For the past year, lifelong Carteret County resident Shannon Adams has been using the skills he’s built through his career in technology to digitize about five decades of the local newspaper for the county’s public library system.

He never expected that by taking on this volunteer project to get editions of the Carteret County News-Times from between 1963 and 2012 from microfilm to the computer screen would lead to a connection between his alma mater, Appalachian State University, and his hometown of Beaufort.

The News-Times has always been a part of Adams’ world. As a child, he said his mother would take him to the store to buy the most recent newspaper for herself and a treat for him.

“That’s kind of how I learned to read. Mom always had it on the table, and it just stuck with me for years. Even when I was away for school, I subscribed to the News-Times,” Adams said. “I think my whole life I’ve always been into local news.”

Adams said that as he got older, he started digitizing whatever media he could: family photos, yearbooks, old film, and home movies.

When he decided to take on the project to digitize the library’s microfilms, Adams recruited a friend also in the technology field, Kris Pettijohn, who resides in Minnesota.

Pettijohn, who told Coastal Review that he has an interest in preserving local history and records, came up with a way to digitize the microfilm using a camera and backlight setup, rather than using expensive commercial scanning equipment.

“A lot of it was trial and error, but it made large-scale digitization much more practical and affordable,” Pettijohn explained.

Once the digital copies were in front of Adams for processing and organizing, he said he would often find himself going “down rabbit holes” while looking through these decades-old editions.

One night in May of last year during one of these deep dives, Adams read a May 1977 article about five visitors from App State who spent a few days in Beaufort to record interviews with notable residents, including the late Grayden Paul, Shirley Babcock, Jean Kell and Eugene Pond, for the Appalachian Oral History Project. The project was launched in 1973 to collect oral histories from residents in Watauga, Avery, Ashe, and Caldwell counties.

According to the article, the professor directing the project, Pat Morgan, was encouraged to go to Beaufort by Borden Mace, who was executive director of the Appalachian Consortium. No longer in operation, the consortium operated from 1970 to 2004 to preserve the region’s heritage.

Mace “grew up in Beaufort and recommended it as a good area to study,” Morgan explains in the article. Adding that the interviews with the town’s residents “reveal a lifestyle which has been maintained over the years and can be used to further research and as a teaching tool.”

Adams, who graduated from App State in 1993, immediately shared the article with fellow alum Karen Willis Amspacher, because “Karen and I have always connected over Appalachian because there aren’t many people in Carteret County who went there.”

Amspacher, a 1981 graduate, is executive director of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island, and she encouraged Adams to find out what he could about those oral histories.

Adams then contacted the university and was connected to Mark Coltrain, an oral historian for the campus’s Special Collections Research Center.

Coltrain told Coastal Review that he was aware of the trip that Morgan took with his assistant and students to Beaufort in May 1977, because he had stumbled on some paper files about the visit in the project’s physical collection while researching another topic several years ago.

He later learned that the trip was at the behest of Mace, who “was inspired by the oral history project’s focus on documenting the memories, experiences, and traditions of rural mountain folks and wanted Morgan to explore a possible partnership that might initiate a counterpart of sorts in rural Carteret County,” he continued.

Another clue about the trip was found in the proposal, “Boone to Beaufort,” that had been stored in the archival collection, which Coltrain shared: “The purpose of the visit is to begin an exchange of interviews and exhibits between the people of the two towns. The Project hopes to conduct a variety of cultural-social interviews with people who are residing in Beaufort and begin making a comparative study of the cultures of these two areas of North Carolina.”

“It appears that ‘the Project’ never took off after that initial excursion but we are left with a small collection of fascinating, rich recordings documenting the experience. The recordings are a combination of tours the Appalachian State group took with local guides and oral history interviews they conducted with local residents,” Coltrain continued.

Coltrain was looped into the email conversation between Adams and the university archivist in May 2025, giving the 1977 trip even more significance.

“I recalled the documents I had seen previously. I dug a little deeper and soon found recordings from the trip.” He shared those finds with Adams, prompting his first visit to the research center.

Adams and his wife Cecilia, also an App State graduate, headed to the mountains in the following month to listen to the recordings and said he “was just blown away,” by the interviews. They returned to Boone a few months later with Amspacher.

In the time since, Coltrain has been working to transfer the physical recordings to Core Sound and has been able to track down one of the five visitors to Beaufort, Audrey Jackson McGee, and connected her with Adams and Amspacher.

McGee, who grew up outside of High Point and lives in Vale now, attended the university from 1974 to 1979, and was in the same work-study program as Amspacher. That’s how McGee ended up in Beaufort with a few other students, Morgan, and another staff member.

While McGee remembers the trip, she said she doesn’t remember all the details. Memories that stick out are setting up the cultural exchange exhibit in the county library and staying in “one of the beautiful historic homes on the water.”

One aspect she found interesting about the project was being able to meet Beaufort residents and to hear about their lives, “about things that were so different from my own experience.”

McGee has revisited the recordings since being Coltrain contacted her, and it “has been wonderful to be able to hear those and some of the people that we met there.”

Coltrain said Adams’ “excitement at hearing some voices of people important to the history of Carteret County was palpable and contagious. These recordings had not been heard in years. It wasn’t long after Adams’ first visit and then his follow-up visit with Karen Amspacher in October 2025 that I knew these recordings should go back ‘home.’”

Amspacher knows more than most about the Appalachian Oral History Project. Her work-study assignment was to listen and transcribe the recordings, and it’s a large part of why the museum has such a sizable oral history collection.

During her first semester on the Boone campus in 1979, she worked “in this little white house” where the Appalachian Consortium was located, “and my job was to transcribe on an old IBM Selectric with headphones and foot pedals these oral histories from the mountain people.”

After about the third one in, she said she thought about home and wondered why oral histories weren’t being recorded in Carteret County.

“Oral histories are important on so many levels. It’s not only the information, but it’s the voices, it’s the time period they represent,” Amspacher explained in an interview. Adding that her top priority at the museum is oral history, and that is because of Appalachian State University and her work with the Appalachian Oral History Project.

Now, the Core Sound museum has more than 600 oral histories in its collection “and I don’t know if we’d have that if I hadn’t going to Appalachian and had that job,” she said. The museum has invested a lot of time, work, and grant money to build the collection because oral histories offer a perspective that documents or artifacts can’t.

To welcome the recordings that will grow the museum’s collection even more, Core Sound is holding an evening program Tuesday to talk about the chain of events leading to these recordings becoming part of the museum’s collection. The covered dish dinner starts at 6 p.m. and Coltrain and Michelle Moriarity Witt, Core Sound’s digital archivist, are to lead the program that begins at 7 p.m.

The museum has the recordings available online now and will be receiving the collection from Coltrain when he arrives for the program.

Amspacher and Adams both have been reaching out to the family members of the people who were interviewed to invite them to the special evening. They are encouraging anyone related to or interested in these recordings to come out to the museum for the special program.

They also contacted this reporter, a 2002 App State graduate and previously with the News-Times, to explain the chain of events.

Coltrain said working with and getting to know Adams and Amspacher has been a highlight.

“It is a real pleasure to connect with people so passionate about their community’s history and reinforces why I’m in this field. The fact that they are both Appalachian State alumni is icing on the cake,” Coltrain explained.

“As a steward of Appalachian State’s oral history collections, ensuring historical materials are in the community where they belong through methods like cultural repatriation is an important value that I take seriously,” Coltrain explained.

“The Core Sound Waterfowl Museum made sense to me as the organization where these materials should go because of Amspacher’s recognized work preserving her local community’s history through methods like oral history. Amspacher’s work, the work of the Appalachian Oral History Project half a century ago, and the continuing work of collecting and preserving oral histories at Appalachian State feels linked in a cosmic way that is impossible to ignore. I am honored to have a role in making these historical connections stronger and these voices more accessible to the community and the world.”

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.

Cecelski stumbled on this travel account while looking for historical sources for a story focused on Marshallberg’s Crockett cannery and the sea turtle fishery in the 1930s. 

In the May 13, 1903, edition of the Raleigh News & Observer, correspondent C.J. Rivenbark told the story of his journey to Graham Academy, a school on the outskirts of a fishing village called Marshallberg that is located in the Down East part of Carteret County.

Marshallberg is on a peninsula bound by Sleepy Creek, Core Sound, and a body of water called The Straits that runs between the village and two islands, Harkers Island and Browns Island.

In the early 1900s, Marshallberg was far more out of the way than it is today. It is only 8 miles east of Beaufort, the seat of Carteret County, but at that time, no bridge had yet been built across the North River, and no roads had been paved anywhere east of Beaufort.

As we can see in Rivenbark’s account, people, freight and mail in Marshallberg all came and went by boat.

Rivenbark arrived in Morehead City by train on May 11, 1903. He then boarded the naphtha launch Violet for the trip to Marshallberg.

Operated by the Morehead City, Beaufort, and Ocracoke Steamship Co., the Violet left Morehead City on a regular schedule, stopped just across the river in Beaufort, then worked its way Down East.

The Violet’s captain carried mail to the fishing and farming communities between Beaufort and Cedar Island, then crossed the sound to the southern end of the Outer Banks. First to the village of Portsmouth, then to the village of Ocracoke on the other side of the inlet.

Along the way, the captain picked up and dropped off passengers and freight as the need arose.

According to Jack Dudley’s lovely book “Ocracoke Album,” the steamship company’s captains left Beaufort at first light on Monday mornings and aimed to be in Ocracoke by Wednesday evening at 6 p.m.

After spending the night in Ocracoke, they set off for home early the next morning, hoping to make it back to Beaufort by 6 p.m. on Saturday.

On the spring day that Rivenbark was on board, the Violet was only carrying him, the captain and two other passengers.

“Aboard the Violet…,  the writer has but two traveling companions. Dr. W. T. Paul, of Atlantic, who is recovering from a fractured rib, the result of a fall through the trestle work at Pier No. 1 at Morehead…, and a lonely widow, en route to the Island of Hatteras.”

I could not confidently identify the Violet’s “lonely widow en route to the Island of Hatteras,” but I wondered if it might have been Viola Johnston Scarborough, a Hatteras Island woman who had lost her husband only a month earlier.

Ms. Scarborough’s husband, George M. Scarborough, was said to have been a native of Cape Hatteras.

At the turn of the 20th century, Scarborough was the assistant keeper of the Roanoke Marshes Lighthouse, a screw-pile lighthouse located at the southern end of Croatan Sound.

On April 14, 1903, he had been home visiting his wife and child on Hatteras Island, then set off in what was apparently rough weather in a sail skiff bound for the lighthouse. His boat overturned in the storm about a mile offshore, still in sight of his family.

Viola Scarborough– if it was she on board the Violet— was left feeling grief upon grief. According to a notice of her husband’s death that appeared in the North Carolina Advocate (20 April 1903), she had already lost one husband in her young life.

The Advocate’s story did not say how her first husband died, and it could have been anything. But thinking of that time and place, one can’t help but wonder if she had also lost him to the sea.

The Violet’s only other passenger that day, Dr. W. T. Paul, was born in Pitt County, N.C. in or about 1848.

Paul served in the Confederate army’s reserves during the Civil War, when he was no more than 16 or 17 years old.

“His youth gave great promise,” one source said.

The village of Atlantic, where he came to practice, was on the northern end of Core Sound. It was some 30 miles north and east of Beaufort, and like Marshallberg, it was reachable only by boat.

In Atlantic, Dr. Paul did whatever was in his powers to do: he treated the sick and dyspeptic, delivered babies, mended broken bones, and performed surgery when, as was almost always the case, there was no time to get a patient to a hospital.

In those days, the people of Atlantic made their livings largely by fishing, waterfowl hunting, and going to sea, though many of the village’s women also worked in a clam cannery that was there for a few years around the turn of the century.

Like so many of the local fishing villages, Atlantic also seemed to attract outsiders, perhaps like Dr.. Paul, who were looking for a place to hide from the world or to shelter their frailties.

Dr. Paul died on New Year’s Day, 1917. He was 69 years old. I found several of his obituaries, and while only disclosing so much, they make it seem as if he had had a tough time of it.

In the Greensboro News & Record’s (2 Jan. 1917), for instance, the obituary writer implied that Dr. Paul had been worn down by “drink and dope,” to the point that he had long been reduced to poverty.

(At that time, “dope” most often meant opium, morphine, or heroin, not marijuana.)

Dr. Paul ended his life at the Confederate Soldiers’ Home, a residence for indigent Civil War veterans in Raleigh. He committed suicide there on New Year’s Day 1917.

I guess it is always that way. If seen from a distance, the scene would have seemed so idyllic: a boat, a captain at the helm, the three travelers, the sea around them, the lighthouse in the distance.

I am reminded again of how little we know of the burdens that others carry, or of the wounds they bear.

-To Be Continued-

The North Carolina Coastal Federation is set to break ground next month in Carteret County on what officials describe as a first-of-its-kind facility intended to help shellfish growers overcome market barriers.

The Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, says the Shellfish Mariculture Hub in Straits, an unincorporated Down East community with deep commercial seafood heritage, will serve as a shared resource for shellfish growers, marking a significant milestone in sustainable shellfish aquaculture in the state and supporting the local community. The Shellfish Mariculture Hub promises to enhance the production capabilities of shellfish farmers while promoting collaboration and innovation, according to the Coastal Federation, which plans to hold a groundbreaking ceremony at 11 a.m. May 4.

Situated at the Straits Landing Boat Ramp, the facility will provide shared refrigeration, equipment and water access, all of which farmers need to grow a thriving local industry rooted in coastal heritage and vital to the state’s blue economy. 

“From costly water access to long hauls for refrigeration and distribution, oyster growers face logistical barriers at every step,” explained Coastal Federation Oyster Program Director Alyson Flynn. “This facility is the solution towards streamlining operations and strengthening the shellfish mariculture industry.” 

Construction of the 50-foot, square building is expected to begin this summer.

The Shellfish Mariculture Hub is part of a broader, coordinated effort to grow the state’s oyster industry into a $100 million sector by 2030 — creating jobs, strengthening the coastal economy, and advancing resilient working waterfronts. By addressing a critical industry gap, the hub will lower barriers to market entry for new growers while enabling existing growers to expand and scale their operations, supporting the next generation of shellfish farmers. 

“Not only is the hub a centralized support facility for growers, but it is also an innovative model for the future of shellfish mariculture—equipping growers to thrive and serving as a blueprint for industry growth and investment along our coast,” said Flynn. 

Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center volunteers are cooking away ahead of the Harkers Island museum’s annual Taste of Core Sound winter edition happening this weekend.

When doors open at 6 p.m. Friday, ticketholders can snack on oysters on the half shell, crab dip, fruit and cheese before the meal is served at 7 p.m. This year’s menu includes Hancock salad, stewed conchs, scallop fritters, crabmeat casserole, garlic shrimp and rice, stewed redheads and rutabaga, chicken and pastry, winter collards, sweet potatoes, squash casserole and light rolls.

Guest speaker, Beaufort native Geoffrey Adair, a retired District Attorney Craven County and historian, will take the podium around 8 p.m., while a dessert of homemade cakes is served.

“Adair, who was born and raised in Beaufort, vividly remembers the smell of Menhaden steamers moored at Beaufort’s docks, the cool air of the season’s first mullet shift and the simple pleasure of swimming across ‘the cut’ on a hot summer’s day,” organizers said.

There will be a live auction of Core Sound decoys at the close of the program.

Tickets are $100 per person for museum members and $125 for nonmembers. Ticket includes annual membership. Purchase tickets through the museum’s website.

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

Featured Image

Marshallberg Harbor is iced in during last weekend’s winter storm. Despite warmer temperatures in the days since, black ice and snow along with refreezing of standing water remain a threat to travel, National Weather Service forecasters in Newport said Thursday. Also, after this brief improvement, strong winds will again develop Friday night over coastal waters as an Arctic front moves through the region, producing strong gale conditions expected to persist into Sunday morning. Photo: Rachael Carlyle

On a clear day, the Cape Lookout Lighthouse is visible from the entrance of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

The black-and-white diamond lighthouse built in 1859 is the centerpiece of the Cape Lookout National Seashore, but it isn’t the only structure of historical significance on the protected, 56-mile-long barrier island system.

Construction began in 1916 on the Cape Lookout Coast Guard Station, one of three stations built on Core Banks in Carteret County, and the waterfowl museum is hosting a celebration to honor the building and what it represents: the county’s Coast Guard history and its guardsmen.

The event, “U.S. Coast Guard Station at Cape Lookout 110th Anniversary Celebration Day:  Honoring Carteret County’s Rich Coast Guard History and It’s Continuing Role in Our Community” is scheduled for 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday at the museum, 1785 Island Road.

“All U.S. Coast Guard veterans, especially those stationed at Cape Lookout, are invited to spend the day remembering and sharing the stories of Cape Lookout Station during a celebration of the 110th anniversary of the U.S. Coast Guard,” organizers said.

Coast Guard veterans, families and descendants are encouraged to bring photos for a memorial table to remember those who served, as well as photos that can be scanned and added to the museum’s collection.

Throughout the daylong event, there will be a slideshow of photos of Cape Lookout courtesy of Core Sound, National Park Service and N.C. Maritime Museums, and staff and volunteers will be conducting short interviews with those who served at Cape Lookout.

The official welcome is at 11:30 a.m., followed by lunch at noon. Reserve your spot for lunch at coresound.com/uscg.

The informal program begins at 2 p.m. with a roll call and include an update on the ongoing restoration work of the lighthouse with Cape Lookout Foundation, an event sponsor.

Cape Lookout’s Coast Guard history

The first Cape Lookout station was completed in August 1887 and a cookhouse was added five years later. In 1916, a new station was proposed for the original site, and the 1887 station was moved 60 feet away, making way for work to begin. The station was completed in 1917 and inhabited a year later. A boathouse was added in 1924, according to the U.S. Life-Saving Service Heritage Association.

The 1887 station was remodeled in the 1920s and used as living quarters for the Navy’s Radio Compass Station until the end of World War II. When the Cape Lookout Lighthouse was automated in the 1950s, the Coast Guard demolished several buildings in 1957 and sold the 1887 life-saving station building and the 1923 boathouse.

Cape Lookout Station mission and personnel were merged into the larger Fort Macon Coast Guard Station in 1982 and Cape Lookout Station was decommissioned.

The publicly owned buildings and property were transferred two years later to the Cape Lookout National Seashore. The 1887 station and boathouse were privately owned until 2003 when both buildings were turned over to the National Park Service. In June 2000, the Cape Lookout Village historic district was listed on the National Register.

The 1917 Coast Guard station was used in the early 2000s by the Maritime Museum for environmental education, research and conservation. Between 2018 and 2020, preservation and restoration efforts took place, according to the association.

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.

Guest Commentary To stimulate discussion and debate, Coastal Review welcomes differing viewpoints on topical coastal issues.

This fall has been one of the wettest in my memory — and yet, we haven’t had much significant rainfall, or a single hurricane or tropical storm make landfall. Still, the water lingers.

King tides have been washing over docks, creeping across yards, and flooding roads that once stayed dry except in the worst storms. For those of us living Down East in Carteret County, it’s a clear sign that something deeper is changing.

I’ve lived in Atlantic for six decades. I’ve never seen the roads hold water like this. The fields don’t dry out anymore. The ditches stay full — they just don’t drain.

When ditches stop working

For generations, Down East communities-built ditches moved water off the land and into nearby creeks or sounds. Those systems were based on one simple principle: gravity. Water flows downhill, and as long as the outlet of a ditch was lower than the land it drained — and the tide stayed low enough — water could flow freely.

But that balance has been shifting. The “hydrologic head,” or the difference in elevation that drives water to move from land to sea, has been shrinking as sea level rises. When the sea surface and ditch outlet are nearly the same height, there’s no longer enough downward pressure to push the water out. Even small rises in tide height or groundwater level can stop drainage altogether.

Today, many ditches are effectively at or just above mean high tide. That means during normal tides, water from the creeks seeps inland through the ditches, instead of the other way around. Even when a ditch still looks dry at low tide, the groundwater beneath it is now closer to the surface, leaving the soil perpetually saturated. Digging the ditch deeper doesn’t help — it only invites more saltwater in and raises the groundwater table even higher.

In short, the plumbing that once kept the land dry is backing up.

Ghost forests: symptom of a deeper change

Drive Down East in Carteret County, and the change is plain to see. Along North River, Core Sound, and the backroads of Cedar Island and Atlantic, stands of gray, lifeless trees rise like skeletons from the marsh — the ghost forests of a drowning coast.

Where there were once loblolly pines, red maples, and black gums, saltwater now seeps through the soil, killing the trees from the roots up. These ghost forests are not isolated patches — they are expanding corridors of dead timber that trace the slow inland march of the tides. They are, quite literally, the frontline of sea level rise.

The loss of these forests shows that this isn’t just a surface flooding problem. It’s the entire groundwater system responding to rising seas — a shift in the coastal hydrology that’s transforming once-productive working lands into wetlands and marsh.

What the future holds

If sea level continues to rise at its current pace — or faster, as most scientists expect — the next two or three decades will bring dramatic change to Down East Carteret County.

• Farming will become progressively more difficult, as fields stay too wet or too salty for crops or equipment.
• Roads will flood more often and for longer periods, isolating communities during high tides.
• Septic systems will fail, as the groundwater table rises to meet the drainfields.
• Homes and businesses built on low ground will face chronic flooding, declining property values, and higher insurance costs.

And yet, all this is happening without a single hurricane this year. The water is simply no longer leaving.

Working with water, not against it

The North Carolina Coastal Federation and many partners are working to restore natural hydrology on thousands of acres of previously ditched farmland and forestland. By filling or plugging ditches and re-establishing wetland systems, these projects allow the land to store and slowly release water — the way nature intended.

Restored wetlands act like natural sponges and filters, reducing flooding, improving water quality, and providing habitat for fish and wildlife. More importantly, they show that living with water is possible — but only if we plan for it, rather than trying to drain it away.

Facing reality

The ghost forests now lining our creeks are not just dying trees; they’re a warning. They tell us that the old ways of managing water — cutting deeper ditches, pumping harder, pushing it away — will not work in a world where the sea itself is rising.

Down East has always lived close to the water and thrived because of it. But if we want our communities to endure, we’ll need to give the land room to breathe again — to let it hold water where it must and adapt to what’s coming.

Because the water isn’t waiting.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation publishes Coastal Review.

Cape Lookout National Seashore officials plan to hold its annual duck blind permit lottery through the National Park Service’s official reservations website later this month.

The permit allows duck hunters to place and leave temporary duck blinds in the park from Sept. 12 to March 31, 2026.  Construction of permanent duck blinds is illegal, and the temporary blinds must be removed by the permittee no later than March 31, 2026.

The lottery will open on recreation.gov at 10 a.m. Tuesday, Aug. 26, and close at 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 28. There is a $10 registration fee to enter the lottery.

Lottery slots are a limited in number. Those who want to enter the lottery are encouraged to create an account before the lottery opens.

After the lottery closes, the lottery order will be randomly selected from the pool of applicants and a time assigned for the required in-person, 15-minute appointment sometime between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Friday, Sept. 12. Those selected will be notified by email.

During the appointments in the visitor center at 1800 Island Road, Harkers Island, lottery winners will be able to select where their blinds will be located, complete the permit paperwork and pay their permit fees.

Hunters are limited to two blinds. There is a $50 permit fee for the first blind, and a $25 fee for the second blind, or $75 for two blinds. The fees are used to administer and monitor the program. 

Applicants must bring a valid driver’s license or identification card, a North Carolina hunting license, and a signed federal duck stamp or federal e-stamp.

“If you arrive for an in-person appointment without ALL these documents, you will not be issued a permit and will forfeit your scheduled lottery appointment,” rangers said (their emphasis).

Those not selected during the lottery or who can’t make their scheduled appointment time are welcome to go to the visitor center to be seen on a first-come, first-served basis beginning Sept. 17.

Hunting is authorized within the national seashore, subject to State of North Carolina hunting regulations and federal law. 

Hunters are advised that failure to obtain a permit or failure to remove blinds at the end of the permit period may result in penalties, a bill for the cost of removing the blind, and exclusion from the program in future years. Illegal duck blinds found in the park will be removed without notice and the cost of removing illegal and abandoned blinds significantly adds to the cost of the program and may have to be passed on to the hunters in future years.

Commercial hunting or fishing guides must obtain a permit to conduct commercial activities in a national park.  To obtain a Commercial Use Authorization, or CUA, permit, guides should contact park business manager Katherine Cushinberry at 252-838-8899. 

Guides with a CUA permit may advertise that they are an authorized hunting guide for Cape Lookout National Seashore. Those caught guiding without a CUA permit may be prosecuted and lose lottery and hunting privileges for a minimum of two years.

For more information regarding the 2024-25 Duck Blind Lottery at Cape Lookout National Seashore, contact Ranger Evan Knight at 252-838-8929.

