National Park Service

U.S. Department of the Interior

Cape Lookout National Seashore

Harkers Island, North Carolina

Cultural Resources

Southeast Region

Gateway to the AtlanticWorld:

Cape Lookout National Seashore

Historic Resource Study
Prepared for

Organization of American Historians

Under Cooperative Agreement with

Southeast Region

National Park Service

U.S. Department of Interior

Gateway to the Atlantic World: 

Cape Lookout National Seashore

Historic Resource Study

David E. Whisnant, Ph. D.

Anne Mitchell Whisnant, Ph. D.

Primary Source History Services

March 2015
Cultural Resources Division

Southeast Regional Office

National Park Service

100 Alabama Street, SW

Atlanta, Georgia 30303

(404) 507-5847

Gateway to the Atlantic: 

Cape Lookout National Seashore 

Historic Resource Study

http://www.nps.gov/

About the cover: 
National Park Service iii
iv Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study
National Park Service v

Table of Contents

List of Figures ...........................................................................................vii

List of Tables..............................................................................................xi

Acknowledgments ..................................................................................xiii

Executive Summary

Historic Resources in a “Natural” Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

The Historical Moment of This Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Chapter Summaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Chapter 1. An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at

Cape Lookout National Seashore and Some New Analytical Possibilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Chapter 2. To and From the Most Remarkable Places: The Communities

of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Chapter 3. Restless and Storm-Battered Ribbons of Sand: Hurricanes and Inlets . . . . . . . . . 4

Chapter 4. An Eye for the Possible: Maritime and Other Economic Activities on the 

Southern Banks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Chapter 5. At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race, and Class in a Maritime World . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Chapter 6. The Government Presence: Revenue Cutters, Lighthouses,

Life-Savers, Coast Guardsmen, New Dealers, and Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Chapter 7. From Regulators to Aviators: War and the Southern Banks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Chapter 8. Down East, Far West, and Hoi Toide: Thinking About

Culture and the Outer Banks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Chapter 9. Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore . . . . 6

Chapter 10. Management, Interpretation, and Research Recommendations . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout 

National Seashore and Some New Analytical Possibilities

Historic Resources in a “Natural” Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

The Historic Resource Study and CALO Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

National Register Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Park Planning Documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Specialized Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Historic Structure Reports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Limitations of Existing CALO Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

New Scholarship, New Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

The Broader History of North Carolina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Maritime and Coastal History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

The Atlantic World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Slavery and Race . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Commercial Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Tourism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Gender and Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Outer Banks Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
vi Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

To and From the Most Remarkable Places: The Communities of 

Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

Off the Beaten Path? The Challenge of Understanding Portsmouth’s Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Reframing Ocracoke Inlet Within an Atlantic World Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

A “History Without Borders” for the Ocracoke Inlet Communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Trade Patterns at Ocracoke Inlet in the Late Colonial Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

After the Revolution: Shell Castle, John Gray Blount, and John Wallace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

To and From Where? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

Shell Castle, Ocracoke Inlet, and Portsmouth After John Wallace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

What Did It All Mean? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

Restless and Storm-Battered Ribbons of Sand: Hurricanes and Inlets

Significant Weather Events Before 1700 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

Weather, Inlets, and Sounds, 1700–1799 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

Nineteenth–Century Hurricanes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

Hurricanes of the Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

Ocracoke Inlet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities

on the Southern Banks

Stock Raising and Agriculture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

Whaling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

Fishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

Dolphin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

Menhaden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84

Mullet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86

Shad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

Oysters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

Shellfish: Clams, Crabs, and Shrimp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Loggerhead Turtles and Diamondback Terrapins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

Regulation and Long-Term Prospects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

Shipbuilding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94

Work-Boat Building . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

Commercial Hunting (or “Market Gunning”) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

Ducks for Food and Feathers for Hats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

Extralegal Maritime Activities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

Wrecking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

Contraband and Smuggling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

Piracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race and Class in a Maritime World

