Currituck Banks, at the time of the county’s purchase, it was dilapidated and a shell of what it had been when construction finished 67 years earlier. Its 1992 price tag of $2.8 million included the building and 28.5 acres, and the purchase was extraordinarily unpopular with county voters. Every commissioner on the 1992 board that bought the property lost their reelection bid after the purchase.

“Most people didn’t understand what we were doing,” Jarvisburg resident Jerry Wright, who was a county commissioner at the time, recently told Coastal Review.

Whalehead was like nothing the Outer Banks had ever seen.

Multimillionaire industrialist Edward Collings Knight built the mansion as a vacation getaway and hunting refuge for himself and his wife Marie-Louise LeBel.

It had an elevator and a basement. Elevators were unheard of here, and the basement was an engineering feat for a building so close to sea level. Two Delco-brand generators provided electricity at all times.

The Knights named their Currituck Banks getaway cottage Corolla Island, a reference to the artificial island that was created by dredge and fill so the ground could support the massive building.

“The main house was erected on a hill formed by the earth dredged to create the moat. The hill made it possible for Whalehead to have a full basement that rests on sunken wood pilings, a feature that is considered extraordinary for a coastline structure,” notes the 1978 Register of Historic Places documentation.

Until 1922, the 2000-acre property had been owned by the Lighthouse Club, one of Currituck Sound’s most exclusive hunting clubs of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Although there are legends that Knight bought the Lighthouse Club after his wife, who was an avid hunter, was not permitted to hunt because of her gender, there is no evidence to support the claim.

According to a 1986 letter provided by the Whalehead Club and written by John B. Litchfield, Corolla Island was built by a local contractor and the plans for the building were somewhat vague.

“Mr. Knight, who had had training in art, drew the plans for the house,” Litchfield wrote. “He did not, however, include any specifications. I do not know who recommended my father as a builder, or how they got together. At any rate, Mr. Knight contracted with my father, J. A. Litchfield of Poplar Branch, N.C. to build the house.”

Litchfield’s observation that Knight’s plans did not “include any specifications” is consistent with the belief that Knight did not use an architect to design the house, in spite of the project’s complexity.

The Knights stayed at Corolla Island for extended periods over the next nine years, entertaining a number of guests. The last entry Edward Knight recorded was Nov. 24, 1934. Edward Knight died on July 23, 1936, and his wife Marie Louise died three months later.

This was during the Great Depression and Knights’ heirs had no interest in maintaining a vacation getaway and hunting lodge on the Outer Banks. They auctioned off many of the one-of-a-kind Tiffany designs in the houses and other art nouveau objects and started looking for a buyer.

Rep. Lindsey Warren, who represented northeastern North Carolina at the time, told his congressional colleagues about the property, and New York Rep. William Sirovich agreed to purchase it for $175,000. The closing date was to be Dec. 17, 1939, the same day Sirovich died suddenly.

Ray Adams, a Washington, D.C., meat packer with considerable political connections, instead bought the property for $25,000 in early 1940.

It was Adams who gave the property its name.

“According to tradition, in the process of clearing land for the air strip that would facilitate transportation of guests, a whale bone was found which prompted Adams to rename his estate Whalehead Club,” the National Register of Historic Places notes in their documentation.

Although a whale bone may have been found when an airstrip was being built, there is reason to believe the area was already sometimes referred to as “Whalehead.”

An August 1926 article in the Elizabeth City Daily Advance headlined “Currituck Girls Enjoyed Camping Trip” reported that the young women had “just returned from their summer camping trip at Corolla, that part of the beach known as Whalehead.”

Adams had big plans for his newly purchased property. Although interested in hunting, “his major motivation for acquiring the 2000-acre estate was to use it for entertaining the government officials who controlled the contracts that provided the bulk of his business,” according to Historic Register documents.

Adams on Nov. 1, 1940, formed Whalehead Club Inc. with 10 shares mostly held by Adams and his wife.

Knight’s plans for an entertainment center, though, were put on hold when the United States entered World War II and the Coast Guard needed a training and patrol site.

In 1942, Knight agreed to rent the Whalehead Club to the Coast Guard. Barracks were built, which no longer exist. At one time, up to 300 Coast Guardsmen were stationed at Corolla.

Adams, concerned about protecting his property, included a provision that his club superintendent, Dexter Snow, be made a chief bosun’s mate and be stationed at Corolla to look after his interests.

After the war, Adams threw himself into his plans to create a luxury resort on Currituck Banks.

“He was kind of promised a toll road that would go … like a Route 12, but all the way up to Virginia along the beach,” said Whalehead Club Curator Jill Landon. “He wanted it to be like a Myrtle Beach or kind of like an Ocean City, Maryland. We’ve got the plans drawn up with like a Ferris wheel and all sorts of infrastructure up here.”

Using his government contacts, Adams began lobbying for a beach toll road.

Adams’ plans relied on the toll road to make the project feasible, but the concept he had in mind was extensive.

The plans are on file with the Olmsted Archives at Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site. Listed as Job No. 10031, Whalehead, the documents drawn for Adams by Olmstead Brothers Landscape Architects clearly show a planned toll road with a 100-foot right-of-way, a yacht basin, shopping center and fishing pier, among other amenities.

The Carolina Virginia Turnpike Authority, or CVTA, was formed, but problems soon emerged.

Dare County Rep. Bruce Etheridge introduced a bill in the House for the “five-year-old beach toll-road project,” reported the April 17, 1953, edition of the Coastland Times.

The bill was doomed. The authority had been given powers of eminent domain, but the state Supreme Court, the article noted, had “opined that the Legislature could not give a company municipal powers nor the right to condemn private land.”

The authority also found there was little appetite in the bond market for a toll road that would cross state lines and require approvals from two states. In December 1954, the Coastland Times reported that “The sponsors of the Nags Head-Virginia Beach toll road still have not sold their bonds.”

The problem, CVTA authorities explained, was “the fact that two separate authorities and two states are involved has created legal problems which must be clarified before the bonds are sold.”

Two years later, in August 1956, it had become clear that the toll road was not going to happen. Adams’ dream of creating a sprawling resort community along the Currituck Banks was never realized.

The last entry in the Whalehead Club log recorded “that Adams died there suddenly at 6:10 p.m.,” according to the Historic Places documentation. That was Dec. 31, 1957.

The heirs to the Adams estate were able to quickly find a buyer. Portsmouth, Virginia, contractors MacLean and Wipp paid $375,000 for the estate and in turn leased the building and immediate grounds to the Corolla Academy.

The Corolla Academy had a clear vision of how the education of young men should proceed.

The Historic Places document quotes from a brochure to parents: “Corolla Academy is the result of the firm conviction that summer study for boys of secondary level is a rewarding and enjoyable experience. The time has passed when American boys can afford to waste the three months’ interval between the end of school in June and the resumption of classes in September.”

It’s not clear if it was location, philosophy or some other reason, but the Corolla Academy closed after three years.

What followed may be one of the more intriguing uses of the Whalehead Club.

The United States was in a frantic race in 1961 with the Soviet Union to be the first nation to land on the moon, and Atlantic Research Corp. was in the thick of it, designing rocket engines for NASA. The Soviet Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR, existed from 1922 until 1991 in eastern Europe and northern Asia.

The corporation, or ARC, leased the estate from Wipp and MacLean with a $1.25 million option to buy that was exercised in 1964. For ARC, the Whalehead Club was ideal for its purposes.

ARC was experimenting with beryllium as a fuel for the Poseidon rocket engines. As a fuel, beryllium has some real advantages. It’s very powerful and it’s relatively stable, although it is extremely toxic.

It became apparent that beryllium was not going to be a practical fuel, and in 1972, ARC sold the property to local Norfolk real estate developers Kabler & Riggs for more than $3 million. That firm subdivided the property but left the 35 acres around the Whalehead Club building intact.

The building was left vacant for 20 years, but as noted in the Historic Places 1978 report, the building, with its I-beam construction and 18-inch-thick walls, had been “successfully constructed to withstand the most severe coastal storms.”

Obligated to pay off the loan for the 1992 purchase of the property, Currituck County was not able to begin a full restoration of the building until 1999, when 25% of occupancy tax collections could be used.

In 2002, 10 years after the property had been purchased, the Whalehead Club opened to the public.

The original custom Steinway piano was inside and some of the original Tiffany sconces were still intact. Careful research of auction records had enabled the team working on restoration to track down a surprising number of original furniture pieces. By the time it opened to the public, the county had spent more than $1 million in restoring the building.

The Whalehead Club is available for tours. Reservations are recommended and can be made by calling 252-453-9040 ext. 226, at the site or online.

He was a lawyer, Vietnam veteran, military judge, retired Marine Corps colonel, commercial fisherman, photographer, volunteer, mentor, advocate and, to some, an adversary.

Above his extensive resume, above all else, Rick Dove was a family man, one whose devotion to his wife, children and grandchildren ran as deep as the waters he fought decades to protect.

Dove, one of the first Riverkeepers in the Southeast and the original Neuse Riverkeeper, died Aug. 22. He was 86.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday at Cotten Funeral Home in New Bern, the riverfront city Dove called home. Visitation will be held an hour prior to the service.

In professional circles, Dove was regarded as a no-nonsense, straight shooter who unabashedly took on any industry, whether it was concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, or wastewater treatment plants, responsible for polluting the Neuse River.

Advocating for water quality protections is a hard job, he would say. Polluters are powerful, well-connected and well-funded, he advised. Fighting for clean waterways requires thick skin and unyielding tenacity, he stressed.

“One of the things I remember most about Rick is that he did not sugarcoat things,” said Coastal Carolina Riverwatch Executive Director Lisa Rider. “He said exactly how things are and that was incredibly beneficial for the folks who worked alongside him. We have a lot of tough Riverkeepers out there today because of how he taught.”

His connection to the water spanned back to boyhood, when he dreamed of being a fisherman.

Dove’s shot at doing just that came in the mid-1980s when he retired after 25 years in the Marine Corps.

He wasted no time tucking away his spit-shined shoes for what he described in a Sound Rivers publication as “the dirtiest clothes I could find and became a commercial fisherman.”

“Things were great until about 1990,” Dove said.

That was the year he and his son, Todd, who fished with him, started to notice their catch sick with sores.

Dove got out of the commercial fishing business. He couldn’t justify selling sick fish, he’d later tell people.

He returned to practicing law, opening R.J. Dove and Associates offices in Havelock and Jacksonville in 1991. Two years later, a job listing advertised in a local newspaper caught his eye.

It was a newly created position called Neuse Riverkeeper. In 1993, Dove became the first to bear that title, one he carried until 2000 when he became the Southeastern representative for Waterkeeper Alliance.

Larry Baldwin distinctly recalls his first impression of Dove after taking the job of Lower Neuse Riverkeeper in 2002.

“I first got to know Rick and it’s like, dang, this guy’s going to be tough to deal with,” Baldwin said. “At that point he still had a lot of the Marine in him. Not that that was bad, but it was just different and, with Rick, it was either you’re going to get into this full-speed ahead or you might as well not get in it at all. Rick would take you at face value, but you also had to prove yourself. You couldn’t just tell him, ‘This is what I am.’ He wanted to see it and he had a way of seeing it, even when you didn’t know he was looking. He could really kind of sense who you were. If you came at Rick trying to overly impress him, you were fighting a losing battle.”

But the sometimes gruff-speaking mentor quickly became a friend, and Baldwin got to see a side of that Dove perhaps revealed only to those whom he was closest.

Dove was a prankster at heart. He was, not surprisingly, also a good arguer.

He was a private man, reserving conversation about his family unless and until he was asked about them. He rarely spoke of his time as a Marine, but faithfully met with a group of fellow Marine Corps veterans well into his golden years.

If he loved you, you knew it. He and his wife, Joanne, shared 60 years together.

“His top priority was the love of his life, Joanne Dove,” Rider said. “His commitment to his family was incredibly important to him.”

They raised two children, Todd, who preceded them in death, and a daughter, Hollyanne.

“Everything for Rick came back to family,” Baldwin said. “That was his reason for being. He loved his family and seeing him and Joanne together, you could tell they just had fun.”

Dove was a “very warm” person, one who was as tenacious on the racquetball court as he was a waterkeeper, Baldwin said.

“I am a blessed individual for having spent almost 23 years with him,” he said. “I’m not sure it has hit me yet. Never has there been somebody in my life that impacted me the way Rick impacted me, and still does. There’s never been one like him and I don’t think there ever will be. In my point of view, we have the obligation to continue what Rick started and what he continued to do. That’s my promise to not just him, but to myself, that we’re not going to let his legacy end just because he’s not here.”

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.

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This is a photograph of a pair of the Weitz Veneer Co.’s workers in one of the company’s cutting rooms in 1938.

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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.

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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.

-1-

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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 first chapter of a recently published book about Ocracoke’s unique dialect begins with the imagined experience of a visitor’s first time taking the ferry from Swan Quarter across Pamlico Sound to Ocracoke Village.

During the trip to the 14-mile-long island only accessible by boat or light aircraft, the visitor decides to explore the ferry, pausing upon hearing a group speak a sort-of familiar dialect they can’t quite place.

“You greet the group and then make the same mistake as hundreds of tourists before you, by asking ‘Where are y’all from?’ The response, ‘right here,’ accompanied by uproarious laughter, leaves you disoriented,” the scenario continues.

The mistake is “so frequent that it is part of island lore, passed down by O’Cockers – Ocracoke residents who trace back their family lineage on the island for generations.”

This encounter in the first chapter of “Language and Life on Ocracoke: The Living History of the Brogue,” sets the scene for an exploration into the once-prominent dialect now only spoken by a few hundred on the island.

Published by UNC Press, authors are North Carolina State University English professors Jeffrey Reaser and Walt Wolfram, and Ocracoke Preservation Society board member Candy Gaskill, a fourth-generation resident.

“With this prolonged and comprehensive approach to the region, the authors document the island’s changes, providing readers with a deeply researched, empathetic, and engagingly written snapshot of one of North Carolina’s most cherished places, one with a linguistic heritage worth celebrating,” UNC Press said in a release.

Wolfram told Coastal Review in an interview that he really wants people to understand that Ocracoke had this rich legacy of language.

“What’s Ocracoke famous for? Well, it’s famous for Blackbeard,” Wolfram said about the pirate that was beheaded on the island in 1718. “It’s also famous for its language,” but O’Cockers are losing this tradition that has been a part of the island culture for centuries.

The dialect was “once an iconic trait of the 200-mile chain of Outer Banks islands” but is “now merely a whisper in the region.” Now, there are less than 200 who speak some semblance of the traditional brogue, the book states, and “there are sure signs that the traditional Brogue will soon become extinct.”

Wolfram said he thinks “there are certain things that are strongly associated with that community, and the language has been one of them, and now it’s threatened. What the book does is remind them of that tradition. So in a sense, (the brogue) will be remembered with examples even when it is almost gone.”

This is their third book on Ocracoke and builds on Wolfram’s 1997 “Hoi Toide On The Outer Banks: The Story of the Ocracoke Brogue.” “Hoi Toide” is the brogue pronunciation of high tide — the long i vowel is pronounced as “oy” – and is the origin of the nickname, hoi toiders.