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 Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center is making this year’s Fourth of July shrimp fry set for Saturday “A Time to Honor our Community Leaders From Carteret County to western NC.”

The nonprofit holds the dinner annually to honor active military, veterans, frontline workers, teachers, school staff, health care professionals, power company line workers and all those who make the community safer and healthier with a complimentary plate, which can be reserved on the website.

This year, organizers have invited the Crystal Coast Water Rescue Team who responded to Black Mountain after Hurricane Helene hit in late September 2024, and Black Member Mountain Fire Department.

“We will be honoring the Crystal Coast Water Rescue Team that courageously traveled to Black Mountain during the Helene response last fall. Part of this recognition is to welcome members of the Black Mountain Fire Department who called on Carteret County for help,” organizers said, adding that the team would be there “to enjoy a much-needed rest from their continuing struggle/recovery and to host them at our event on July 5.”

Throughout the evening, attendees will have be able to enjoy “mountain music” in honor of Black Mountain with area bluegrass bands, Mac McRoy and The South Point Band and the Asher Brinson Band.

Preordered plates will be served from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., at 1785 Island Road on Harkers Island. Others can preorder theirs for $20 online, at 806 Arendell St., Morehead City, the heritage center on Harkers Island, or by phone at 252-728-1500. Organizers “strongly encourage” getting tickets ahead of time.

Honor those who serve by serving yourself a plate of local shrimp and all the trimmings at this year’s Core Sound shrimp fry on Harkers Island.

The Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center is hosting the community gathering July 5 to honor active-duty service members, veterans, first responders, including fire and rescue personnel, law enforcement, and teachers and school staff, healthcare workers and linemen.

Complimentary plates will be available to these individuals.

Everyone else may buy a plate for $20.

The event is scheduled from 4-7 p.m. “under the oak” at the museum and heritage center at 1785 Island Road.

The U.S. Marine Corps stage band will perform at 5 p.m. There will also be guest speakers, special tributes, children’s activities, a bake sale and silent auction.

Preorders and plate reservations are strongly encouraged.

Orders, reservations, and plate and event sponsorships may be placed online, at 806 Arendell Street, Morehead City or the heritage center on Harkers Island, or by phone at 252-728-1500.

Preordered plates will be available between 4-5:30 p.m. After that time, plates will be offered based on availability.

This year’s Crystal Coast Star Party and celebration of International Dark Sky Week is set for this weekend on Harkers Island.

The Cape Lookout National Seashore, Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center and the Crystal Coast Stargazers are hosting the two-day event that includes stargazing, children’s activities and a special presentation by a NASA leader.   

The event is being offered at no charge but organizers ask those who plan to attend to register using the online form for planning purposes.

Cape Lookout National Seashore was certified as an International Dark Sky Park in December 2021 for “exceptional quality of the night skies of the park and the opportunities for astronomy-based experiences. Cape Lookout National Seashore is the first Atlantic coastal Dark Sky Place in the NPS to receive this certification,” according to the National Park Service.

As part of the star party programming, NASA’s Nagin Cox, mission lead on the Mars Perseverance Rover and the Curiosity Rover, will give a special talk starting at 4 p.m. Saturday titled, “Dare Mighty Things: Mars Rovers Paving the Way” in the museum’s education hall.

Cox graduated from Cornell University and was commissioned as an officer in the Air Force. She worked in F-16 Aircrew Training and received a master’s in Space Operations Systems Engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology. While captain, she served as an Orbital Analyst at NORAD/Space Command in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs.

Cox joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1993 has been a systems engineer and manager on multiple interplanetary robotic missions including NASA/JPL’s Galileo mission to Jupiter, the Mars Exploration Rover Missions and the Kepler telescope mission to search for Earth-like planets around other stars, according to the NASA website.

Other activities include public stargazing at the seashore’s visitor center on Harkers Island starting at 8:30 p.m. both Friday and Saturday. Crystal Coast Stargazers will have their telescopes set up for public stargazing and NASA Solar System Ambassadors are to be on-site.

From 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday, NC SciFest Kids’ Astronomy Activities with Cape Lookout Ranger Sabrina Godin will be held in the museum’s education hall, and NASA Solar System Ambassador Jimmy Fulks will be on hand for solar viewing at the seashore’s visitor center.

The starlight cruises to Cape Lookout Lighthouse scheduled for both nights are fully booked and the wait list is closed.

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.

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.”

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.

Prospective participants can register online now for the ninth annual Core Sound Run scheduled for 9 a.m. Saturday, April 5, at the Core Sound Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

Held annually, the 10K, 5K and 1-Mile Fun Run usually bring together more than 400 participants of all ages and speeds, organizers said.

For those who register by Feb. 28, fees for the 5K and 10K are $30 and $15 for those under 18. The Fun Run is $10 for the race only, or $15 with a shirt.

Fees go up $5 for the 5K and 10K after Feb. 28 and $10 for the Fun Run.

A shirt is not guaranteed for those who register after Feb. 28.

Teachers, school staff and students can form teams and run at no charge. Email museum@coresound.com by March 3 to get signed up.

To sponsor one of these youth teams for $250, register online by March 17.

Schools that need a sponsor as of Feb. 18 include Broad Creek Middle, Atlantic Elementary, Beaufort Elementary, Beaufort Middle, Morehead City Middle, Smyrna Elementary, Down East Middle, East Carteret High, Tiller School, Croatan High, Harkers Island Elementary, Carteret Preschool and homeschool students from Carteret, Onslow and Craven counties.

“Our goal is for every student and teacher who wants to run to be part of this very family, very community event,” organizers said.

Register online to sponsor the entire event by March 3. Details and how to register are online.

A near-vanished island popping up from the channel between the Cape Lookout Lighthouse and Harkers Island has been restored, offering itself once again as a haven for waterbirds.

Around since at least 1970, Sandbag Island is a human-made, dredge spoil island built up by the sand, mud and other material scooped and sucked up from clogged waterways.

The island, owned and managed by the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission sprawled as large as 18 acres in the late 1990s.

But it began slowly disappearing after that time. Dwindling in 2019 down to 2 acres and, by last winter, 0.1 acre, land where waterbirds gathered to nest, rest and forage in peace was erased.

A $6.9 million dredging project to improve waterway access at Cape Lookout National Seashore has brought new life to the little island, plumping it with 135,000 cubic yards of dredge material and expanding it to a footprint of about 5 acres, according to the Army Corps of Engineers Wilmington District.

That’s good for waterbirds, explained Wildlife Resources Commission’s wildlife diversity biologist Carmen Johnson.

“Many of the birds that use these islands, they need that open, sandy habitat,” she said. “They like going to the beach too, but whenever they’re nesting they need areas that are free from disturbance.”

On islands like Sandbag, waterbirds can incubate their eggs and, once their chicks hatch, raise their young away from beaches popular to locals, tourists and their dogs.

Johnson said state wildlife officials were eager to be part of discussions with the Corps about where the dredged material — tens of thousands of cubic yards of it — might go in hopes of getting at least some of that material to build up Sandbag Island.

The dredge project, a collaborative effort between the National Park Service, Corps of Engineers, and Carteret County wrapped in mid-May, leaving boaters a channel between Harkers Island and Cape Lookout Lighthouse that is 100 feet wide with depths ranging from 7 to 9 feet.

In all, 167,000 cubic yards of material was dredged to improve navigation from Back Sound channel through Lookout Bight, Wilmington District Public Affairs Specialist Jed Cayton said in an email. Of that, 32,000 cubic yards of material was injected onto Barden Inlet beach directly in front of the lighthouse.

“All beach compatible material (sand) was placed on the beach, providing some protection for the historic lighthouse,” Cayton said. “The material placed on Sandbag Island was a silty sand (not quite beach compatible), and was a great based to help rebuild an eroded bird island.”

Two pairs of American oyster catchers, a state species of concern, settled in to nest on Sandbag Island mere days after the dredge crew finished the project, Johnson said.

“We’re hoping that next year, because the work is now completed, that some other species will come in and use it as well,” she said. “It’s been very interesting to see the history of birds that have nested there over time.”

Waterbird colonies have been surveyed in North Carolina roughly every three years since 1977.

These surveys have allowed biologists to witness a shift in where waterbirds chose to nest as Sandbag Island shrank, preferring to settle in on nearby, beefier islands.

“As the surveys have continued throughout the years, we’ve seen different species using the island,” Johnson said.

When the island has been injected with material that leaves open, sandy habitat, birds that favor that terrain – black skimmers, common terns and least terns – have gravitated there to nest.

“Whenever there was more vegetation on the island we were seeing some of the gulls nesting out there. We also had brown pelicans nesting there at different times. Now that the island has been restored to this open, sandy habitat we’re expecting to see some terns and skimmers potentially return, which is exciting,” Johnson said.

Terns have not been documented to nest on Sandbag Island since the 2000s. Skimmers were last documented to nest there in the 1980s.

Johnson will visit the island to document the types of species and numbers of birds nesting there next spring.

Sandbag Island is a protected island, one that is posted March 1 to Sept. 15 each year warning people to steer clear of its shores. Anyone caught trespassing during that timeframe may face a civil penalty.

It’s important to leave these islands undisturbed, Johnson said.

“That is something that we do see a problem with,” she said. “We know that people love to see the birds and so the best possible thing to do is, if you can admire them from your boat, bring your binoculars and watch them from the boat. That’s the best thing.”

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. 

The morning of Aug. 17, 1899, a Category 3 hurricane plowed across Shackleford Banks, Diamond City and Portsmouth, then-inhabited island communities in Carteret County.

With 2024 being the 125^th anniversary of the storm that forced many of these families to pack up everything – even their homes – and move inland, descendants are planning a reunion for Saturday, Aug. 17, to commemorate the exodus.

The Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island is hosting the daylong Diamond City Homecoming that is held every five years to celebrate “our ancestors of the Shackleford Banks,” in partnership with the Cape Lookout National Seashore and Island Express Ferry.

The first gathering took place in 1999 to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the storms of 1899 that drove folks from the Banks to Harkers Island, Salter Path or the Promise Land, a community between 12^th and 15^th streets near downtown Morehead City.

The day begins with an 8:30 a.m. ferry ride to Shackleford Banks for a wreath-laying ceremony at the Wade’s Shore Cemetery, followed by an afternoon of discussion at the museum. Starting on Thursday and throughout the weekend, descendants will have on display family photos, scrapbooks and artifacts at the museum.

Carteret County native Shannon Adams has helped coordinate the homecoming, held every five years, since 2014.

“The original residents of Diamond City and their descendants were deeply connected to the sea, both because of its constant presence and its role in their livelihoods. They were a close-knit community, characterized by their strong wills, outspoken nature, and warm hearts. Their conversations are marked by a unique brogue,” Adams said.

He explained that Carteret County “has three distinct areas known for its unique mystique, reputation, and ties to Diamond City: Harkers Island, Salter Path, and Promise Land” in Morehead City.

They can trace their roots back to the seafaring folk of the Cape Banks, which are the Outer Banks islands extending west and north from Cape Lookout, including Shackleford Banks.

“Nearly a century after the last of their Ca’e Banker ancestors left these islands, their memories and heritage remain entwined with the land,” he continued. The name derived from Cape Banks, Ca’e Bankers were primarily fishermen, although they spent part of the year whaling.

“They pulled nets teeming with mullet and other fish, supplying both their own needs and the mainland market. The Banks once had abundant fresh water, supporting livestock and gardens, and their maritime forests were lush and widespread,” Adams said.

The shoals along the shoreline were treacherous, making navigation dangerous.

“Many ships ran aground before their crews could react, and the Bankers often launched boats to rescue shipwrecked sailors and salvage any floating cargo, from bananas to furniture, and even the wood from the wrecked ships. One of the most notable shipwrecks in the area was the Crissie Wright, a schooner carrying phosphate, lost off Wade’s Shore, Shackleford Banks, in a frigid January night of 1886,” he said.

Diamond City, the largest settlement on the Cape Banks, was named after the black-and-white diamond pattern of the Cape Lookout Lighthouse on the east end of Shackleford. At one time the population was nearly 500.

A series of devastating hurricanes in 1878, 1879, 1897 and two in 1899 battered the Cape Banks.

“These storms led to the maritime forest’s decline and the sand’s encroachment over the greenery, prompting an exodus from the area. By 1905, Diamond City had become a ghost town,” Adams said.

Adams said he is connected through all three areas tied to the migration from Diamond City.

His seventh great-grandfather was Ebenezer Harker, for whom Harkers Island was named.

“Many ancestors on my paternal side were born on Core Banks,” Adams explained. Bettie Gillikin Adams was a school teacher on Diamond City and moved to Salter Path in the early 1900s, after the storms of 1899. The community of Bettie is named after her.

“She met my great grandfather, Macajah ‘Cagie’ Adams and married him in 1910. They moved to the Promise Land in 1918. Cagie was a well-known boatbuilder in Morehead City in the early 20th century,” Adams said. “My wife, Cecilia, and I now own their original home on Shackleford Street in Morehead City. We purchased it in 2012 to bring it back into our family and my father restored it.”

Adams said it is important to keep this oral history alive.

“Descendants like me have a source of fierce pride and are committed to the preservation of this special place that no longer exists. My focus is The Promise Land since my recently deceased father and aunt were so proud of it and taught me well. It is my calling to keep those stories alive,” he said.

Also, a descendant, Camella Marcom, a resident of Harkers Island, has been helping coordinate the wreath-laying ceremony at Wade’s Shore Cemetery on Shackleford Banks.

Marcom noted that this is the 125^th anniversary of the 1899 storm that “made it necessary to move from that wonderful place.”

The purpose of the homecoming always is to link generations, “to remember those who came before us and help those descendants remember who they are and where they came from. Their strength in the storms and resilience is a legacy we can cherish and hold on to,” Marcom said.

She said her great-great-grandparents moved to Harkers Island from Diamond City in 1899-1900. Their names were Alfonzo “Fonzy” and Alice Hancock Guthrie.

They moved their house with them on two sail skiffs and set it up Harkers Island. They lived in it for years before it was torn down in the 1980s. One of their sons lived in it after they died until his death, Marcom explained. They have numerous descendants literally all over the world but many still here in Carteret County.

Her connection to the cemetery on Wade Share through her grandfather’s first wife Mollie Lewis Willis, who is buried there and is one of the few identified marked graves.

Marcom attended the 2019 homecoming that was rained out.

Scheduled for Aug. 17, of that year, the museum was undergoing repairs from damages associated with the September 2018 Hurricane Florence, but they made due and forged on with the homecoming.

They tried to weather the storm and took the short ferry ride to Shackleford Banks, but when they reached the island that morning, the rain was so coming down so hard, they couldn’t reach the cemetery. The ferries turned around and the ceremony took place in the museum, Marcom said.

“It was an emotional but beautiful day of remembrance when each name from the cemetery was read,” she wrote in a social media post about the ceremony at the museum, adding that though the wreath was damaged in the transport, “it stood as a reminder of the perseverance of those who came before us and our own perseverance we will hand down to the next generation.”

The next day, Sunday, Aug. 18, 2019, the wreath was repaired and taken back out to Wade Shore.

“Today, with the weather changed more favorable for an August day, the wreath got its second trip to Wade Shore. This time the sun was shining and the water was glistening. The cemetery could not have been more beautiful,” she wrote. “The stately cedars, hollies, dogwoods, and oaks with a hint of Spanish Moss stood tall reaching heavenward.”

The names were read and the plots were found. “Some of the tombstones had been broken over the years and the engravings were very difficult to read at best but each memorial still a tribute placed there by loving, grieving family members. We knew we stood on hallow, sacred ground. A place that had been revered for years as the final resting place of these sweet souls — our family,” she continued.

About the homecoming

Based at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island, at 8:30 a.m. ferries at the neighboring Cape Lookout National Seashore visitor center docks will carry passengers to Shackleford Banks. A wreath-laying ceremony is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. at Wade’s Shore Cemetery.

“There will be a new wreath this year and renewed feelings of love and belonging. Connections will be made and remembered,” Marcom said, adding that it only happens during these gatherings that take place every five years.

Ferries will head back to Harkers Island at 10:30 a.m. Reservations are required and can be made through www.CoreSound.com/dc-ferry. Cost is $10 a person. 

The museum and community center will open its doors at 10 a.m. when visitors can view family displays and videos.

A welcome is at 11 a.m. Lunch is from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. by Bring Back the Lights Committee/Harkers Island’s Christmas Decorating Project.

Cost for the barbecue and chicken plate from Fat Fellas is $15 each. Tickets for lunch can be purchased at www.CoreSound.com/dc-lunch. Hot dogs and desserts available for purchase on site.

Panel discussions are to begin at 1 p.m. with Promise Land Memories, followed at 2 p.m. with Stories from Salter Path, and at 3 p.m. the discussion will focus on the Camps of Shackleford Banks.

Those who make their way there can expect to be educated by a fiercely proud group of descendants through oral presentations, slideshows, and videos, Adams added.

The day will close out at 7 p.m. with the Diamond City Community Choir:  Music & Memories of our Shared Heritage at Free Grace Church.

Diamond City 125th homecoming shirts are available for sale on the museum’s website.

All the tears shed when El’s Drive-In closed for summer could cut a new inlet through Carteret County.

The owners promised that the beloved Morehead City landmark would return this fall after renovations. They also opened an outpost in up the coast in Smyrna. Nonetheless, a hole remains in the hearts of locals who still remember when El Franks opened this go-to for the famous N.C. shrimp burger in 1959.

El’s is one of those local-favorite seafood restaurants along North Carolina’s coast that don’t just serve tasty food. They bring a sense of joy and connection that keep regulars coming back.

Staff are just so nice, and you’re bound to see someone you know. Even if you don’t, folks at the next table or in line behind you will strike up a conversation. Before long, the owner might join in, sharing family stories, cherished recipes passed down through generations and the names of commercial fishers who harvested the fresh catch.

Of course, fried seafood aromas drift from kitchens into homespun dining rooms, more reasons why locals return again and again.

O’Neal’s Sea Harvest

618 Harbor Road, Wanchese 

The L-shaped counter hosts a cashier taking lunch orders on one end and a second ringing up fresh seafood at the other. Fish and shellfish glisten on ice in between while crews cut seafood behind them. Customers filling the zero-frills dining room savor fried black drum, sheepshead, golden tile, whatever’s biting. Daily specials might list scallop po’boys, grilled mahi tacos or blackened shrimp and asiago cheese stuffed inside baked potatoes. If you decline a side dish, expect the cook to change your mind at the pickup window: “Are you sure I can’t make you something?”

Basnight’s Lone Cedar Café

7623 S. Virginia Dare Trail, Nags Head

The all-hands-on-deck Basnight family, including commercial crabber Vicki Basnight, opened the restaurant in 1996 to uplift the region’s seafood industry during a challenging period of high fuel prices and increased imports undercutting the domestic seafood supply. The local catch remains central in dishes like Wanchese clam chowder and seasonal lump crab cakes, as well as on an “Outer Banks Traditions” menu, keeping year-rounders loyal, even during the busy tourist season.

Bay Brothers Seafood

100 Jean St., Plymouth

You could mistake Bay Brothers’ simple, red brick building for an industrial plant instead of seafood central. Locals come for live hard and soft N.C. blue crabs (a soft-shell crab shedding operation occupies the back), lump crab meat and various fish and shellfish. Tables in the middle of the immaculate market are where neighbors tuck into uncomplicated seafood specials like she-crab soup, tuna salad and broiled, Old Bay garlic butter shrimp.

White Point Take-Out

101 Core Sound Loop Road Ext., Atlantic

This itty-bitty gray cottage tucked within a residential neighborhood has a single take-out window serving fried-to-order seafood like shrimp burgers and soft-shell crab sandwiches, with a side of crinkle-cut fries. Eat on picnic tables under twisty, old live oak trees. Hours vary but the owner reports that for summer 2024, the window opens at 11 a.m. and closes by 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday and by 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Wild Will’s Revenge

1015 Morris Marina Road, Atlantic

The hashtag #coresounders and family commercial fishing photos on Wild Will’s Instagram tell you it’s worth the drive to far-flung Atlantic. Grandchildren of esteemed community and fishing industry leader, the late Billy Smith, have Down East roots dating to the 1700s. They named the restaurant for their late father, William Ellis Smith, who ran the original Wild Will’s 20 years ago in nearby Harkers Island. The kitchen serves whatever’s fresh, like jumbo-lump, blue crab cakes. Specials might spotlight heritage recipes such as corned spots in fall and fluffy Down East light rolls. Hours are limited, usually Friday and Saturday starting at 5 p.m.

The Spot Grill

202 Wellons Drive, Beaufort

You’ll leave the pine-paneled dining room wearing the delicious perfume of fried mahi, soft-shell crab, flounder or whatever’s fresh (sometimes conch stew) even if you don’t sit at the counter that’s practically inside the wide-open, galley kitchen. The lingering aroma is a pleasant memory of seafood cooked to order with a side of eavesdrop-worthy conversations about everything relevant in the community. Lunch only and cash only, but there’s an ATM inside.

Blackbeard’s Grill

1644 Live Oak St., Beaufort

The Rose family of commercial fishers operates Blackbeard’s next door to its seafood market. Cross your fingers that the specials menu features North River clams, harvested nearby and smothered in garlic butter, white wine and parmesan. Pray, too, for the Local’s Supper of fresh shrimp and speckled trout with crispy okra and sweet potato casserole and a plate of Harkers Island soft-shell crabs fried according to Aunt Dora’s recipe.

Jordan’s Smokehouse & Seafood

129 Phillips Loop Road, Swansboro

You know the fried sea mullet is fresh when you ask if it’s local and the server replies, “I caught it myself last night.” Arrive early to sit among regulars who don’t mind traveling from the other side of Onslow County for the old-timey oyster bar vibe. Forget being shy. Everyone talks to everyone like they’ve known each other all their lives. In many cases, they have.

Riverview Café

119 Hall Point Road, Sneads Ferry

Sneads Ferry is no longer a tiny fishing village, but it still feels that way at this waterfront restaurant owned by the same family since 1946. Riverview started as an oyster bar behind a store with a single gas pump. All that’s changed but the fresh seafood hasn’t, including shrimp harvested on the family trawler. The whiteboard lists so many specials you have to walk up to read it. Fantail shrimp, bang bang shrimp, peel-and-eats, whole flounder, deviled crab, steamed clams and homemade pie baked from treasured family recipes.

Seaview Crab Co. Kitchen

1515 Marstellar St, Wilmington

Lunchtime is crush time, but moms from the neighborhood, workers in uniform and the guy who just needs a break from his honey-do list wait patiently for orders. They’re quick to share picnic table seats mere steps away from iced-down seafood. Steamed blue crabs and overstuffed fried fish sandwiches are legendary. No matter what you select, expect fellow diners to swoon over your plate. “I almost got that,” they’ll lament. Fortunately, there’s always next time to try and decide between specials like fresh-shucked clam chowder and seared tuna bao buns with gochujang mayo.

Lifelong Ocracoke resident Alton Ballance can trace ancestors on both sides of his family back to the barrier island’s first settlers, he writes in the preface of his 255-page book, “Ocracokers.”

The book that is about “Ocracoke and Ocracokers, past and present, and how both have adapted to the changes that have taken place within the last few years” was published in 1989 by UNC Press.

His parents both grew up on Ocracoke, with roots going back generations to the 1700s. “We were related to so many people,” he told Coastal Review recently.

His late father, Lawrence, worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and his mother Vera, was “an Island girl” who was born in 1918 in the house where Alton Ballance lives today. “And she lived over 77 years there and died there,” he explained.

Ballance said that he remembers his childhood fondly “because of the connection to the outdoors, the families and the voices, the stories, the humor.”

Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s in the island village “was a time when you had immediate contact with people like grandparents, who had themselves grown up in the age of sail and in homes without running water or electricity and they depended on sailing across the sound to trade or go to Carteret County” to shop or get medical care.

Ballance will be taking the same Pamlico Sound route his ancestors likely took to Carteret County on Friday, Feb. 23, when he visits Harkers Island — one of the 13 unincorporated, tight-knit communities north of Beaufort referred to as Down East. He’ll be the guest speaker for the winter Taste of Core Sound.

The annual fundraising dinner at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center includes a family-style feast and two auctions. Located at the end of Island Road, the center is next to the Cape Lookout National Seashore visitor center.

Previously a teacher at Ocracoke’s K-12 school and staff at North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching on the island, Ballance has owned The Crews Inn on Back Road since 1989, served on Hyde County Board of Commissioners from 1984 to 1992 and was on the state’s Coastal Resources Commission, which establishes rules for coastal development, from 1996 to 2002. He has two daughters, Emma Reese, 11, who lives with her mother in High Point, and Vera, 23, who lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Ballance explained that the book is in three parts. The first is the history of Ocracoke through World War II, including the island’s geological formation. The second part focuses on the Ocracokers themselves, those who represent the island when he was growing up, and finally, what “launched us into where we are today,” including the National Park Service, tourism, and school.