Slavery in North Carolina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

Coastal Slavery in the State Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

The Historical Dynamics of Slavery and Race . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

The Revolution and Its Aftermath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

The War of 1812 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

Slavery in the Nineteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
National Park Service vii

The Civil War and Reconstruction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114

Toward a New South: Black Gains and Losses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

Jim Crow and Civil Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

School Desegregation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

Race, Class, and Work: The Menhaden Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

Retrospective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

Epilogue: The Pigott Family and Race Relations in Portsmouth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

The Government Presence: Revenue Cutters, Lighthouses, Life-Savers, 

Coast Guardsmen, New Dealers, and Others

Portsmouth Custom House, Marine Hospital, and Weather Station . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

Custom House . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

Marine Hospital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

Portsmouth Weather Station . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Cape Lookout Light Station and the Lighthouse Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136

The U.S. Life-Saving Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140

The U.S. Coast Guard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

The Great Depression and the New Deal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

From Regulators to Aviators: Wars and the Southern Banks

The Revolutionary War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

The War of 1812 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

Civil War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164

“Freedom for Themselves”: Black Soldiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

The War Winds Down . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

Spanish-American War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

World War I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

World War II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

Down East, Far West, and Hoi Toide: 

Thinking About Culture and the Outer Banks

From Depraved “Adamites” to Unforgettable Folks: 

 Conundrum of Outer Banks Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

The New York Times Comes to Harkers Island: 1924 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

Hoi Toide (or Not): Defining and Promoting the Culture of the

Southern Banks After World War II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180

Hoi (but Ebbing) Toide: A Close Look at the Brogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182

Down East and Far West: Bankers’ Linguistic Cousins in the Mountains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

Cultural Survival and Revival: An Endangered Dialect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming

of Cape Lookout National Seashore

The Nags Head and Ocracoke Nodes: Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Tourism . . 193

The Closing Years of the Century: Hunting Clubs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196

Early Twentieth-Century Tourism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202

Cape Lookout Village and the Cape Lookout Development Company . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204

The Era of Roads and Bridges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206

Post-World War II Private Tourism Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208

Public Tourism Development: Two National Seashores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
viii Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Management, Interpretive, and Research Recommendations

“Historic Resources” and Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

Widening and Updating the Historical Frame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

Connectedness Instead of Isolation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

Race . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224

Gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224

Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226

The National Seashore Itself: Land Use, Conservation, and the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

Research Needs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

Topical Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

Updating Existing Documents and Completing Draft or Partial Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228

Updating or Adding National Register Nominations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228

Additional Studies Needed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229

Bibliography

Books and Articles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231

Government Documents, Studies, and Reports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240

Cultural Landscape Reports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240

Historic Resource Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240

Historic Structure Reports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240

National Register Nominations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

Superintendents’ Annual Reports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

Theses and Dissertations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242

Repositories and Collections Consulted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245

Appendices

Appendix A: National Register Nominations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

Appendix B: Calendar of Hurricanes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248

Appendix C: Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252

Map 1: Historic Inlets Map. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252

Map 2: Shackleford Banks, N.C. (1850-1890). Simpson and Simpson,

Whaling on the North Carolina Coast. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253

Map 3: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Base Map. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254

Map 4: Cape Lookout Bight Historical Base Map. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

Map 5: 1963 Development Plan Map with Causeway Bridge to Shackleford Banks. . . . . 256

Map 6: Proposed Boundary, Cape Lookout National Seashore, April 1964. . . . . . . . . . . . 257

Map 7: Plat of Property on Core Banks and Cape Lookout, 1970. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257

Map 8: Contributing Features, Portsmouth Village. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258

Appendix D: Coastal County and State Election Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259

Elections of 1896-1908 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259

Appendix E: Historic Resources and Their Contexts: 

A Quick Reference Guide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260 

Part I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260

Part II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

Part III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
National Park Service ix

List of Figures

Figure ES-1: Junk cars abandoned on Cape Lookout National Seashore lands .................................2