Reaser said in an interview that they “really wanted this to be the first linguistics beach read” and be a bit of an introduction to the linguistics, which is the study of language and structure, to make it accessible for all audiences.

The book is broken up into 24 short chapters, which can be read in any order, and touch on what the brogue is and who speaks it, if the brogue is Shakespearean English or if it’s pirate talk, how to study language, accents and dialects, about African American and Latino communities on Ocracoke, the weather, how the language is evolving, and speculation on how the brogue will evolve, or disappear.

The brogue isn’t Elizabethan, by the way, and it’s “not just pirate talk” (their emphasis) despite Ocracoke’s ties with Blackbeard.

What is it then? The short answer is that the “primary finding was that it was an English dialect that had been influenced by Gaelic languages and other English dialects that had previously been influenced by Gaelic languages.”

“We’re focused on Ocracoke, and we want to preserve and celebrate that dialect and that tradition, but there is another purpose of just getting people to understand more generally, that this is how languages work, this is how dialects work. That they’re always patterned and systematic,” Reaser explained. “Even when there’s a dialect that isn’t celebrated the way that Ocracoke tends to be, that is something that people should take seriously and value.”

Of special note is the companion website with more than 80 QR codes that link to sound or video clips on ocracokebrogue.com, all pulled from their extensive collection of oral histories, media clips, documentary footage and other materials.

“You don’t want to just read about it, you want to hear what it actually sounds like,” Wolfram said.

A peek between the pages

Many of the chapters are based on stories from villagers, such as the first chapter, “Do they take American money over there?” That’s coming straight from the O’Cockers’ stories, Reaser said.

There’s even an anecdote in the book about a British Broadcasting Co. crew that traveled to Ocracoke with the intention of having residents recite lines from Shakespeare’s plays.

Reaser said that having the BBC visit was a “really funny experience,” because they were sure the story was that Ocracoke had preserved Elizabethan English.

“We’re trying to tell them otherwise,” he said, and tried to direct their attention to how interesting the community is with its “really rich mix of all these historical traditions,” but they stuck with their story.

“They actually had the complete works of Shakespeare, and they’re trying to get locals to read it,” he said, expecting it to sound like they were at the Globe Theater, “which is so insulting.”

So, some of the performers in the community recognized what was happening, and decided to put on their best British accent, and overdo the stage performance.

“What the BBC captured was something that’s not even close to the local dialect,” Reaser said, but they aired it, and they must have received enough feedback because you can’t find it anywhere on their website. An updated version has been released but it still pushes the Elizabethan myth.

Wolfram said the publication features stories that people aren’t necessarily aware of as well, like the prominence of the one African American family that moved there in 1865 and maintained the family as a unit until the late 2000s, and how men’s and women’s speech patterns were affected by changing economic drivers, namely the village increasingly depending on tourism.

“We want people to remember how the Black family fit and didn’t fit into the community,” Wolfram said.

Women were in the service industry as tourism grew for the village while men continued to focus on water-related work, Reaser said. The brogue then became “crystallized as this artifact of masculinity, where it never had that in the past.”

Appreciating Ocracoke

Wolfram first heard about Ocracoke as a new professor at N.C. State in 1992.

In the acknowledgement, Wolfram explained that he and his wife decided to travel the state to experience different communities. While explaining these trips to his colleagues, another faculty member told him to “take a trip to Ocracoke, where ‘the people speak Elizabethan English.’”

Wolfram said he recognized the comment to be a “simplified romantic myth often associated with long-term isolated language varieties such as Appalachian English, but I was intrigued.”

That first trip was the catalyst to him devoting more than three decades and taking hundreds of trips to the island to learn more about the village’s families and their history.

When Reaser was a graduate student at N.C. State in 2000, he joined Wolfram on a trip and became just as enthralled with Ocracoke.

The two emphasized how grateful they are to have been welcomed over the years.

There’s a real love of the community and people who live there. “They’re so generous to us. It’s an incredible experience,” Reaser said.

Wolfram said the residents “have been incredibly collaborative and cooperative with us, and we can’t thank them enough for that.”

He feels that when researchers study a community, it’s nice for academics and their reputation, “but we want it to be meaningful” for the communities who give their time and resources.

“We do these sorts of sophisticated analyzes, but what does the community get out of it?” Wolfram continued, explaining that he finds it “ethically inappropriate” when academics go to a community for information and never see them again.

People need to know what you’re doing with the stories, histories and cultures they share with you, and how what you’re doing can help the community, Wolfram said, adding he and his team try to help with any project or program they can as a way to thank the community for “being so generous in terms of talking to us, working with us, and allowing us in.”

HARKERS ISLAND — It takes countless hours of work for the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center to fulfill its mission of preserving Down East Carteret County’s heritage.

Located next to Cape Lookout National Seashore’s visitor center on Shell Point, offering on most days a view of the diamond-patterned lighthouse across the sound, the museum spotlights the history and traditions of the 13 unincorporated communities in the eastern part of the county through exhibits, programs and events.

While Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher and about a dozen volunteers were busy setting up the morning of July 3 for the annual All-American Shrimp Fry taking place that Saturday, July 5, she told Coastal Review that “It’s the work that makes this place what it is” and the museum “was built on volunteers.”

From converting an old doctor’s office to the gift shop housed in the facility, clearing land and pulling stumps from Willow Pond behind the museum, to creating beautiful quilts and feeding thousands fresh local seafood and sweet puppies, “Core Sound has always been and still is — and hopefully will always be — grounded in the hard work, talents and dedication of the people of our community,” she explained.

So, when Gov. Josh Stein inducted Amspacher and nine others June 25 into the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, the highest civilian honor in the state, she didn’t tell a soul.

Amspacher, who has been leading Core Sound since it was established in 1992, had been in Raleigh that last week of June with others fighting against a proposed law that would ban commercial shrimp trawling in the state’s inland waters and within a half-mile of the shore. The House chose not to push the contentious bill through.

She was reluctant to accept the award at the time because, she said, it wasn’t only her who had made the museum a success, and didn’t feel like a time to celebrate. Amspacher decided to meet with the governor anyway because it was a chance to speak to him about the proposed trawling ban.

She wrote in a social media post a week later a “confession of guilt for accepting something good that belongs to everybody that I have mommicked all along the way.”

Amspacher thanked everyone for their congratulations, “but know … WE have accomplished NOTHING alone. Since I moved back home in 1982 it’s been quite a journey, thank you to everyone who is still holding on for our fishing communities no matter what it takes,” she wrote, adding that she hopes her daughter, Katie, remembers when she “puts me in the ground on #redhill under those oaks to post a sign somewhere .. ‘Work is love made visible.’ I believe that … I do love ‘my crowd’ … and love means work.”

Amspacher paused between tasks the morning of July 3 to reiterate that she’s truly grateful for all of the volunteers, especially the young ones “who keep showing up to do the work it takes to keep the museum’s work moving forward.”

Her “shrimp boys” Liam Calabria, Nick Davies and Jackson Saunders, were among those setting up tables and chairs. The three best friends grew up together in Raleigh.

Calabria explained during a break that the nickname came from when he and his older brother, who is in college now, began helping at Core Sound about five years ago.

The first few years, “We had to clean all the shrimp, so that was the main focus, and then we would just help out where need be,” Calabria said. “Now we set up all the tables, chairs, water stations, and we’ve helped serve the food recently, and that’s the fun part because we make​ it a friendly competition.”

His family began in 2020 splitting their time between Carteret County and the state capital, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

When Core Sound decided to hold the shrimp fry again after pausing during the pandemic, Calabria said that his brother, who was in ninth grade at the time, needed volunteer hours and wanted to help the community.

“I decided to tag along with him,” and his family decided to continue to help. “Now, we started dragging our friends along,” Calabria explained, gesturing to Davies and Saunders.

Davies started helping about three years ago. Currently attending Wake Tech Community College, Davies said it’s “a lot of fun” at Core Sound and he gets to spend time with his best friends.

This is the first year for Saunders, who said he decided to join because he needed some community service hours for scholarships, and “thought it’d be fun to hang out with my friends. So I was just like, why not tag along?”

Calabria added, “We just love the community, and we’ve made a lot of friends and connections through Harkers Island over the five years we’ve lived here, so we just like to see them enjoying the time here and meeting up with some friends.”

Nearby, high school senior Thomas Lathan was helping his grandfather Bill Lathan, a board member for more than 20 years, hang banners that thanked the shrimp fry’s sponsors.

Thomas Lathan has helped at past events, but this is his first summer as an intern. He’s been working with a doctoral student to interview residents about their experiences with tropical storms and how the natural disasters affect and change the culture. He plans to present the findings when he’s done.

Bill Lathan, who still works full time as an attorney in New Bern, said he heads to Harkers Island whenever he’s available and decided to join Thomas that Thursday to help.

Amspacher explained in a later interview that many of the youth that help have been volunteering as shrimp cleaners and trash collectors since they came with their parents and grandparents when they were 9 and 10 years old.

“Now they are high school and college students and they are returning as interns and as the ‘power’ behind our events and projects. They care and each of them know they are part of us and always will be,” she said. “Troop 252 of Davis has been part of our events from the first year we were in this building in 1999. Many of them have children who are now Scouts, doing what they did.”

After the event, Amspacher told Coastal Review that the shrimp fry was a success. This year highlighted the Crystal Coast Water Rescue Team who traveled to Black Mountain during Helene response in fall 2024 and welcomed the Black Mountain Fire Department who called on Carteret County for help.

Core Sound has been reaching out to leaders in the mountains since Hurricane Helene caused untold destruction last fall to the western part of the state to help cope with the destruction and heartache.

Recognizing “our water rescue team traveling to help Black Mountain Fire Department was the same story. The shared experience, the bond that tragedy builds, the ever-knowing that we are all one storm away from needing them to come help us was heavy on everyone there. It was a moment that we will all hold dear,” said Amspacher. “The All-American Shrimp Fry is just that: communities coming together to celebrate our homes, our families and the traditions we hold sacred from across North Carolina.”

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.

Dewey Hemilright has spent more than 30 years on the water as a commercial fisherman. Along the way he has become an outspoken, sometimes harsh critic of how commercial fishing is regulated in the United States.

He is forceful in expressing his opinions, his language sometimes colorful, but the knowledge is deep, insightful and earned through a lifetime in the commercial fishing industry.

“I started in the fish house, unloading the boat. That’s the lowest tier on the totem pole,” he recalled.

He moved up the totem pole to working in a fish house, “packing, laboring long hours, nights, winter, cold, all that other stuff.” And when he turned 21, he headed to Ocean City, Maryland, to go fishing.

“My first two weeks, I lost 15 pounds from being seasick and throwing up. But the first trip we went fishing, we caught a big bluefin tuna, and I thought it was the most unreal thing. And from then on, I’ve been going my own route,” he said, adding, “but I never thought when I got started into it, that (the industry) would end up where it is today.”

He’s a longliner, fishing from his 42-foot-long boat, the F/V Tarbaby. The name, he explained, came about because it’s a smaller version of the 48-foot Tarheel, a charter vessel owned by John Bayliss and built by Ricky Scarborough.

He doesn’t get out to sea much at all any more. The combination of his advocacy, bad knees and years spent on the water have taken their toll, although the Tarbaby still heads out from Wanchese with a father-and-son crew he’s worked with for years.

Hemilright resides in Kitty Hawk with his wife Sara Hallas, education and outreach director for the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review.

Dwindling numbers

Longlining has become the least environmentally harmful method of commercial fishing, although “25 years ago, it wasn’t, but for the U.S. now, we’re the Mother Teresa,” Hemilright said describing the improvements regulators demanded and the changes the fishing industry made — or at least the changes have been made in the U.S. fishing fleet, which is one of Hemilright’s biggest complaints.

As to what remains of the domestic longline fishing fleet — Hemilright estimates the numbers from Maine to Texas total fewer than 50 active vessels — is forced to harvest fish in an environmentally safe way, but other nations aren’t, yet they have the same access to American markets as he does.

“You would want the U.S. standard of the harvest in these quota (for) these other (nations) in the Atlantic to be doing the same method. Or if they’re not, they don’t get our marketplace,” Hemilright told Coastal Review.

Hemilright’s concerns are wide-ranging. Asked about regulations and whether they are necessary, his one-word answer is “absolutely.” His answer, though, comes with a caveat: Stock assessments are based on models that use data selected by the scientists working on the assessment.

“That model performs by the data you interject into it,” he said.

A lot of studying

Hemilright was an indifferent student — at best — in high school, he said, telling Coastal Review, “If I would have studied this much in school, I wouldn’t be fishing today.”

The studying he does now has taken him to Majorca, Spain, for the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) in an advisory role in 2019. From 2012 until 2023 he represented North Carolina on the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, and served as the liaison to the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council.

And it requires a lot of studying.

“You got to know the politics, you got to know the council, you got to know the stock assessment. You got to know this whole different picture,” Hemilright said describing what is needed to be an effective advocate.

Hemilright has stepped back. “Twenty-five years of bitching, complaining at fishery meetings, to where I’m coming down the backside of the hill and aging out,” he explained.

Yet, he is still passionate and highly critical of fisheries management describing the science behind the regulatory structure as trying “to put a roof on the house, and we don’t even got pilings for the foundation.”

“You would not run your life, your business, or anything, by the way that accounting is taking place,” he said. “The folks at the table would not want their livelihood, their household income, or anything based on this MSC.”

The MSC, or Marine Stewardship Council, is an international organization that rewards “efforts to protect oceans and safeguard seafood supplies for the future.” Its fisheries certification program is a widely used standard to establish whether a fishery is sustainable. The MSC awards its blue label only to fisheries that the organization determines meets its standards.

Hemilright said the organization is inconsistent in how it uses data to award blue label certifications, particularly sample sizes and margins of error.

“Some of them have a lower decision of standard of error. Some of them have a higher standard error,” he said.

The MSC has been criticized in recent years. The U.K. charity Shark Guardian published a 2023 study by the advocacy group On the Hook that concluded, “the MSC’s drive for growth and income has come at the expense of the Standard’s effectiveness and scientific credibility.”

Hemilright is particularly critical of recreational fishing. The criticism is not directed at the men, women and kids throwing a line in the water, rather it’s how what is caught gets counted – or doesn’t. He described recreational catch limits as pieces of a pie, “and you whack this pie up here, and you whack this pie up here — there ain’t so much of a pot of a resource out there.”

Commercial fishing is highly monitored with cameras on boats and inspectors taking trips with fishing craft to ensure compliance with catch limits. Recreational landings are self-reported and fisheries biologists use a small sample size to estimate how many fish are being caught.

Although recreational landings are estimates, they are often given a larger share of the pie than commercial fishing interests. Hemilright is critical of a recent North Carolina Marine Fisheries Commission decision to consider increasing the amount of southern flounder allocated to recreational fishing to 50% and reducing the commercial portion by 10% of what had been previously allocated. The reallocation plan came despite acknowledgement that the recreational catch was 14,000 pounds over the 2024 limit. Commercial landings were within 1.6% of allocation.