He acknowledges in the preface that some of the people in the book have died or don’t do what they used to since he started writing the book in the late 1970s, but “this difference doesn’t bother me too much because the book really is about the past, about the people and events who have made Ocracoke what it is today. For all that might happen to the island in time to come, it will always have its past – a past full of rich history, some of it alive today.”

Ballance began working on the book in the late 1970s and it took to the late 1980s, to get it done. “It took me a while.”

The book went through through several revisions as it was transferred from handwritten pages, to manual typewriter, to electronic typewriter and finally, a computer.

The idea for the book happened shortly after Ballance graduated from high school.

He attended University of North Carolina Asheville for a few years — hitchhiking across the state the day before Thanksgiving one year to surprise his family — before transferring to UNC Chapel Hill.

At Chapel Hill, he discovered the library’s North Carolina collection and became interested in trying to record the stories of Ocracoke’s past and its people, which eventually became the core of “Ocracokers,” he explained.

He did much of the work after graduating from UNC and going back to Ocracoke around 1980. “I spent a year fishing with these old guys that I portray in the book,” he said, and writing, interviewing and keeping journal.

He said he took his first teaching job in Hillsborough after that year but moved back home to teach at Ocracoke School. He taught at the kindergarten through 12th grade school from 1982 to 2003. He also worked on his master’s through Middlebury College in Vermont, where he could take summer classes.

He became interested in village politics because of the Anchorage Inn being built on Ocracoke at the time and decided to run as the village’s representative for the Hyde County Board of Commissioners. This was in 1984.

He described the Anchorage Inn as a “brick building, like a roadside interstate hotel that had been jammed on a residential lot,” adding it was “Only 3 or 4 feet from the highway” and at some point, a ladder had to be on the highway to finish the project.

“So, I was interested in introducing the island’s first development ordinance. I wrote it myself in 1985 and so what got introduced was height limit, and setbacks and parking and things like that,” he said.

Before that, there were no development rules. “That wasn’t easy. To go from nothing to something, and most people, I think, were supportive,” he said.

While teaching, he heard about the program, North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching, or NCCAT, where teachers could take seminars in Cullowhee. He made his way there in the mid-1990s and the director at the time approached him about expanding the program to Ocracoke.

The first program they developed on the island was held in 1995 and took place a few times a year. Then one day, Ballance said they were heading over to historic Portsmouth Village, now protected as part of Cape Lookout National Seashore, and were discussing how the Coast Guard was downsizing and leaving Ocracoke. As well as its World War II-era station on the shore of Silver Lake empty.

“We had a dream to make the old station an eastern campus for NCCAT, he said.

“It took an act of Congress — literally and figuratively — for them to give the building to the state (for NCCAT) and we came very close in the late 90s to getting it,” he said, “But then Hurricane Floyd and a few other things put the brakes on the funding.”

When the effort reignited in 2003, he stepped away from teaching and began working to get NCCAT eastern campus to Ocracoke, which he succeeded in doing and it is still in operation today.

Though not offered anymore, one of the most popular seminars was called “Salty Dogs.” Groups of teachers would spend the day on commercial fishing boats. They would clean what they helped catch and then cook the seafood in Ballance’s backyard.

The teachers after that experience “would never look at seafood the same way again because of the complexities,” from having to be your own lawyer and accountant to having to take the risks. “I’ve seen my two nephews, who are commercial fishermen, you know, they make zero one day because they lost gear, and the next day make $10,000, so you’ve got to be really in tune to a lot change.”

Ballance led seminars at NCCAT until 2018, when he decided to spend more time at The Crews Inn.

“I’ve spent my time renovating. I’m kind of a do-it-yourself person, so after Hurricane Dorian (in 2019) I had rebuilt whole first floor of the inn, and my house, and The Crews Inn cottage,” he said.

Ballance told Coastal Review that he feels like Ocracoke and Down East are both kind of “at the end of the road,” the center’s slogan, and are “kindred spirits” for their coastal connection and concerns with when storms come along.

“You have to learn to be resilient if you’re going to keep living there. You’ve got to get used to pushing sand around, you’ve got to get used to being flooded, you’ve got to get used to having your roof blown off, trees down, and your backyards growing wetter,” he said. “We’ve got some of the same sort of concerns.”

About Taste of Core Sound

Taste of Core Sound begins at 6 p.m. Feb. 23 with a reception that includes oysters on the half shell.

The dinner, served at 7 p.m., is to include “Hancock Salad” with homemade poppy seed dressing, venison bites, stewed conchs, assorted fruits and cheese, oyster dressing, shrimp and grits, scallop fritters, redhead ducks and rutabagas, Ocracoke pork tenderloin, winter collards, sweet potato pudding, squash casserole and light rolls. For dessert, culinary students at East Carteret and West Carteret high schools are baking Down East fig cakes.

Ballance, who is slated to start his talk around 8 p.m. after dinner is served, will also be on hand to sign copies of his book throughout the event.

Visitors will have a chance to bid on decoys, collectibles and waterfowl art during live and silent auctions.

Davis Springle carved this year’s contemporary decoy for the live auction.

He said that both of his grandfathers started taking carving classes at the community college after retiring “so when I was growing up I was always helping them sand a decoy head or painting ‘abstract’ decoys,” he said.

He began carving decoys while in college, after joining his grandfather, Clinton Barnes, at the Core Sound Decoy Carvers Guild and have been carving since. “I usually carve Core Sound style decoys but will occasionally carve and paint a more decorative bird. I enjoy carving wood ducks the most but have carved most of the birds local to our area.”

A vintage decoy will also be auctioned.

Tickets are $100 per member or $125 each for nonmembers, and that includes an annual membership. There’s also the option to reserve a table with seating for 10 for $1,000. Call the museum at 252-725-1500 or visit www.coresound.com/wintertaste or at the giftshop in downtown Morehead City.

HARKERS ISLAND – From hurricane damage to the current proposed rate increase for homeowners insurance, having a home on the North Carolina coast often comes at a price.

To help property owners better understand their current insurance and what it covers, the Down East Resilience Network, a group focused on adaptation and resiliency for the Carteret County communities, held an all-day community roundtable on insurance at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center.

Insurance specialists, including Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey, were invited to answer questions, and provide information.

Causey told the crowd that making sure your property is more resistant to storms can help hold down insurance costs.

“I think anything we can do to protect the property from wind damage, storm damage, knowing what to do before, during and after a storm is most important in saving lives and holding down our insurance costs,” Causey said, adding there are grant programs for mitigation.

The about 100 who dropped by throughout Wednesday were able to speak with representatives from the state departments of Insurance and Public Safety, and the North Carolina Insurance Underwriting Association, a tax-exempt coastal property insurance pool, and other insurance specialists.

“I want you to understand that everyone lives in a flood zone. The level of risk varies,” Charlotte Hicks said that morning. The flood insurance consultant said that has been her mantra, “everyone is in the flood zone.”

“I want you to be able to assess your risk. Make a good decision for you. Does every single person in the United States need to buy flood insurance? Probably not, but you need to know what your true level of risk is and whether or not it’s a smart decision for you to make. And I think so many people don’t realize what their risk truly is. And if they did, they would purchase flood insurance and they would not have a problem.”

When asked how a homeowner can best prepare for a natural disaster, Department of Insurance Consumer Complaints Analyst Tim Crawley told Coastal Review that the “number one thing” is to have homeowners insurance in place and understand what’s covered in the policy. He also recommended making sure to keep the structure maintained and let the “cell phone be your friend.”

“Use your phone take a picture of your policy” ahead of the storm, take photos around the home as a way to inventory personal property, he said. “If your house gets decimated, all those papers are gone. You can at least retrieve that from an online cloud.

From a floodplain management perspective, “know your risks,” answered Eryn Futral, a National Flood Insurance Program planner with North Carolina Emergency Management, when asked how a homeowner can best prepare.

“Don’t just look at the flood maps that are available. Look at the other tools that might show you different flooding scenarios depending on storm surge for the type of flooding that you have,” Futral said.

Futral advised asking neighbors and other residents how high waters have been in the past and what types of storm caused flooding. She also recommended online resources such as the North Carolina Flood Inundation Mapping and Alert Network, or FIMAN, a flood-risk information system, and the NC Floodplain Mapping Program.

Department of Insurance Regional Director Jessica Gibbs added that there is a waiting period to buy flood insurance. “Some people will try to buy it right before the hurricane hits, which is never the best.”

It’s also unavailable, once a storm enters a prescribed geographic window. Companies will not put new policies in effect in these situations.

Companies seek big rate hike

Causey, during his remarks, encouraged residents to submit their input during the public comment period ending Feb. 2 on the North Carolina Rate Bureau’s proposed rate increase of 42.2% statewide. The requested increase includes a 99.4% hike for beach areas in Brunswick, Carteret, New Hanover, Onslow and Pender counties.

The most recent rate increase request was in November 2020, when the Rate Bureau sought an overall average increase of 24.5%. That resulted in a settlement between Causey and the Rate Bureau for an overall average rate increase of 7.9%, according to Department of Insurance website.

Causey explained the rate bureau system to the 50 or so at the waterfowl museum Wednesday. The association representing insurance industry interests was created by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1977, and any insurance company that writes business in the state must be a member. When insurance companies want to raise rates on car or homeowners insurance, they’re required by state law to submit a rate filing to the Department of Insurance, which can be 2,000 to 3,000 pages that actuaries must then comb through.

The rate bureau this year is “asking for a whopping increase on homeowners averaging 42% statewide, but is almost 100% on some of our coastal areas, from Carteret down to Brunswick County,” he said.

As required, the department has scheduled a public hearing for 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday, Jan. 22, in Raleigh’s Albemarle Building. There is a virtual hearing taking place at the same time.

About 6,000 people have sent letters and emails so far with their opinion on the proposed homeowners rate increase, Causey said.

At the end of the roundtable Wednesday afternoon, Causey reiterated to Coastal Review that “the rate increase is a proposal, and not a done deal. We have a long way to go and the people need to let their voices be heard.”

The public can email comments to 2024Homeowners@ncdoi.gov, or by mail to Kimberly W. Pearce, Paralegal III, by Feb. 2 and addressed to 1201 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, NC 27699-1201.

All public comments will be shared with the North Carolina Rate Bureau. If Department of Insurance officials do not agree with the requested rates, the rates will either be denied or negotiated with the North Carolina Rate Bureau. If a settlement cannot be reached within 50 days, the Commissioner will call for a hearing, according to a release from Causey’s office.

‘A few major factors’

North Carolina Rate Bureau Chief Operating Officer Jarrod Chappell responded to Coastal Review Wednesday in an email that the rate indications in the filing were “being driven by a few major factors reflected in the data,” including rising costs to repair homes.

“We have all seen high rates of inflation in numerous aspects of our lives recently and construction supplies are not immune to that,” Chappell said.

He cited rising labor costs in the construction market since the last filing and noted greater demand than supply in the construction labor market.

“The largest driver overall, however, is reinsurance costs. Homeowners insurance companies must buy reinsurance to cover catastrophic claim exposures and their costs for reinsurance have risen roughly 50% per year over the last 3-4 years,” he said in the email. “This is primarily due to climate change and increased population/exposures in North Carolina. This is especially a problem in the coastal communities where they have the greatest exposure to hurricanes.”

Chappell said it’s the rate bureau’s statutory responsibility to collect data from the insurance companies on any policies written in the state and use that data to determine an adequate rate that will maintain a healthy insurance market for consumers.

“At this point, NCRB has supplied that data to the Commissioner of Insurance with the rate indications. The Commissioner will now review that data and ultimately determine what an appropriate rate should be. Consumers should expect to hear a response from the Commissioner within the next two months where he can either accept the changes as indicated or order a hearing to discuss it further. We have requested an August 1, 2024 effective date for the new rates, but the process often takes much longer than that,” he continued.

As a homeowner, Chappell said he understands the concerns about the numbers they’re seeing in the news. He advised shopping around.

“One thing people should keep in mind is that the Rate Bureau sets a base rate that insurance companies then deviate off of in order to price individual risks accordingly. What that means in the market, is that many homeowners policies are already priced with adequate rates and any change to the base rate will have little to no impact on them,” Chappell said. “We are lucky to have a very competitive insurance market in NC, because it helps keep our rates lower than many other similar states around the country. Maintaining an adequate base rate is critical to keeping that market as competitive as possible.”

Featured Image

Fishing trawlers are protected from recent strong winds in a boatyard on the Sleepy Point peninsula between Gloucester and Marshallberg in Down East Carteret County. Photo: Dylan Ray

The Down East Resilience Network is hosting a property insurance community roundtable this month for owners to learn more about their current insurance coverage to help better prepare for the future.

The open house is from 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 17, at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

The Down East Resilience Network is a group of researchers, agencies, educators, students and others invested in the adaptation and resiliency that was formed three years ago to raise awareness of the environmental changes taking place in the region, which includes 13 communities in eastern Carteret County. To help with planning, register online.

During the open house there will be representatives from the state’s departments of Insurance and Public Safety, North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, the National Flood Insurance Program, Federal Emergency Management Agency and other specialists.

Roundtable discussions with insurance specialists are scheduled for 10:30 a.m., 1:30 p.m., 4:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. Registration is not required to attend.

“This is not an insurance sales pitch, but rather an opportunity to learn more about coastal insurance changes/challenges,” organizers said.

This event is intended to give community members the opportunity to ask the following questions and address other concerns:

• Are you ready for the next storm, the next high tide or the next nor’easter?
• Is your home or business in a flood zone? What does that mean? Do you have questions regarding flood maps?
• Do you need flood insurance? Can you afford flood insurance? Can you afford not to have it?
• What resources does FEMA provide for pre-storm mitigation, post-storm recovery, long-term resilience?
• What companies are still covering coastal NC? What is the long-term projection for these companies?

The insurance roundtable is a recommendation from the Down East Resilience Network meetings held in Sept 2023.

Food will be available throughout the day for lunch, supper, and snacks. Organizers thanked Chalk & Gibbs Insurance of Morehead City for supporting the discussion.

Email museum@coresound.com with any questions.

HARKERS ISLAND — The innovative new bridge that opened here Tuesday represents a bittersweet change for folks in Down East Carteret County, where the harsh saltwater environment has its way.

More than 300 attended a ceremony Tuesday morning to commemorate the earlier-than-anticipated opening of the roughly $60 million high-rise structure that connects Harkers Island and the mainland.

The 3,200-foot-long, fixed-span bridge with a 45-foot navigational clearance is the first in the state to be built with mostly carbon-fiber reinforced steel, used to combat corrosion in coastal environments, officials said.

The new bridge replaces two bridges that are more than 50 years old and badly deteriorated, despite the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s efforts to keep extending their lifespan. The swing-span Earl C. Davis Memorial Bridge will be dismantled and the other, simply called Bridge No. 96, will be converted for pedestrian access to Straits Fishing Pier on the small causeway between the old bridges.

Merrie Jo Alcoke, board member for NCDOT’s Division 2 that includes Carteret County, said during the ceremony that the project had begun in fall 2021, and “Now here we are to celebrate the opening almost a full year ahead of schedule.”

Alcoke listed reasons why the bridge means so much to residents — more than just convenience. “By not only improving the structural capacity, the new bridge will also provide better access to and from the island in emergencies and during hurricane evacuation.”

NCDOT Division 2 Engineer Jeff Cabiness added that transportation officials understand that the bridge will make a positive impact here.

“And speaking of the community, I want to say thank you,” he said, explaining that having so many people attending the ceremony shows the community’s spirit. “I can easily say, in 32 years with the department, this is the largest-ribbon cutting I have ever been part of. And you’ve all been very supportive for this project.”

Cabiness reiterated that not only did NCDOT staff and contractor Balfour Beatty complete the project early but nearly a year ahead of schedule. “A year ahead of schedule. I’ve never had a chance to say that,” he said.

Cabiness said to build the bridge, NCDOT used materials including carbon-fiber and glass-fiber reinforcing bars, which have been used in other projects but never to this extent in a structure in the state.

“And that’s critical for areas down on the coast like Harkers Island with the saltwater and the harsher environments. This bridge will require less maintenance and be more resilient for the coastal environment,” he said, which is a benefit for both the community and NCDOT.

Carteret County Commissioner Chris Chadwick, who grew up in Gloucester and traveled over and under the old bridge many times, also pointed to the community’s spirit.

The island’s seen a lot of changes over the years and this bridge is really needed, he said. “This bridge will last some of our lifetimes and remain strong like the Down East spirit.”

Russ Lewis, the last bridge tender who also documented his days there through photographs, said he stood there “with a heart full of memories and lens filled with captivating scenes of this beautiful island that has been my workplace and sanctuary.”

For years, he’s “had the honor of being the keeper of a bridge that, like the ebb and flow of the tide, has witnessed the comings and goings of boats, the magical dance of sunsets and the glorious rebirth of sunrises,” he said.

“But as the old bridge turns, so does the wheel of progress, and a new chapter of unfolds. A new bridge, sturdy and modern, stands tall, ready to take the responsibilities of his predecessor. While we bid farewell to the old structure, we must also celebrate the resilience it represents — the countless stories it silently bore witness to, the boats it gracefully turned for, and the sunrises and sunsets it framed,” he said. “As we embrace the arrival of the new bridge, let us not forget the significance of preserving the memories embedded in the old structure. It’s a bridge that has not only connected us physically, but also emotionally to the heart of Harkers Island. As we turn the page to the new chapter, let our appreciation for the old bridge serve as a reminder of a delicate balance between progress and heritage.”

Area historian and Down East native Joel Hancock explained that bridges in general, and not just this one, have been a fairly recent addition to the historic landscape of Harkers Island.

Ebenezer Harker, Hancock’s seventh-great-grandfather, purchased the island from George Pollack in 1730. After “the great storm” in 1899, communities on barrier islands migrated to Harkers Island, and demanded a way to get back and forth, including to Beaufort where they sold their fish and bought groceries and supplies.

A mail boat began daily service to the island in the early 1900s, and it carried passengers as well as envelopes, and with the advent of the automobile, a ferry service was started. Islanders led by Earl Davis had begun campaigning for a permanent bridge to connect them to the outside world. That effort proved successful when the first bridge linked Harkers Island to the mainland in 1941. The original bridge was replaced in 1970.

“But time and nature have taken their toll. And now the time is right for an even better bridge. And one that, as mentioned, most likely will outlast most of us who cross it for the first time today,” he said.

Rep. Celeste C. Cairns, R-Carteret and Craven counties, joined the crowd that walked across the bridge after the ceremony. She told Coastal Review it was a great joy to attend, especially on such a beautiful day.

“It’s an Impressive structure, and it’s going to mean a lot for the community. It’s just a blessing to be part of it today.”

Straits resident Lillie Chadwick Miller, whose home is across the water from Harkers Island, was strolling the new bridge she watched be built. She told Coastal Review that the new bridge is going to be a huge benefit to the community.

NCDOT Resident Engineer Brad McMannen said that the contractors were going to finish painting stripes that day and begin Wednesday on dismantling the old bridge swing-span bridge.

At a reception following the ribbon-cutting ceremony at Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island, Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher told the couple dozen there that she had cried all day “and I don’t know why. Change is hard. And that’s what the bridge means, is change.”

And for all that the past leaders, including Davis, “have done for us, we are still Harkers Island, there’s no amount of progress that is going to take away how we feel about this island, and what it stands for.”

Last in a series.

The week after Hurricane Florence devastated eastern North Carolina in September 2018, Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher wrote in an online message to members and patrons that throughout the 13 unincorporated communities making up Down East and the entire county, “we’ve been putting back the pieces.”

But “in the midst of the damage and pain throughout Down East, the Museum has suffered far more damage than originally seen.” She continued that there were significant leaks in the facility, mold was growing on the carpet, floors were buckling and drywall was crumbling. 

By mid-October 2018, teams and equipment had been brought in to help manage moisture, and staff and volunteers had completely emptied the nearly destroyed building so the damaged floors, walls and roof could be replaced, Coastal Review reported at the time. The museum reopened May 2020, after the $3.4 million in repairs were completed. 

Hurricane Florence’s impact on Down East initially grabbed the attention of researchers, agencies, educators, students, advocates and others invested in adaptation and resilience, leading to research on ghost forests, sea level rise, inundation and flooding. They’ve formed the Down East Resilience Network to raise awareness and create a better understanding of the environmental changes to the area and find solutions. 

As part of that awareness effort, the network hosted a two-day community conversation Sept. 12-13 at the museum on Harkers Island to discuss Down East since the 2018 Category 1 storm and how to prepare better for “the next Florence.” 

Over the course of the two-day conversation, attendees were given tours of Cape Lookout National Seashore and Down East communities, they heard the science behind ghost forests and king tides, had discussions with representatives from the North Carolina departments of transportation and insurance, and area utilities.

There also was time for residents to voice their concerns including the everyday flooding plaguing Down East, the poorly maintained ditches throughout the area, and frustrations with new development. 

Upgrading transportation infrastructure

Department of Transportation Assistant State Hydraulic Engineer Matt Lauffer, Division 2 Engineer Jeff Cabaniss and Division 2 Deputy Engineer Jeremy Stroud explained during the conversation that the state agency is preparing for climate-related change.

Division 2 is responsible for eight counties, including Carteret, and manages preconstruction, planning and construction, and maintenance of roads, bridges and ditches and culverts along state routes. 

Cabaniss said the agency is one of the largest landowners in the state because it owns rights of way. 

NCDOT’s responsibility when it comes to drainage is two fold, he continued. First is to keep water off the road if possible and the other is to divert through pipes, culverts and bridges the water that is coming.

Since the department owns facilities in all communities, as communities face issues with flooding, so does NCDOT. “A lot of times, we have the ditches alongside the road. We can clean those out, but we can’t make (the water) go away from the road because that goes off the right of way. And we don’t have the permission, the funds or the people to make that happen,” he said. 

NCDOT removes debris from the roadways and to restore the network after emergencies and other catastrophic events, Stroud added.

But not all ditches are state-maintained, especially Down East where artificial drainage can also funnel water onto land as well as roadways.

To prepare for how environmental changes will affect transportation infrastructure, Lauffer said NCDOT is working with climate scientists to design projects that consider more hurricane surge and sea level rise, and the implications of those on a proposed facility, such as an interstate. Planners are also beginning to incorporate resilience methodology in new projects. 

 “We’re definitely looking at the hazards that can adversely affect that facility,” he said, and how to best design projects. 

The agency is using past flooding data for vulnerability assessments. An assessment that is nearly complete is for U.S. Highway 70 between the state ferry terminal at Cedar Island and Raleigh that will look at the vulnerability of that major corridor.

Cabaniss said that, on the maintenance side, NCDOT is replacing older, smaller drainage pipes. Recently, a 24-inch pipe in Davis was replaced with a 55-inch by 72-inch pipe. 

Stroud added that they get recommendations from the hydraulic unit for every pipe that is replaced, a requirement now for projects that receive federal funding. 

“If we have future events, we can show that we brought it up to the current standards,” he said. “Hopefully there is no damage to that structure, and even if there is, it’s not because we put an inadequate pipe size in that would not meet the criteria for that event.”

Lauffer said that after Hurricane Florence, there was a huge realization that NCDOT could do better to know what to expect during major storms and how they affect the larger transportation network.

To do that, NCDOT has partnered with other state agencies and researchers who have tools and programs in place to measure flooding across the state, like the Flood Inundation Alert Network. NCDOT is using that data to project what roadways could be inundated based on the forecast for a particular storm. The agency also has a system that continually monitors 15,800 major bridge structures and culverts statewide. 

“We have a better understanding of the vulnerability of our facilities and structures,” Lauffer said, which they’re trying to get a better handle on “so that we can potentially recover faster, respond better, and potentially save lives by knowing these things are coming.”

Girding utilities 

Heidi Smith, manager of energy services and corporate communications with Tideland Electric Membership Corp., which serves parts or all of Beaufort, Craven, Dare, Hyde, Martin and Pamlico counties, and Ethan Horne, field engineer with Carteret-Craven Electric Cooperative’s resilience planning, both said the utilities they represent are working to prepare smarter. 

“We’ve just obviously had a lot of hurricanes. Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect, but you get smarter and smarter each time around, there’s always lessons to be learned,” Smith said.

Horne said that flooding is always a big issue, especially because it makes reaching lines when they’re down more dangerous and difficult, but Carteret-Craven Electric Co-op is going to be better with the next Florence, starting with upgrades to the main office in Newport. 

A new fuel system that holds 10,000 gallons of diesel, a new radio tower for better communications, “because we always have problems communicating from Newport down to Cedar Island, Harkers Island area, especially when the towers are down,” he said. The co-op is working on improving response to outages, putting in a new substation in Otway, upgrading lines, and talking about bringing in different contractors with specialized equipment for hurricane response.