Figure ES-2: Core Banks Gun Club, 1960s or 1970s..............................................................................2

Figure 1-1: Emily Jateff’s projection of probable location of shore whaling camps, 2007............11

Figure 1-2: Archeological work at shore whaling camps on Shackleford Banks............................20

Figure 1-3: Steamer Neuse taking on naval stores in Wilmington, 1870s......................................24

Figure 2-1: Washington Roberts House, Portsmouth.......................................................................32

Figure 2-2: North Carolina’s colonial ports of entry ........................................................................38

Figure 2-3: Map of Ocracoke, 1795, by Jonathan Price ...................................................................39

Figure 2-4: North Carolina Import and Export Tonnage, 1768–1793..............................................41

Figure 2-5: John Gray Blount’s Lands, North Carolina and Territory 

South of Ohio River, 1783–1796 .....................................................................................44

Figure 2-6: Two early nineteenth-century maps showing the geography of Ocracoke Inlet........45

Figure 2-7: An 1897 map of Ocracoke Inlet produced by the Army Corps of Engineers...............46

Figure 2-8: Liverpool-ware pitcher featuring image of Shell Castle Island ....................................49

Figure 2-9: Map showing Caribbean destinations for Blount ships in the 

late eighteenth century ..................................................................................................51

Figure 2-10: Map of railroads and plank roads in North Carolina, 1860..........................................55

Figure 3-1: Historic inlets of the North Carolina coast ....................................................................62

Figure 3-2: Portsmouth Methodist Church.......................................................................................65

Figure 3-3: Shackleford Banks after 1899 hurricane........................................................................65

Figure 3-4: Selected hurricane tracks of the 1950s ..........................................................................67

Figure 4-1: Location of nineteenth-century windmills on North Carolina coast............................76

Figure 4-2: Windmill on Harkers Island, ca. 1904.............................................................................76

Figure 4-3: Thomas Chadwick whaling license, 1726.......................................................................79

Figure 4-4: Whale-boat tools.............................................................................................................80

Figure 4-5: Whale on beach at Beaufort, before 1894 ....................................................................80

Figure 4-6: Cutting blubber on Shackleford Banks, 1894................................................................80

Figure 4-7: Trying out oil from whale, 1894.....................................................................................80

Figure 4-8: Shackleford Banks whaling communities, 1850–1890 ..................................................81

Figure 4-9: John White, “Indians Fishing” (1585–1586) ..................................................................82

Figure 4-10: Menhaden-fishing steamer, before 1917.......................................................................85

Figure 4-11: Industrial menhaden press, before 1917 .......................................................................85

Figure 4-12: Menhaden production, 1887–1970 ................................................................................86

Figure 4-13: Striped or “jumping” mullet ..........................................................................................87

Figure 4-14: Camp of mullet fishermen on Shackleford Banks, before 1907...................................87

Figure 4-15: Mullet production, 1887–1970 .......................................................................................88

Figure 4-16: Shad .................................................................................................................................88

Figure 4-17: Shad production, 1887–1970 ..........................................................................................89

Figure 4-18: Oyster production, 1887–1970 .......................................................................................90

Figure 4-19: Clam production, 1887–1970..........................................................................................92

Figure 4-20: Shrimp production, 1887–1970 ......................................................................................92

Figure 4-21: Total pounds of fish harvested in North Carolina coastal waters, 1880–1970 ............94

Figure 4-22: Core Sounder work boat ................................................................................................96

Figure 4-23: De Bry engraving of John White drawing: “The Manner of Makinge 

Their Boates” (1585–1586)..............................................................................................96

Figure 4-24: John White, Indians Dancing Around a Circle of Posts (1585–1586)............................97

Figure 4-25: Carteret County waterfowl hunters in sink box............................................................98

Figure 4-26: Gunners in blind, Carteret County .................................................................................98

Figure 4-27: “Stripping the Wreck” [before 1902].............................................................................99