“You’re taking it from one that’s accountable for its catch, and you’re giving it to the other side that’s not that’s not accountable to the methodology that’s been placed upon them,” Hemilright said.

Recognitions

Hemilright  has received numerous awards for his advocacy. In 2015, the Coastal Federation awarded him its Pelican Award for “outstanding contributions to education and outreach on behalf of the federation.”

The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council presented him in 2024 with the Ricks E Savage Award “given annually to an individual who has made exceptional contributions to the management and conservation of fishery resources in the mid-Atlantic region.”

Looking back on his career, Hemilright laughed at how it unfolded.

“I did it for North Carolina, that’s where I’ve been advocating, and my community and my town. I never thought when I got started into it, that it would end up today, not just what I’m doing, but the industry, because the world evolved where the technology changed, things have changed,” he said.

NAGS HEAD — Jockey’s Ridge used to be known as the tallest natural sand dune on the East Coast, but now it’s described as its largest natural active sand dune system.

While it may not be as high as it was in 1973, the unique phenomenon of nature is still there — famously thanks to Carolista Baum, a young mother who that year physically blocked a developer’s bulldozer.

A celebration of the 50th anniversary of Jockey’s Ridge State Park held June 5-8 drew thousands of people, from folks who had rolled down the dune as children to tourists who climb it every summer to watch the sun set, to share in appreciation of the beloved Outer Banks landmark.

Festivities included a duneside performance last Friday by the popular indie band, the Connells — with a surprise appearance by North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein — followed by the Outer Banks’ first drone light show.

In his introduction to a documentary about “magical, awesome” Jockey’s Ridge screened at the park’s visitor center late that Saturday afternoon, park ranger Austin Paul said the 22-minute “collection of heartfelt stories” from the community and state officials about the site will continue to grow as more content is gathered.

“Jockey’s Ridge is kind of like the center point of the Outer Banks, Ann-Cabell Baum, Carolista Baum’s oldest daughter, says in the film. “Jockey’s Ridge is so many different things to so many different people … It’s part of our souls, it’s part of our hearts, it’s part of our families.”

Baum and her siblings used to play every day on Jockey’s Ridge, she recalled in a later interview with Coastal Review.

One day the children saw a bulldozer arrive to start digging on the backside of the dune, and Baum, then age 6 1/2, along with her sister Inglis, 5, and her brother Gibbs, 3 1/2, dashed back to their nearby home to tell their mother. Carolista immediately ran over to the spot and stood in front of the bulldozer, not moving until the operator gave up and left, Baum said. 

Her petite 33-year-old mother, a dark-haired Edenton farm girl who grew up with six brothers, then promptly removed the distributor cap, and went about rallying the community in what became the “Save our Sand Dune” campaign to get the state to preserve Jockey’s Ridge.

It wasn’t the first time that developers had raised the ire of the locals — by then the Villa Dunes subdivision was already built on the northern edges of the dunes, and plans for the new development had already been submitted to the town. But this time, the whole community got behind her mother, Baum remembered.

“She was sincere and loving and kind,” her daughter said about Carolista, remembering how people always would come by her jewelry shop to visit with her and chat.

A year after the bulldozer was banished, the dune was declared a National Natural Landmark, and the following year the state park was created.

As former Nags Head Mayor and Commissioner Renee Cahoon says in the documentary, the park is an asset to the town in multiple ways.

“No one else has a Jockey’s Ridge,” she says. “It’s not just cultural icon; it’s also a business icon.”

The park is routinely in the top five of the most-visited state parks in North Carolina.

Last year, 1.2 million people visited. But during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, visitation went through the roof, at 1.9 million and 1.8 million, respectively. Both years had the Nags Head park as the No. 1 most-visited state park. It is currently back to prepandemic visitation.

“It’s more than a fabulous sand pile,” Peggy Birkemeier, a member of the Friends of Jockey’s Ridge Board of Directors, says in the film.

As Birkemeier notes, Jockey’s Ridge has a bounty of natural resources that offer numerous “exciting experiences” for visitors.

The backside of the park abuts the Roanoke Sound, with its long shoreline meandering northward along brackish marshes and toward the ancient maritime forest of Nags Head Woods. It includes a sound beach access that is popular with families. There are also unpaved trails through shrub forest areas beyond the shoreline that lead to the lower expanse of the dunes.

And the night sky above the dunes presents some of the most dramatic scenes on the Outer Banks. In fact, any time of day or night, cloudy or starry, at sunrise or sunset, the sky from Jockey’s Ridge is a wonderment.

“It is certainly a place where many memories are made,” Birkemeier says about the park. 

Legacy projects for Jockey’s Ridge that are in the works include the creation of a trail that loops around the park with informational markers about 10 different significant areas — such as hang gliding and the sometimes-buried sand castle — and a time capsule with various artifacts that is tentatively planned to be kept on display at the visitor center museum.

When the park first opened on May 31, 1975, the big dune was 140 feet tall, Jockey’s Ridge State Park Superintendent Joy Cook explained to Coastal Review in an interview after the event. But shifting maritime winds continually rearranged its estimated 30 million tons of sand, mostly quartz blown in ages ago from the mountains, into different shapes, while surrounding development influenced sand travel. Now the dunes are a system of three smaller hills that are 60 to 80 feet tall. 

“It’s moving 1- to 6-feet to the south each year,” she said. “The prominent wind is out of the north. The dunes are north-south orientation, and the southeast corner is moving faster than the rest of it.”

About six years ago, she said, the park had to relocate the sides of the corner that were moving into the road, and it will probably have to be moved again in a few years.

But even at its decreased height, being on top of Jockey’s Ridge is close to a surreal experience, and it’s not only because of the panoramic view of sea, sound and landscape. The vast expanse of undulating sand at times feels nearly mystical. Depending on the time of day, as well as the weather conditions, the shadows cast by the light and the wind-carved designs in the sand can transform the dunes into art.

But as every local knows, Jockey’s Ridge is the last place a person would want to be in extremes of any weather: a blazing hot summer day, a very windy or rainy day, or any degree of thunderstorm. And sometimes being on top in the middle of all that sand can be disorienting — it’s not unusual for visitors to lose their bearings.

On the flipside, kids delight in rolling and leaping down the dune, and young adults love to slide down them on boogie boards — especially if there’s a rare snowfall. Not to mention that the hang-gliding and kite flying, if the wind cooperates, is extraordinary.

Carolista Baum, an artist and a jeweler, died at 50 from a brain tumor. She remains as one of the most admired personalities in Outer Banks history, not only for her vibrancy and strength of character, but for her courage to stand her ground and protest what she believed was wrong.

As many recognized during the anniversary celebration, without Carolista taking action at that moment, and creating the momentum and inspiration in the community for the preservation fight, it’s likely that Jockey’s Ridge would not have been here to celebrate its 50-year anniversary.

“In 1973, she stood in front of a bulldozer and probably wouldn’t have been arrested,” Baum said. “It was a different time then. But I think she still would have stood in front of a bulldozer if that happened today.”

HATTERAS — Long famous for its bountiful fishing, Hatteras Island now has a new state-of-the-art processing and packing facility that keeps Outer Banks fish local from sea to plate, while also enabling local fresh catch to be shipped directly to customers.

And it’s owned by a local fishing family, to boot.

“The thing was, all this fish used to go to Virginia to get processed,” owner Jeff Aiken said during a recent tour of Jeffrey’s Seafood, situated along Back Creek in Hatteras Village.

The business officially opened May 21 during a ribbon-cutting celebration.

At a time when commercial and charter fishing enterprises face multiple challenges, the new facility is especially good news, Lynne Foster wrote in a message to Coastal Review.

“Jeffrey’s brings vitality to our Working Waterfront,” said Foster who along with her husband Ernie Foster run the Hatteras-based Albatross Fleet. “It also offers hope to the fishing community as well as the island community, which include many supporting businesses that rely on a vibrant fishing fleet and the sale of their catches.”

Working nearby in the chilly, 55-degree fish-cutting room, with heavy metal music seeming to set the pace, Aiken’s son Kelsey, 35, skillfully sliced through fish, one after another, cleaning and filleting. Along with another four or so people, they work their knives swiftly on large tables from early morning hours until about noon.

“As soon as we cut it, it gets bagged, we vacuum seal it and then it’s placed in a box to be shipped,” Kelsey Aiken said. Delivery drivers transport fish to local restaurants and markets from Hatteras to Avon, and sometimes to Rodanthe and Ocracoke. Fish awaiting processing are packed in ice, or stored in large freezers.

In addition to a temperature-controlled fish cleaning and cutting area, and rooms for packing, freezers and storage, the 11,000-square-foot facility also includes Hatteras Seafoods, the new retail market on the ground floor. Additional space remains for a small restaurant that is being planned, with the idea of serving local seafood favorites as well as beer and wine.

Proper cooling is provided by on-site freezers as large as walk-in closets, and the flash freezer — 30 degrees below zero — includes three gigantic fans to keep the air moving. There is also a chute from an ice machine on the upper floor to an “ice room” below.

“This is the brand-new vacuum sealer,” Jeff Aiken said, pointing to a long, steel machine with a pressing device on top. “That’s a $35,000 piece of equipment,” he added, as Kelsey Aiken demonstrated on a rockfish, using a 4-milliliter bag.

Nearby, there is the shrimp grader, another huge machine that not only pinches off the shrimps’ little heads, but also sorts them by four different sizes.

Jeff Aiken said that the business buys most of its shrimp from Native Seafood in Ocracoke, which has a deepwater inlet.

Although the warmer water from climate change has created boom years for shrimpers from Florida to Virginia, Jeff Aiken said, most of the local catch has to be processed in Engelhard and Swan Quarter because of depth limitations for the 60-foot shrimp trawlers. But he said that he hopes they’ll be able to get smaller shrimp boats into Hatteras for processing in the near future.

The retail store displays whole fish on ice in the glass cabinet, as well as filleted fish. A large window offers the customers in the retail store a view into the remarkably shiny and clean cutting room, showing the men, all wearing gloves and waterproof overalls, as they worked.

“I wanted them to see what’s going on,” Jeff Aiken said.

Fish scraps are returned to the water, to be happily “recycled” by other sea creatures, he added.

The facility also has an upstairs area for offices, meetings and storage, with an outside deck that boasts a wide view of the creek, the Pamlico Sound and lovely sunsets. Once the new website is up and running this winter, fresh-frozen filleted fish and shellfish will be able to be ordered online and shipped next-day air directly to consumers.

Jeff Aiken, along with his then-partners, founded the original fish house at the Hatteras docks in the 1980s, soon expanding to a wholesale business that involved driving a refrigerated truck packed with fresh Outer Banks catch to Hampton, Virginia.

Over the years, Jeff Aiken’s business adapted and evolved along with the fishing industry, as numerous local fish retailers and processors downsized or closed entirely.

But it was the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when supply chain disruptions left local chefs without fish to serve, that led to the dramatic expansion of Aiken’s business.

“They said, ‘Hey, you got the fish. Can you cut the fish?’” Jeff Aiken recalled. “So from that point, it spread by word of mouth and they kept coming.”

By then, Kelsey Aiken and his wife, Kelly, had joined Jeff Aiken in the business.

Jeff Aiken said he had purchased the fish house from Lee Peele, who had owned it when it was called Quality Seafood. It is also where he worked for $5 an hour when he first came to the Outer Banks in 1981.

“We were finally out of that little space out of Hatteras Harbor and we were cleaning all the fish for the charter vessels,” he recalled.

Jeff Aiken, who is from Hampton, Virginia, where he still has a home, credits his daughter-in-law Kelly, the company’s retail manager, with securing grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2021 to renovate and enlarge the facility with the goal of improving efficiency and capacity. The business had to pony up about a third of the matching funds.

“We’re in it for a million and they’re in it for two,” Jeff Aiken said. “And they got what they paid for.”

Now local chefs at local restaurants can ask for the fish they want to be filleted to order, Kelly Aiken said. Whenever possible, she said, the fin fish as well as seasonal oysters, shrimp and crab are local catch, and Jeffrey’s continues to partner with Ocracoke and Wanchese fish operations. The business also works with a distributer to bring its fresh fish — frozen and labeled — to North Carolina farmers markets to sell.

But Jeff Aiken said while their business sells almost all North Carolina product, and would never buy foreign shrimp, it’s impossible to guarantee that all their fish is strictly from the Outer Banks since fishers work within the realities of fisheries ecosystems and seasons.

“Fish have fins and tails and they swim,” he said. “They go where ever they want.”

And some fish they sell aren’t local at all, such as salmon from Norway or Scotland.

Jeff Aiken said that they buy most of their shrimp from Native Seafood in Ocracoke, which has a deepwater inlet. Although the warmer water from climate change has created boom years for shrimpers from Florida to Virginia, he continued, most of the local catch has to be processed in Engelhard and Swan Quarter because of water depth limitations for the 60-foot trawlers. But he added that he hopes they’ll be able to get smaller shrimp boats into Hatteras for processing in the near future.

Any customers looking for a brief history of Hatteras fishing can walk to the hallway behind the retail store to view a collection of historic to contemporary photographs of fishermen, including Jeff Aiken, with their boats, their family, their friends and the fish they caught.

“We call it the Hall of Fame,” he said, adding with a laugh: “Or, the Hall of Shame.”

One prominent picture is of the Ada Mae, a skipjack built in 1915 by Ralph Hodges and named after his then 13-year-old sister, who was Jeff Aiken’s grandmother.

The vessel, a former oyster dredge boat that is believed to be the last surviving skipjack in the state, has been restored. Today the boat is moored in New Bern and has participated in the reenactment of Blackbeard’s battle on Ocracoke Island, with Jeff Aiken onboard.

“All of those guys are local fishermen,” Jeff Aiken said, in between telling numerous fish tales about the various scenes lining the walls. “These pictures kind of bring the life to commercial fishing.”

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.

What do you think would happen if you took a young guy who grew up as a fishing nut in western New York State and transplanted him to eastern North Carolina?

If you said that he would turn into a crazy fishing adult, just in a different place, you would be correct.

Justin Manners grew up in a small town, west of Rochester, New York, and just south of Lake Ontario. This meant he had access to some of the finest trout and salmon in the East.

“I grew up fishing creek mouths at the lake for king salmon, steelhead, and brown trout. This was seasonal, but definitely what we looked forward to every fall,” Manners said recently.

It was a family experience with everybody pitching in to help each other learn the best way to go about things.

“I grew up fishing with my dad, brothers, uncles and cousins,” he said. “It would be difficult for me to single out one person that was my biggest influence.”

In case you didn’t know, there is a huge variety of fish to catch there.

“Growing up we would fish for anything that would bite. Depending on the season, we would fish for largemouth and smallmouth bass, catfish, northern pike, carp, walleye, perch, trout, and salmon.”

Of all his family members, Manners said that the fishing bug bit him hardest.

“I am the middle child of five boys,” he explained. “All of my brothers fish occasionally, but I wouldn’t call it a passion for any of them like it is for me.”