Smith said there’s a lot of challenges for underground infrastructure, including inundation, falling limbs and trees in ghost forests, and fires that burn and burn for months, especially for places like mainland Hyde County that are losing population. 

There’s so much technology, but “Here’s what I’m going to tell you, you’ve got to be prepared. We’re getting people back on faster than ever before. Our lives are more electrified, it is more inconvenient but what is shocking,” she said, is that in her 31 years with the utility, she’s seen a lot of hurricanes, but during Hurricane Florence, she saw communities flood that had never been flooded before. 

“When you’ve been flooded before, you’re better prepared than if you haven’t been,” Smith continued. She explained that she witnessed 900 of 2,000 homes in a community flood and “people literally died sooner because of that, because they’ve never been through it before. They didn’t have the mental infrastructure. They didn’t have the physical infrastructure. They didn’t have the family infrastructure –nothing to make them through it. And we’ve got to better prepare people. Because preparation makes us better. Preparation helps us emerge and resume our lives much more quickly. And we’ve got to do it. And we’re going to help lead the way.”

Understanding insurance

Jessica Gibbs, regional director for coastal northeast North Carolina with the state Department of Insurance, said the department has many services and is available to answer any questions. 

“We’re there to help you understand it, help you make sure you’re getting exactly what you need, and you’re not being overcharged, and you’re not being double-covered.” She reiterated that experts in the department answer the calls, not a recording. There are also resources on the department’s website to prepare and recover from catastrophic events. 

Also with the Department of Insurance, Tim Crawley, consumer complaints analyst, told those in attendance that if you run across issues in making a claim, he’s the person you contact. 

Here on the coast, he said during the community conversation, “Most companies will exclude wind and hail, so then you have to chase the wind and hail policy down” and if you have a federally underwritten loan, they’re going to require you to carry flood insurance on your home as well. “Those are the challenges you’re having to face here.” 

He added that it’s important to make sure your coverage is in sync with the current real estate market and adequate for your dwelling – don’t just base it on your tax records.

“When a claim is filed for, especially here, you’re having a multifront attack on your property. You’ve got water coming up from the ground to flood, and then you’ve got the wind assault from above,” he said, and the insurance company is going to have to determine how the damage occurred. For example, if the floor or carpeting is soaked, and there’s a saturation line coming up the wall, the insurance company’s going to say that’s flood related and will have to go through the flood policy. 

“The home policy is a covered-peril policy,” Crawley said. 

That means it only covers those perils that are expressly stated in the policy. 

“We all think, well, I have insurance, so I’ve got everything from hurricanes to lightning, to alien invasion, to my kid drawing all over the house with crayons, you know. It is written as a covered-peril policy for a very specific reason,” Crawley said.

Then there’s also the language used in homeowners policies. “It says they will repair or replace. The word ‘repair’ is first for a very specific reason: They’d rather put X-number of shingles on your roof than have to (replace) your entire roof.”

Ryan Cox, president of Insight Planning & Development consultant services, said he defined a natural flood as moving water covering two or more properties, and that could be your property and the road, which is state property. “If the road and your property are flooded, then that is two or more properties, but that is the definition of a natural flood,” he said. “Flood is water moving across the ground, that’s a flood. If it’s from the roof, that’s wind and hail.”

Your insurance agent is also a great resource to find out if you have the right coverage, Crawley added. But, he warned, agents sell policies, they do not adjust claims.

“Once the claim is filed with the insurance company, it’s the adjuster that’s driving the bus at that point,” he said, adding that the agent has to step aside to let the claims organization take over.

Crawley said he tells everybody before any storm that their smartphone is their best tool. He encourages residents to take photos of their insurance policies and expensive or bigger items, like bedroom and living room furniture and electronics, and make sure those are saved in online storage. 

“As a former claims adjuster, the easier you make it on the adjuster, the faster you’re going to go through the process,” he said, so have your policy information ready when you file a claim.

Cox added that just because you are not required to have flood insurance, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get flood insurance. Many residents don’t get flood insurance because they’re not in a special flood hazard area, or 100-year floodplain. A 100-year floodplain means there’s a 1% chance of annual flooding, or a one-in-a-hundred chance every year that an area could flood. 

“The gamble is, where is it going to happen? It can happen in the western part of the state for flash flooding. It can happen in the central part of the state through flash flooding or hurricane. It can happen either here from storm surge, or it can happen as a combination of storm surge and riverine flooding,” he said, which is when water from the ocean or sound – storm surge – and riverine flooding meet. 

He encourages residents to have flood insurance, whether in a floodplain or not, “the worst is having to tell somebody that there’s nothing I can do for you because you didn’t have flood insurance,” Cox said.

Identifying what’s next

Organizers spent the weeks after the community conversation compiling notes collected during the two days of programming to identify concerns and what actions are needed. 

The following are some of the comments provided to and compiled by organizers and shared in a spreadsheet with Coastal Review: 

“One person says that recurring flooding Down East is driven not only by sea level rise, but also by poorly maintained ditches – not enough, filled with debris, etc.”

“The tours through Down East communities were eye-opening and having residents leading the way gave me a lot of perspective on the issues they’re facing.”

“I’ll admit that when I first heard about global warming thirty years ago, I thought I’d never live to see it or feel it. Obviously, I was wrong.” 

And one comment said the realistic expectation is that it’s not possible to be able “to protect every parcel” but they “don’t have to run for the hills.”

“Environmentalists aren’t going to let us dump [referring to water] into Sound” later goes on to say that she understands that it may impact sea life, but says that “water needs to go.”

The spreadsheet also detailed notes where action was needed, such as Down East needs to look at all the options for community sustainability and have a “seat at the table” when it comes to planning for roads and other infrastructure, and for a readiness, response, recovery plan to work it has to be developed with the community. 

Amspacher told Coastal Review after the event that she believed everyone who participated went away feeling that the conversation was positive for all involved.

“The community learned about resources for adapting to the changes, and the researchers and agencies gained a firsthand look at the issues Down East residents live with every day,” she said. “These two days were the beginning of many more conversations that have taken place since this gathering, and more are underway for the immediate and long-term future. Those who helped plan see it as an excellent first step in connecting needs and resources.”

Among those who helped plan the conversation were North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency Resilience Planner Holly White, Western Carolina University geology professor Rob Young, and lifelong Down East resident Chris Yeomans, a retired educator. 

White told Coastal Review that resiliency staff attended the recent meetings of community leaders Down East to listen to their concerns about flooding issues and other hazards impacting these areas. 

“We want to understand the local perspectives as a continuation of NCORR’s recent community work in the eastern half of the state through a disaster resilience program called RISE. Through hearing the perspectives of those that live in the region, we hope to determine if NCORR or other partners can be helpful in increasing the resiliency of the communities,” White said.

Young, who is director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western, told Coastal Review that he became involved in the network three years ago when he met Amspacher. 

She shared with him the issues she saw for Down East and how the unincorporated areas of the counties seem to have trouble getting resilience funding and organizing for projects, “Even though it is clearly one of the most exposed areas to coastal hazards in the state,” he explained.

Areas like Down East have a lot of trouble developing projects and getting resilience funds because it’s not an incorporated municipality. It’s really easy for the state to work with a municipality that has lots of capacity, like planning and GIS departments, “but working with an area that doesn’t have any of that, you have to go through the county. And if the county is either not interested or if the county doesn’t have the capacity, then those folks end up at the end of the line.”

Young said meetings like the community conversation are important “even though we didn’t walk out of there with the projects developed and money on the way” and because the state agency representatives showed up and listened, they were reminded what and where the needs are “because ultimately, they are going to have to drive some of these solutions” by working with county governments.

Yeomans, a retired Carteret County principal, spoke to Coastal Review in a follow-up interview from the front porch of his daughter’s home on Harkers Island that she just purchased. He was helping with odds and ends that needed fixing. 

He said he sees how vulnerable Down East is to storms and sea level rise. 

“The water is higher than it was 20 or 30 years ago,” he said. Adding it’s the changing environment is just part of nature, “but I think we humans have sped up that process.” 

His question, which appears to be on the minds of most Down East residents, is “How can locals maintain their heritage and maintain where they live. Be able to stay here and thrive, too.”

When he was a young boy growing up on Harkers Island, before Down East was “discovered,” he could see development coming. He observed it on the Outer Banks, and knew it was imminent for Down East, he said. 

Now, what gets his attention is development in the unincorporated communities, and the associated septic systems and well water, especially in low-lying areas where there’s sea level rise, which is saturating the ground. 

When does development maximize our ability to sustain the natural environment and human interaction? He asked. “When do we put up a ‘No Vacancy’ sign? Who’s going to make that decision?”

That concern, Yeomans continued, runs parallel to Down East resilience efforts. 

“My heart is Down East. I love the Down East people. I love our culture. And I want to see it protected as much as we can with the changes that are happening,” and those changes need to happen responsibly, and in a way that protects the environment and the Down East heritage, he said.

Second in a series.

Aerial photographs that capture ghost forests, pilings jutting up from the water in Hatteras Inlet, the narrow two-lane N.C. Highway 12 at North River Bridge, and oceanfront homes with waves lapping at the front steps were hanging in the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island in late June 2018 as part of a multimedia exhibit showing climate-related change.

“Rising: Perspectives of Change along the North Carolina Coast,” featuring 15 photographs accompanied by firsthand accounts, was on display when Hurricane Florence lingered over eastern North Carolina just a few months later in mid-September, amplifying and exacerbating the changes focused on in the exhibit. 

In the very room where the exhibit survived the storm, its co-creator Ryan Stancil and a gathering of Down East residents, community leaders and academics in September revisited that scene from five years ago when the storm hit and then, its aftermath. Stancil and Dr. Barbara Garrity Blake had collected the oral histories to accompany Baxter Miller’s photography for the exhibit funded by North Carolina Sea Grant.

“Five years ago, this world changed swiftly,” Stancil said Sept. 13 to those participating in the two-day community conversation, coordinated by the Down East Resilience Network.

The network is made up of researchers, agencies, educators, students, advocates and others invested in adaptation and resilience was formed three years ago to raise awareness of the environmental changes taking place in the region.

“Florence sank her teeth into Down East – gnashing at the banks, shoving water up through the marsh and into the 13 unincorporated villages,” Stancil continued. “She dumped nearly 30 inches of rain and left in her wake damage and flooding like we’ve never seen. Homes destroyed, business at a standstill and livelihoods in jeopardy.”

People Down East were battered and bruised, “But, if you know anything about Down East, you know the people are strong, self-reliant and resilient,” and in the days, weeks and years that followed, they held close to each other, neighbor helping neighbor.

“So much has changed since Florence came ashore,” Stancil said. “10 years ago, we were asking what was happening around us. Five years ago, we were asking what we could do to fix it. Today, we are asking, ‘How can we buy more time?’”

Stancil said that the museum’s executive director, Karen Willis Amspacher, has said that “Rising” had inspired the community conversation.

“Sure, ‘Rising’ might play a small part in why we’re here today, the truth is, today’s conversation was inevitable,” he continued.

“There is a different sort of storm brewing – one of eroding shorelines, migrating fish, intruding saltwater, and inundated roadways. And Down East is smack-dab in the middle of that storm’s path,” Stancil said. “The people who live here aren’t the only ones who know it.”

In the last five years, Down East has attracted the attention of most of the state’s academic institutions and state agencies, and there’s at least a dozen research projects taking place in the communities.

“I’m grateful to see the interest and engagement of so many researchers as we all work to open doors of communication. We must work together to better understand the science and its intersection with place and people and policy. I believe the work we are doing here today can be a foundation for resilience building, in unincorporated communities across North Carolina and beyond,” he said.

What is changing?

The fishing industry is having to navigate changes in water quality, development and once-reliable species migrating.

Hardy Plyler with Ocracoke Seafood Co. said he had been told several times long ago by an Ocracoke fisherman that fish populations are controlled by natural cycles and are influenced by climatic events — hurricanes, freezes, salinity changes, droughts — many things that are in the natural world that affect these fish over and above regulations by the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries.

Fish also are influenced by environmental factors like pollution, agricultural runoff, municipal wastewater, and industrial pollution. When you have a big rainstorm in coastal North Carolina, pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers wash off the farmland into sounds and rivers, he added.

Adam Tyler, owner of Harkers Island’s Core Sound Oyster Co., said one of the biggest challenges on the coast he’s seeing is development and hardened shorelines. He said that living shorelines, rather than seawalls or bulkheads, are an effective way to protect the coast and promote resilience.

Tyler said there’s a marshy property a half-mile from the water under development in Carteret County that he knows won’t perk, and is being backfilled. Tyler said he didn’t know how that could be allowed.

“And then I asked one of the guys who built the home down here, and he told me, he said, ‘son,’ he said, ‘When you know the right developer and you got enough money, anything can be done.’ That conversation was about six weeks ago,” Tyler said in mid-September.

Adding that the commercial fishing industry “always get blamed for everything,” Tyler said it’s not responsible for all the coastal environmental damage.

“It’s not all us. I’m not saying that we don’t bear some burden there, but it’s not all of us. It’s the people coming in here backfilling these marshes and destroying the ecosystem. I see that all the time.”

Tyler said his frustration with regulatory agencies encouraged him to transition to oyster farming to keep himself on the water and instill in his son the proud Down East heritage.

Raleigh’s Locals Seafood Market owner and co-founder Ryan Speckman said he’s seen the shrimp fishery change since 2010, and the company has been having a hard time getting the popular bottom fish — snapper, grouper, sea bass, triggerfish — that used to be reliable almost year-round.

Speckman said that, traditionally, they’d get their bottom fish from the southeastern part of the state, the coast from Carteret County south, but he’s seen more triggerfish in waters north of Hatteras than in the southeast during the last two years.

Because the Raleigh-based company sells fresh, local seafood bought almost daily from fishermen along the coast, Speckman said he hears feedback daily, including that some species once abundant on the North Carolina coast have moved north.

‘We don’t have to wait for these changes’

Ghost forests are another visible environmental change Down East, and in much of coastal North Carolina.

Duke University professor and ecosystem biologist Emily Bernhardt explained that these dead and dying trees are “an iconic symbol of rapid change” on the coastal plain.

“There’s always hurricanes blowing salt onto the landscape, and there’s trees dying. But in the past, those trees would come back,” Bernhardt said. “What we’re seeing now is that we’re having a lot of ghost forests forming, and the trees are often not growing back.”

When a coastal forested wetland is lost, and can’t grow back because the soil is too salty or too wet for trees to grow, it is a fundamental change to the ecosystem.

“The big question I’m interested in is, what is going to happen to the ecosystems and communities of the eastern coastal plain over the next century? What makes these systems and people and communities vulnerable? What is the impact that we’re already seeing? And that we can expect? And then the big question, which is not a scientific question, it’s a human question, is, what is going to happen next?” Bernhardt continued.

The conversation about rapid environmental change taking place in this country implies it’s going to happen in the future, Bernhardt said, but there are areas already subject to widespread tidal flooding, called recurrent or nuisance flooding. “We don’t have to wait for these changes.”

During hurricanes and tropical storms, areas Down East are extremely vulnerable to storm surge, which can bring not just water but also salt. Storm surge is a big component of how salt gets delivered to the system.

So is drought, which is a very confusing problem to explain to people, she said. Salt can penetrate the ground when it’s arid and when it’s extremely wet, and both are a risk for saltwater intrusion.

“We focus a lot of attention on hurricanes because they’re acute. But what we’re looking at with ghost forests is kind of more of a slow disaster. Those hurricanes might push you over the edge, but it’s a disaster that’s building over time as a result of the accumulation of salts in these exposed and vulnerable landscapes,” Bernhardt said.

Thermal expansion

Scientists have evidence that water levels are rising, another change affecting Down East now and in the long term.

“We’ve been measuring water level in many different ways, and yes, water levels are rising,” said North Carolina King Tides Project founder Dr. Christine Voss, a retired coastal scientist from University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences.

“Part of the whole sea level rise story is just the thermal expansion of water,” she continued.

Also affecting water levels are wind, the tides and the Gulf Stream.

Last year, federal agencies published a report saying that water levels are expected to rise within the next three decades, by 2050. “That difference for the East Coast is about 10 to 14 inches. And that’s kind of hard to comprehend,” said Voss.

King tides have always happened and are predictable, taking place when the moon is at its closest distance to the Earth, causing extremely high high tides, and extremely low low tides. “We use those high tide events to help us visualize what future higher sea levels will look like. It’s kind of giving us a glimpse of what future higher sea levels will look like,” Voss said.

In the last 20 years, sea levels have risen about 6 inches. Within the next 30, federal officials forecast sea levels up to a foot higher. 

Voss said other visible changes are related. “We’re having more and stronger tropical storms,” and know that these will be stronger.”

One of the biggest take-home messages, Voss said during the gathering, is that the changing environmental conditions are basically integrated into the coastal landscape, “and I’ll say in your seascape as well. You are the communities seeing these changes. And there’s a lot of complexity,” she said, referring to the numerous changes happening at once, including warmer temperatures and sea level rise.

Katherine Arnade is co-leader of the Sunny Day Flooding Project, which aims to monitor how often land is flooded due to sea level rise. Project scientists are measuring water levels and storm drains using special gauges they have developed. The sensors also take photos of the roadway and can measure flow in stormwater systems, including the contributions from rainfall and, in some cases, groundwater.  The first installation was in Beaufort in 2021.

“We’re committed to learning about flooding in Down East and collecting data that’s useful to your community for as long as long as we can,” Arnade said, adding the sensors will be there for at least five years. Right now, there are only four sensors in use but the program could expand.

Realtime sensor data is available online.

Priorities identified

Dr. Rob Young, a geology professor and director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University, has been part of the Down East Resilience Network since its inception three years ago. Young recently worked with Cape Lookout National Seashore officials to assess its villages’ and historic buildings’ vulnerability and has piloted a program for vulnerability assessments of private homes Down East.

“I can’t tell you how many times in the last 24 hours I’ve had people come up to me frustrated with the nature of the new development that’s going on Down East, where folks are filling wetlands, building in places where we know that septic systems cannot possibly be perking,” he said the second day of the conversation.

Young said residents are frustrated. These folks who are generally suspicious of regulations, always seem to be regulated, while they see others not be held to the same standards. And elected county officials – the only local government representation residents of unincorporated Down East hamlets have – and county management were absent, despite being invited to the event.

“Unfortunately, a lot of the people who might answer some of those questions for us at the county level are not with us for these two days to help us find solutions or have that discussion. I don’t know how to fix that either,” Young said.

Young said his priorities are how to keep residents from being displaced by flooding, how transportation infrastructure and utilities will be maintained in the future, and how to deal with the public health implications of failing water treatment and septic systems.

“The final piece to all of this, I think, is trying to understand how we tap into some of those infrastructure dollars that have become available over the last couple of years that just don’t seem to make their way Down East,” Young said. “How can we tap into all of the new sources of funding available from the federal government that comes to the state and find a way to get some of those funds into a place like Down East, for meaningful projects? That’s what we really need to know, at the end of the day, from a meeting like this. We have to stop talking and start doing stuff. And we need our elected officials to really engage and help make that happen.”

Next: What is being done to prepare?

“Fish House Liars” Rodney Kemp and Chris Yeomans will kick off the Core Sound Museum and Heritage Center’s summer Parlor Talks at 2 p.m. Thursday with “Memories of lies, lies and more lies, Mule Trains and famous Downeaster’s whose stories never fade.”

A new topic is planned for each Thursday afternoon through Aug. 31 for the talks, which will take place in the upstairs parlor of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center’s downtown Morehead City location, 806 Arendell St.

The museum based on Harkers Island honors the heritage of Down East communities of Carteret County including decoy carving, boatbuilding and commercial fishing through its exhibits, fellowship, celebrations, documentation and preservation.

Museum Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher told Coastal Review that the Parlor Talks, which began in the summer of 2019 as a relaxed way to discuss important issues, share history, enjoy stories, celebrate traditions and learn together — the perfect blend of what Core Sound is about — have evolved over the years.

“The format is very informal and very conversational for all who attend, so it’s more like a time to visit than a program, but a wonderful experience for those of us who have been here forever as well as those who are new to our community,” she said.

Parlor talks schedule

• June 15: “Fish House Liars” with Rodney Kemp, Chris Yeomans and fellow liars.
• June 22: “Shorebird Hunting And The Art Of Shorebird Decoys” with Robbie Smith of Carolina Decoy Collectors.
• June 29: “The Tide is Rising,” a panel discussion with researchers, journalists and scientists.
• July 6: “Cape Lookout Lighthouse past and present” with Nate Toering, chief of interpretation and education with Cape Lookout National Seashore.
• July 13: “Coastal Songs Old and New” with Connie Mason and friends.
• July 20: “Portsmouth Island Decoys” with Robbie Smith of Carolina Decoy Collectors.
• July 27: “Family Neighborhoods of Harkers Island” with Joel Hancock, author of “The Education of an Island Boy.”
• Aug. 3: U.S. Coast Guard History Carteret County with Todd Nelson, retired Coast Guard commander.
• Aug. 10: “Ocracoke A.D. (After Dorian)” with Ann Ehringhaus, photographer and community chronicler.
• Aug. 17:  “Foundation for Shackleford Horses Presidents Past and Present” with Margaret Poindexter and Carolyn Mason.
• Aug. 21: Panel discussion with community historians on hurricane anniversaries, including the 90^th of the Storm of ’33, 20^th for Isabel, and fifth of Hurricane Florence.

The talks are to be be recorded and posted on the museum’s website.

Astronomers of all ages are invited to Harkers Island April 21-22 for the second annual Crystal Coast Star Party and the 2023 NC SciFest Star Party.

The Crystal Coast Stargazers, Cape Lookout National Seashore and Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center are hosting the Crystal Coast Star Party during International Dark Sky Week.

The two-day Crystal Coast Star Party will feature starlight cruises at 7 p.m. both days, speakers from NASA and public telescope stargazing from the field behind the visitor center at Cape Lookout, a certified Dark Sky Park by the International Dark-Sky Association.

Fort Macon State Park joined efforts with these organizations to offer the 2023 NC SciFest Star Party themed Celebrating the Night Sky starting at 1 p.m. April 22. In its 11th year, NCSciFest, or North Carolina Science Festival, is a statewide celebration of science featuring more than 400 in-person and virtual events.

Fort Macon Ranger Paul Terry and Crystal Coast Stargazers members will coordinate these activities for children inside and outside of the Harkers Island Visitor Center.

As part of the Crystal Coast Star Party, Dr. Anthony Norris from the NASA/JPL Exoplanet Watch Group will give at 4 p.m. April 21 his presentation, “Exoplanets, Acquiring Transit Curves,” in the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum Education Hall. Exoplanet Watch is a NASA citizen science project designed for everyday amateur astronomers wishing to contribute valuable data.

Dr. Dominic Benford, NASA program scientist for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope project will present at 4 p.m. April 22, also in the education hall. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is a NASA observatory designed to settle essential questions in the areas of dark energy, exoplanets and infrared astrophysics, according to NASA.

Ferry passengers will disembark from the starlight cruise for a laser-pointed tour of the night sky by a NASA Solar System Ambassador. Call 252-728-7433 for reservations and to purchase tickets, which are $27 for adults and $17 for ages 3 to 11. Starlight cruises are weather-dependent. In the event of inclement weather, there will be astronomy programs and presentations indoors.

All events are free except ferry cruises.

Organizers ask that all guests register in advance. Visit the website for the complete schedule and to register.

Event sponsors include the Carteret County Chamber of Commerce, Crystal Coast Tourism Authority and Island Express Ferry Service.

For coastal North Carolina, living off the land and sea are a way of life, and the traditions that surround hunting and fishing play a prominent role at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

The importance of these traditions to Down East communities is always highlighted by the museum, now in its 30^th year of working to preserve Carteret County heritage and history, and will spotlight local food customs with new events during its annual Waterfowl Weekend taking place Friday through Sunday.

The Waterfowl Weekend is free to the public this Saturday and Sunday on the museum grounds. There will be decoy carvers, area crafters, artists, musicians, demonstrations and local seafood served both days.

Visitors also will be able to view the third annual Gallery of Trees: “Telling our Story.” This special exhibit of Christmas trees tells the unique stories of Down East families, organizations and longstanding area businesses, many of which are tied to the seafood industry.

“Seafood was not only one of the main features for Christmas gatherings, but it was the financial base for Down East families that made Christmas possible. Seafood and Down East are inseparable, especially at Christmas,” museum’s Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher said.

In years past, the Friday Night Christmas Gathering was a preview party for ticketholders to get an early look at the museum before opening to the public the next day.

This year, organizers are taking a different route for the Christmas gathering. They are celebrating area food traditions with the new event, the Core Sound Chow Down cooking competition starting at 5:30 p.m. Friday.