Figure 4-28: “Attack upon Smugglers by United States Revenue Officers 

at Masonborough, North Carolina” (1867) .................................................................100

Figure 4-29: Blackbeard fights Royal Navy Lt Robert Maynard at Ocracoke Inlet, 

November 22, 1718 ......................................................................................................102
x Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Figure 5-1: Preserved and partly rebuilt slave cabins at Ventosa 

(Walter Clark home) in Halifax County, ca. 1943 .......................................................106

Figure 5-2: Great Dismal Swamp.....................................................................................................107

Figure 5-3: Negro baptism at New Bern, ca. 1910 .........................................................................107

Figure 5-4: Dismal Swamp Canal.....................................................................................................107

Figure 5-5: Map of Dismal Swamp Canal in 1839 ..........................................................................109

Figure 5-6: Clubfoot and Harlowe’s Creek Canal, 1839 .................................................................109

Figure 5-7: Wilmington turpentine distillery, ca. 1850s.................................................................110

Figure 5-8: Carteret County turpentine distillery, 1876.................................................................110

Figure 5-9: “Freed Negroes Streaming Toward Union Lines, New Bern”.....................................114

Figure 5-10: Distribution of captured rebels’ clothing to contrabands, New Bern, 1862 .............114

Figure 5-11: Racist cartoon from Raleigh News and Observer, August 30, 1898...........................117

Figure 5-12: “North Carolina’s Womanhood Appeals to the Ballot for Protection,”

October 13, 1898 ...........................................................................................................117

Figure 5-13: A ‘White Man’s Party’ Democrat Normal Institute in Duplin County ........................118

Figure 5-14: Blue Eagle logo of the National Recovery Administration (NRA)..............................120

Figure 5-15: Renovated Portsmouth school building (1927)...........................................................121

Figure 5-16: Three-teacher Rosenwald School .................................................................................122

Figure 5-17: Logo for the Free the Wilmington Ten campaign.......................................................125

Figure 5-18: Black and white mullet fishermen ...............................................................................128

Figure 5-19: All-Black Pea Island Life-Saving Crew ..........................................................................129

Figure 5-20: Henry Pigott at about the age of fourteen (ca. 1910)................................................129

Figure 5-21: Henry Pigott and Walker Styron, 1955 ........................................................................131

Figure 5-22: Gravestone of Leah Pigott (1867–1922).......................................................................132

Figure 5-23: Henry Pigott house, Portsmouth..................................................................................132

Figure 6-1: Brick cistern, Marine Hospital, Portsmouth, 2008 .......................................................135

Figure 6-2: Shell Castle lighthouse..................................................................................................137

Figure 6-3: Orders of Fresnel lenses................................................................................................138

Figure 6-4: Treasury Department notification to Cape Lookout lighthouse keeper ...................139

Figure 6-5: Life-Saving Station on the North Carolina beach, ca. 1882........................................141

Figure 6-6: Self-righting lifeboat ....................................................................................................141

Figure 6-7: Kinnakeet Life-Saving Station......................................................................................142

Figure 6-8: Thomas Nast [presumably Harper’s Weekly] cartoon in wake of Huron disaster.....143

Figure 6-9: Outer Banks lifesaving stations built, 1878 .................................................................143

Figure 6-10: United States lifesaving station on the Eastern Coast. ...............................................143

Figure 6-11: Outer Banks lifesaving stations built 1880–1888 ........................................................144

Figure 6-12: Distribution of lifesaving stations on the North Carolina coast, 1905.......................144

Figure 6-13: Lifesaving station on the North Carolina beach ........................................................144

Figure 6-14: Lyle gun for propelling rescue lines.............................................................................145

Figure 6-15: Motor lifeboat, 1908.....................................................................................................146

Figure 6-16: Portsmouth lifesaving crew in the 1920s.....................................................................146

Figure 6-17: Drawing of Cape Lookout Life-Saving Station............................................................147