Manners moved to Kitty Hawk in 2017 and immediately became enamored of the fishing surrounding his new home on the Outer Banks.

“My favorite fish to target are red drum and speckled trout. I am learning a lot and there are still plenty of other fish.”

Manners relocated to Richlands in 2022 to set up shop for an HVAC business.

“I worked my way up in the trade, from helper, installer and technician, and recently became the regional manager for Pro-Serv Food Equipment,” he said of the New Bern-based commercial kitchen service firm. This new relationship was formed through a mutual love of fishing with Jared Shepherd, the owner of the company, but it’s deeper than just fishing. Manners sees a future for himself in the industry.

“I truly enjoy my career in the HVAC field and greatly appreciate the opportunities that I have been given,” Manners said, adding that, since everybody around here needs air conditioning a big part of the year, “I think that’s probably good advice for a lot of young guys looking to get started.”

When he’s not helping people stay cool, you’ll find Manners out on the water somewhere.

“My favorite way to fish is to come up with a game plan for red drum or speckled trout and try to execute that,” he said.

That means he’ll go with a friend or by himself, and doesn’t mind either.

“One of the benefits of being solo is that I can really focus on specific spots and pick them apart,” said Manners.

Whether the fishing is hot or cold, there’s always something to take home from the day.

“I have found that I learn more on the slow days than when they bite anything. The key to consistently catching fish is to learn every time you’re on the water,” he said, noting that fish don’t come and go just for the fun of it — they’re always looking for water that provides them safety, food and comfort.

“More times than not when you find the fish there is a reason why they are where they are: bait, structure, depth changes, grass beds, moving water, etcetera” he explained.

As a proponent of making a plan before heading out, Manners often quotes the old adage often attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “Failing to plan is planning to fail.”

He never wants to be out fishing without an idea of what he’s going to be doing beforehand.

“The most important thing to having a successful day is taking all outside factors into consideration and coming up with a plan,” he said.

For now, Manners said he is planning on staying in the HVAC business because he likes what he’s doing, but he also wants to continue learning and pass his love of fishing as well as his experience and knowledge, on to others. He recently got his Operator of Uninspected Passenger Vessels, or OUPV, license from the Coast Guard, permitting him to operate as a fishing charter captain with no more than six paying passengers.

“I took OUPV/Six Pack course last fall through Carteret Community College and got my Captains License,” he said. “Since fishing is a passion of mine, I would love to make a career out of it in some fashion in the future. I have not put a timetable on it yet, simply because I have a responsibility to give my best effort in my current position.”

In the meantime, look for Justin Manners on social media. He likes to live stream his fishing trips online as Salty Toad Fishing. It’s pretty entertaining.

“Salty Toad Fishing is to share my experiences on the water and help others learn from them, good or bad,” Manners said.

That includes this tip: “It is vitally important to understand why certain spots hold fish. That is the difference between catching fish on a slow day or going home with a cooler full of clean ice.”

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.

A gaggle of excited students and staff stand at the seawall, peering across the Beaufort Channel. Chatter ebbs and flows as people come up with possible explanations of what they’re seeing. Is it a sea turtle? A log? A lump of plastic? Finally, the silhouette moves, revealing its true identity. Excitement rushes through the crowd — it’s definitely a seal! 

While commonplace in the Northeast, this seal was 600 miles south of Boston in Beaufort, North Carolina. The animal, a harbor seal, was repeatedly sighted in the Beaufort area the week of March 24, swimming in Taylors Creek and hauling out at the Rachel Carson Reserve. 

Miriam Sutton, owner and director of Science by the Sea Eco-Tours, heard about the seal and set off on her paddleboard to catch a glimpse. She knew the seal was in the area but didn’t know it was so close. Sutton turned around and, “it just kind of caught me off guard,” she said. 

Ava Kocher, a sophomore at the Duke University Marine Lab, was part of the gathering that spotted the seal from the seawall. “It was a time where I wished I could have walked on water so I just could have gotten a little closer,” Kocher said. 

Luckily, Brantley Acree, chief mate aboard the Marine Lab’s R/V Shearwater, pulled up to the seawall in a skiff and offered to take students closer to the seal. Mindful to keep at least 50 meters, or 164 feet, between themselves and the seal, students took photos of the seal and noted its behavior. 

The seal was big news. “There was a lot of talk from the people who had been at the Marine Lab for so long, for so many years, and had never seen one, that if they hadn’t seen one in all of their time here, there must be something wrong with this one and you must be like a penguin in the North Pole, seriously lost,” Kocher said. 

Sutton has lived in the Beaufort area for 31 years and had yet to see a seal. “That’s the first one I’ve actually seen … certainly not this far south,” she said. 

Originally from Massachusetts, Kocher noticed a big difference in how people talk about seals here. “I’ve seen so many harbor seals, and when you see them on Cape Cod, you’re not even excited about the seals. You’re thinking about, ‘Oh, there’s seals on the beach. There must be sharks in the water’ … And so then to go from that to here in North Carolina, where that harbor seal is so much more rare and of an occurrence, then that suddenly was a huge anomaly.”

“It was exciting to see that something that was commonplace in one region of the world could be groundbreaking or indicative of a pattern in another place, and it just feels like you’re not learning what’s going on in the world. Because if the world is always changing, there’s always something new to be learned,” Kocher said. 

While seals are rarer in North Carolina than in Massachusetts, this one wanderer is closer to an established harbor seal colony than you might think. Harbor seals have been hauling out in Oregon Inlet, on the Outer Banks, for at least 10 years. 

As for when the Outer Banks population first popped up, “we don’t know a lot about its origins and when harbor seals were first seen regularly there,” said Dr. Andy Read, Stephen A. Toth Professor of Marine Biology, director of the Duke University Marine Lab and co-author of a scientific article about the Oregon Inlet harbor seal population. 

Read said we’re likely to see more harbor seals in this area “because the population of harbor seals has been protected since 1972 as the result of the Marine Mammal Protection Act and has been protected largely in Canada now, but also as a result of habitat exclusion by gray seals, which were also recovering and maybe squeezing harbor seals out of their former range.” 

Seals may have been in the area historically. A harbor seal specimen from the North Carolina Museum was found in Ocracoke Inlet in the 1930s, and there is some evidence that they’ve been seen in the intervening decades. 

Read is one of the leaders of a Duke Bass Connections Team that will attempt to dig into this in the next academic year. The team of doctoral, master’s and undergraduate students will pore through stranding records, newspaper articles, archeological information, scientific literature and other sources to reconstruct the timeline of harbor seal abundance in North Carolina. 

Dr. Vicky Thayer, the North Carolina Aquarium’s Marine Mammal Stranding coordinator and adjunct professor for North Carolina State College of Veterinary Medicine, has gotten many calls about seals in the area over the years. North Carolina has the highest diversity of any state in the country when it comes to strandings and sightings of marine mammals with four species of seals, 35 species of cetaceans, and manatees reported stranded or seen off of the coast. 

“We get the northern limit of the tropical species and the southern limit of that temperate species. And it’s such an exciting place to work. We learn so much from stranded specimens. We never know what species, will wash ashore next,” Thayer said. 

Thayer received numerous calls about the recent harbor seal in the Beaufort area. Procedure dictates that the stranding team gives seals for 24 hours before responding because they need to haul out and rest.

“As long as the seal is resting in a place that seems that people will not harass it or obstruct its access to the water,” Thayer said, “then we attempt to educate people and let them know that observing from a distance is fine. We post volunteers and set up a perimeter if the seal is in a heavily trafficked area.”

On March 28, Jillian Daly of Beaufort was kayaking in Taylors Creek after work when she saw a “large gray lump” in the marsh. 

“I’d heard there was a seal hanging around the Rachel Carson Reserve, so I quickly realized that’s what I was seeing,” Daly said, “I zoomed in with my camera and saw bile pooled around it’s open mouth, a cut under its neck, and noticed it didn’t seem to be breathing.”

It was the same seal, now dead. 

Daly reached out to Thayer and with her location and photos of the seal. 

“It was so sad,” Daly said, “I’ve never seen a seal in Beaufort and I wish I’d seen it alive and well. However, I’m glad I was able to locate it before animals or other folks came across it so Vicky could retrieve it and perform a necropsy.” 

Thayer, N.C. Aquarium Veterinarian Dr. Emily Christiansen, and Bonehenge Whale Center Director Keith Rittmaster were able to recover the seal that night and perform a necropsy, an animal autopsy, a few days later.

The initial necropsy report found that the animal was a thin out-of-habitat subadult harbor seal. The seal had a cataract in its left eye, lesions on its tongue, and was missing a tooth, all of which may have made foraging difficult. There were also parasites in its stomach, intestines, lungs, and airways, which also could have contributed to its thin condition.

Even though there’s now a colony in North Carolina, this seal is still considered a straggler, out of its habitat. “The weather here isn’t really great for them …The climate is too warm and getting warmer, and so it’s not a good option for long term survival, for high numbers,” said Thayer. 

“The climate is shifting and the prey and the population numbers are changing, and so that’s causing species to expand their ranges, maybe, and it’s not always good for long term survival of individuals.”

We might never know why this seal was down in Beaufort, adding yet another question to the long list of things we don’t know about seals in North Carolina. “What are they doing here? What are they eating? How long are they staying? What’s their body condition? Like, what age and sex classes are here? Are they interacting with human activities like fisheries?” Read asked. 

Harbor seals are a conservation success story; they beat the odds and recovered from extirpation across their range. But without answers to these questions, the perception of seals might not be so positive. However, the unknown is also exciting; there’s so much left to discover. 

If you see a seal in North Carolina, stay at least 50 yards away. “The seals need to rest, and you shouldn’t obstruct their path to the water and stay away from them, because they carry diseases and they can bite,” Thayer said. Please call 252-241-5119 to report live and dead seals and manatees, and stranded whales, dolphins, and porpoises.

“If they’re not stressed, they can fight off disease better. People approaching them can stress them, and if they are sick, but might be able to recover with rest. People may be preventing their recovery by approaching them too closely and they carry diseases that can be transmitted to humans and dogs,” said Thayer.

Thayer and Read both expect to see an increase in the number of seals in the Beaufort area in the future. Only time will tell if this lone seal was a random occurrence or a harbinger of the future. 

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.”

When he was young, newspaperman and avid fly fisher Rip Woodin didn’t fish at all.

Instead, he used his talents on the tennis courts of the North Carolina junior circuit, eventually finding himself on the B squad at the University of North Carolina. There he found out that the talent level seemed to stretch on without him.

“I was on the freshman team at Carolina but never got to play a match because I was on the bench picking up leftover balls,” Woodin said.

How does a young man, who is a decent tennis player but doesn’t fish at all, become a lifelong fly fisherman and ardent conservationist in his later years?

Woodin’s life has seen him move three-quarters of the way across the continental U.S. and eventually return to North Carolina. Now he’s fishing waters and doing the kind of work that he never dreamed of back when he was smacking tennis balls across the net.

After graduating from UNC in January 1969 with a double major in journalism and English, Woodin joined the Marine Corps where he enjoyed a pleasant six-week vacation at Parris Island, South Carolina. Later, he spent six years working in Greensboro while also serving in the Marine Corps Reserve.

That’s when, in a twist, Woodin received an offer to join the Air Force and go to flight school.

“(I) probably would have been sent to Vietnam and met John McCain,” Woodin theorized, but instead he stayed in Greensboro until 1976.

“I worked various reporting jobs for the Greensboro Daily News,” he said of the Guilford County paper.

Then in 1976, he moved to Jackson, Wyoming. He became editor of the Jackson Hole Guide and met his wife Jane.

“I was living in the basement apartment of a condo while three women lived upstairs. The other two moved out and Jane moved downstairs,” Woodin said.

Jackson was where they stayed until 1986 and where many of the events that would shape much of Woodin’s later life took place.

“We were married in 1979 and two of our three children were born there,” Woodin said of Jackson, which is also where he first learned to fly fish.

“Paul Bruun was my boss when I first moved out there, and he gave me a fly rod,” Woodin said.

Bruun would go on to be inducted into the Fly Fishing Hall of Fame in Roscoe, New York, in October 2021.

Bruun’s was an opportune gift because, “Jackson is all about fly fishing for cutthroat trout,” Woodin said.

Woodin, with an eye for newspaper design, quickly found that the thrill of fly fishing was the visual aspect.

“The thing that really appealed to me was seeing the fish come up and take the fly,” Woodin said. “When a nice cutthroat trout comes up to hit a hopper, he just rolls up on it slowly, opens his mouth and takes it back down. Then you lift the rod and you’ve got an 18-inch fish.”

There was also an opportune real estate purchase that would come to shape Woodin’s later years.

“We purchased a piece of property that we never developed and when the kids got older and we had moved away, we decided to sell it. Real estate values in Jackson had risen dramatically over 30 years, and after using the money to help pay for the kids’ colleges, we were able to buy a duplex in Atlantic Beach,” he said.

By that time, after having jobs at different newspapers in various states, the move back to North Carolina came with a new title, publisher at the Rocky Mount Telegram.

The Woodins quickly took to the coastal life and they decided if they were going to be spending a lot of time at the beach, they needed to have a boat.

“I went to Jerry at Fort Macon Marina and bought the boat I still have today,” he said.

He found that the variety of marine life and saltwater fishing was something he really liked, and he got into it quickly.

“I bought a saltwater fly rod and starting fishing around here pretty quickly,” he said.

As Woodin progressed with his fly fishing, he started traveling to some pretty far-flung places where he tangled with a lot of different fish.

“The most challenging is the permit because it’s the hardest to catch and the hardest to hook,” he said. “They fight hard and they’re rare. You don’t go out and get 10 shots on permit in a day, you’re usually lucky to get two or three.”

One of the most thrilling species, however, is the tarpon, Woodin said.

“Obviously, because they jump so much,” he explained.

Closer to home, Woodin loves to fish for false albacore.

“The hardest fighter is false albacore. They fight better than bonefish (and I’ve got some big bonefish). But fight wise, nothing compares to a false albacore,” he said.

In recent years, Woodin has blended his experience as a newspaperman and his love for the saltwater environment and fish and applied it to becoming actively involved in conservation with the Coastal Conservation Association, an organization of recreational anglers focused on protecting the marine environment.

“For a while we put out a newspaper, which I edited, and because of my background in writing I wrote press releases and stories,” Woodin said. “I still advise them on good PR strategy.”

He’s also on the board of CCA-NC and an active participant in the state chapter’s activities.

Woodin’s fishing advice?

“The key is practicing your casting and being able to hit your target, but more important is keeping your emotions under control so you are able to concentrate and don’t basically screw it up when staring at a big fish.”

In the end, Woodin said, “If you take care of the fish, the fishing will take care of itself.”

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.

From Cecelski: This is the 26th photograph in my photo-essay “Working Lives”– looking at the stories behind the photographs in the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection (1937-1953) at the State Archives in Raleigh.

In this photograph, we see workers slaughtering and canning sea turtles at a cannery in Marshallberg, N.C., September 1938.

According to a story in the Raleigh News & Observer that was published a year earlier, March 21, 1937, the cannery’s owner, Carroll Crocket, hailed from Crisfield, Maryland, one of the busiest fishing ports on the Chesapeake Bay.