Local cooks will prepare traditional Core Sound stews and chowders, including stewed oysters, clam chowder, stewed redhead duck, stew-fried shrimp, venison chili and Cajun-style gumbo. The stews will be judged by guest judges, James Beard award-winning chef Ricky Moore of Saltbox Seafood Joint in Durham, University of North Carolina professor and “Edible North Carolina” editor Marcie Ferris and assistant editor KC Highsmith, and Raleigh-based Locals Seafood founders Ryan Speckman and Lin Peterson.

The winner will be announced by 8 p.m. Friday.

Speckman told Coastal Review on Monday that he and Peterson are excited to be a part of this Down East event that celebrates so much coastal North Carolina history and culture. 

“The Chow Down is a fun way for Locals Seafood to support our North Carolina seafood culinary heritage with traditional dishes made by the locals themselves,” Speckman added. “Locals Seafood has been dedicated since its inception to promote the bounty of our coast’s natural resources, and I can’t think of a more authentic way to do that than having the privilege of being a part of this Down East event.”

Tickets to the chow down are $35 each and going fast, Amspacher told Coastal Review on Monday.

Tickets include four bowls of stew or chowder, cornbread and drinks. Beer and wine will be on sale, courtesy of Tarboro Brewing Co. and Beaufort Grocery Co. Ticketholders will also be able to enjoy Christmas cookies, coffee and punch while perusing vendor booths. To purchase tickets, visit the museum’s website.

Amspacher said that Friday night’s opening for Waterfowl Weekend has always been a huge part of the event. But, the museum was damaged in September 2018 during Hurricane Florence, rendering the building unusable for close to two years, and because of COVID-19 precautions, the previously indoor-only event evolved to be held both indoor and outdoor.

“The Friday night event is a new way to adapt to our event structure with outside vendors and our Core Sound Christmas light show and still keep our commitment to local seafood and home cooks,” she said. “We are excited this idea has already caught on — with more than half the tickets sold — and we are looking forward to the start of a new tradition ‘at the end of the road’.”

Amspacher said the museum is honored to welcome Moore and the “Edible NC” crew to the Waterfowl Weekend. 

“Ricky – a native of New Bern – has been to Core Sound often and shares our commitment to local seafood cooking the ‘old way.’ His home-base restaurant in Durham, Saltbox, serves it the old way every day,” she said. 

“Dr. Marcie Ferris has been one of the key leaders in North Carolina’s local food movement and has instilled in a new generation a love for the stories behind the food, a connection that is very important to Down East Carteret County. For us the seafood is inseparable from the men and women who catch, process and market this wonderful resource,” Amspacher added.

In keeping with highlighting area traditions, from 1 to 2 p.m. Saturday during Tent Talks, Moore, Ferris, Speckman and Peterson will have a conversation about their work with coastal food traditions, followed by Moore and Ferris signing copies of their books, “Saltbox Seafood Joint Cookbook,” and “Edible North Carolina,” respectively. 

Related: Book explores complexity of eating ‘local’ in North Carolina

“I’m thrilled that the ‘Edible North Carolina’ editorial team is participating in the first-ever Core Sound Chow Down,” Ferris told Coastal Review in an email response. “I’m the editor of Edible North Carolina (UNC Press, 2022), which explores the vibrant contemporary food movement across the Tar Heel State. You cannot know a region’s food culture and history without experiencing the joy and flavor of its distinct places. It is our honor to meet community members and experience the historic, evolving food heritage of the Core Sound region at the Chow Down event.”

She added that during the Tent Talk, “we’ll have an important conversation about the local seafood movement in North Carolina with several of its leading voices, including two of our ‘Edible North Carolina’ essayists Karen Amspacher and Chef Ricky Moore, and Ryan Speckman and Lin Peterson, founders of Locals Seafood, one of NC’s best retail and wholesale fish markets featuring local, NC-caught fish,” she said.

Ferris explained that several years ago, Amspacher visited her food studies class at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill along with her friend and colleague, Ocracoke fisherman Morty Gaskill.  

“Amspacher told my students, ‘North Carolina seafood is your inheritance as North Carolinians!'” Ferris said. “Gaskill explained that the North Carolina coast is one of the most important and abundant fish ecosystems in the coastal United States, thanks to the meeting of the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current off of the Outer Banks.”

Chef Moore “taught us about the seasonality of our local fish and seafood, and how to appreciate lesser-known Delicious, native varieties such as croaker, spot, sugar toads, mullet, and fried hardshell crabs,” Ferris continued. “Protecting and preserving our local seafood is a critically important issue of the local food movement. Inlanders sometimes forget about the local seafood movement!! Eat it to save it — says food writer April McGreger, and that applies to one of North Carolina’s greatest treasures, its local fish and seafood — our inheritance.”

Other speakers scheduled for Tent Talks Saturday afternoon at the museum are lighthouse keeper Heber Guthrie, the Fish House liars, and a discussion on Harkers Island boatbuilding traditions.  

The handful of cooks participating in the Core Sound Chow Down cook-off are deeply rooted in Down East or active in the local food community, Amspacher explained.

Sara Lee Yeomans Willis, founder of Seaside Sensations Catering Co. has a family history in the seafood business. She will prepare stewed oysters for the cook-off.

“Her mother and father, Ellis and Melisie Yeomans were fishermen, fish/scallop house owners and beloved members of the commercial fishing industry on Harkers Island for decades. There’s when Sara Lee learned the value of local seafood and how to cook it. Check out her stewed oysters and you’ll understand,” Amspacher said.

Donavan Guthrie is the youngest cook participating. A Harkers Island born and bred native, he learned to cook from his family, the original Capt. Stacy Davis fleet. “Donavan carries forward the love of cooking to the next generation with his version of Down East clam chowder,” she said.

April Scott Taylor will bring Harkers Island’s original recipe for stew-fried shrimp. 

“April, like all young women Down East, learned to cook from her mother, grandmother, aunts and church women, and today as the wife of a commercial fisherman, she shares her knowledge and shared heritage with local seafood – the only kind of seafood Islanders will cook and eat,” Amspacher said.

Keith Fulcher’s stewed redhead ducks come from a long line of waterfowlers from Stacy.  

“His father, Mr. Homer Fulcher, beloved and famed carver and fisherman, made sure his sons — and daughters — carried forward all the traditions of Coresounders … hunting, fishing and cooking.  Keith’s redheads are said to be ‘the best on Stacy’ so we will see,” Amspacher said. Stacy is a community in Down East Carteret County.

Bryan Blake will bring a touch of Cajun to the mix with his chicken and sausage gumbo, she continued. 

Bryan and his wife Barbara Garrity-Blake, the founders of Gloucester’s Mardi Gras each February, “keep us reminded of the strong connections with the traditions of Louisiana and Down East, from fishing, shrimping, hunting to the deep sense of community,” Amspacher explained. 

Wendy Park, co-owner of Beaufort Grocery and chef in her own right, will prepare venison chili, Amspacher said.

“Wendy is one of the most active leaders in the local foods movement in Carteret County and always supportive of community events, especially Core Sound.  Thank you, Wendy, for supporting Down East with your time and support of our community,” she said. 

Shuttles will be available to transport visitors between the museum and Harkers Island School where the 34^th annual Core Sound Decoy Festival will be taking place 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. The Core Sound Decoy Carvers’ Guild organize the festival.

“Portraits of Down East,” an exhibit of 19 original paintings depicting landscapes of these unincorporated communities in eastern Carteret County, will be on display this weekend in Atlantic Elementary School’s historic gym.

A reception to welcome the artist, Tony Alderman of Durham, will be from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Friday. Visitors can also view the exhibit from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday.

Hosting the exhibit are the school and Atlantic Civic & Beautification Committee, with support from the Arts Council of Carteret County and the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center.

Alderman told Coastal Review that his project to paint Down East scenes began in 2017. He said he was scrolling through Facebook and found “this fantastic image by Cathy Rose, a photographer in Marshallberg.” Marshallberg is a community Down East.

“The photograph was so perfect that I contacted her immediately and asked if it would be possible to create a painting using her image. She gave me the go-ahead and we became online friends,” he said.

When he finished the painting, he said he drove from Durham to Davis, a community Down East, with a print of the painting to give to Rose.

“We spent the rest of that day driving around Down East, shooting photos, as she told me about the area where she had spent her life. I fell in love with Down East and decided that I would be painting there for a very long time. That is when the Down East Project was born,” he explained.

He decided to move forward with the show in Atlantic now is because he wanted his friends Down East to see the collection before they’re dispersed to buyers.

“It is one thing to see a painting in a photo online and another altogether to see them in person. I want to share that experience with them and hear all the stories that will be told when they see the paintings. That is one of the joys I cherish,” he said.

Museum Executive Director Karen Amspacher told Coastal Review that she appreciates Alderman’s efforts “to help us see ourselves through his paintings and for the local people who have shared their stories with him. Tony has come to know us through these landmarks that we take for granted, and helped us realize how important our cultural landscape it to each of us.”

Alderman has been a resident of Durham for more than 37 years. He earned a degree in Fine Art from the University of Mobile in Alabama. Alderman works as a post-modern industrial realist painter. 

For more information visit www.tonyaldermanarts.com/ or www.facebook.com/tonyaldermanarts/

BEAUFORT — Those traveling from Beaufort to Down East Carteret County on U.S. 70 later this month should expect a detour while a section of the highway north of North Harbor Drive is closed while drainage system improvements take place.

The work set for Aug. 15-18 was initially planned for Aug. 8-11, but the North Carolina Department of Transportation announced Wednesday that there would be a week delay.

While old pipe is replaced with a larger pipe to increase the flow of water below the roadbed, motorists approaching from Morehead City/Beaufort area should take N.C. 101 north to Laurel Road. Then turn right and continue to the stop sign at Merrimon Road and turn right again. From there, continue to the intersection of U.S. 70 and turn left onto U.S. 70 to continue to your destination. 

Travelers passing through Craven County to the Cedar Island ferry terminal or any other point Down East can pick up N.C. 101 where it intersects with N.C. 70, near Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, and follow signs to U.S. 70.

Updated June 28: Organizers have opened up the invitation to this year’s shrimp fry to electric system linemen and women. “A group that we depend on throughout the year and especially during the summer and fall months of hurricane season.”

The Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center has made it a priority to honor and celebrate those who make a difference in the community, past and present.

As part of that mission, the museum on July 9 during its annual All-American Shrimp Fry will again recognize active military and area veterans as well as thank health care workers, first responders, law enforcement, teachers and school personnel who have been on the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The theme this year is a continuation of the 2021 theme, “Thank you, community, for leading us through COVID all these years!”

This year’s celebration is from 4 to 7 p.m.  at the Harkers Island museum. Those who are being honored will receive a complimentary dinner of a half-pound of fresh local shrimp with all the trimmings, dessert and drink and a chance to win a sunset cruise to Cape Lookout. 

Reserve a plate through the museum’s website by noon July 8 or call the museum at 252-728-1500. Additional plates can be purchased for $15 each. Hot dogs are offered for the children.

In addition to dinner, attendees can enjoy treats from the bake sale, participate in the silent auction, watch decoy carving demonstrations, check out Crystal Coast Antique Club’s cars and hear music from the 2d Marine Aircraft Wing Band from Cherry Point. 

Lisa Kittrell, director of elementary education and Title I for Carteret County Schools, told Coastal Review Monday that she was thankful educators were again being invited to the Waterfowl Museum’s annual shrimp fry.

“Along with so many others in the county, our teachers have worked hard during COVID. The opportunity to bring together so many heroes to say thank you, to enjoy delicious food and to fellowship is a great idea,” she said.

Down East resident and military veteran Paige Hurley Humphreys attended last year. She said in an interview that she and her family attended “as a way to enrich ourselves more in the wonderful history and community we live in.”

She added that it was a wonderful occasion with speakers commemorating locals who did so much through the pandemic and those who have served this county and the United States.

“It was great after a long pandemic to see people coming together to celebrate our county’s heritage,” she said, adding that she thought the Marine Corps Band was incredible and there were great vendors selling crafts. The museum itself was so enjoyable and educational.

“The perfect finish for our family was that we won passes to go on the ferry to Cape Lookout. It was a wonderful and memorable day,” she said.

The museum has been holding the shrimp fry for years as a community event around Fourth of July, Karen Willis Amspacher, executive director, told Coastal Review.

In the last decade, Ike Southerland, museum’s sponsorship coordinator, transformed the event to a veteran and active military appreciation celebration. 

Once the museum began offering the plates to veterans and active military that were sponsored by community members as a thank you, the event grew, serving around 200 plates to between 350 to 400 plates.

“There are so many veterans Down East and in Carteret County we are honored to do this,” Amspacher said.

Last year organizers opened the invitation to those on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic, when they served almost 800 plates.

Amspacher explained that entering the third year of COVID-19, the organizers decided to extend again this year appreciation to these community leaders. “Once again we are honored to say, ‘thank you’ to the men and women who lead our community every day,” she said.

First responders, health care workers and school personnel continue to face this historic health care emergency with strength and resolve, and “we recognize their courage and fortitude in this continuing battle,” Sutherland said in a statement. “We appreciate the leadership and commitment of all the men and women who have faced this unprecedented threat to our community. We will also recognize the education community – teachers, principals, bus drivers, school administrators and all those who have helped our children through this very difficult time.”

Volunteers will be on hand to interview those who want to share how they faced this unprecedented time in history and memories of how this pandemic has changed the community. 

Volunteers are always needed to help with this event, including setup and cleanup. Desserts are needed and door prize donations are welcome. To help, email museum@coresound.com, or call 252-728-1500.

Sponsorship opportunities are available. Host sponsors are asked to donate $1,000. Plate sponsorships, which go to cover the cost of the food, are available at the following levels: $500 for 35 plates, $300 for 20 plates, $250 for 18 plates, $150 for 10 plates, $120 for eight plates, and $100 for six plates. All sponsor names are to be recognized at the event and included in promotional materials.

The museum offers programs year-round, from hands-on demonstrations of decoy carving and quilting, interactive community exhibits, outdoor experiences, field trips and summer camps for students and educators. The signature event, Waterfowl Weekend, is the second weekend of December. 

If you can’t make it out to Harkers Island, swing by the museum’s Community Outreach Center at 806 Arendell St., in Morehead City. 

In addition to carrying locally made arts and crafts, at 2 p.m. every Thursday through Labor Day visitors can enjoy Parlor Talks, which highlight different topics, at the outreach center. No reservations are needed. Handicap access is available via ramp outside and lift inside.

On the schedule 

June 30: Protecting our Dark Skies with Crystal Coast Stargazers Club

Related: Cape Lookout is now a certified International Dark Sky Park

July 7: “Menhaden Fishing, When Beaufort was a Money-making country” with Steve Goodwin, author of “Beyond the Crow’s Nest: The Story of the Menhaden Fishery of Carteret County” and Barbara Garrity-Blake, cultural anthropologist and co-author with Amspacher of “Living at the Water’s Edge: A Heritage Guide to the Outer Banks Byway.”

Related: Our Coast’s History: Menhaden Fishing Days

July 14: “The Tide IS Rising” with Swansboro Commissioner Frank Tursi, and former editor of Coastal Review.

July 21: Dynamics of Extreme Events, People and Places (DEEP) with UNC researchers Elizabeth Frankenburg and Nathan Dollar

July 28: Leaving the Banks with Joel Hancock, author of “The Education of an Island Boy.”

Aug. 4: Cape Lookout Lighthouse History and Restoration Status with Cape Lookout National Seashore Superintendent Jeff West

Aug. 11: Cabin Culture of the Southern Banks with Dr. Stan Rule

Aug. 18: The Value of Down East Culture in Arctic Alaska with artist Susan Mason

Aug. 25: Marshallberg Boatbuilding, story of the Albatross Fleet, North Carolina’s first charter fishing business, with Ernie Foster and Keith Willis

Sept. 1: Stories and Songs We Love with museum archivist Connie Mason

Update March 22: Organizers told Coastal Review that as of late Monday, there is a waiting list for classes to participate on April 8. The food truck on April 9 will be Beaufort Grocery Co.

Original post:

The Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center is celebrating Earth Day the second week of April.

The free celebration is from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Friday, April 8, for kindergarten to fifth grade classes and again Saturday, April 9, for families. The event will be held at the museum, 1785 Island Road, Harkers Island.

Educators will need to register their classes to attend on April 8. Email education@coresound.com or send a message through Facebook with the school name and total number of students that will be attending. 

There will be 21 learning stations around the museum, along its Willow Pond trail, under the oaks and at the restored Jean Dale vessel. Education exhibitors from the area include the Sylvan Heights Bird Park and Avian Breeding Center, Capt. Thomas Smith of Miss Gina’s Fresh Shrimp, the North Carolina Coastal Federation and others.

“This is my first Earth Day since joining the Museum as Education Programs Coordinator and I am overwhelmed with everyone’s eagerness to come to the end of the road for a day of honoring our natural environment,” Tanner Lynk with the museum said in a statement.

Family Day is set for 9:30 a.m. until 1:30 p.m. April 9. Parents and children will have the opportunity to explore the maritime forest along the Willow Pond Trail behind the museum, paint their own one-of-a-kind decoy head, and take part in further educational experiences about the unique wildlife in the area.  

“Through these exhibits you and your family can learn about the wonderful world that surrounds us from the ocean to the sound and the shoreline and the ways in which each of us can help protect it for future generations,” added Dr. Ike Southerland, Core Sound’s STEAM programs coordinator. STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics.

School groups are encouraged to bring a bag lunch. Surf Shack food truck will be on site Saturday.

Core Sound has celebrated Earth Day, when able, with gatherings large and small since 2008. Earth Day has been celebrated since 1970 on April 22, marking the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement, according to earthday.org.

Dozens of quilts are on display this month from one end of Carteret County to the other in celebration of National Quilting Month this month.

The exhibit, “Cape Carteret to Cape Lookout: A Carteret County Quilt Ramble,” is a collective effort of the Carteret County Public Library System, Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center, Crystal Coast Quilters’ Guild and the Core Sound Quilters.

About 100 quilts ranging from traditional, hand-quilted and embroidered pieces; art quilts; modern designs and expressions of coastal beauty are on display at all county libraries, Core Sound Museum and Waterfowl Center on Harkers Island, and the Core Sound Store & Gallery located at 806 Arendell St., Morehead City.

“Crystal Coast Quilters’ Guild has hung exhibits at a few libraries in the past, but we were very excited that the library system wanted to showcase quilting at all the locations,” Guild member Nan Miller, who helped organize the countywide exhibit, said in a statement. “Partnering with other organizations results in so much more than what we could accomplish alone. The stunning array of quilts demonstrates the breadth of what contemporary quilters create today while honoring the traditional roots of quilting.” 

Museum executive director Karen Amspacher explained that the museum has a large collection of historic quilts and recently received an entire collection from the Davis family of Tusk and Marshallberg included in the quilt display at the Museum. 

“Quilts are part of every family Down East, and we are honored to be the keeper of many.  The quilt ramble is a great opportunity for us to partner with the libraries and the quilters’ guild to celebrate the tradition of quilting,” she said. “We are especially thankful for our Core Sound Quilters who have been meeting weekly for more than twenty years to stitch together.”

Amspacher continued that since Hurricane Florence, the quilters have been gathering at Core Sound’s Museum Store in Morehead City.

“As part of the quilt ramble, years of their work will be displayed there along with several beautiful creations by the quilters individually.” The group has created many beautiful raffle quilts resulting in more than $150,000 in donations to Core Sound programs,” she said.

Several of the library locations will have a theme for the exhibit. 

Dorothy Howell, branch manager at the Newport branch, explained that there is a special quilt, which “is part of the permanent art displayed at the branch and are looking forward to seeing it surrounded with others, some that reflect our coastal environment.  The library system has purchased more than thirty new books on quilting and sewing and we are looking forward to sharing them with our patrons.”

For hours and addresses for each of the venues, visit the following websites:

• https://carteretcountync.libguides.com/FAQ/hours
• https://www.coresound.com/directions-hours-contact
• https://www.crystalcoastquiltersguild.org

Editor’s Note: Coastal Review asked Karen Willis Amspacher, executive director of Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island, to share how the tight-knit Down East Carteret County communities are coping with the deadly plane crash Sunday. Of the eight lives lost on the private plane that was returning from a duck hunting trip in Hyde County, six were Carteret County residents and two were from Pitt County.

A few days ago, no one could have ever imagined what the people of Down East would be facing. Life was slowly moving closer to “normal” as the pandemic (at least) seemed to be fading, winter was giving way to a few hints of spring and the fishermen were working on their nets, pots and boats. All was calm Sunday morning.

And then it happened, the unimaginable.

Phones and social media went wild with calls for prayer, questions of who was on the plane and what happened, where and when, all laced with a painful mixture of fear, dread, and disbelief. As the names emerged, the story unfolded and one of the most horrific moments in Down East history began to emerge.

We are now going into our fourth day of this nightmare and the reality is worse than anyone could grasp in the beginning. Each day has brought deeper heartaches as the facts have become known. Mothers, fathers, grandparents, brothers and sisters, families and neighborhoods have waited hour by hour for news from the offshore search.

For Down East, the world stopped …

Shrimper and East Carteret High School teacher Zack Davis, of Marshallberg, says it is “instinctive” for Down East people to “carry its loved ones” through times like these. He tells how we come from a long line of tragedies, from shipwrecks to hurricanes, lost loved ones and difficult times, and he is right. Since Sunday we have relived the Storm of ’33, boats sinking, men and women lost to lasting tragedies that remain etched in our collective minds and hearts. This is not our first disaster and the people Down East don’t forget.

We cannot forget. Down East people are so intertwined with one another there is no way to move too far beyond the people we have loved. We are all “kin” in ways that we cannot explain and we don’t even understand, and we don’t even try to figure it out, we just know. Our mothers and fathers were connected, and their mothers and fathers ahead of them. Generations of overlap and shared bonds define who we are, the way we hold onto each other and this place that binds us, Core Sound and the people we love.

For the communities of Atlantic, Sea Level and Cedar Island, these are their children, the boys they taught in Sunday School and took shrimping in the summer. Their families, generations deep, are grounded in their harbors, just like each community is with their own — this way of life, this place that has shaped us through the traditions that we share across the creeks and marshes of eastern Carteret County.

For Down East, one community’s burden is every community’s shared heartache. These children, and their families, are part of us too. From generation to generation we have worked together, played ball together, fished together, shrimped together, marched in the band together, raised our children together, and for many of us, we have grown old together.

It’s been said that Down East is “at its best when things are at their worst” and that is true, but this burden, this tragedy has been of such magnitude we could not have ever faced it alone. This cruel agony runs too deep in all of us.

We are amazed, overwhelmed and humbled by the outpouring from the entire county and beyond. Ribbons and school colors, pop-up fundraisers, everyone trying to do “something” to help ease the burden, show their love, and meet the needs such a tragedy creates. This has been at the scale Down East has never seen before. This too was unimaginable before Sunday.

From across the state and country, people have heard of this disaster and are offering their prayers and reminders that people really do care. In these dark days for Down East, they want to be part of the extended community that will see these families and their friends through these unknown places, and we welcome their hearts into ours. We know that we will hold strong together with the help of all who share the burden of this tremendous loss for our community.

A Down East mother who lost her child to another tragic moment once told me, “the healing is in the giving” as she and her family faced a new world beyond the pain of losing their son, their shining star and all their dreams. I have thought of those words often over the years and especially during the past four days. It IS how we heal, how we move on, how we face the future without the people we love, and in this case, these young men, who like the others we have lost too soon.

Down East has had more than its share of losses. Maybe it feels this way because we know each other too well, we are too connected, we are too engrained in each other’s lives. Maybe that’s the price we pay for being who – and whose – we are, with deep roots that have connected us, even before we were born.  Maybe …   

And if so, that is our strength and our blessing as we stand together, safe in that inheritance of love and reassurance.

***

The Core Sound Museum, with the approval of all the Down East families involved with Sunday’s plane crash, has established a Core Sound Family Fund for the victims of this tragic accident. 

This financial support will go to help meet expenses and other family needs associated with this disaster. Funds received will be held in a special agency account and disbursed as needed to each family.

Contributors will receive an authorized receipt for their nondeductible donations.  Immediate family members will receive a full accounting of monies received and disbursements made.

The museum will continue to respectfully help the people of Down East Carteret County in the weeks and months ahead. We are thankful for the outpouring of support locally and from across the region. 

Contributions can be made online or by mail to CSWM, Family Fund, P.O. Box 556, Harkers Island, NC  28531.

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

A little more than a century ago, a group of seagoing people from the “Down East” part of Carteret County, settled on the shores of Lake Erie and began commercial fishing.

They came from a part of Down East known as the Straits, five miles east of Beaufort. At that time, it was a quiet, remote land, hundreds of miles from the crowds and clutter of Industrial America. The local people largely got around by boat. Salt marshes and broad estuaries stretched to the horizon.