Figure 6-18: Cape Lookout Life-Saving Station, 1893......................................................................147

Figure 6-19: Portsmouth Life-Saving Station, ca. 1903–1915 ..........................................................148

Figure 6-20: Portsmouth Life-Saving Station in the 1920s ..............................................................148

Figure 6-21: Portsmouth Life-Saving Station after renovation, 2006 .............................................149

Figure 6-22: Cape Lookout Coast Guard Station, 1917....................................................................151

Figure 6-23: Drawing of Jesse Babb House ......................................................................................151

Figure 6-24: Coast Guard Stations on the Outer Banks...................................................................152

Figure 6-25: North Carolina Highways, ca. 1924 ..............................................................................153

Figure 6-26: Distribution of textile mills in North Carolina, 1896...................................................154

Figure 6-27: Distribution of tobacco factories in North Carolina, 1896 .........................................154

Figure 7-1: Revolutionary War campaigns and battles in North Carolina....................................160

Figure 7-2: Issuing rations to the inhabitants of Wilmington, April 1, 1865................................165

Figure 7-3: View of Fort Hatteras just before the surrender.........................................................165

Figure 7-4: Bombardment of Forts Hatteras and Clark by the United States fleet, 1861............165

Figure 7-5: Raising the Union flag at Washington, NC, 1862........................................................166
National Park Service xi

Figure 7-7: General Burnside on the road from New Bern to Beaufort, NC ................................167

Figure 7-8: Recruiting office for contrabands on Market Street, Wilmington, NC......................168

Figure 7-9: Colored troops freeing slaves in Camden County, early 1864....................................169

Figure 7-10: Citizens of Wilmington taking the oath of allegiance ...............................................170

Figure 7-11: World War II military installations in North Carolina .................................................173

Figure 8-1: An eminent Banker.......................................................................................................178

Figure 9-1: Sherrill’s Inn, 1834. Hickory Nut Gap, NC.....................................................................192

Figure 9-2: Mountain sanatarium for pulmonary diseases, 1870s ................................................192

Figure 9-3: Advertisement for Brunswick’s Atlantic Hotel, July 1877 ...........................................193

Figure 9-5: Ad for Ocean Retreat Hotel, 1841................................................................................194

Figure 9-6: Nag’s Head Hotel advertisement in North State Whig...............................................194

Figure 9-7: The beach at Nags Head, 1860 .....................................................................................195

Figure 9-8: Advertisement for Nags Head featuring steamers to Elizabeth City.........................194

Figure 9-9: Principal railroad lines in North Carolina, 1890 ..........................................................196

Figure 9-10: Map of Southern Railway system, 1895.......................................................................197

Figure 9-11: Cover of brochure published by Southern Railway to entice 

hunters to the South, 1895...........................................................................................198

Figure 9-12: Advertisement for breech-loading shotgun................................................................199

Figure 9-13: Carteret County waterfowl hunters in an elevated shooting platform ....................199

Figure 9-14: Pilentary Gun Club on Core Banks, December 1915 ...................................................200

Figure 9-15: Interpretive sign for Styron and Bragg House, Portsmouth.......................................200

Figure 9-17: Lumina, Best Dancing Pavilion on the South Atlantic Coast, ca. 1917.......................202

Figure 9-18: Interior of Lumina dancing pavilion at night, ca. 1912 ..............................................202

Figure 9-19: Movies “over the waves” at Lumina............................................................................203

Figure 9-20: Map of Wrightsville Beach showing former site of Lumina Pavilion, 

Shell Island Resort, and several large clubs and hotels ..............................................203

Figure 9-21: Gaskill-Guthrie House, 1939 .........................................................................................204

Figure 9-22: Cape Lookout Development Company plat, 1915 ......................................................205

Figure 9-23: O’Boyle-Bryant house as it looked in 1939..................................................................204

Figure 9-24: Cape Lookout Village as it looked in 1942 ..................................................................206