In the 1890s, Crockett’s father, A.R. Crockett, was among a group of Crisfield oyster dealers that began coming south in search of new oystering grounds. He was drawn above all to Core Sound and particularly to the stretch of quiet bays and marshlands between Harkers Island and Smyrna.

In or about 1897, he established an oyster cannery at Marshallberg, a village located on that part of Core Sound.

The village sits on a a peninsula shaped by Core Sound, a lovely bay called Sleepy Creek, and a body of water called the Straits that runs between Marshallberg and Harkers Island.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Crisfield fishermen also played an important role in bringing the soft-shell crab industry to Marshallberg. In the late 1930s, when this photograph was taken, soft-shell crabbing was still a big business on Core Sound and Marshallberg was home to the state’s busiest soft-shell crab fishery.

A.R. Crockett’s oyster cannery does not seem to have lasted very long. However, following in his father’s footsteps, Carroll Crockett opened his cannery in Marshallberg in 1937.

At that time, Marshallberg was a threadbare but bustling little village. If you had visited that part of Down East in those days, you would have found a cluster of homes, a highly regarded boatyard, a crowd of fish houses, a crab-packing plant, two or three general stores, a pair of churches, and a school.

In the 1930s, Marshallberg was also an important shipping point for local truck crops, especially sweet potatoes.

A generation earlier, the village had also been the site of an important preparatory school called Graham Academy. Launched by northern missionaries after the Civil War, the Star of Bethlehem Church, most often just called the “Star Church” by locals, got its early support from women associated with the Methodist Missionary Society of Boston in 1874.

Founded 12 years later, in 1888, the academy was renown for providing a classical education to the children of oystermen and fisherwomen, as well as to the well-heeled from many other parts of eastern North Carolina, and for turning out some of the the region’s finest teachers.

The academy also had a lasting impact on Marshallberg. Again and again, old-time Marshallbergers have told me how the school’s teachers, the influx of students from other parts of eastern North Carolina, and the cultural events held at the school shaped them and gave the village a somewhat different air than other villages Down East.

Though Marshallberg remained a busy fishing port in the 1930s, the Great Depression was still hard in the village, as it was on all of Down East. For many people, soul-cripplingly hard.

To learn more about Marshallberg’s history, be sure to visit the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island. The museum’s webpage also includes a special section on Marshallberg’s history.

In addition, in 1938 many local people were still just getting their feet back on the ground after the great 1933 hurricane.

The ’33 storm had laid waste to much of Marshallberg. According to news reports, the hurricane washed away docks, fish houses, and boats by the score and destroyed or seriously damaged some 30 homes.

When the cannery opened in 1937, Carroll Crockett announced that he expected to employ some 150 seasonal workers. Given the hard times, the Marshallbergers must have welcomed the cannery’s arrival.

In addition to the cannery in Marshallberg, Carroll Crockett established at least half-a-dozen other canneries on the North Carolina coast in the 1930s and ’40s: a shrimp cannery in Wilmington, oyster canneries in Beaufort and Washington, and canneries focused more on tomatoes and other truck produce in Kinston, New Bern and Windsor.

* * *

According to the News & Observer, the Marshallberg cannery’s workers canned tomatoes in the summertime.

Then, in the fall and winter, they shucked and canned oysters and clams.

Shucking clams and oysters was cold, wet work, hard on the body and not infrequently debilitating. Many a time, when I was younger and more of them were still with us, the men and women who used to do that kind of work in Down East canneries told me how it made them feel old before their time.

On the other hand, Marshallberg’s people were no strangers to hard work, and times were hard. Few turned down a job because it wasn’t easy, if only because there were no easy jobs to be had.

Evidently, when they had neither clams nor oysters, nor tomatoes or other truck crops, they at least occasionally turned to canning sea turtles.

* * *

I am not aware of any cannery on the North Carolina coast that focused primarily on sea turtles.

In the late 19th century, such canneries did exist for a short time in the Florida Keys and in a few places on the Gulf of Mexico, where the most desirable of sea turtles for making turtle soup — green turtles, (Chelonia mydas) — were far more abundant than on the North Carolina coast.

Those canneries in Key West and the Gulf Coast did not last long. Even by the 1890s, the mass killing of sea turtles, as well as the harvesting of their eggs, had driven them close to extinction in many parts of the Florida and Texas coast.

As early as 1900, the sea turtle fisheries in Florida and other parts of the Gulf Coast had, with one or two exceptions, shut down. From that time on, the harvesting of sea turtles was done almost exclusively for local consumption or when sea turtles were caught as “by-catch” by fishermen engaged in other fisheries.

The highly prized green turtles were also found in North Carolina’s coastal waters, but far less frequently than in more tropical seas.

Loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) were far more common on the North Carolina coast.

Though their meat was darker, oilier, and considered less desirable than that of green turtles, loggerheads were still sold to be used in turtle soup. I can’t be sure, but I assume that loggerheads made up the bulk of the sea turtles caught on the Outer Banks and other parts of the North Carolina coast.

The luxury market for turtle soup was always the driving force behind the sea turtle fishery in the United States. However, the oil of sea turtles was also put to use at least occasionally. According to an article called “The Origin, Evolution, and Demise of the U.S. Sea Turtle Fisheries” that appeared in NOAA’s Marine Fisheries Review in 1994, the oil of loggerhead turtles was sometimes sold as a leather softener and fishermen in some places coated the bottom of their boats with loggerhead oil in order to discourage worm damage.

Compared to Florida or the Caribbean, a far smaller fishery for sea turtles had existed on the North Carolina coast since at least the 1880s.

In 1885, for instance, according to the June 9, 1885, issue of New Bern’s Daily Journal, a man identified as “Mr. K. Willis” was “the champion turtle hunter” on the waters around Swansboro.

The newspaper reported that Mr. Willis used a 20- or 30-yard-long, wide-meshed net to capture  29 “large sea turtle” over a two-day period.

More than likely, he was the kind of man that did a little bit of everything around the water, a “progger,” they would have called him on some parts of the North Carolina coast.

However, on most parts of the North Carolina coast, a fisherman or woman might make a turtle stew now and then, but they were unlikely to make much profit from catching them.

* * *

That could be seen on Hatteras Island in 1901. According to a visitor to the island that winter, the keeper at the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse spied a dozen sea turtles just offshore a couple weeks before Christmas.

Writing in the Baltimore Sun March 31, 1902, the visitor recalled that the lighthouse keeper used some kind of meat as bait to catch three of the turtles with a hook and line.

The Sun’s correspondent asked the lighthouse keeper what he had done with the sea turtles.

According to the article, “he replied that there was no market there, and the lighthouse crowd didn’t eat turtles, so he sent them as a present to the Cape station of life savers, where they were acceptable.”

I think that was quite typical on the Outer Banks, where, to my knowledge, there were never any canneries that handled sea turtles.

Of course at that time, there were also no restaurants on Hatteras Island that might have been interested in putting turtle soup on their menu. There were no restaurants at all on the island. For that matter, no bridges to the island had yet been built and no roads on the island had yet been paved.

Now and then, an Outer Banks waterman might stow a live sea turtle in a shipment of salt mullet or shad and make a few dollars if it found a buyer at the docks in Norfolk or New Bern or Elizabeth City.

But overall, at least on the Outer Banks, sea turtles were generally one of the sea’s creatures that the islanders kept for themselves and, even then, partook of only every once and awhile.

* * *

On the Outer Banks, that did not seem to change later in the 20th century. On April 7, 1929, for instance, a correspondent of the News & Observer reported that Ocracoke Island fishermen had recently captured “dozens of sea turtles weighing from 200 to 500 pounds.”

The turtles, he said, were bound either for local kitchens or cast back into the sea.

“Here the natives bring the turtles ashore and make soup or hash from them, or if they are not in a turtle eating notion they throw them overboard as there is hardly any market for this species of turtle.”

There were canneries just to the south, though.

Even in the late 1800s, canneries operated in North Carolina’s larger coastal towns, including Morehead City and Beaufort, but now and then also in some of the more remote fishing villages along Core Sound.

For a few years, for instance, a Long Island, New York, company operated a clam cannery in Atlantic, called Hunting Quarters then. Smyrna was home to an oyster cannery, and there was even a cannery or two at Diamond City, out on the island called Shackleford Banks, prior to all the villagers leaving the island in the late 19th and early 20th century.

How often, if at all, those canneries handled sea turtles, I do not know. Their real business was elsewhere — in oysters, above all — but perhaps like the cannery in Marshallberg, they may sometimes have slaughtered and canned sea turtles on a small scale when the turtles were available and the cannery workers did not have anything more profitable to do.

As was always the case with catching and butchering the sea’s larger creatures — whales, dolphins, sharks — sea turtle canning was a grim business.

A casual visitor with a weak stomach or a soft spot for the welfare of wild animals was bound to be alarmed by a visit to any of those enterprises.

In September 1938, the same month this photograph was taken, such an individual did visit the cannery in Marshallberg.

That individual’s name was Edward Peyton “Ted” Harris, and he was a playwright and theater actor originally from Greenville.

I do not know how Harris came to be in Marshallberg. Judging from the timing of a letter that he wrote to the Raleigh News & Observer, he and the photographer who took this photograph very likely visited the cannery together.

I only know about Ted Harris’s tour of the cannery because the News & Observer published his letter. In that letter, he expressed outrage over the treatment of the sea turtles at the Marshallberg cannery.

He had seen the holding pen in which the sea turtles were kept until it was time to slaughter them. That was standard practice: sea turtle canneries typically kept captured turtles alive until the workers had enough to make it worth their while to slaughter and can them. In some cases, that was days, but in other cases they were held in captivity for weeks or months.

Of the turtles’ living conditions at the cannery, Ted Harris wrote:

“Yesterday… an attendant showed us a dozen sea-turtles penned up for slaughter. Boxes hedged them about on a dry concrete floor. There was  no provision for feeding them or giving them the water they need worse than food. One had already died. The workman assured us … that this one would not become the main ingredient for some unsuspecting purchaser’s soup. However, those that remained alive could not be in good condition when the ax ends their suffering.”

In his letter, Harris indicated that he wanted to bring the sea turtles’ living conditions to the attention of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, as well as to the local health department.

He also noted, by way of a coda, that the worker that was his tour guide at the cannery had told him, on the side, that “he himself would never eat canned turtle, having watched the canning.”

 * * *

The Status of Sea Turtles Today

In a 1994 article titled “The Origin, Evolution, and Demise of the U.S. Sea Turtle Fisheries,” a NOAA marine scientist named W. N. Witzell wrote:

“Commercial fisheries, habitat destruction, and pollution has had a devastating impact on both U.S. and world sea turtle populations. The U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973 and subsequent amendments has provided the legislation needed to prevent the extinction of these magnificent animals in the northwestern Atlantic Ocean [including the North Carolina coast].”

Today, with the aide of the N.C. Wildlife Commission’s NC Sea Turtle Project, more than 20 different community groups are monitoring sea turtle nesting and stranding activities on the North Carolina coast. (You can find a list here.)

At the same time, state and federal agencies are increasingly working hand-in-hand with the commercial fishing industry to protect sea turtles from being accidentally caught in fishing nets.

Through their efforts, sea turtle populations have begun making a significant comeback in recent decades.

Much progress has been accomplished in the last half century. However, recent political developments in the U.S. have put into doubt the future of sea turtles and all other endangered species that rely on the protections of the Endangered Species Act, the vitality of the Environmental Protection Agency, and/or the ongoing research work of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, all of which have played key roles in the preservation of sea turtles here in the U.S. and around the world.

​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.

While boaters, beachgoers and coastal North Carolinians alike are familiar with the state’s well-trafficked waterways at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, there’s a less famous inlet with a unique name and the history to match.

Lockwood Folly Inlet separates present-day Oak Island and Holden Beach. It is the endpoint of Lockwood Folly River, a 25-mile-long waterway that flows through central and southern Brunswick County before emptying into the inlet.

In addition to being a productive outlet for boaters and fishermen, Lockwood Folly Inlet is a historical curiosity. Its location and name shed light on a period of North Carolina history overshadowed by the Lost Colony when 117 English settlers disappeared from Roanoke Island in the late 1580s, or the Albemarle settlements.

The name of Lockwood Folly Inlet dates back to the 17th century to a mostly forgotten episode during the settlement of North Carolina. That episode, if successful, would have directly changed the fate of the colony and cured it of the “general economic backwardness,” according to historian Hugh Lefler, that defined its colonial reputation.

Though Lockwood Folly Inlet is one of the more stable — its size and surrounding sandbars shift regularly — at only around 100 feet wide and sometimes only a few feet deep, the inlet doesn’t allow for sizable ships.

As a result, it has not been the site of significant development over the past four centuries. The inlet was never a proposed site for a major dredging project or a new town like Beaufort or Roanoke.

This limited development has likely been a reason why the inlet has kept its unique name for centuries. Much of the speculation about the inlet’s name has focused on the titular “folly” involved.

One early theory was that the “folly” was a boat built so large that it could not sail out of the river. Louis T. Moore argued in a 1948 article for The State magazine, now known as Our State, that the name instead came from an attempted settlement or house by a man named Lockwood in the 18th century.

Moore said that the homestead was destroyed by Native Americans he mistreated. As the author described, the “folly” resulted when “a man unable to control his temper or passions later was punished by being driven from the place he intended as his home.”

While writers have worked hard to explain the second half of the inlet’s name, they have done much less to figure out the first half. Few people have researched who Lockwood actually was. Who was the man who built the ship that could not sail, or who made the failed settlement?

In order to solve that mystery, one must go back to the earliest attempts to settle North Carolina, several of which have been almost lost to history.

Moore posited that Lockwood Folly received its name in the early to mid-18th century, with Lockwood likely being a settler during that time.

That period would have been after the 1720s when James Moore and his family first settled the Cape Fear River.

The 1720s was the traditional start of European settlement in that area, the time when North Carolinians discovered the Cape Fear as a productive outlet to the ocean and began establishing some of their largest towns on it.

Seeming to confirm this theory is the presence of Lockwood Folly on maps as early as the Edward Moseley map of 1733. Moseley held political appointments between 1715 and 1749. But Lockwood Folly is not just on the Moseley map, it is also on the Herman Moll map of 1708 and William Fisher’s “New Mapp of Carolina” dated to 1698. Both Moll and Fisher were London, England, mapmakers.

The earliest map that contains a place named Lockwood Folly is the Ogilby map from around 1671. Taken from an influential book on the Americas published by British author John Ogilby, the map, “A new discription of Carolina by the order of the Lords Proprietors,” was drawn decades before North Carolina’s first incorporated town and less than 10 years after the Lords Proprietor first received their Carolinas grant in 1663. It was one of the first maps drawn that focused primarily on North Carolina after the Lost Colony.

Given many of the other details on this map, the most likely explanation for Lockwood Folly is that it was named after a man who was part of one of two lost British colonies of the Cape Fear area.