But of course the sea has no boundaries and the world’s oceans and rivers make neighbors of us all.

So it was with the people from the Straits. They followed the sea a thousand miles from home and built a community that was a tiny piece of Down East on the shores of Lake Erie.

A trip to Vermilion

The story of those Down Easterners on Lake Erie has never really been told. I only learned about them recently myself. As best I can tell, all but a few old timers have forgotten them.

But recently my wife and I happened to be vacationing at two dear friends’ cottage in Vermilion, Ohio, right on Lake Erie, which is one of the places that those Down Easterners made a new home.

As soon as I got to Vermilion, I recalled that one of the grandchildren of those wandering Down Easterners got in contact with me a year or two ago and told me their story.

That man’s name is Giles Willis Jr. Now 88 years old, Mr. Willis spent much of his early life on Lake Erie. He shared photographs of those days with me, and he told me stories about his life there when he was a boy. He recalled as well what his father and other older relatives had told him about their fishing days on Lake Erie before he was born in 1932.

He also sent me a video copy of a wonderful interview with his father’s sister Evelyn describing the little community on Lake Erie.

Love on Lake Erie

According to Mr. Willis, the first fishermen from Carteret County to settle on Lake Erie were his great-uncle Giles Whitehurst and another man named Tom Pigott.

Whitehurst and Pigott were both from the Straits and had always been around boats and water people. In the late 1800s, Giles Whitehurst’s father, Capt. John A. Whitehurst, had been the master of a three-masted schooner that traded all along the East Coast and in the West Indies.

His last vessel, a two-masted schooner named the J. H. Potter, was built at North River, not far from the Straits, in 1875.

Capt. John A. Whitehurst eventually bought farmland in the part of Straits that came to be called Gloucester in the early 1900s. The village was named after the Massachusetts seaport that another local schooner captain used to visit on his voyages north.

Capt. Whitehurst’s son Giles Whitehurst and the captain’s old first mate, Tom Pigott, apparently set out on their own to make a living on the water in the last years of the 1800s or in the first few years of the 1900s.

For a time — I’ve heard secondhand — they may have fished down in Punta Gorda, Florida, where another, larger group of Down East fishermen had gone in search of new fishing grounds in the late 1800s.

Pigott and Whitehurst later ended up far to the north though. They may have worked on a number of vessels, but Giles Willis, Jr. recalled one in particular, a steam yacht called the Peerless. Tom Pigott was apparently the yacht’s captain and Giles Whitehurst was his first mate or engineer.

Eventually their voyages led them to Lake Erie. There, on the south shore of the lake, in the town of Grand River, Ohio, Giles Whitehurst and Tom Pigott met a pair of sisters and fell in love.

Giles Whitehurst married Adah Searle in 1906. Tom Pigott married her sister Mabel around the same time.

A fishery at Grand River

According to family lore, Giles Whitehurst was the first of three Whitehurst brothers to fish on Lake Erie. Another brother, Richard, soon joined Giles in Grand River. In or about 1915, the brothers opened a fishing business there.

Richard Whitehurst met his wife in Grand River, too. Her name was Olive Swan and she was from Iowa.

Yet another brother, Monroe, joined them after he finished a stint in the U.S. Life-Saving Service during World War I.

Giles Willis Jr.’s father, Giles Willis, was one of a number of other Down Easterners who joined them in the mid-1920s. He was the son of the Whitehurst brothers’ sister, Olivia, and Wilbur Willis, who was from Williston, a village 6 or 7 miles north of the Straits.

Then, sometime around 1930, the Whitehurst clan left Grand River and relocated to Vermilion, 70 miles to the west, on the other side of Cleveland. The town is situated at the mouth of the Vermilion River, where it flows into Lake Erie, in what people up there used to call “The Firelands” or the “Sufferers’ Lands.”

At that time, Vermilion probably reminded the Whitehursts at least a little bit of home. Fish houses lined the waterfront. Fishing boats crowded the little harbor. All along the shore, nets were spread out to dry. Almost every family made their living by fishing.

Of course, not everything was the same: winters were snowy and icy and the little town was beset by storms that sometimes came off the lake with bone-chilling fury.

At the Vermlion History Museum and the Ritter Public Library in Vermilion, I found historical photographs of fishing boats with so much ice on them that I can’t imagine how they stayed afloat.

Many a winter, at least early on, the Whitehursts left Lake Erie and came back south to fish in warmer waters until the spring.

A Vermilion fishing life

When they settled in Vermilion, the Whitehursts operated three boats, all of which Giles Whitehurst built himself.

He ran one of the boats. He and his brothers had recruited two other fishermen from Carteret County to captain the other two.

While Giles Whitehurst oversaw the family’s fishing operation, his brother Richard ran their wholesale fish business and their brother Monroe, known as “Mund,” ran their family’s retail fish market, which was located on the second floor of the family’s fish house.

On the day I talked with him, Giles Willis Jr. remembered how, when he was a small boy, his great-uncle Richard would take him down to Lake Erie around 3 in the afternoon and they would look for the boats coming back from the fishing grounds.

The fishermen tended trap nets, which they staked out on the lake bottom as soon as the ice broke up in the spring.  (You can see a yellowed, stained example of a Vermilion fish company’s trap net plan from that era in the illustration below.)

In that weather, they required sturdy, covered boats that the Lake Erie fishermen called “fishing tugs.”

When I talked with Giles Willis Jr., he recalled how the fishermen dumped their catches out on the dock when they got back from the fishing grounds. The Whitehursts and the other workers, most were from Carteret County, would then sort them.

In those days, he said, they caught a lot of blue pike, white perch and pickerel (walleye) — the last being, he said, “a big fish.” He remembered that his dad often catered fish fries in Vermilion and the white perch were especially in demand at those events.

He recalled that roughly 10 people were working in the fish house when the boats unloaded at the dock. Each of the three boats had two or three crewmen. “The ones from Carteret County were staying upstairs,” on the second floor of the fish house, he told me.

After Giles Whitehurst died of pneumonia in 1933, his brother Monroe took over the boats and Giles Willis Jr.’s father started a fish market that was located separate from family’s fish house.

They also did a good deal of wholesale business. When the boats came in, they put the fish into boxes with ice in them, nailed them shut and put them on a truck. They carried them to the local train station and put them on a train for shipment to Cleveland and other distant parts.

Giles Willis Jr. told me that he loved going out on the fish house dock and watching the trains cross the Vermilion River on the New York Central Railroad Line. The freight trains were fun to see, too, but he especially liked to watch the 20^th Century Limited, the famous all-silver express train that ran from New York to Chicago.

“That would be a time — a little kid is going to look at this train and wonder who’s on that train and where they were going and (dream) maybe one day I would get to ride that train … ”

Coming Home

The little enclave of Down Easterners stayed on Lake Erie a total of roughly 40 years. The Whitehursts sold their fish business and moved back home to Carteret County in 1948.

I am not sure exactly why the Whitehursts and the other Carteret County fishermen left Lake Erie.

But when I visited the Ritter Public Library and the Vermilion History Museum, I learned that 1948 was around the time when commercial fishing catches on Lake Erie plummeted and Vermilion’s fishing boom ended. Today you won’t find a fish house in the town and there is very little commercial fishing on that part of Lake Erie.

Giles Willis Jr. estimated that somewhere between 30 and 40 Down Easterners made their home on Lake Erie over the years. Some stayed all year, while others traveled back and forth seasonally between the big lake and fishing grounds back south.

Those were not easy years for Carteret County’s fishermen. Especially during the Great Depression, many left home and followed the sea wherever it led. Some went looking for new fishing grounds. Some went in search of dredging, piloting and other maritime work anywhere they could find it.

In those days, if you lived on the North Carolina coast, it sometimes felt as if the local fishermen had scattered to the four winds. In New York City, for instance, every harbor pilot seemed to come from Smyrna, a village a few miles from Straits. On Ocracoke Island, on the other hand, every family seemed to have a father and/or a few sons that had left home and gone to work on dredge boats in Philadelphia and the Delaware River.

You can find my story on the historical connections between Ocracoke Island and Philadelphia here.

Florida was another place where Down East fishermen often strayed. Along the shores of the Straits and its neighbors — Harkers Island, Otway, Marshallberg — every family seemed to have somebody in Florida for at least part of the year, shrimping in Punta Gorda, for instance, or mullet fishing in Cortez, or menhaden fishing in Fernandina Beach.

Back in those days, travelers often described the Down East part of Carteret County as a remote land, where the “simple fishing people” remained untouched by the outside world. They seemed to think that everybody was descended from old English settlers, and they declared that the local people had little knowledge of the bigger world and its ways.

But none of those things was true at all, and such descriptions of any part of the North Carolina coast were and still are merely fanciful. As Giles Willis Jr., who is nearing his 90^th year, told me, “There’s always been a lot of back and forth between Carteret County and Ohio.”

Mr. Willis no doubt knows too, as I have learned, that Ohio is only one of many, many such places where those quiet little villages Down East are tied to distant lands by the sea.

 *  * *

Many, many thanks to Dennis Chadwick, Roger Whitehurst and most especially Giles Willis Jr. for all their help with this story. Thanks, too, to the staff and volunteers at the Vermilion History Museum, the Ritter Public Library in Vermilion and the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center on Harkers Island. Finally, a big shout out and deep gratitude to Paul Baldasare and Jane Wettach for sharing their cottage in Vermilion with my wife Laura and me. One could not ask for a nicer place to stay or better company.  

Featured Image

Slick waters reflect the sky in the salt marshes earlier this spring near Davis in Carteret County. Photo: Dylan Ray

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Featured Image

Hundreds of green-winged teal fill the sky above the 6,000-acre North River Wetlands Preserve earlier this month. About 1,000 of the small dabbling ducks have been observed at the preserve in recent weeks, said birder John Fussell of Morehead City, who counted about 270 in the above image and estimated about 800 at the site that morning. Flocks of green-wing teal can be dazzling with their “rapid twisting and turning in unison,” according to Audubon’s Guide to North American Birds.

Got a photo you’d like to share with Coastal Review Online readers? Please read our submission guidelines.

BEAUFORT — Carteret County commissioners last week voted unanimously to remove an extra layer of water quality protection that has been in place for a decade in the part of the county known as Down East.

The action came during the board’s regular meeting Sept. 21 at the county administration building.

The change deletes a 20-foot buffer requirement for buildings in areas of environmental concern as designated by the state Coastal Resources Commission under the Coastal Area Management Act. The now-deleted 20-foot buffer was in addition to the 30-foot CAMA buffer still in place and was adopted in 2006 in response to concerns over development pressure in Down East communities.

Mark Hooper of Smyrna was the only member of the public to speak during the hearing on the proposal. Hooper said there was a “good reason” for requiring the extra buffer, including designated outstanding resource waters Down East.

“As we are unincorporated down that way, where do our protections come from? You have ordinances, you have CAMA rules and regs. If you want to go beyond those things, this is what this is for. You do these special types of ordinances and that gives you some extra protection.”

Hooper was part of a group known as Down East Tomorrow that was formed at the time in response to rapid development in the northeastern part of the county prior to the financial crisis of 2007-08 that slowed real estate markets.

The county planning commission had voted unanimously Aug. 10 to recommend the change. County Planning Director Eugene Foxworth said during the meeting that exceptions to the rule were the most frequently requested variance received and granted, with a handful a year, he said.

Buffers improve water quality by filtering pollutants such as nutrients and bacteria from stormwater runoff.

Areas of environmental concern are designated to protect them from uncontrolled development that can damage property, public health and the environment. These areas cover all coastal waters and about 3% of the land in North Carolina’s 20 coastal counties, according to the Division of Coastal Management.

Commissioner Robin Comer said he’d served on the planning commission when the overlay buffer was created. Stormwater rules have changed since then, he noted, adding that all variance requests from the buffer rule had been granted.

“It sounds like a wasted bit of lineage in an ordinance,” Comer said.

The Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center on Harkers Island will open at 10 a.m. Friday, after being closed since the September 2018 Hurricane Florence that caused millions of dollars in damage to the building.

“It’s been a long road, but with the help of hundreds of volunteers and thousands of dollars in contributions, we are home – stronger than ever,” museum director Karen Amspacher said.

Hurricane Florence damage repairs ended up costing about $3.4 million because of roof damage and the 30 inches of rain that led to major mold infestation, according to a release Monday. Immediately after, all museum contents were removed to avoid damage to the artifacts, collections and equipment that had all safely survived the storm.

“It was a museum nightmare,” said Pam Morris, collections manager for the museum. “We have all our belongings stored from here to Charlotte, but everything is back now, safe and sound, and it is amazing to see it all together again.”

Core Sound has undergone a complete rework on the inside with new exhibitions, an expanded education area and updated community exhibits. Experiences at Core Sound range from a Coast Guard display in the tower to a documentary of 120 years of hurricane history in the side gallery, with a new waterfowl hunting exhibition in the main Core Sound Heritage gallery.

“Our insurance paid off and we’ve had help from many sources including the Golden Leaf Foundation, the Cannon Foundation, the State of North Carolina and many others, but it has been the generosity and commitment of our members and our community that has allowed us to maintain operations, programming and events during this extended recovery period. We could not have done it without them,” Amspacher said.

While the building was undergoing repairs, the museum operated from 806 Arendell St. in Morehead City, and the outreach location will continue to feature a Museum Store, an art gallery, Core Sound quilters room, art classes, children’s programming, and the headquarters for all museum activities.

“We will be keeping 806 as our Outreach location now that we are back in the museum. This location will help us introduce visitors to the county to Core Sound and that will be important as we reopen. The museum is truly ‘at the end of the road’ on Harkers Island and sometimes it takes real encouragement to get folks to make the trip,” Amspacher explained. “We are determined to retain the important place Core Sound’s 806 location has become and we will continue to use that space as a preview of the good work happening ‘at the end of the road. ‘”

Plans were to open the museum April 1 but the coronavirus closures delayed that schedule and canceled plans for a month-long celebration of events. The museum will open Friday, in compliance with all COVID-19 guidelines and will reschedule events later in the summer when crowd limits will allow.

Hours will be 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday.  Hours at 806 Arendell St. are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday. For more information, call the museum at 252-728-1500, visit www.coresound.com or email museum@coresound.com.

MOREHEAD CITY – Though the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island is still undergoing much-needed repairs to the facility Hurricane Florence damaged in September, its staff and volunteers won’t let that setback get in the way of a good meal and fellowship.

The annual winter edition of Taste of Core Sound will be hosted this year at Southern Salt, owned by Sammy Boyd, on the Morehead City waterfront. Set for Feb. 22, traditional winter seafood and wild game dishes will be served at the special event hosted by The Redhead Society, Core Sound’s educational programming fund.

In addition to a spread that represents Down East cuisine, there will be a program featuring a presentation by Robbie Smith of the Carolina Decoy Collectors Association discussing Shorebird Hunting on Core Sound.

“Antique shorebird decoys are the epitome of great Southern folk art. They are an unintentional art form which were made and used to attract and kill shorebirds for food. The story of shorebird hunting in North Carolina is a part of our heritage which needs to be told and the decoys are an art form which needs to be celebrated and enjoyed,” Robbie Smith said in a statement.

Tickets are $50 per person for museum members and $65 per person for new members. Tickets are available at Core Sound’s Museum Store, 806 Arendell St., Morehead City; by calling 252-728-1500; or visit at online www.coresound.com. All proceeds to the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center Redhead Society for Education Programs.

“We couldn’t do this event now after the storm damaged our building without Sammy’s willingness to share his restaurant, cooks, kitchen and energy with Core Sound to keep this winter event on our calendar,” said Karen Amspacher, Core Sound Museum Director in a statement. “Sammy has agreed to close his business that evening to help us. This fundraiser for our educational programming is much needed this year as we make plans for school groups this spring and our summer camps this summer.”

There will be time to check out the silent auction and visit the cash bar starting at 6 p.m., while hot crab dip will be served alongside Down East egg rolls, one of Southern Salt’s signature recipes.

The buffet, to be served at 7 p.m., will feature conch stew, fried oysters, baked scallops, stewed ducks and rutabagas, fried shrimp, chicken and pastry, winter collards, sweet potatoes, homemade slaw, light rolls and Albert’s famous lemon pie.

The silent auction will feature decoys donated by Core Sound Decoy Carvers Guild members, along with hunting gear and other outdoor equipment for outdoorsmen. Bidding will take place online at www.coresound.com starting Feb 12 and wrap up when Taste of Core Sound comes to a close.

The night will close with a live auction of redhead decoys, including a contemporary decoy by Kelly Nelson, a contemporary working decoy carved by Patrick Eubanks and donated by Dr. Stan Rule and a hard-to-find heritage decoy by the late David A. Lawrence.  A special auction item will be a “Carving Day with Brother Gaskill,” one of Core Sound’s award-winning carvers and a teacher-mentor for new carvers.

“We are especially thankful for these contributions of time and talent from these carvers and contributors. These funds will be help bring back the strong educational programs Core Sound offers,” said Dr. Ike Southerland, Chairman of the Redhead Society.

Florence caused major damage to the museum’s roof, leading to leaks throughout the building that caused major sheetrock damage along with the wood floors, carpets and all subfloor electrical systems.

While staff took precautions to protect artifacts and art, none of which were damaged, the museum still has a long path head. As of mid-February, the museum faces a yearlong setback to operations, visitation and museum programming. Museum staff have been working from home and alternate locations to maintain contributions.

In the meantime, Core Sound’s Museum Store is operating at 806 Arendell St. in Morehead City.

WILMINGTON – The North Carolina Coastal Land Trust said this week it will use a $100,000 grant to purchase for conservation waterfront property in Down East Carteret County.

The grant is part of the Water Resources Fund, a $10 million commitment from the Duke Energy Foundation.

The Coastal Land Trust is one of 11 organizations across North and South Carolina to collectively receive more than $700,000 in the eighth grant announcement. The Water Resources Fund is a multi-year commitment that will leave a legacy of improved water quality, quantity and conservation in the Carolinas and neighboring regions.

“This grant will allow us to protect almost 5,500 acres along 13 miles of waterfront located ‘Down East’ in Carteret County,” said Camilla Herlevich, Coastal Land Trust director. “We thank Duke Energy for its support and are eager to launch this project so that we can continue to save coastal lands and waters.”

The property to be purchased is adjacent to Cedar Island National Wildlife Refuge and features estuarine marsh, pocosin and longleaf pine forest. It is a natural heritage area ranked by the state as having high ecological significance, as well as an Important Bird Area, as designated by National Audubon Society.

More than 5,000 acres of the property will be transferred to the state to be managed by the Wildlife Resources Commission as public game lands. Other acquisition funding is being provided by the North Carolina Clean Water Management Trust Fund, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Department of Defense because of the parcel’s strategic location near the Marine Corps’ Piney Island Bombing Range, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission and others.

“Duke Energy is dedicated to protecting and restoring the rivers and waterways that power our regional economies,” said Stephen De May, president of Duke Energy in North Carolina. “We look forward to our partnership with the Coastal Land Trust and the impact this project will have in the region.”

The trust, in its announcement, noted that investment decisions are reviewed by the Water Resources Fund committee, an independent body that includes five environmental experts and two Duke Energy employees. Selected projects are chosen on several criteria, including whether the project is science-based and research-supported.

Duke Energy anticipates one remaining grant announcement to fulfill the $10 million commitment to the Water Resources Fund. Visit nccommunityfoundation.org for more information on how to apply.

Founded in 1992, the mission of the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust is to enrich the coastal communities of North Carolina through conservation of natural areas and working lands, education, and the promotion of good land stewardship. The Coastal Land Trust, a membership organization, has saved more than 72,000 acres of special places, and has offices in Wilmington, New Bern and Elizabeth City.

DOWN EAST CARTERET COUNTY – Hurricane Florence ravaged in mid-September most of the coast of North Carolina, leaving a trail of billions in damage and untold destruction.

Down East Carteret County, more than a dozen unincorporated but close-knit communities situated between Beaufort and Cedar Island, is in the beginning stages of recovery from the disaster that caused many to lose their homes, their businesses and their life’s work.

The Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island was hit especially hard. Once filled with artifacts that illustrated life Down East, the museum was nearly empty Friday afternoon, save for boxes of various sizes waiting to be moved and equipment brought in to help manage moisture.

Pam Morris, exhibition curator, weaved through movers working on the second floor. She said that there was no damage to the artifacts because the items were either covered in plastic or in a case, and nothing was wet in the office, which they were in process of packing up.

Morris explained, “We basically have to vacate the building for demolition, and they’re going to redo the floors, sheetrock and roof.”

She added that they have fine arts insurance as well as facility insurance. Fine arts handlers packed up the collection for further documentation and light conservation work to be done while the building is being repaired and the museum gift shop has been relocated to a storefront at 806 Arendell St. in Morehead City for the time being.

We’re going to have to figure out what we can do to be in better shape for the next storm, roof wise, which is probably the case for a lot of people,” she said.

Worst-case scenario is that it will take six months to have the building operational, she said, and there are no preliminary numbers on funding they’ll need to get back open.

Morris said if folks wanted to help but couldn’t make it to Harkers Island, the museum website has a page marked to donate for the recovery effort.

“That’s how people can help, we’ve had tons of help from the community, thank God for them, but we also need other help as well. We would be so appreciative if they logged onto our website and made a contribution earmarked for the relief effort,” she said.

“We’re going to recover, be better than ever, and I think we’re going to come out in on the other side in probably better shape than we were going in,” Morris added.

Terry Krauss of Carrboro was volunteering Friday afternoon at the museum. He said that he and his wife are big fans of Harkers Island and Cape Lookout. “We visit regularly, so when they had this disaster, I decided to spend some time down here helping people I know, doing everything from putting tarps up, hauling trash to the drop off center, chain sawing trees.”

Near where Krauss was helping upstairs, Lynn Hess, who works at the museum, was in an office sorting through documents. Hess said that she and her husband are in the process of revamping their 108-year-old home in Atlantic and while they had some water damage from broken windows, “Compared to what other folks are dealing with, we’re very fortunate.”

She added, “The community came together beautifully, which is one of the things we dearly love about Down East.”

Gloucester resident Barbara Garrity-Blake was also taken by the outpouring of kindness showed during and after the storm.

“The damage Down East, like in so many areas, is devastating, but response to the storm’s aftermath has been overwhelming,” she said. Fire departments Down East were the points of emergency supply drop off and distribution and firefighters and other first responders worked around the clock clearing roads, checking districts and fielding calls.

“I helped give out cleaning kits, MREs (meals ready to eat), water, canned goods, clothes and so on at the Marshallberg Volunteer Fire Department. We had crews of U.S. Forestry workers who helped unload tractor trailers — they were awesome,” Garrity-Blake said. “Churches stepped up and helped feed people. The Salvation Army folks were lifesavers with meals and supplies. Red Cross and Lion’s Club are examples of so many organizations that helped. Chowan County sent a 4-H team with livestock feed and hay.”

Garrity-Blake said that many took it upon themselves to drive in from Asheville, Raleigh, Charlotte, you name it, to help.

“I was especially moved by a Hispanic family – mother, teenage daughter and little boy – who drove two hours from flood-ravaged Kinston. When I asked them what they needed, they told me they didn’t need a thing – they had come to help Down East,” she said. They came with a van full of bleach to donate and helped at the Marshallberg Baptist Church serve meals that evening.

“Now we are in the muddy, mosquito-infested grind of long-term recovery. My heart goes out to those who were displaced, and whose possessions are on the side of the road.”

Barbara Garrity-Blake

“Now we are in the muddy, mosquito-infested grind of long-term recovery. My heart goes out to those who were displaced, and whose possessions are on the side of the road. Thank goodness for the Baptist Men, the Latter-day Saints and others who continue to do the dirty work of helping clear trees and deal with flooded homes,” she said, adding that some have no place to go and the Federal Emergency Management Agency cannot help. “People need temporary housing and FEMA no longer provides trailers.”

The Down East Council, which serves as a voice for the communities, is meeting 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Davis Volunteer Fire Department, she said, “to talk about how we can improve storm preparation and response for the next time, and we know there will be a next time. It’s appropriate that we are meeting in Davis, the epicenter of damage Down East.”The discussion will also focus on addressing concerns at the county level.

Lillie Chadwick Miller with the Down East Council reiterated the level of damage Florence produced throughout the county and especially the communities Down East.

“Many agree it produced more damage than ever before; and another comment reflected the fact that water came higher onto their property than they have ever seen,” she said.

“However, with the destruction that took place, many good things resulted. Friends were helping friends. Neighbors helping neighbors. Members of the fire and rescue departments worked above and beyond to accept the thousands of donations and disperse them to community folks,” MIller added. “Many members of the community stepped up and began organizing with friends outside of our county to get donations into our communities.”

What was the most humbling, she continued was to see the quantity of supplies that poured into the Down East communities, “And they’re still coming in. It’s amazing how the human spirit always steps up in times of need.”