Figure 9-25: North Carolina highways as of 1924 ............................................................................206

Figure 9-26: Aycock Brown photograph of a bathing beauty and Cape Hatteras lighthouse......208

Figure 9-27: National Park Service group embarking at Oregon Inlet for 

tour of the Outer Banks................................................................................................209

Figure 9-28: 1963 General Development Plan map, Cape Lookout and Shackleford Banks.........211

Figure 9-29: Landing strip next to Portsmouth Life-Saving Station, March 2008 ..........................211

Figure 9-30: Charles M. Reeves, Jr., Master Plan, Proposed Cape Lookout Development, 1964...212

Figure 9-31: Antique Model A Ford modified for fishermen’s use, ca.1975...................................211

Figure 9-32: Removing junk cars from Cape Lookout National Seashore ......................................213

Figure 10-1: Survey of Roanoke Inlet and Sound, 1829...................................................................214

Figure 10-2: Historic Period Plan, Portsmouth Village, ca. 1760-1866 ............................................220

Figure 10-3: Gravestone of Capt. Thomas W. Greene......................................................................222

Figure 10-4: Portsmouth postmistress Annie Salter, ca. 1935..........................................................225

Figure 10-5: Children of Portsmouth School, 1916 ..........................................................................222

Figure 10-6: Sadie [?] and Nora Dixon, ca. 1917 ..............................................................................226

Figure 10-7: Gravestone of Rose Pickett...........................................................................................226
xii Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study
xiii

List of Tables

Table 2-1: Export tonnage from North Carolina’s minor ports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Table 2-2: Workers in specified occupations listed in federal census 

for Portsmouth Island . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

Table 4-1: Ships built in selected North Carolina cities, 1727–1917 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

Table 6-1: Persons on relief in southern coastal North Carolina counties, 1932–1935 . . . . . . . 155

Appendix B: Calendar of Hurricanes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248

Appendix D: Coastal County and State Election Results: Elections of 1896-1908 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252

Appendix E: CALO Historic Resources and Their Contexts: A Quick 

Reference Guide (Parts I, II, and III) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260

National Park Service 
xiv Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study
xv

Acknowledgments

In preparing this study, we have benefited from advice and assistance graciously offered by many people 

both inside and outside the National Park Service (NPS). 

Cape Lookout National Seashore staff helped orient us to the park and made key records available: Chief 

of Resource Management Michael Rikard, Chief of Visitor Protection Barry Munyan, Management 

Assistant Wouter Ketel, Facility Manager Mike McGee, Administrative Officer Rich Huffman, 

Administrative Clerk Cathy Frazier, and Superintendent Russel Wilson. At various points, Tommy Jones, 

Brian Coffey, and Bethany Serafine at the Southeast Regional Office of the NPS offered useful commentary 

on what we had written and steered us toward other important materials and issues. Longtime volunteers 

Ed and Rene Burgess gave us a thorough tour of Portsmouth. Archives Technicians Michelle Schneider 

and Alvie Sellmer of NPS’s Technical Information Center in Denver provided indispensable digitized 

documents on several occasions. 

Karen Willis Amspacher of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum at Harkers Island welcomed us to the 

museum’s informative public programs, and David Montgomery of The History Place in Beaufort helped 

with elusive statistical data. The staff at the Outer Banks History Center in Manteo offered assistance as 

well. Joseph Mitchell located details on the Methodist church at Portsmouth in Methodist church sources. 

The always-knowledgeable staff of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources provided 

archival help and advice on many occasions. Military Collections Archivist Sion Harrington III was 

especially helpful. Senior Architectural Historian Michael Southern and North Carolina’s National 

Register Coordinator, Ann Swallow, guided us through technicalities related to the National Register of 

Historic Places and alerted us to relevant documents in the State Historic Preservation Office. 