The first, founded by explorer and Hilton Head’s namesake William Hilton, was settled by Puritans from New England in 1663. After the Puritans quickly abandoned the area, a somewhat more successful colony was formed by Barbadians led by the Yeamans and Vassall families.

This Cape Fear colony, identified by historian Lindley Butler as “the first English town in the Carolina propriety,” included enslaved people from Africa and committed to producing food and goods to support Barbados. The colony lasted only three years before Native American attacks, a lack of supplies, and disasters in England led to its abandonment.

Lockwood was not a known member of either the colonies or the initial William Hilton expedition. But of the dozen or so Cape Fear area names on the Ogilby map, several were from the Hilton and Yeamans expeditions.

One of these was a region labeled Long’s Delight, likely named after Capt. Anthony Long, a leader of the Hilton expedition. Another was Turkey Quarters, an area noted by the Barbadians for its large number of turkeys.

The Barbadian connection with Lockwood is bolstered by a story from James Sprunt’s influential 1914 book, “Chronicles of the Cape Fear River,” which combined historical narrative with local legends and stories.

In one section, Sprunt, inspired by a 1734 travelogue, wrote of the inlet’s name, “One Lockwood, from Barbados, however, made a settlement farther to the south [of another proposed settlement up the Cape Fear], which the Indians destroyed, and hence the name to this day of ‘Lockwood’s Folly.’”

While we may never know exactly who Lockwood was, the Barbadian lineage in Sprunt’s tale would appear to corroborate the theory that he may have been part of the Barbadian colony.

The early settlement of the Cape Fear River is a fascinating what-if in North Carolina history. Cape Fear is a more stable and hospitable inlet to shipping than those by the Albemarle Sound.

It might have quickly fostered towns like Beaufort in South Carolina or Norfolk in Virginia.

Instead of existing for 50 years as an almost-forgotten backwater, North Carolina might have grown faster and with a more refined air had it been originally settled at Cape Fear.

Along with Rocky Point, Lockwood Folly Inlet is one of the two last remnants on a North Carolina map of the Hilton and Yeamans colonies. Other names like Long’s Delight have disappeared from use and have no modern equivalent, illustrating the forgotten nature of the 1660s Cape Fear expeditions.

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.

Capt. John Mallette grew up fishing, but didn’t come from a fishing family.

Born and reared around Sneads Ferry and the Topsail area, he said his mother worked in real estate in Wilmington and his father was one of Ocean City’s original developers and bought a home there in 1950.

Ocean City was established on Topsail Island in 1949 and was “the first place where Black people could have oceanfront property” in the state, Mallette recently told Coastal Review.

The motel had a pier, and “I pretty much lived on the pier fishing as a little kid,” he continued.

“There was a lady who had One Stop Bait & Tackle in Surf City — Betty Warren, she’s long passed away now — but she would babysit me, basically, and I would sit there and help sell seafood and head shrimp and filet flounder. And then her husband, Preston, would take me out shrimping in the waterway with him, and that’s how I got started commercial fishing and just never stopped. I just grew into it, and started running boats.”

From there, he became a captain and spent several years piloting various commercial, private and charter vessels in Central and South America, Australia and Hawaii. While a fishing guide on a private island near Turks and Caicos, he learned his mother was ill and returned to the U.S. in 2008 to take care of her.

These days he co-owns Southern Breeze Seafood Co. on U.S. Highway 258 between Richlands and Jacksonville. He delivers fresh seafood all over the state, including to a handful of universities such as Elon and North Carolina Central.

“Wednesday, Thursday, Friday I’m on the road for the most part,” he said.

Stories like his are the backbone of an ongoing NC Catch Initiative to highlight African American contributions to the North Carolina Seafood Industry. Established in 2011, NC Catch is a nonprofit organization that aims to educate consumers about the state’s seafood industry.

Mallette and NC Catch President Barbara Garrity-Blake, a cultural anthropologist who teaches fisheries policy at the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort, are heading up the project, “Recognizing African American Participation in the North Carolina Seafood Industry.”

The project is the center of a new traveling exhibit, “African Americans in North Carolina Seafood,” that will debut March 9 at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

Garrity-Blake told Coastal Review that NC Catch wanted to highlight the diversity of people and roles within the seafood supply chain.

“The seafood industry is made up of men and women of various races and ethnicities who harvest, process, transport, buy, sell, and cook North Carolina seafood. We are focusing on Black contributions because African Americans have a history and legacy in North Carolina fisheries since Colonial days, from herring to menhaden, blue crab, mullet, shrimp — all of it,” she said.

For the project, people from the Black seafood business community and researchers worked together to compile narratives, video and oral histories of Black fishers, wholesalers, chefs and others working in seafood to increase recognition of African American participation in the state’s seafood industry. These currently are being housed on the NC Catch website.

Garrity-Blake said that Mallette is a “perfect co-principal investigator because he delivers seafood all over North Carolina and knows so many people in the industry. Right away he had a list of Black practitioners for us to interview,” and the “stories we are documenting are so compelling.”

Among those who shared their story for the project is Tyrone Hightower of Apex Seafood. Also on the NC Catch board, he quit a career in veterinary science to sell seafood at triangle-area farmers markets because he loves interacting with people, Garrity-Blake explained.

“He had a tough time breaking in at first, but Brett Blackburn, a major seafood distributor out of Carolina Beach, helped him out and taught him ‘fishermen’s language,’ like what shrimp counts mean,” she said.

Another is a young shrimper named Nate Ellison, who lives in the unincorporated Carteret County community of Merrimon. He “talked about his determination to maintain working waterfront access at the end of Silver Dollar Road, which was infamously sold out from under his family,” Garrity-Blake continued.

A husband-and-wife team who fish out of Hertford, Herman and Quinetta “Mermaid Q” Manley of Crackn Crab Seafood are featured as well. They “had their crab pots cut, their boat sunk, and their business shunned. But they stuck to their guns and eventually earned the respect of the community. Today they crab, fish, and sell seafood in low-income neighborhoods to help combat food insecurity,” she said.

Project’s early days

Garrity-Blake and Mallette connected during the 2021 North Carolina Seafood Festival, held annually the first weekend of October in downtown Morehead City.

Mallette said he was there to give a cooking demonstration for Got to Be NC, a marketing campaign for North Carolina products under the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, and they “just started a conversation.”

Garrity-Blake told Coastal Review that during this conversation, Mallette shared his experiences as a commercial fisherman out of Sneads Ferry, which she said she found interesting.

“Since the last menhaden fish factory in North Carolina closed in 2005, you don’t meet a lot of African American fishermen. Long story short, Capt. John joined the NC Catch board, and we applied for a NC Sea Grant’s Community Collaborative Research Grant — pairing researchers and practitioners — to do this project,” she said.

Mallette also recognized that “African American commercial fishermen are few and far between. And it’s always been that way. The question is, why?”

When he was the captain of larger vessels while traveling around the globe, he said only a few of the American captains were Black. “It was me and maybe two other guys. Literally the only ones.”

So, they started exploring and researching, looking into stereotypes like “Black people can’t swim” and “little things that people would actually take to heart, “Mallette said.

While talking with the old fishermen and fish house owners he grew up around, “It was never, ‘we didn’t have Black shrimp boat captains or Black guys running the boats, because they were Black.’ They tried to give them the jobs, but they wouldn’t do it because a lot of their grandmothers and moms would be like, ‘That water ain’t for us. You stay on the dock,’” Mallette recounted.

They’d pack fish or head shrimp but wouldn’t actually go out on the boats, “and it wasn’t that they didn’t have the opportunities given to them, a lot of it was they were just always told that that wasn’t for them.”

Mallette said he never understood that either, especially once he began traveling.

The best fishermen were Black when he was in Central and South America, the Caribbean, and West Africa. “All through the Caribbean, your commercial fishermen are Black,” he said, but not in the United States. “It’s the one place you just don’t see it.”

About the exhibit

During the exhibit opening that begins at 4 p.m. Sunday, March 9, visitors will have an opportunity to listen to a panel discussion, and a cooking demonstration with Chef Ricky Moore of Saltbox Seafood Joint in Durham, Chef Jamie Davis of The Hackney in Washington, and Chef Keith Rhodes of Catch in Wilmington.

The public is welcome at no charge and are asked to register online ahead of the event.

“NC Catch’s mission is to raise awareness about the superior quality of North Carolina seafood and the importance of supporting the people, families, and communities who provide consumer access to it,” Garrity-Blake said. “Through the lens of North Carolina’s African American seafood legacy, we are ‘taking it to the people’ so they can enjoy the exhibit, hear firsthand stories about Black experiences in seafood, and taste what it’s all about.”

Core Sound’s Exhibit Curator Pam Davis Morris told Coastal Review that the museum is proud to host the opening exhibition and is glad to have provided a supporting role in its development.

“This exhibition dovetails in well with and builds upon previous work produced by the Core Sound Museum such as the popular Menhaden Fishery exhibition, The Local Fisheries Knowledge Project, Community Exhibit displays and many other oral history and artifact-driven projects,” Morris said. “Built as a traveling exhibition, this display will not only be shown at the Core Sound Museum but will travel to other sites as well.”

The exhibit is a kick-off for the NC Catch Summit taking place March 10 at Carteret Community College in Morehead City. Also a no-charge event, the daylong program will look at the state’s fisheries and seafood industry. Register online to attend.

NC Catch held a preview of the exhibit at the University of North Carolina Wilmington Tuesday, followed by a “Chef’s Takeover” cooking demonstration with Davis, Rhodes, and Mallette. 

Garrity-Blake said Wednesday after the event that it “went great.” The program was well attended, there was good discussion and the “food was fantastic.” Mallette prepared shrimp and crabmeat etouffee, Rhodes made a “Soul Bowl” with salmon, black-eyed peas and plantains, and Davis prepared fried catfish with ham hock gravy.

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-

No matter how big worldwide brands like McDonald’s or KFC get, they’ll never match the iconic status of a tiny Morehead City burger stand named El’s Drive-In.

Tucked away on a gravel lot, shaded by centuries-old live oaks that whisper of a time when forest bordered this 69-year-old restaurant, El’s has no flashy, sky-high sign beckoning motorists from the road. The same faded, white menu board that’s always listed El’s beloved super burger and shrimp burgers is all that crowns the vanilla milkshake-colored brick box.

If you didn’t know El’s was there sitting on its plain concrete slab, you’d probably never stop.

But everyone knows it’s there.

“Sometimes the train will call in his order and say, ‘Can you have it ready in 20 minutes?’” El’s third-generation owner Shelton Franks says, raising his chin to the conductor’s whistle as a locomotive chugs down tracks dividing U.S. 70 in front of El’s.

“And he’ll block the traffic right there so he can come in and get his order,” Franks’ mother, Gail, adds.

The affection people have for this tiny take-out was especially obvious when El’s re-opened on Jan. 17, following a nine-month closure. Every vehicle jamming the parking lot held a personal story.

Mending hearts

Construction worker Joseph Booth is sure he’s been an El’s regular since the days right after he was born 45 years ago in the hospital next door. “My momma used to love coming over here,” he said, “All the time!”

High school sweethearts Josh and Amanda Lyle not only grew up eating at El’s, the restaurant even played a role in rekindling their teenage romance. “I wanted to get back together because I realized the wrongs of my ways,” Josh recalled, “so, she agreed to meet me at El’s after school one day, and it was January 17, of 1997.”

Josh convinced carhops to deliver chocolate milkshakes to his vehicle when Amanda arrived, and he set the mood with her favorite country music playing. “We’ve been together ever since.”

“And we do still try to come back every year on this day,” Amanda said.

An obituary in the local newspaper days before the reopening is one of many over the years to note a deceased’s love of El’s. It reminded Gail Franks of the man who once stood atop the building in honor of a buddy who passed. “All his friends had their hot rod cars lined up out here in the parking lot and did a drive away,” Gail recalled, tearing up.

“You know, people just have a lot of memories. If it weren’t for them, we’d just be a little place.”

Because of its location in a popular coastal tourist area, El’s has long been known outside of North Carolina, but its fame across the state and beyond exploded with the introduction of Google reviews and social media, Gail said. Especially during the pandemic, fans shared their El’s experiences.

But it was clear by 2024 that the old building could no longer withstand the weight of time. The Franks family was forced to shutter El’s that April and do the unimaginable — tear the place down.

A family’s resilience

The Franks family didn’t bulldoze El’s. They convinced contractors, including Booth, to dismantle it brick by brick. Workers salvaged 90% of those bricks to construct a new El’s identical to the original that an indomitable Elvin Franks built in 1959.

Though a childhood bout of osteomyelitis left him with a limp, Elvin persevered. He worked tirelessly in various restaurants since high school, eventually channeling his passion and determination into starting his own business.

“He had a good work ethic and, you know, he cared about what we put out there,” Elvin’s son, Mark Franks, said.

Elvin co-owned an Atlantic Beach drive-in before leasing what is now nearby Cox’s Family Restaurant. There, Elvin and his wife, Helen, operated a drive-in named This Is It, but Elvin soon realized owning property was his best bet.

Ambition brought challenges. Construction of the first El’s couldn’t begin until a house on the property was relocated. Gail Franks recalls stories about Elvin and Helen owning just one car. “She worked in the daytime, and he would work at night,” Gail said. At midnight, Mom would gather her children for the drive to pick up Elvin after his shift.

Mark always knew he would work at El’s. Family legend has it that when Mark’s draft number for the U.S. Army came up, Elvin “talked to somebody” to ensure his son wouldn’t report to duty until after clocking one more summer at the restaurant. “I got in on what they called ‘the delayed-entry program,'” Mark said with a grin.

Like his dad, Shelton was happy to start working at El’s as soon as he was old enough, around age 12. Now, he runs the place, although Shelton stresses that his father “still beats me out here every morning.” And Mark was right there in the kitchen on reopening day.

“He’s my best friend,” Shelton said, “so, I guess I never thought about doing anything else. Why wouldn’t I want to help my dad? Why wouldn’t I want to keep this going?”

Gail is El’s bookkeeper. She and Mark’s daughter, Jenna, have lent a hand at the restaurant too. When the family agreed to expand to Smyrna in 2024, while the original location was under renovation, the goal wasn’t to seed a mega brand. Instead, Shelton wanted to help a cousin fulfill his own entrepreneurial dream. The independently operated El’s food truck there offers the same beloved menu and features a convenient drive-up window. Despite its remote address, a steady stream of loyal customers lines up.

No shortcuts

The Frankses write at El’s website that they have lovingly maintained the Morehead City restaurant “so you can feel the history — but not taste it.” Yet, it’s clear the values that the late Elvin Franks instilled all those years ago still season each order.

“I try to tell people who work for me, ‘Don’t send anything out that you wouldn’t want to receive,’” Shelton said.

What looks like chaos along the narrow kitchen line is a synchronized dance of short-order and prep cooks who patty Black Angus ground beef each morning into El’s signature burgers, the most popular items on the menu.

Creamy slaw for the top-selling “All The Way” — a classic Carolina burger that also gets mustard, chili and onions — is still prepared from-scratch according to Helen Franks’ recipe, with an unexpected hint of ketchup. “If it weren’t for the slaw, we’d just be another burger joint,” Shelton said as his father nodded in agreement.