In terms of recovery, Miller said it will be slow for many.

“Many homes are totally destroyed and the families are displaced. The lack of housing is a huge problem and those that are unable to stay in their homes because of the damage are finding it extremely difficult to find a place to house their families,” she said. “This is causing more stress on so many people with very few options open to them.”

Miller continued that with more and more homes deemed uninhabitable, the residents are finding themselves in dire situations.

“Families are struggling and finding it impossible to get help from FEMA and in some cases their own insurance. Families are told their homes are uninhabitable; but with no places to even rent, they are literally left with no viable choices. And then many cannot afford home insurance, much less flood insurance. It is definitely an extremely difficult situation for many Down East.”

Miller mentioned how heartbreaking it is to see how the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum has been damaged. “For so many, the museum is an icon of our communities. Like always, folks will work together to help restore the museum to what it was before.”

Among those pitching in at the museum was Liz DeMattia, lead scientist for the Community Science Initiative at Duke University Marine Lab, along with faculty, students, staff and their family members.

“Families are told their homes are uninhabitable; but with no places to even rent, they are literally left with no viable choices. And then many cannot afford home insurance, much less flood insurance. It is definitely an extremely difficult situation for many Down East.”

Lillie Chadwick Miller, Down East Council

“The Core Sound Museum and Heritage Center is such an important space for the community and has been a wonderful community partner for faculty, staff and students at the Duke Marine Lab,” DeMattia said. “When we heard what Florence did to the museum, we wanted to give back to an organization that gives so much to everyone else. We have such respect for the museum, that we contacted (museum director) Karen Amspacher and said ‘how can we help’?”

Many different groups have helped out from Duke Marine Lab in whatever capacity the museum staff needed, DeMattia explained. She said that groups shoveled mud and ripped carpets at one of the Down East churches, cleaned storage spaces to make space for museum furniture and packed up the gift store and some contents from the museum’s community exhibits.

“Anyone who has worked with the (museum) staff knows how community oriented and hardworking they are, and how much they give to the museum and the community — as friends and partners of Core Sound, our goal was just to lighten their workload and help them on the road to restoring such a wonderful community space.”

In a note to museum supporters, Amspacher wrote “Eastern North Carolina has suffered a disaster for sure, and Core Sound and Down East are just part of a much larger tragic situation, but we – like generations before us – will adapt, work and persevere.”

WILLISTON – It’s probably safe to say that relatively few women – or men – would start an oyster seed nursery at age 65. It’s probably even safer to say that few if any women who deign to take on that task and degree of risk would buy a big, decrepit cinder block building, renovate it and hope that the business will help revitalize an entire community, albeit a small one.

But Susan Fulcher Hill is doing it in Williston. A few years ago she and her husband, Robert, purchased the run-down, long-abandoned 8,000-square-foot Willis Brothers Seafood building on U.S. 70 at Jarrett Bay. After years of learning and planning, in late July they “planted” their first tiny larvae – 3 million of them – with the goal of selling seed oysters to the growing number of oyster farmers around the state.

Will the business make money?

“We certainly hope so,” Hill said recently. “But it’s like anything else that involves Mother Nature: You don’t know. We should know by the end of August.”

But the story of how Susan Hill got to this point is as interesting as the question of whether the couple’s business will succeed.

A native of Williston, she’s the daughter of Donald Fulcher, who made a career on the water. He was a commercial fisherman and for many years was the chief engineer for the Eastward, the first research vessel used by the Duke University Marine Laboratory on Pivers Island. So she grew up with salt water in her blood, and with an abiding love for all things marine.

By the time it was time to go to college, Susan headed to East Carolina University to major in marine biology. She ended up transferring to Vanderbilt University and graduated with a degree in biology, then headed off to Brigham Young University in Utah, where she earned a master’s in food science and nutrition.

Eventually, she met Robert, they got married and founded a company, Diabetes Care and Education Inc., in Greenville, South Carolina.

“I was diagnosed with diabetes when I was 19,” Susan said.

So starting and running a company that helped other diabetics obtain supplies, support and information seemed as natural as a Williston native getting involved in seafood. And the company was very successful. Eventually, they had offices in five states, and the headquarters ended up in Louisville., Kentucky, where the couple stayed for 20 years.

When they sold the business in 2007, they retired, and spent much of the next 10 years doing volunteer work and missions for their church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

But all along, Susan said, there was a nagging desire to return to her first love, marine biology, in some way, and a desire to come home to Down East Carteret County.

Eventually, opportunity presented itself in the form of that old Willis Brothers building, which locals just call “Elmer’s clam house,” she said.

“When I was growing up, it was the hub of eastern Carteret County,” Susan recalled. “Dozens and dozens of people worked there over the years. Williston used to have a post office and a store, and we’d walk to the store and get a soda, go to the post office and get the mail, then go to the clam house and watch the boats at the boatworks. There are a lot of memories for me and many other people in that place, a lot of history, and a lot of emotional connections.”

The ‘Clam King’

Elmer Willis was known far and wide as “The Clam King.”

According to a 2014 CRO article by Frank Tursi, “Willis quit school after the eighth grade to help his father fish commercially. He left for Norfolk where he worked for a time as an engineer on boats, but he came home to stay in 1939, bringing with him a wife – Pearl Smith of Atlantic – and a 2-year-old daughter, Nancy. Another daughter, Beverly, would be born later.”

Willis opened a general store just past the bridge crossing Williston Creek. It housed the post office Susan Hill mentioned, and in the early 1940s Willis started the seafood business with his brother, Wesley, who later sold his share to Elmer.

Heinz was the big customer – think clam chowder, although not necessarily the great stuff produced by skilled seafood artist in Carteret’s fishing villages – but Elmer Lewis sold the national company all the clams they used for many years.

Willis Brothers’ clams also went elsewhere in the U.S. besides Heinz in Pittsburgh. Cleveland was a huge market; for some reason clambakes were always big there.

Willis Brothers clams also raised money for local schools for years at clambakes. The business, and Elmer, were integral and important parts of the community and culture of a place that was isolated and self-sufficient. And proud of it.

But Elmer died in a car wreck in 1977 and the clam house closed. A fire destroyed the store and boatworks in the 1990s, and the clam house deteriorated into what Tursi, in his 2014 article called, “frankly, an eyesore.” There were efforts to obtain grants, and talk of a park.

But if it had become an eyesore, it was, as Susan said, one with rich, still vibrant history. And it still kindled emotional connections to times gone by, perhaps better times, for many people, including a Williston native who had been gone a long time and had salt in her blood.

So she put in a bid for the property and got it, and started talking to people. She knew that the state, with a push from the North Carolina Coastal Federation, was getting into oyster production in a big way, building reefs and encouraging oyster farming, both to revive a once-thriving industry and to help improve water quality. One oyster – just one – can filter clean up to 50 gallons of water per day. So Down East Mariculture Supply Co. began to become a reality, slowly.

Susan had found out more than two years ago, at a North Carolina Sea Grant meeting, that there was a shortage of oyster seed for those efforts, and that almost all seed used here comes from Virginia. Buying from Virginia can be time-consuming, as state Division of Marine Fisheries rules require that those larvae or seeds must be tested for disease. So even those are sometimes hard to get.

And that’s when her idea was hatched. A shortage is an opportunity for the adventurous. But there was a lot of work to be done.

“A lot of people said I should tear the building down, but I didn’t want to do that,” Susan said.

Part of the reason was that history, that culture, but part of it was also practical. While most oyster nurseries are outside, Susan said, “At our ages, we didn’t really want to be outside in all the heat and the humidity and the rain and wind.” So they decided to pipe the seawater into the building, where the larvae would be placed in upwellers and grow to the size needed by the state’s oyster farmers.

Hatchery Protocol

Generally, nursery systems pump seawater to provide a constant flow of water and food to the oysters. The designs and locations may differ, but the goal, no matter how it’s done, is to allow the oysters to grow to approximately an inch as quickly as possible. From the nursery, these seed oysters can either be sold to other commercial producers for grow-out or placed in a company’s own grow-out facility. The Hills opted to just sell the seed oysters.

With her knowledge of marine biology and her ties to the commercial fishing industry and its heritage, she knew a good bit of what she needed to know. But Susan studied intensely, taking classes at Carteret Community College, talking to others, reading extensively on the internet and taking a seminar from a renowned expert on the subject, Scott Rickard of Auburn University.

“We’re basically using his protocol,” she said. Most experts say 20 percent of the larvae die before they reach the size oyster farmers need, she said, and that would be 600,000 of that first batch of 3 million. Rickard has much better success, and Susan’s hoping she and Robert do, too. It’s a waiting game, for now.

And it’s taken quite a while just to get to the point in late July when the first larvae went into the water.

The building needed major renovations. Those aren’t finished yet. But after two years, it’s usable, and Susan thinks it looks nice. Inside, the nursery takes up only a small fraction of the space, and she wants to use at least some of the rest of the space to help rebuild those connections so many residents in the area had to the site.

“This isn’t all about us, or even just about us and oyster farmers. It’s also about the community.”

Susan Fulcher Hill

“We’re open to ideas,” she said. “We want people to give us suggestions.”

There’s room for art, and she’s been talking to a mosaic artist. Susan wants an educational, history component to the building, devoted to the area’s rich hunting and fishing culture. She envisions ecotours, students and others visiting to see how the process works, and they might eventually sell supplies.

“We want to help bring some jobs back for people in Williston,” she said. “This isn’t all about us, or even just about us and oyster farmers. It’s also about the community.”

The community, she said, has been positive.

“I think people are excited,” she said. “Everyone seems thankful that we didn’t tear down the building, that we’re making use of it.”

One who is pleased is Elmer Lewis’s daughter, Nancy, who is a Williston native but now lives in Davis.

“I’m very happy with what Susan is doing,” she said. “It certainly looks a lot better, and I’m glad that the building is getting used for something that can help the commercial fishing industry.

“The fishing industry is in such difficult times,” she added. “It’s hard for me to be believe there’s not a fish house in Atlantic. And we had an inspector at our business (Luther Lewis and Son Crab Co. in Davis) and I asked him how many crab-picking places there are in North Carolina now. He had to think really hard and finally said, ‘Less than five.’ At one time, there were 45.”

Ms. Lewis’s company – her husband, James Paul Lewis died in 2016 – used to be involved in all aspects of the crab fishery and operated 10 trawlers, but now just makes crab cakes, which are shipped up and down the East Coast.

So, saving “Elmer’s clam house,” she said, preserves a significant part of a heritage that is rapidly disappearing.

“At one time, just about everybody in Williston worked there,” she said. “There would be a 100 pickers in there.”

Her father, she said, was an innovator, a brilliant man despite having only an eighth-grade education. He built yachts and head boats, and that legacy lives on in Jarrett Bay Boatworks. He started the scallop business in the area, and even developed and patented a scallop-shucking machine.

She’s happy that his legacy lives on in the building.

“It was so sad to see that building in such disrepair,” she said. “I hope Susan has great success.”

HARKERS ISLAND – There are 15 photographs on display in the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center exhibition gallery. Dynamic images of coastal North Carolina. Some taken from the sky, some an abstract detail, and others a glimpse into everyday life.

The voices of men and women sharing their stories about their changing environment fill the room from a speaker overhead.

This is “Rising: Perspectives of Coastal Change.” A collaborative multimedia exhibition that looks at first-hand accounts of climate-related change.

The exhibition features the photography of Baxter Miller and 16 oral histories collected by Ryan Stancil, content creator, and cultural anthropologist Barbara Garrity-Blake. Team members also include museum Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher, Alton Ballance, Ben Cahoon, Stan Riggs, Susan West, Jessica Whitehead and Margaret Cheatham Williams. The traveling exhibition will be on display in the museum gallery through Sept. 30.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the museum is bringing together fishermen, scientists and community representatives Tuesday, Aug. 14, for a “Change: Community Conversation” to talk about relationship with place, the role of change in the region and its impact today and the future.

Check-in for the event is from 9 to 10 a.m., giving time for fellowship and to view the exhibition. Sessions begin at 10 a.m. and will feature community leaders and government representatives, scientists, fishermen and visitors from the Chesapeake Bay to share their observations of changes, the effect of these changes and what adaptive measures have been taken. Organizers ask that attendees register for lunch planning purposes.

Partners and organizations that will have resource tables present include North Carolina Sea Grant, North Carolina Coastal Federation, the University of North Carolina Coastal Resilience Center, the Division of Coastal Management, the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership, or APNEP, and others.

Stancil explained that this North Carolina Sea Grant research project focuses on Beaufort, Dare, Carteret, Hyde, Tyrrell and Washington counties.

“The oral histories explore people’s experiences with change, and their thoughts about it, thoughts about their future and the ways people adapt,” Stancil said. “And this is the outreach component, we didn’t want to just do research to better understand the perspectives of change, we wanted to build some sort of tool around it for communities to use however they see fit.”

He said that the exhibition launched in Chapel Hill earlier this year at UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South.  “Then we wanted to bring it back home to the communities and Core Sound is the first venue.”

Miller explained that each of the 15 photographs is paired with a clip from the oral histories that were collected specifically for the “Rising” exhibition.

“The whole ‘Rising’ project is occurring in the context of a region that is defined by change, period. And always has been,” Stancil said, citing the abandoned Diamond City on Shackleford Banks as an example. “They had to leave because of the way that environment was changing, and storms. It’s a conversation that happens in that context.”

Stancil explained that the oral history participants shared their experiences on adaptive measures and general observations, such as one person spoke about the beach in front of Cape Hatteras before it was moved, others share their experiences with flooding and farmers talk about the way saltwater intrusion caused by sea level rise affects agriculture and the way they’ve adapted.

Miller said that the catalyst for the project rests in a family story.

“My dad’s side of the family is from Buxton, and they’ve been there since the 1700s or earlier,” she began. “So my grandfather had six siblings and one was the postmistress of Buxton, Maude White. She is a famed folklore character of Buxton and she had a piece of land where the Buxton motels are at the time.

“Maude had this piece of land, oceanfront — we haven’t been able to trace how many acres it was but somewhere in the neighborhood of 7-10 acres — that she offered to my grandfather for $3,000 and he said to her, ‘Maude, that land is valueless, no fool would ever build on the beach,’” she said. This was in the ’70s and now there’s nowhere to build.

Miller said that stuck with her, her whole life.

Miller continued on how “Rising” came to be. In 2016, Garrity-Blake and Amspacher asked her to take photographs to be included in their book, “Living at The Water’s Edge: A Heritage Guide to the Outer Banks Byway.” Miller took a series of aerial photos for the book along N.C. 12, Cape Lookout National Seashore and Core Banks.

“I was just struck by the way that this place that I have spent most of my life, that I have such a relationship with, that I have such family heritage ties to, I was just struck by the way it looked from the air and how fragile it seems, but the banks prevail,” Miller said. “Seeing it from the air gave this whole new perspective of rising above the surface, rising above very complex narratives of change that people that live here have been dealing with for generations.”

Stancil continued that after hearing stories from Miller’s father, he became curious about what other stories are out there. “What do people think about this change?”

Stancil said “Rising” opened in late June in conjunction with Core Sound’s “Harm’s Way” exhibit focusing on storms that occurred over the last century, “Which is nice, the two work really well together, because ‘Harm’s Way’ is about storms and adapting and being resilient and our response to natural disaster. The two have a nice conversation together.”

Miller said that though the photos are abstract, “We wanted someone to come into this exhibition and their curiosity to be piqued at the micro level. So it’s a nontraditional approach to even depicting these issues. We really wanted to change the conversation in a way that drew different people in to thinking about planning for it and talking about it,” Miller said.

Stancil added that the hope with the exhibit is that the conversation turns to the future.

Amspacher said that Core Sound has been part of the groundwork over the past several years that has evolved into “Rising” and it has been a meaningful experience.

“Baxter’s striking photography has brought into focus the changing world we live in but seldom see in a larger context of change. This exhibition has helped bring this conversation to our communities in a very ‘close to home’ way that has made all of us more aware of what is happening around us,” Amspacher said.

“This ‘Community Conversation’ is designed to be just that; a conversation across communities who are already feeling these impacts, already adapting – as they always have – to the forces around them,” she continued. “We are looking forward to hearing from all those who share a stake in this changing world where land and water give and take.”

A Community Collaborative Research Grant, a program of North Carolina Sea Grant in partnership with the William R. Kenan Jr. Institute for Engineering, Technology and Science at N.C. State University funded this project.

Learn More

• “Rising: Perspectives of Coastal Change”
• Change: A Community Conversation Registration
• Excerpt from Oral History with Dawn T.
• Excerpt from Oral History with Gabby C.

HARKERS ISLAND – For the past 25 years, the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center has made its focus those who call Down East home.

Those long-remembered names that have been woven into local lore as well as the volunteers and staff who have spent tireless hours doing any and everything from spending the day frying seafood in a hot kitchen to chasing down memorabilia for an exhibit have been commemorated with the museum’s 25^th anniversary documentary, “Core Sound’s Place,” that will be shown in its entirety for the first time during the annual Taste of Core Sound summer edition. The museum also hosts a Taste of Core Sound each winter.

Set for Friday, Aug. 25, the Taste of Core Sound summer edition will feature a spread of scallop fritters, baked flounder, seafood casserole, chicken and pastry, fresh wahoo salad, shrimp salad, collards, sweet potatoes, squash casserole, fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, light rolls and fig cake that will be served at 7 p.m., before the documentary is shown at 8 p.m. Doors will open at 6 p.m., when wine and cheese will be available.

Tickets are $50 per person for museum members and $65 for non-members. There will also be a raffle that night, giving ticketholders a chance to win a golf cart, 100 pounds of fresh shrimp, a Yeti Hopper 30 cooler or gift certificates to restaurants and shops across Carteret County. Tickets are $20 each or six for $100.

Karen Willis Amspacher, museum director, explained that the documentary is more of a scrapbook of all the people who have been part of the 25-year journey.

“The goal of the documentary was to bring together the voices of those who have been leaders in this work,” she said.

“Our question to them was ‘Why?’ What brought you to this project and what has caused you to invest so much of yourself in this effort for Down East?,” she said. “There were lots more questions of course, but essentially, Why? This museum is a story of people … People who care about their community – past, present and future … and that is relayed in these conversations.”

Filmmakers Ryan Stancil and Baxter Miller were tasked with condensing the past 25 years of museum history into a 25-minute film. They spent months interviewing folks who have had an impact on the museum, filtering through archives and listening to oral histories collected over the decades.

“It is an impossible task but they have captured the spirit of this museum and the heritage it preserves, documents and shares,” Amspacher added.

“Yes, it is an incredible building with an impressive collection and excellent programming but at the end of the day, it is the people and their shared dedication to their heritage and history that has made the museum a success and such an important resource for the region and North Carolina. It’s their voices that tell the story,” Miller said.

There are a range of voices that have contributed to the success of the museum that were recorded for the documentary, including that of Carteret County storyteller Connie Mason; Core Sound Decoy Carvers Guild founding president Wayne Davis; volunteer membership secretary Margaret Goodwin; decoy carver Lionel Gilgo; North Carolina Arts Council director Wayne Martin; Kathryn Chadwick, the granddaughter of founding chair, the late Billy Smith; historian and author David Cecelski; and county historian Rodney Kemp.

Echoing throughout the film is the sentiment that it’s the people who make the museum.

“I’ve always said that Down East is not so much the place, it’s the people. And to me the people are the hidden treasure of Down East, North Carolina, and the Core Sound waterfowl Museum highlights the people and what they are and who they are, so I think it plays a vital mission to understanding who we are,” Mason said in the film.

Cecelski is quoted in the film as saying that the museum is one of the handful of most important museums in the country.

“And yes, the museum does very professional exhibits and they’re a first-class museum, but what’s really extraordinary about them is a way that they’re redefining what a museum is … So, it’s a museum, but half the time it’s more like church and it’s a space for homecoming and reunion and for connecting the generations. You know you couldn’t have a museum any closer to the people and the place.”

Martin of the state’s Arts Council said the office of folklife programs began collaborating with the waterfowl museum.

“I was just struck. I was struck by the fact that of all the groups I was working with, there were two groups that felt so strongly about place – the connection of place to culture. One was the eastern band of Cherokee. The other was Core Sound and Harkers Island and those communities Down East,” he said.

Martin continued by explaining that they realize that the dirt and the water and the trees and the flora and the fauna shape who they are as people and that they, in turn, have shaped those resources and utilized those resources and to some extent changed them. Adding that the fact that everything grew out of that philosophy of being connected to the land and place today’s world is so rare.

“To find communities that understand how important it is to honor that concept and, in a sense, stay true to it so that your identity remains connected to that very spot on the earth or in North Carolina.”

Kemp has a long history with the museum and spends many hours a year there leading programs, including one he created, Community Nights. One night a month, a community is highlighted  following a potluck dinner.

“You’re talking love now. You’re talking love of saltwater. You’re talking love of water everywhere. You’re talking about the breezes, the ones that freezes us in winter, and cools us in the summer. And the people,” Kemp said about the museum. “The people are unbelievable. And I don’t just mean Down East, all of Carteret County, those that are native Carteret County that were raised here are loving people that will give you what you need in a time, good friends, very good friends.”

The granddaughter of founding chairman the late Billy Smith, Chadwick has many generations tied to the museum. She said that she thinks that the museum is an anchor to what they want the future generations to be able to see.

“We were excited that there was going to be a museum. …  I think everybody was proud to see it break ground and I know my grandmother was very happy to see the gallery completed … that was probably the highlight of the museum for her, was to actually know that the building was complete and everything was how she you know if everyone had envisioned it. The dream had become true.”

Learn More

• Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center

HARKERS ISLAND — Sponsors, volunteers, staff and the community have been working together since 1992 to make Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center a Down East destination for residents and visitors alike.

The hard work and dedication have paid off. This year marks the 25^th anniversary of the museum that also serves as an educational facility, regional archive, meeting place and a destination for heritage tourism travelers.

A celebration of this landmark will take place June 23 and June 24 at the “end of the road” on Harkers Island. During the evening of June 23, there will be the Heritage Gallery dedication honoring longtime museum supporters Purcell and Helen Jones, followed by the Core Sound’s 25^th anniversary exhibition opening and premiere of the documentary, “Core Sound Values: Reflections on Core Sound Duck Hunting and Decoy Traditions.”

June 24 is the Core Sound Community Day and is from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. There will be the Rig of Six Working Decoy competition, Superior Decoy Craftsmanship and International Wildfowl Carvers Association-style decoy competitions, old shorebird exhibition, antique waterfowling roadshow, a celebration of Harkers Island music traditions, an arts and crafts fair, children’s activities, and local seafood.

Learn More

• Schedule and Details

DOWN EAST, CARTERET COUNTY — When final selections for the new Kinston minor league baseball team’s name were announced on Sept. 15, folks here were quick to react to the phrase “Down East” included in all five choices.

The reaction wasn’t one of support, and despite a petition opposing what’s seen here as community identity theft, a petition signed by more than 1,300 Down East residents, team officials announced their decision Wednesday: The team set to start its first season in 2017 at Grainger Stadium in Kinston will be known as the Down East Wood Ducks. An official logo is to be unveiled later this month.

Harkers Island native Karen Willis Amspacher called the decision disappointing for the people of Kinston who love their town, as well as heartbreaking for the “true Down East people” who hold sacred their place in the world. Amspacher was active in starting the petition against naming the team after Down East.

“It is an absolute shame that an ill-conceived marketing strategy would outweigh the cries of the people and their deep commitment to their own communities,” Amspacher said Wednesday.

The other four finalists in the fan-voted decision to name the Texas Rangers’ Kinston farm team were the Down East Eagles, Down East HamHawks, Down East Hogzillas and Down East Shaggers. Rangers Kinston LLC President Joe Januszewski said Wednesday the chosen name garnered the most votes of any of the options that could be trademarked. The wood duck, or Carolina duck, has a broad distribution across North America, and ducks in general are the stuff of museums Down East, but ducks aren’t the issue for Down East residents.

The Texas Rangers said in September the Down East name for the Class-A Advanced Carolina League team was meant to reflect the broader, regional market.

“While the new team will call the great city of Kinston home, there are so many people from neighboring areas that will be part of the new family of fans,” the team’s general manager Wade Howell explained. “To honor the geographic diversity of the fans, and to give a nod to the many vibrant areas the team will serve, we’ll precede the new team nickname with the phrase Down East.”

“Kinston is not Down East,” notes the Down East petition drive posted at change.org. The proposed names also caused “a public outcry among Kinston residents,” petition organizers claim, but especially Down East, where community residents don’t want “their name associated with a ball team that is located some 80 miles west.”

Where is Down East?

For the unfamiliar, Down East is 13 distinct, tight-knit and unincorporated communities tucked away in a corner of Carteret County, most of which is surrounded by water. Bettie; Otway; Smyrna; Williston; Davis; Stacy; Sea Level; Atlantic; Cedar Island; Straits; Gloucester; Marshallberg; and Harkers Island are all tied together by bridges and meandering roads.