Through the now many years that we have done research on projects in their collections, the University 

of North Carolina Library and its North Carolina Collection have provided an incomparable array of 

key documents and resources in both conventional and (more recently) digital form. Their extensive 

Documenting the American South digital collection allowed us both to access historical documents 

(especially the Colonial and State Records of North Carolina collection and the new North Carolina Maps 

compendium of digital maps) and to use them more efficiently than was ever possible in the pre-digital age. 

This is the second NPS study we have undertaken through the cooperative agreement between the 

Organization of American Historians and the National Park Service. As before, it has been our great 

pleasure to work with OAH’s Public History Manager, Susan Ferentinos. Her sensitivity to the concerns of 

professional historians in all settings is as impressive as her managerial skills. 
xvi Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study
1

Executive Summary

Historic Resources in a “Natural” 

Environment

Nature has always had the upper hand on the 

“ribbon of sand” that is now Cape Lookout 

National Seashore (CALO). Part of the everchanging Outer Banks, the seashore’s island 

environment has commanded attention and 

demanded respect for centuries.1 Reports of 

disastrous encounters with hurricanes and shoals 

go back at least into the late sixteenth century. 

Appropriately then, the 1966 federal law that 

authorized creation of a National Seashore at 

Core Banks and Shackleford Banks focused 

on the area’s “outstanding natural values” and 

required that they be managed for “conservation 

of natural features.” At the same time, however, 

the establishing legislation specified that the area’s 

“recreational values” be conserved and managed so 

as to contribute to “public enjoyment [and] public 

outdoor recreation” (P.L. 89-366). 

As every National Park Service (NPS) employee 

who has ever worked at CALO (or indeed at 

any national park) has learned, these two sets 

of values and obligations can be difficult to 

harmonize. Conservationists don’t always see 

1 The term “Outer Banks” has been used in a variety 

of ways to refer to a not always well-defined portion 

of the narrow islands that lie off approximately the 

northern half of the North Carolina coast, from the 

Virginia border to Cape Lookout. David Stick’s map 

in The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 1584–1958 

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1958), 

xiv, even includes an additional section that runs 

eastward from Cape Lookout, including Shackleford 

Banks and the short section stretching still further 

east of Beaufort Inlet. Some definitions are much 

more restrictive, using “Outer Banks” to refer only 

to the part of the islands lying north of Ocracoke 

Inlet. Some, but by no means all, local people tend 

to employ this restrictive definition, which would 

actually exclude Cape Lookout National Seashore 

from the Outer Banks. But especially given the fact 

that we try to situate our analysis within the larger 

Atlantic world context, we employ the larger, more 

inclusive definition, which accords both with the 

broader historical frame and with usage in much of 

the relevant scholarship.

things in the same way that ATV riders do; sport 

and commercial fishermen can find themselves at 

odds; tourists sometimes want more infrastructure 

than the environment can support. Demands 

for historic preservation of sometimes-fragile 

structures can clash with their adaptive reuse, 

and each requirement must be measured against 

available public tax dollars. In fact, opposition 

between these values and aims long predated the 

coming of the National Seashore.

In 2007, a much-acclaimed new park orientation 

film welcomed visitors with the soothing voice 

of Meryl Streep channeling Rachel Carson. “The 

shore,” Streep nearly whispers, “is an ancient 

world,” a place of the “meeting of land and water,” 

where “in every curving beach and every grain 

of sand, there is the story of the earth.” For the 

nearly thirty minutes that follow, human history 

(in the form of a few picturesque but unoccupied 

and uncontextualized historic structures and the 

Cape Lookout Lighthouse) plays only a bit part in 

a sweeping drama featuring sparkling blue water, 

blowing sands, orange sunsets, galloping horses, 

swooping and wading birds, God-like satellite 

views, heart-stopping helicopter flyovers, newage music, and finally the comforting benedictory 

assurance that “All at last return to the sea, to 

Oceanus.”