Every shrimp burger, every piece of fried chicken, everything on the menu, from BLTs to oyster dinners, is cooked to order, no matter if 20 tickets crowd the board and an equal number waits stacked on the counter to take their place.

With nary a second of dilly dally, carhops whiz back and forth, delivering brown bags stuffed full of El’s goodness to what resembles a parking lot pile up. Servers magically monitor who’s just pulled in, who gets which bag and who needs special attention because they’ve been waiting in their vehicle too long.

“It’s hard to explain how we keep track of it,” said Mary Magara, who’s been working at El’s since 2006. “You just know.”

Between monitoring a griddle covered in burgers and five fryers all a go, cooks still take time to slide food to the few people, like Robert Ligas, who slip inside to grab their call-in orders.

Customers know to stay out of the way, but even in the lunch-rush madness, cooks alert Ligas that burgers for his six-man painting crew are almost ready. He doesn’t mind a delay. “We’ve been waiting nine months, so everybody wants a cheeseburger.”

Where did his team eat while El’s was closed? Ligas answers with a true testament of loyalty to this timeless piece of delicious history. “We brought a grill to work, and we made our own burgers.”

Editor’s note: Amanda Lyle is chief community engagement officer with the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review.

There’s almost something deceptive about walking through the newest addition to Holly Shelter Game Land.

Trees rising from sandy ground largely blanketed by a thick cover of pine needles and wind-rippling wiregrass deafen any sense you’re just a short way from U.S. Highway 17.

Ben Jones summed up the experience during a recent hike through a small slice of the tract referred to as the Sleepy Creek property, a 1,616-acre parcel where baby longleaf pine trees sprout in savannas, carnivorous plants thrive and dense brush coats the surface of pocosin wetlands.

“It feels like we are miles from civilization,” he said.

That’s the idea behind rerouting a stretch of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail from the side of U.S. 17 in Pender County near Surf City and tucking it on land safely away from the four-lane blacktop.

Jones is the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail’s Coastal Crescent project manager and architect of the future section of trail, one that will link with nearly 20 miles of existing North Carolina trail snaking through the vast game land.

On a blustery cold day last week, Jones, Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail Associate Director Betsy Brown and North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission officials offered a tour of the portion of game land where the new trail is anticipated.

This is a particularly unique project, one where the plan is to steer hikers away from the gravel roadways that cut through the game land and onto natural surface defined by upland sand ridges, longleaf habitat and pocosin wetlands.

“We want to keep it wild,” Jones said.

The exception will be a boardwalk structure planned through a little more than a mile of pocosin. The walkway will be constructed of some type of fireproof material, perhaps precast concrete that can withstand fire from prescribed burns state wildlife officials will administer to manage the land.

The modern method for maintain longleaf pine forests is through controlled burns, which reduce hardwood growth and manage grasses and forbs in the understory. Fires are essential to longleaf habitats for a number of reasons, one being that longleaf pine seeds germinate on bare ground.

This habitat is essential to a variety of plants and animals, including federally threatened red-cockaded woodpeckers.

The Nature Conservancy acquired the Sleepy Creek property about two years ago, permanently conserving land that would have most likely been developed. The Nature Conservancy transferred ownership to the state Wildlife Resources Commission.

Growth along the U.S. 17 corridor between Wilmington and Jacksonville has exploded in the last couple of decades as demand for property along the coast has skyrocketed.

The roughly 64,000-acre game land sits almost half way between the two cities – 25 minutes from Wilmington and 30 minutes from Jacksonville.

While Holly Shelter is a draw for hunters of game ranging from whitetail deer to rabbit to turkey, it’s also a formidable hiking spot.

The new, natural trail will extend a little more than 3.5 miles through the game land addition, which will also be made available for public hunting.

Negotiations are underway to purchase an additional 45-acre tract surrounded by the game land. If plans go accordingly, that property will be the site of a primitive camp ground.

Brown said kiosks and signage explaining trail and hunting etiquette to help educate those groups on how to coexist will be installed at the trail head.

Hikers are urged to plan ahead, make sure they have sufficient supplies, including water, and check for hunting seasons before heading into the game land. Wildlife officials ask hikers to wear something blaze orange, whether it be a hat, vest or other attire, if traversing Holly Shelter during a hunting season.

The Mountains-to-Sea Trail stretches more than 1,100 miles from the Great Smoky Mountains to the Outer Banks.

The Coastal Crescent Trail gives its guests the opportunity to experience a portion of the Cape Fear Arch, an area tapped as having the greatest biological diversity on the East Coast north of Florida.

The Arch spans between Cape Lookout National Seashore, a barrier island system in Carteret County, and Cape Romain in South Carolina, and inland beyond Fayetteville to the Carolina Sandhills.

The Coastal Crescent Trail runs through Johnston, Sampson, Cumberland, Bladen, Pender and Onslow counties.

The segment (there are 18 total) of Mountains-to-Sea Trail included in Holly Shelter Game Land spans a little more than 90 miles. It includes 3.5 miles of trail, just over 9 miles of beach, about 5.5 miles of multi-use path, 19 miles of forest roads and a little more than 53 miles of paved road.

Jones said he did not have an exact timeframe on when the new rerouted trail will be open for hiking, though it is expected to be complete in fewer than five years.

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.”

Reid Wilson does not disagree with those who tell him he had the best job in state government.

He loved being secretary of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

It’s a role he said he’s going to “miss terribly” when he steps in Monday as head of the state Department of Environmental Quality, a position appointed to him by Gov. Josh Stein.

“But I think now is a time of important opportunities and challenges in terms of public health and environmental protection and moving to DEQ brings me back to some of my roots,” he said in a recent telephone interview.

His is a storied environmental career spanning more than a quarter of a century. He’s been an environmental advocate, national political director of the Sierra Club, held three different titles during his tenure of nearly eight years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the Clinton administration, and a public affairs consultant to national environmental groups.

Outside of work, he’s a husband and father of two adult children. He declares himself the least musically talented in his family. His brother played the French horn in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra for more than 30 years.

Wilson enjoys everything from classical to bluegrass to rock.

And, he loves to do his laundry.

“I don’t trust anyone else not to shrink something,” he said.

Wilson and his wife left the nation’s capital for Raleigh almost 22 years ago, lured by a job he said his wife was doubtful he would get.

She figured the Conservation Trust for North Carolina would not be interested in out-of-state applicants, Wilson said. He applied anyway.

He would go on to lead the statewide nonprofit as its executive director for 14 years. During that time, the organization’s budget nearly doubled and its success in educational outreach to youth in conservation became a national standard.

Wilson has been with the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, or DNCR, since 2017, first at the department’s chief deputy secretary. He was appointed secretary in 2020.

Today, he is grateful to call Raleigh home. Sure, he misses the friends he made in Washington, D.C., but not life inside the Beltway.

He relishes the fact that William B. Umstead State Park is a 15-minute drive from his home.

There’s a particular spot just off Company Mill Trail where Wilson often goes when he needs to think through something or make a big life decision.

Sometimes he goes there to not think at all and breathe in the tranquility he finds in the sound of water cascading over boulders and rock slabs in a creek that cuts through the park.

“It’s just a very peaceful spot for me to sort things out. It’s just perfect for sitting and watching the water in the creek go by as it tumbles over some very small falls,” Wilson said.

He is a self-described lover of hiking. Nature is his refuge.

And whenever he gets the opportunity, he indulges in both, which married well with his position as DNCR secretary because it afforded him opportunities to hike when he visited a park or preserve on official business.

He knows the terrain he’ll be visiting as DEQ secretary will be a tad different. He’s looking forward to visiting as many of the department’s coastal reserves as he can.

“I do think one of the things I want to do is get out more, to leave Raleigh and see what’s going on with DEQ work around the state and especially with all of the challenges associated with Hurricane Helene,” Wilson said. “I want to see those challenges for DEQ firsthand.”

Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend on Sept. 26, 2024, and charged north through western North Carolina, demolishing communities and killing more than 100 people in this state alone.

Wilson did not see the areas hardest hit by the hurricane when he visited portions of western North Carolina with former Gov. Roy Cooper last fall.

“But I did get a good sense of the amazing challenges ahead and the incredible work being done by people in those communities,” he said. “There are piles and piles and piles of debris still in the affected areas. There are water quality issues in lakes and streams. There are challenges with water and drinking water structure that continue so there will be lots of work that DEQ will be doing to help communities in western North Carolina recover from Hurricane Helene. I think it’s important to see that work to understand it so that, back in Raleigh, we can do everything we can to efficiently help those communities. One thing I’ve learned over and over again is you understand an issue so much better if you actually go there and see it and talk to the people involved.”

He knows the work related to water quality issues will not be isolated to those areas of the state ravaged by the storm.

Tens of thousands of North Carolinians living everywhere from unincorporated, rural communities to towns and cities, including those within the Cape Fear Region, have been grappling with the knowledge their drinking water sources are contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

PFAS are chemical compounds that are used in the manufacturing of a host of consumer goods from food packaging to water resistant clothing.

While research is ongoing into possible human health effects of these chemicals – there are anywhere from 12,000 to upwards of 15,000 – some have been linked to cardiovascular disease, weakened immune function, various types of cancer and decreased liver and kidney function.

Wilson underscored what he said is a firehose of information that is only starting to trickle in as he takes his new role.

“At this point I have a lot more to study on that issue so that I can speak with a deeper knowledge base,” he said. “Having said that, these are dangerous chemicals that settle in the environment. EPA has set drinking water standards for them that local water utilities must meet to protect their customers.”

The state Environmental Management Commission appears to be moving forward with establishing health standards of PFAS in groundwater, but for only three of eight chemical compounds suggested by DEQ.

The commission’s proposal has been met with a flurry of public backlash as residents demand more protections for their drinking water sources.

“I know there’s conflict about the best next steps to protect people from them, but my hope is to be able to bring together different viewpoints and figure out a way that’s equitable, that protects people from these forever chemicals,” Wilson said.

He has an outline in his head of how he wants the first month to go. There will be meetings with staff, briefings, working with members of the North Carolina Senate on the state confirmation process, and making sure he understands the intricacies of big decisions that will need to be made in his early days with DEQ.

Looking back, Wilson said he’s proud of the dramatic expansion of state park land, trails and other outdoor recreational access in the state park system under his tenure.

The department continues to work hard updating old exhibits at history museums, historic sites and other facilities that share history, expanding their online content, and making sure those exhibits include more perspectives.

He’s particularly proud of the Dueling Dinosaurs exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. If you haven’t seen it, you must, he said.

The one thing he’ll miss most about DNCR secretary? Introducing bands that perform at the big music festivals DNCR sponsors in the state.

“Let’s just put it this way, introducing The Avett Brothers three years ago at MerleFest was a big highlight,” Wilson said. “That’s not going to happen anymore. But I am excited about (DEQ’s) mission, which is to protect public health by protecting air quality, water quality, our land and soils and that mission is also critical to strengthening our state’s economy.”

This story has been updated to include funeral arrangements.

Avid birder, wildlife enthusiast and conservationist John Oliver Fussell III, 75, of Morehead City, is being remembered for his decades of contributions to raising awareness of often-overlooked environmental issues affecting the North Carolina coast, particularly its plants and animals, of which he had a deep understanding.

Fussell, who studied zoology at North Carolina State University, died Friday, Dec. 27, 2024, at home. His fellow environmental advocates and scientists have shared their fond remembrances in the days since Fussell’s death.

Paul Branch Jr., who retired last year from his role as park ranger and historian at Fort Macon State Park, shared some details with Coastal Review on Fussell’s early work.

Fussell first held an internship at the park in summer 1974, studying the Theodore Roosevelt Natural Area and its resources and doing preliminary work to lay out a nature trail.

Then, in fall 1975, he was hired under the Comprehensive Employment Training Act, or CETA, Manpower Program both to provide a “State Parks ‘presence’ at the Natural Area during the construction of the Marine Resources Center,” now the North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores, and to develop the nature trail, Branch said.

“Based on his previous intern work, he established a half-mile trail through the maritime forest along the northeast corner of the tract to the salt marsh along the sound and back,” Branch explained.

The trail was named the Hoffman Nature Trail in honor of Alice Green Hoffman, the relative of the Roosevelt family who had owned and managed the large tracts of land on Bogue Banks from which the Theodore Roosevelt Natural Area had been donated.

Fussell worked there through summer 1976, and that fall under the CETA program, he worked at Fort Macon State Park as an interpreter to give nature and history programs at the park year-round.

“In addition to giving the usual history guided tours and slide shows at the fort, Fussell also began giving bird and nature walks to the public, which were well received. He also created a birding checklist for the park. In the fall and winter of 1977, he worked sorting through and cataloguing museum artifacts at the park,” Branch said, adding that Fussell left the park in 1978 for other pursuits but returned periodically over the years to take birding groups around the park.

Coastal Review contributor and former Hammocks Beach State Park superintendent Sam Bland said he first met Fussell in summer 1978, when both were working at Fort Macon State Park.

“John was the historian/naturalist and I was a park attendant,” Bland said. “I was envious of John as he was always out giving tours of the fort or taking people on nature hikes while I spent most of my time mowing the mosquito-infested grasses of the fort. But we did get to spend some time birding together and he introduced me to the painted buntings. He was a birding mentor to many and I think that is when he was happiest, sharing his knowledge with others.”

Bland said he considered Fussell to be a friend, but, he clarified, their relationship was more on a professional level.

“During my years at Hammocks Beach State Park, we would collaborate to conduct bird surveys on Bear Island and the surrounding marshes. He was my go-to person, as he was to many, for any birding identification or related questions. Often, he would give me a call to see if I had seen a species of bird that he had recently seen further up the coast,” Bland explained. “If it was a specific species of interest, such as a rare, unusual or out of season sighting, he would quiz me about details as he wasn’t going to consider it a confirmed sighting unless he was sure. One winter, a fairly large group of red phalaropes, which is an offshore bird, were spotted close to shore. John wanted to know if I had seen them off of Bear Island, which I had. But it took some convincing to reassure John that I had actually seen this specific species.”

Bland also noted that while well known as an ornithologist, Fussell was also a skilled botanist who would arrive at first light on the days of planned maintenance and cleanups at the Hoop Pole Creek nature trail in Atlantic Beach to put flagging tape on the rare plants to make sure they didn’t get trimmed and were protected.

“He was a great advocate for preservation, protection and restoration of our coastal resources. His ornithological and botanical surveys were instrumental in documenting our natural coastal heritage, especially during times of rampant development. His knowledge was an invaluable resource that will be greatly missed,” Bland said.

The day after Fussell’s death, Southern Environmental Law Center Senior Adviser Derb Carter shared on an online birding forum that with Fussell’s death, North Carolina had lost a “giant in the birding community,” of which he had been a fixture for 60 years.

“He knew the birds and every birding corner along his beloved NC coast like no one else,” Carter posted, referencing Fussell’s book published in in 1994 by the University of North Carolina Press, “Birder’s Guide to Coastal North Carolina” which “remains the definitive guide.”