The roads here pass by stretches of marsh, family graveyards, quaint churches, new construction and homes built a century or more ago, small garden plots and the occasional fish house.

This network of roadways was also recently named a part of the Outer Banks National Scenic Byway, which extends from Whalebone Junction in Dare County to where Down East and Beaufort meet.

“People who don’t understand the history of the term say everything east of Raleigh is Down East and that is woefully incorrect,” said Rodney Kemp, a former high school teacher and baseball coach, longtime storyteller and Carteret County historian.

Down East begins at the North River Bridge in eastern Carteret County and extends to Cedar Island, Kemp explained.

“Down East is a nautical term indigenous to Carteret County.  In the late 1800s and up until the 1950s, the mail was brought to Morehead City by train. The Mailboat, a sailing vessel, took it to Beaufort and then sailed to the communities to the (east) to deliver,” he continued. “The prevailing sailing wind in Carteret County is from the southwest. On most days, the Mailboat was sailing ‘downwind to the eastern’ thus the name Down East is born. The state of Maine has a Down East for the same reason.”

Kemp is among those with strong feelings about the team’s naming.

“Obviously, I feel it would be historically in error for Kinston to use the term,” Mr. Kemp said.

“A lot of us in Carteret County are baseball fans. We would still attend games in Kinston, but would not honor the name. I would wish Kinston would honor our heritage and refrain from stealing the term,” Kemp continued. “They could easily be named the Coastal Indians, the Eastern Indians, the Tuscarora Indians, the Kinston Pam Pack and many other historically correct names to honor Eastern Carolina’s heritage.”

Down East is more than just a place name; it’s been home to many generations.

Down East is “a place where we help each other – come together when our neighbors, family and friends need help. Down East is a lifestyle, which is generally a slower pace than any other place,” said Lillie Chadwick Miller, a Straits native.

Miller said the term is “part of who we are and where we find our home. We’re grounded by our area because of family, friends, and neighbors … It’s where many folks were and are reliant on the water. It’s where many people have grown into adulthood as teachers, doctors, lawyers, business owners, policemen – you name it.”

Along with Amspacher, Miller has also been active in the effort to have Down East dropped from the title.

“Everyone agrees,” Miller said. “Kinston is not Down East.  It truly makes no sense at all that Kinston, or anywhere else actually, could take the Down East name and try to market it as their own.”

Kinston’s Baseball Heritage

Kinston has its own heritage, including a long history of being home to minor league baseball, with professional teams dating back to 1908.

Before the Texas Rangers announced plans to bring professional baseball back to Kinston, the city’s Grainger Stadium, built in 1949, was most recently home to the Kinston Indians, an affiliate of the Cleveland Indians. The team left in 2011 for Zebulon, becoming the Carolina League’s Carolina Mudcats.

Bringing back baseball will be a game changer for the town, explained Tony Sears, city manager for Kinston. He said the people of Kinston have genuinely missed baseball being there and have longed for its return.

“First off, the city is grateful to have found an organization like the Texas Rangers with whom to partner. We believe partnering with a major league ball team will make a tremendous difference in the gameday experience,” Sears said. “Secondly, as a community, Kinston is economically in a better place than we were five years ago when the Indians moved to Zebulon.  We feel having a team will only enhance our continued economic efforts.”

Regarding the inclusion of the name Down East, he said that the city is very supportive of the Rangers and their efforts to be innovative and creative in finding a unique identity for the team.

“We understand that there has been a shift in minor league baseball with naming and re-branding of other minor league baseball teams around the country.”

Sears explained that teams in both New York and Louisiana are currently re-branding, and have solicited community input regarding equally unique names for their ball clubs.

“As far as Down East, we have to remember that other geographical identifiers are being used by other organizations. I think the Rangers are referring to Down East not as a geographical identifier but rather as a ‘state of mind.’ It really is an attempt to be as inclusive as possible of every community in the region,” Sears said. “We are confident that at the end of the day, people are not as worried about the name of the team as they are with watching a quality product on the field.”

Sears said the Rangers are “a first-class team whose farm system is second to none and the Carolina League is considered one of the best leagues in all of Minor League Baseball. In April of 2017, the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd will once again return to historic Grainger Stadium in Kinston.”

No matter what they call the team, Amspacher said, “Down East is still Down East, east of North River bridge, a people proud of who they are and the beautiful, powerful place where they have lived and worked for generations. No one will take that away from us, ever.”

Learn More

• Kinston baseball
• Down East petition

Reprinted from the Tideland News

HARKERS ISLAND — The ultimate repository of the Down East Carteret County culture will host its biggest weekend of the year Saturday and Sunday: It’s “Waterfowl Weekend” at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center, “at the end of the road” on Harkers Island.

Karen Amspacher, director of the museum, said it’s a greatly anticipated weekend when so many “come home” to visit family and friends and to celebrate the natural beauty and unique lifestyle and heritage of the watery end of the county, a place of ever-changing marshes and rivers and all the wonders that go with them. In short, it’s a homecoming.

Things will start at 6:30 p.m. Friday with the Preview Party. Bill and Fossie Lathan and Jim and Phoebe Briley, known as “The Sweet Puppy Crew,” will be honored for their contributions to the museum. Their greatest contribution may be the “sweet puppies,” or dessert hushpuppies, a signature dish that has graced many plates and greatly benefited the museum.

The night will feature a seafood and wild game extravaganza, a Down East community dessert party with specialty coffees, Christmas music, a silent auction, gallery exhibitions and more than 40 of the region’s best artists, carvers and crafters.

The silent auction runs throughout the weekend, featuring decoys, original art, antiques, jewelry, sporting equipment and collectibles.

There will also be a raffle of a gorgeous quilt, another Down East tradition. Core Sound Quilters will be there to tell you all about it.  Raffle tickets are $5 each.

Local musicians will provide live music throughout the weekend, with carols and old-time music.

Beloved Down East supporter, writer and musician Bland Simpson will be on hand Saturday and Sunday with his wife and photographer, Ann, a Down East native, signing copies of their amazing new book, Little Rivers and Waterway Tales, which paints lyrical tone poems of some of the best spots Down East, including North and South rivers and Taylor’s Creek in Beaufort, not to mention Swansboro’s White Oak and Jacksonville’s New River.

Bob Garner, UNC-TV’s favorite food fan, will be on hand with his Book of Barbecue and Foods That Make You Say Mmm-mmm. Local author Cecila Faye Styron will sign copies of her book, The Tides Have Spoken, about the history of fishing in Beaufort, as will other writers and historians.

Everyone should stop by to see world-famous North Carolina artist Bob Timberlake’s Sportsman’s Series prints, including the 2015 release of “Post Season Reunion,” the companion print to last year’s “Resting Place.”

The full series will be on display with the museum’s membership table.  This marks the beginning of a museum partnership with the N.C. Habitat Foundation and Bob Timberlake to establish the Purcell & Helen Jones Endowment Fund.

Also in the gallery inside the museum, there will be a number of special exhibitions, including: A Tribute to the Lewis Family Boat builders – 2016 Heritage Award Recipients; The Carlyle Adams Collection: Gerald Davis Decoys; The Roy Willis Collection; Core Sound Workboats; and Hometown Teams Down East – within the Community Exhibits on the second floor.

The museum shop will be open, with a full supply of wonderful local decoys, crafts, art and food items. Everything from duck socks to oyster platters, decoy jewelry, lighthouse collectibles, Core Sound shirts and the world-famous and much beloved crab pot Christmas trees will be for sale.

Saturday at 9 a.m. the Decoy Festival will begin just up the island road at Harkers Island Elementary School. A shuttle will run between the museum and the school. Some of the most renowned carvers in the world will be on hand with the stunning results of their craftsmanship.

At the museum, arts and craft vendors will be set up inside and outside. Boatbuilding demonstrations will take place at noon, 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Saturday and at 2 and 4 p.m. Sunday.

East Carteret High School’s boatbuilding class, led by Core Sound’s own Hebert Guthrie, will showcase its latest projects, including the 10-foot hydroplane the class designed and built in commemoration of the school’s 50th anniversary and a model the students are building of a James Gillikin trawler.

Little boats by boatbuilding families will also be built and available during the silent auction. They are perfect for planters or toy boxes, and you can watch them being made.

Miss Teresa will have a full tent just for the young folks. Santa Science will give kids a chance to paint, create and learn, and the N.C. Wildlife Commission’s “Mallard Madness” shooting game will be back for a second year.

For dog lovers, there will be retriever demonstrations across from the museum along the shore at noon, 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Saturday and at noon and 2 p.m. Sunday.

New this year is the Core Sound Heritage Auction, which will be Saturday, beginning at 4 p.m., featuring a select group of Core Sound carvings from family collections throughout the region. The work of well-known carvers, original art and hand-selected collectibles will be offered

On Sunday, the celebration starts at 8 a.m. with the Core Sound Community Church Fellowship singing and storytelling with the Rev. Kerry Willis and Corey Lawrence. During the ceremony, the N.C. Arts Council’s N.C. Heritage Award winners will be honored. Jamie, Houston and James Lewis, Harkers Island boat builders, will be recognized for their significant contributions to state’s traditional arts.

Music by local trios and choirs will also be part of the Sunday morning service.  A fellowship breakfast with homemade sausage, cheese grits and light rolls will follow.

Most Waterfowl Weekend events are free and open to the public. Decoy Festival tickets are $8 daily, with children in free on Sunday.

Tickets for the Friday Night Preview are $150 per couple or $75 per individual.

This story is provided courtesy of the Tideland News, a weekly newspaper in Swansboro. Coastal Review Online is partnering with the Tideland to provide readers with more environmental and lifestyle stories of interest about our coast. You can read other stories about the Swansboro area here.

No one really how many clams Elmer Willis shipped out of this now ramshackle building in Williston, but it was an economic force and a proud symbol of the region known as Down East. Photo: Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center

WILLISTON – There’s really no telling how many clams and scallops Elmer Willis shipped out of the now derelict cinder block building that sits on the bulge of a sharp curve along U.S. 70 in eastern Carteret County.

“Millions, maybe?” speculates his daughter Nancy Lewis.

Enough, notes Jonathan Robinson, to make Willis Brothers Seafood for decades one of the main employers in this end of the county. “My aunt and uncle worked there,” says Robinson, the chairman of the county commissioners and a former commercial fisherman from down the road in Atlantic. “A lot of people did. Man, you had to see those ladies’ hands a-flyin’ shucking those clams.”

Elmer Willis, The Clam King. Photo: Nancy Lewis Collection, Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center

There’s a picture of Willis on the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center web site. He’s fit and smiling and dapper. Arms folded across his chest and dark hair slicked back, Willis looks almost regal. It’s the pose of The Clam King, which is what they called him back in the day.

It’s all gone now, of course. Willis died in a car wreck in 1977. The clam house died with him. The thriving fishing industry that supported them both is now a shadow of itself. All that’s left of that glorious time is the sad hulk of an abandoned building – its roof rotting, its windows gone, its walls obscured by weeds and trees. What was once a proud symbol of a region they call Down East and of the fishing folks who live there is now, frankly, an eyesore.

Karen Willis Amspacher thinks The Clam King and the heritage he represents deserve better.  A native of the Down East community of Harkers Island, she is the director of the museum and a fierce protector of local culture.

“This place was an institution,” Amspacher says as we walk to the back of the old building, through the weeds and across the decades of discarded clam shells that cover the ground. “My hope is that the people of Down East can hold on to it. It may never be a clam house again but we may be able to adapt it to another use.”

A move is afoot to do just that. In the end, it will likely take the Marines and a bunch of ding-batters – local parlance for people who ain’t from around here – to make it happen, but so be it.

The Conservation Fund, which has saved more than seven million acres of land and water all across the country, is trying to buy the old clam house and the  90 or so acres – marsh mostly – that come with it.  The fund is working with the Down East Council, a group of volunteers who are involved in an initiative coordinated by Amspacher called Saltwater Connections. The four-year-old effort aims to protect cultural heritage and sustain livelihoods and natural resources Down East and on Hatteras Island on the Outer Banks.

The fund last week submitted a request for $130,000 to the N.C. Clean Water Management Trust Fund, a state agency that provides grants to preserve ecologically sensitive land. The Marine Corps, explains Justin Boner, may pay the remainder of the $185,000 purchase price for the clam house from a program to prevent development from encroaching on its bases and training areas.

“The Marines are always concerned about tall structures, such as cell towers,” says Boner, the fund’s director of North Carolina real estate.

Fisherman unload bushels of clams onto Willis Brothers dock in the 1940s. Photo: Nancy Lewis Collection, Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center

The clam house property, he says, sits under the convergence of three flight paths used by aircraft from the Corps’ air station in Havelock.
If all the pieces fall into place, the fund could own the property by the end of the year. It would then donate it to the county for public use.

No one knows just yet exactly what to do with it. There’s talk of picnic tables and a kayak launch, maybe even a public restroom. There’s not one on U.S. 70 along its 40 or so miles through Down East. The old clam house itself, though, would likely have to come down.

“Hopefully, we’ll be able to develop some public access there,” Robinson says. “It’s the most picturesque spot in the eastern end of the county.”

Right across Williston Creek, the waterfront site commands a sweeping view of Jarrett’s Bay. Historic Davis Island sits on the horizon, where the bay empties into Core Sound. A good pair of young eyes can see the roof of the old hunting lodge above the tree line. The rest of us need binoculars.

Lewis hopes something is done with her Daddy’s old place. She’s 77 now and it pains her to drive by it. She sits a few miles away, on the back porch of her house in Davis. Spread out on the table in front of her or piled in a box at her feet are old family photographs, newspaper articles and other bits and pieces she has collected that tell of a happier time for the old clam house.

In 1960s the clam house was in its prime, selling thousands of clams a week. Photo: Nancy Lewis Collection, Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center

“Here, take a look at this,” Lewis says as she hands me a page from a Willis Brothers receipt book from the mid-1940s. The handwritten numbers tell the story: 22,000 clams, 50,000 clams, 78,000 clams, 100,000 clams. That’s for one week.

“There were a lot of clams that went out of that building,” she says. “People just don’t realize it.”

A native of Williston, Willis quit school after the eighth grade to help his father fish commercially. He left for Norfolk where he worked for a time as an engineer on boats, but he came home to stay in 1939, bringing with him a wife – Pearl Smith of Atlantic – and a 2-year-old daughter, Nancy. Another daughter, Beverly, would be born later.

Willis opened a general story on the big curve just past the bridge crossing the creek. It housed the post office, where Pearl was the postmistress for many years. He also opened a boat-building shop near the store and then in the early 1940s, Lewis says, started the seafood business with his brother Wesley, who Willis later bought out.

Clams became the company’s main product after Heinz Soup came a calling. For years, Willis provided every clam that Heinz put in its cans of chowder. Again, to the receipt books: 5,000 gallons of clams were shipped to Heinz’s plant in Pittsburg every week in the mid-1940s. Willis got about $2.20 a gallon.

Gov. Kerr Scott, center, attends one of Elmer Willis’ clambakes. Photo: Nancy Lewis Collection, Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center

Soon after Willis signed the Heinz contract, Pearl bought a can of the company’s chowder and served it to Willis one night without telling him what it was.

“Do you know what you’re eating, Elmer?” she finally asked.

“I sure do,” he responded. “It’s vegetable soup.”

“I will always remember that,” Lewis says, still chuckling at the memory. “There were so few clams in that chowder that Daddy thought it was vegetable soup.”

But he kept sending clams to Pittsburg.

He also shipped them to Cleveland, Ohio, which for some odd reason is known as the Clambake Capital of America. Every three days each fall, 100,000 little necks arrived in Cleveland from Williston.

Some of the clams stayed closer to home. Willis sponsored a clambake one fall to raise money for a cafeteria at his daughters’ public school in Smyrna. They became yearly fundraising events for the local schools.

“They were a big deal,” Lewis remembers. “A thousand people would come. I’ve got pictures of governors at the clambakes.”

Nancy Lewis, the daughter of Elmer Willis, is surrounded by memorabilia of her father’s seafood business. Photo: Frank Tursi

Willis also perfected a scallop-shucking machine that he later patented, against Lewis’ advice.  It would be too expensive and too difficult to defend, she thought. “But he just had to have that patent,” she says.

Willis had a heart attack in the 1960s. Lewis visited her father one day in the hospital in Chapel Hill. On a table beside him was a huge, gorgeous flower arrangement from the patent attorneys. “That’s a $65,000 bouquet,” Willis cracked.

After the car accident, Pearl sold the clam house, but the new owners couldn’t keep it going for long.

“A business is sort of in a man’s head,” Lewis explains. “It’s not the buildings. Daddy had a vision in his mind. If the clams were dwindling around here, he’d jump in a car and drive all over to get clams. That’s the way he was.”

The clam house closed, and a fire in the 1990s destroyed the old store and boat works.

All that’s left is a ramshackle building probably beyond saving, but Amspacher will try. “I have to try and save it,” she says. “I’d be happy with one wall that we can paint Elmer’s picture on. But even if it all ends up as a pile of rubble, we have to keep it as a memorial to Elmer.”

A farm along North River in eastern Carteret County is being slowly restored back to wetlands to benefit wildlife and water quality. Photo: Sam Bland

SMYRNA — The waterfowl welcome mat is out at North River Farms in Down East Carteret County, and Wes Newell expects up to a million visitors someday.

And that’s just the snow geese.

Other birds are already there – pelicans, egrets and all the usual small stuff – and they’re perfectly welcome, of course, to hang out and wait for friends that are sure to come.

Newell, owner of Backwater Environmental, a Pittsboro company, is one of the owners of the land and a is a key partner in a monumental effort to restore this 6,000-acre farm to what it was back before it was a farm: a vast natural wetlands and an astonishingly beautiful habitat that not only supported wildlife, but buffered polluted runoff from the North River, Wards Creek and Jarrett Bay watersheds, all important fishing grounds.

Altogether, Newell said, 150,000 trees and wetlands plants have been planted on this 385-acre tract. It breaks down into about 320 acres of wetlands and 60 acres of forest.By sometime next month, Newell said, as he showed a reporter around the property on a crystal clear spring morning in early May, his company will have finished 385 acres of restoration work. Trees – cypress and other swamp hardwoods – were planted last year, in advance of what’s being done now: plugging the agricultural canals that once irrigated crops but which also dried the land and funneled pollutants into larger streams that were home to countless shellfish and other marine organisms.

Once the canals are gone, water will saturate the land, and pine trees – some planted and some natural – will begin to fade away, to be replaced by even more of the native swamp hardwoods. As Lexia Weaver, put it on that recent spring morning, it’s going to be “reverse succession.” She’s a coastal scientist for the N.C. Coastal Federation, the lead partner in the restoration effort.

On this morning, two earthmovers are growling away in some of the richest, thickest mud you’ll ever see, building a dike. The muck is even muddier than usual, because it rained almost every day for a week. But Newell said things are on schedule. And once the construction is finished, some more trees and plants will go in, and then nature will run its course.

“We’re already seeing a lot of waterfowl, and we’ve been told that we can probably expect a million snow geese to stop here, eventually,” Newell said. “We’re in the right place.”

If Lake Mattamuskeet in Hyde County deserves to be called the “Serengeti” of birdlife, there might have to be a similar moniker for North River Farms when the work here is finished.

That effort, spearheaded by the federation and its executive director and founder Todd Miller, began nearly 15 years ago, when the non-profit group in 1999 bought 1,991 acres of the farm for $1.07 million, with a grant from the state’s then-thriving and now endangered, taxpayer-funded Clean Water Management Trust Fund. That acreage has long been restored. In 2002, federation purchased an additional 2,168 acres of the farm for $3.01 million, with more money from the trust fund. The federation is developing the restoration plan for it now.

That same year private investors — 1804 Wildlife Partners LLC, a hunters’ group – bought 1,435 acres of North River Farms with intended enrollment in the federal Wetlands Reserve Program. That land is also now restored, and is home to growing impoundments for waterfowl.

Hunting activity seems sparse, Weaver said, but it’s an important part of this and many other conservation efforts these days: It provides income in an era when state and federal grants for large conservation projects are becoming harder to find.

This blue grosbeak is one of the many species of birds that can be found in the restored wetlands at North River Farms. Photo: Sam Bland

Also that year, a private mitigation bank company, Restoration Systems LLC, purchased 385 acres of the farm. It’s that purchase that ended up in the hands of Backwater Environmental, which also does mitigation work, helping balance the environmental damage done by highway construction projects and other types of development elsewhere.

Newell, who among other things has served in the Peace Corps and U.S. AID, has been involved in this kind of work since 1990. He’s proud to be a participant in the North River project, which he called the only opportunity on the East Coast to create a whole “new” ecosystem.

Weaver, who visits the site often and has been closely involved in the overall project, pointed out that many other agencies have participated in the project financially and providing expertise. Among them are the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, FishAmerica Foundation, the N.C. Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Program and the N.C. Wetlands Restoration Program.

Universities, including N.C. State, have also been involved, through planning, design and research and monitoring. In fact, Newell and Weaver said, N.C. State is doing the planning for one of the most exciting parts of the project: channeling the water that has flowed in now-doomed straight and unnatural agricultural canals back into long-dry creek channels. Aerial infrared photography, Weaver said, shows where those creeks and even smaller streams were before the farming operation altered the landscape. All together, Newell said, there will be about 4,000 feet of shallow stream restored.

This was once a farm field that drained its pollutants into North River. The ditches that drained the field were plugged and nature had its way. Photo: Sam Bland

All of the entities involved, Weaver said, have worked well together. Although no one person or organization “manages” the effort, they coordinate and cooperate.

And Newell pointed out that while the farming operation might not have been good for the natural environment in a watery paradise like Down East Carteret County, the farm’s owner, Jimmy Winslow, was a key to the project.

When Winslow decided to consolidate his finances in a farming operation in the Edenton area, he could have sold the farm, or portions of it, to someone who’d have used the flat, by-then mostly dry land for residential or even commercial development. But Winslow, Newell said, decided he wanted to go the natural route and create wildlife habitat and help stop the pollution that had contributed to the state-required closure of countless shellfish beds over the years.

Wes Newell expects a million visitors — snow geese — to land he’s helping restore at North River Farms. Photo: Sam Bland

“He held out for environmental restoration,” Newell said, as he, Weaver and federation staffer Sam Bland walked along a muddy path beside a canal. “And he was excited about it.”

Countless volunteers have participated in the work, plugging plants into the swampy restoration areas. The federation uses school groups as often as possible, both because kids are hard workers and because they enjoying getting out in the muck and learning about wetlands – and they often become environmental stewards in the process.

Some of the planting on the 385-acre tract, Newell said, was done by machine. But hand-labor gets it done best. When the manual work is “just too much” for volunteers, the partners in the project call in a private contractor, Carolina Silvex.

“It’s amazing,” Weaver said, “how much they can do. They come with big knapsacks and just get it done.”

The entire North River Farms project will eventually involve the planting of more than a million trees and other wetlands plants. Up to 5,100 acres of the 6,000-acre farm will be restored to wetlands.

Miller said there’s already clear evidence the conversion is working. “One of the major goals was to clean up the water quality down stream in North River,” he said. “When it was ditched and drained for agriculture, it took about two hours for the (rain) water to run off.”

Now, he said, monitoring indicates it takes a month or more.

“What’s happened is the land is doing what it is supposed to do, acting like a sponge to just suck this water up,” he said. “We’ve restored the old hydrology.”

Miller said he’s pleased with what he’s seen of the work on the Backwater Environmental land, and called it a fine continuation of the overall plan for the old farm.

It’s not, however, an easy task, and there’s much to consider when doing this kind of work, not all of it obvious. During the recent walk, Newell and Weaver pointed out a patch of phragmites, an invasive species of reed. It grows fast and tall and lives a long time … and is utterly useless, according to Newell. Wildlife doesn’t eat it, and if left unchecked, it can take over large areas normally inhabited by native and more beneficial wildlife vegetation.

They also expressed a little concern about a crop dusting plane that circled over the area several times while working at Open Grounds Farm, a sprawling and still operating international agricultural farm that borders the property. Pesticides, after all, are pollutants, and can still be carried to shellfish waters by the slow-moving tidal canals, in which the tide fell visibly in a 90-minute span.

But change is hard, and takes time, even at North River Farms, where some farming still takes place. The federation leases a portion of its property – that’s the 2,168 acres purchased in 2002 – up close to U.S. 70, for farming. To get to Backwater Environments’ 385 acres, you must drive through acres and acres of wheat, still low but green this time of year and blowing slightly in a gentle breeze on this spring morning.

But the wheat is essentially an endangered species here; Weaver said that after this year’s crop is harvested, that will be it. North River Farms will be a farm no more, just a stirring and hopefully successful example of what man can do to repair some of the damage he’s done, wittingly or not, to a fragile and important part of his world.