Carter noted that Fussell “cared deeply” about protecting important habitats and as an accomplished naturalist contributed his knowledge and observations to the identification and preservation of lands by state and federal agencies and conservation organizations.

Among Fussell’s many contributions to promoting birding in the state, Carter explained that Fussell regularly volunteered to lead birding field trips for Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count, Wings Over Water Wildlife Festival on the Outer Banks, and other birding events.

“The one thing you could almost be certain of on one of John’s trips is you were going to get your feet soaked within the first hour. If the shortest way was dry, John would take the long way through the marsh or tidal flats on the chance of flushing a rail, sparrow, or wren,” Carter said.

He led Morehead City’s Christmas Bird Count for more than 60 years and participated in the counts in Wilmington and Masonboro Island.

“Sun, wind, rain, or snow he would be dropped off on the north end (of Masonboro Island) by boat first thing in the morning and walk the eight and a half miles to the south end to be picked up late afternoon.  The gulls, terns, shorebirds, and pelicans will be looking for him on Saturday and will miss him. We will all miss him,” Carter said.

Peter Vankevich, co-publisher of the Ocracoke Observer on Ocracoke Island, is a bird enthusiast who founded and serves as compiler of the Ocracoke and Portsmouth Island Christmas bird counts. He’s also an active supporter of the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust’s longtime efforts to protect Ocracoke’s 132-acre Springer’s Point Preserve.

“I first met John some years ago when he led a spring walk for the N.C. Coastal Land Trust through Springer’s Point on Ocracoke Island —  not for birds, but to point out the native plants of which seemed to have an equal amount of passion,” Vankevich said. “He was a gracious field trip leader.”

In recent years, Fussell frequently visited the massive wetland restoration project at North River Wetlands Preserve in Carteret County, documenting the changing bird communities as the wetlands are restored, Carter said. The preserve is a 6,000-acre restoration project of the Coastal Federation.

When recognized in 2017 by the North Carolina Coastal Federation with a Pelican Award “For Enduring Commitment to Preserving the Spectacular Natural Heritage of Our Coast,” he said that for many years he focused on environmental issues for which his involvement is disproportionately important.

For example, “Issues that I know a lot about but which are mostly ignored by the general environmental community,” he explained. “I have mostly focused on protecting rare plants and habitats in a major reserve of native biodiversity in our backyard, the Croatan National Forest.”

Fussell told Coastal Review at the time that he spent countless hours documenting the amount and numbers of rare plants in the Croatan National Forest, and sometimes their disappearance, and then getting that information on the radar screen by providing it to the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program and the U.S. Forest Service.

He added that he monitored projects, often at several stages, to make sure information did not get ignored or forgotten.

“I find it rewarding to find that if you persevere, sometimes you can make a difference,” Fussell said.

In the mid-1980s, Fussell worked with the Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, on an effort to protect what is now Hoop Pole Creek Preserve area in Atlantic Beach from a massive development project.

“That effort turned out to be ultimately successful and it was a major milestone in the development of the Coastal Federation as an important factor in addressing environmental issues. I found out that sometimes you can make a difference,” Fussell said in 2017.

There was an outpouring of condolences and memories on the birding forum after Carter’s announcement.

Ross McGregor of Stirling, Scotland, previously of Beaufort, wrote that he joined Fussell on Sunday morning birding trips.

“What really struck me about John were two things. Firstly he wore his vast knowledge so lightly. He was a great communicator. He never bragged and was always wanting to learn,” McGregor wrote. “Secondly, he could ask questions like few I have met. He would quiz me about my research on red-cockaded woodpeckers asking questions that really made me think. I think the questions were coming from his desire to know more and understand better, rather than to demonstrate my lack of knowledge and understanding. I learned so much from these chats. For me, it was these things made spending time birding with JF such a joy. He was a thoroughly decent bloke and the world is a poorer place without him.”

Harry LeGrand, who worked for the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program, said on the forum that he and Fussell were in some of the same classes at N.C. State University in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“He was the premier naturalist for 50+ years for the central NC coast,” LeGrand explained. “Not just with his knowledge of birds but also of botany and various other biological sciences, such as ecology and natural communities. He provided the N.C. Natural Heritage Program, where I worked for 31 years, with numerous reports of rare plants, especially from his beloved Croatan National Forest.”

LeGrand added that Fussell’s 1994 guide “was a birder’s ‘bible’ and is still useful today” because so many public sites have not substantially changed since.

“I will greatly miss JF, as he called himself, as will so many other folks who knew him, went on his many field trips, and got to learn so much from him,” he said.

Bob Lewis of Durham called Fussell “one of the giants” of North Carolina birding of the last 50 years.

Walker Golder, previously with the National Audubon Society, said on the forum that with the death of Fussell, “North Carolina has lost a great person in the bird world.”

Golder said he came to know Fussell in the mid-1980s as part of North Carolina’s early waterbird surveys.

“I consulted him often in the decades thereafter about various areas of the coast. Rest assured, he had been there. He was always glad to chat and would share the unwritten history of the regular birds and the rarities at the site. Birders visiting the coast from other states would often call my office seeking information about where they could see a particular bird. John’s book- A Birder’s Guide to Coastal North Carolina -was (and remains) the source for finding birds on the coast. I always recommended John’s book and occasionally received a call back from folks impressed with the thorough and detailed information. But that’s who I found John to be.”

His funeral will be at 3 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 8, at Noe-Brooks Funeral Home and Crematory in Morehead City. Visitation will precede the service, beginning at 2 p.m.

Editor Mark Hibbs contributed to this report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!’”

Fisheries researcher Samantha Farquhar has traveled far to learn more about industrial fishing and food security, and the related effects of a changing climate on peoples’ lives. Work that first requires building a level of trust.

Her travels have taken her from the University of Washington in Seattle to East Carolina University in Greenville, with stops in Nepal, Madagascar, Greenland and a small village in northern Quebec. Also included was a stop on the Outer Banks, where she worked as a seasonal fisheries technician with the Department of Marine Fisheries.

“I got to know a lot about what fishermen think of the regulations really fast,” Farquhar told Coastal Review recently.

It was, she explained, time well spent, especially for her chosen field of research.

“You go down to Wanchese, it’s their life. You have to really respect that when you’re doing research. You can’t just go in there asking a bunch of questions,” she said. “You have to take the time to build the right partnerships and develop trust.”

She was in Greenland this summer, spending most of July in Uummannaq, a town on the west side of the country. Although most of her work has been with fisheries, in this case she was working with Hurtigruten Expeditions, a Norwegian company that offers cruises to Greenland.

She was looking into the effects of climate change on the indigenous culture there.

“Greenland is one of the only countries that is (approximately) 80% indigenous people. It’s an indigenous-run country, which is pretty cool, but with strong ties to Denmark,” she said.

Farquhar was studying how climate change was affecting the use of the qajaq (pronounced kayak), which is the traditional kayak of the Inuit people of Greenland. Made of stretched animal skins over whalebone or driftwood, it is a long, narrow watercraft, that, because of its construction, is used only in relatively calm seas.

What Farquhar found was that days with conditions safe for qajaq use were becoming more infrequent.

“I can almost definitely say it’s harder for kayakers, than, say, 30 years ago,” she said. “A kayaker will tell me, ‘I will only go kayaking when it’s between zero and 0.5 meters of wave height. If it’s greater than 0.5 meters, it’s too wavy. I don’t feel safe going out.’”

Farquhar is in an ECU doctoral program administered by the Coastal Studies Institute on the ECU Outer Banks Campus that she described as unique in the world of academia.

“I’m in a PhD program called Integrated Coastal Sciences. It’s the only PhD program in the world that has this title,” she said, adding that trying to describe the program is difficult.

“It’s like coastal resource management, but more integrated,” Farquhar said.

“I have to understand the fishery science side of things,” she said, adding that her works demands an understanding of food security, food systems and how people obtain food within the food system. “So it’s really interesting.”

After five years of study, Farquhar  expects to defend her doctoral dissertation next spring.

Aquaculture sans ocean

Farquhar, fresh out of college with an undergraduate degree in biology, began her career in Nepal, where there was opportunity, despite what she describes as a “really funny” experience, “because they don’t have an ocean.”

And it was, she said, a place where the economics of food security, society and fish intersect.

“It was an aquaculture project that was for women specifically, because in a lot of traditional Nepali societies, women are stuck in the household, and they don’t have a lot of options for economic development,” Farquhar said. “That led me to get into fisheries development … to see how fisheries could be tied to people.”

The societal aspects of fisheries became a frequently recurring concept in her work. She later spent nine months living in Madagascar on a U.S. government Fulbright Student Grant Program.

“I was working in a marine protected area,” she said, describing how it was managed by a local community, “small-scale fishers, traditional sailing vessels, that kind of thing.”

Beyond the managed area, industrial-scale fishing was permitted, but vessels from the European Union or Asian countries were entering the marine protected area. “They would get very upset,” Farquhar said. “They’d be like, ‘This boat is stealing all of our fish.’”

Often, industrial-scale fishing operations are described as “really bad for local communities, especially when the industrial fishing is by a different party and not the local community,” Farquhar said. But, empirical proof of harm is difficult to produce.

“If you think about it in terms of data, it’s really hard to prove that industrial fishing happening here is causing this household over here to lose out on meals and suffer,” she said.

Some of the difficulty in showing a link is in the recordkeeping, or lack thereof.

“There is no good long-term data for Madagascar,” Farquhar said. Even in developed nations, it can be difficult to show how food security and industrial fishing are interwoven in the local economy.

Because of COVID-19 travel restrictions, Farquhar was unable to return to Madagascar, but she did find a project in Canada, where she found, there was “much better data.”

The focus of her work in northern Quebec was in Kuujjuaq, an Inuit town on the southern side of the Hudson Straight. The town, with a population greater than 2,600 is the largest town in the Nunavik region of Quebec.

Unlike her work in Madagascar, Kujjuaq residents are developing an industrial fishing economy with the goal of benifitting the Nunavik region.

“The commercial fishery that they’re ramping up in the area is shrimp,” Farquhar said. “Shrimp is not a traditional food in the indigenous community that I’m working in. They like it, but it’s not like something that they’re (saying), ‘Yes, this is important to our culture.’”

What is important to the culture is Arctic char, a fish that looks a bit like salmon, although it has yet to catch on as an export commodity.

“It’s very important to them. It’s a really good-tasting fish. You can never find it in the United States,” she said.

The Kuujjuaq community has been fairly successful, too, exporting most of the shrimp to Asia, Farquhar said, adding although that, “they hit a bit of a bump during COVID.”

There may be a limit to how much shrimp can be harvested, however, if a healthy population of arctic char is to be maintained.

“Arctic char eats shrimp,” Farquhar noted. “So, if you’re fishing your shrimp population, is that going to affect your arctic char population?”

That remains unknown because the local ecosystem has not been well studied, something that, for Farquhar, makes working with the locals even more interesting.

“It’s very innovative work. The community is really interested in the work. They’re asking me questions to look at in my dissertation,” she said.

Steve Smith made it a point to go outside the boundaries of the Topsail Island town he served for nearly a decade to educate himself on coastal issues up and down the North Carolina seaboard.

“He was all the time keeping up with information as it became available at all different levels — state, federal, local,” said North Topsail Beach Mayor Pro Tem Mike Benson on Monday. “He was always doing his homework and had his background figured out before he brought issues forward. So, most of the time he was right. He also knew things that were going on in Virginia and South Carolina and how some of their policies might be good here.”

Smith, who was serving his second mayoral term in Topsail Beach, died “peacefully” Friday, according to a town news release. He was 73.

His death, “leaves a huge void in the Town of Topsail Beach,” the release states. “His leadership, wisdom, and compassion will be greatly missed by all who knew him.”

Topsail Beach Mayor Pro Tem Morton Blanchard said Smith was a “consummate mayor.”

“He was a better politician than I’ll ever be. He knew how to get to the legislators and get this little town money,” Blanchard said in a telephone interview Monday afternoon. “Through our time together I’ve been upset with him a few times, but he always managed to stay calmer than me. He was a good friend. Personally, he loved this beach as much as anybody.”

A native of Portsmouth, Virginia, Smith’s childhood was that of a typical military brat, moving from duty station to duty station.

The family’s final post was Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, where Smith left as a high school graduate for the halls of East Carolina University, earning a Bachelor of Science in 1973.

More than 40 years later in 2016, his alma mater honored him with its Outstanding Alumni Award, one of the most prestigious awarded by the university and that recognizes alumni for “outstanding and uncommon achievement in one’s profession, civic affairs and/or politics.”

Smith’s career in business and industry in the United States, Southeast Asia and Africa spanned nearly four decades.

He retired in 2011, moving with his wife, Edna, to their home in Topsail Beach.

It would become evident Smith had no intentions of living a life of complete leisure once the couple settled as permanent residents in the small Pender County beach town.

He was first elected to the town’s board of commissioners in 2015, holding that position for four years before running for and winning the mayor’s seat in 2019 and again in 2023.

He would come to serve on countless boards and committees, “a visionary leader who had a passion for serving his community,” according to the town release. “His commitment to preserving the town’s unique character and natural beauty was evident in his many accomplishments over the years.”

During his time in office, he chaired the Topsail Island Shoreline Protection Commission, or TISPC, and, in 2019, served on the North Carolina Beach, Inlet and Waterway Association’s Board of Directors.

Smith was known for his calm, easy disposition. It wasn’t uncommon to spot him sitting in the audience at quarterly North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission meetings, the locations of which rotate among the north, central and southern areas of the coast.

Benson, a fellow member of the TISPC, somberly recalled in a telephone interview Monday morning the man he considered to be a friend.

“Steve had such a positive outlook on life,” he said. “He would call you and say, ‘how are you today?’”

Kerri Allen, coastal management program director and coastal advocate with the North Carolina Coastal Federation’s Wrightsville Beach office, said that Smith was kind, dedicated, “and always willing to think outside the box and try innovative solutions when it came to coastal resiliency.”

“He genuinely cared about his community and always put them above any personal or political agenda,” she responded to Coastal Review in an email Monday. “He was a true leader, and had a way of making anyone and everyone feel welcome and valued. His passing leaves such a void in the Topsail community.”

Benson highlighted a number of contributions Smith made over the years, including leading the TISPC in support of state funding for beach nourishment projects on Topsail Island and Coastal Barrier Resources Act-related issues, supporting the North Carolina Marine Debris Action Plan, helping secure funding approval for Surf City’s proposed federal coastal storm risk management project, and, more recently, leading local efforts in conjunction with the Coastal Federation up to the state level in support of a ban on abandoned vessels in coastal waters.

In addition to his wife, Smith is survived by his son and daughter-in-law, two grandchildren and a brother.

A service is scheduled for noon Thursday at Emma Anderson Memorial Chapel in Topsail Beach with a reception to follow at the town Assembly Building.

Blanchard said the town board is expected to meet next week to select a mayor. A date and time for that meeting is to be determined.

“We’ve got a good team down here,” Blanchard said. “I don’t think we’ll miss a lick. Whoever gets [mayorship], it’ll be daggone hard to fill his shoes.”

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.