Would that it were so. When an NPS team gathered 

at the park in 1967 and 1970 to begin drafting a 

master plan, however, not everything had slipped 

so peacefully into the sea. In converting the 

parklands for recreational use, early park managers 

found on their to-do list a recommendation to “[d]

ispose of the hundreds of abandoned and junked 

cars and many squatter shacks” remaining on Core 

Banks.2

2 Cape Lookout National Seashore, Master Plan, Cape 

Lookout National Seashore, 1971 (Harkers Island, NC: 

Cape Lookout National Seashore, 1971), 55.
2 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Executive Summary

The 2,500 junked cars and the squatter shacks were 

just the latest residue of a long history of human 

activity on the islands that became the National 

Seashore.3 Like nearly all national park areas in 

the eastern United States, CALO was carved out 

of privately owned lands rather than out of the 

comparatively trackless public domain on which 

most early western parks had been mapped. While 

most of the permanent residents of the islands had 

already left by the time the National Seashore was 

created, protracted land-acquisition conflicts with 

major property owners like the Core Banks Gun 

Club and with individuals who owned fishing or 

vacation cabins remind us that creating the national 

parks, especially in the east, superimposed Park 

Service-defined landscapes on vernacular ones.4

Deciding how much—and what elements—of the 

former landscape to retain and interpret in a new 

park context is a central management challenge for 

the NPS.5

3 National Park Service. Final Environmental Impact 

Statement on General Management Plan / 

Development Concept Plan (Denver, CO: NPS Denver 

Service Center, 1982), 28.

4 Candy Beal and Carmine Prioli, Life at the Edge of the 

Sea (Wilmington, NC: Coastal Carolina Press, 2002), 

131–135.

5 See Anne Mitchell Whisnant, Super-Scenic Motorway: 

A Blue Ridge Parkway History (Chapel Hill: University 

of North Carolina Press, 2006); Durwood Dunn, 

Cades Cove: The Life and Death of an Appalachian 

Community, 1818–1937, 1st ed. (Knoxville: University 

of Tennessee Press, 1988); Katrina Powell, The 

Anguish of Displacement: The Politics of Literacy 

in the Letters of Mountain Families in Shenandoah 

National Park (Charlottesville: University of Virginia 

Press, 2008); Arnold R. Alanen and Robert Z. Melnick, 

eds., Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America 

(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 

During the decade between the park’s 

authorization in 1966 and its formal establishment 

in 1976, park managers and others began to realize 

that the new park contained substantial material 

remnants of the long human history on the islands. 

This growing understanding of the historic 

resources in the park doubtless came about at 

least partly due to NPS efforts to comply with the 

newly codified principles of historic preservation 

encompassed in the landmark 1966 National 

Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), which created 

the National Register of Historic Places and 

housed it within the Park Service. 

Thus the sparse material remains of human history 

still in evidence on Meryl Streep’s “natural” 

Cape Lookout National Seashore are to a degree 

misleading. Most of that history has been altered 

or erased by centuries of storms; shifting sands; 

impermanent inlets; and dynamic social, economic, 

and cultural systems. It is this restless interplay 

between natural and human history that this 

study most seeks to comprehend and explain. In 

the process, we attend to the human history both 

seen and unseen, for both are, in a true sense, the 

“historic resources” that the park must understand 

and interpret for the public.

The Historical Moment of This 

Study

NPS Policy 28: Cultural Resource Management 

(NPS-28) specifies that a historic resource study 

(HRS) should provide “a historical overview of 

a park or region and identif[y] and evaluat[e] a 

Figure ES-1. Two of the many hundreds of junk cars 

abandoned on Cape Lookout National Seashore lands. The 

car on the left seems to be a 1950s Dodge or Plymouth; the 

one on the right may date from a decade later. Southeast 

Regional Office archive, National Park Service.

Figure ES-2. Core Banks Gun Club ca 1960s-70s. Cape 

Lookout National Seashore archives.
National Park Service 3

Executive Summary

park’s cultural resources within historic contexts.” 

In the customary sequence, the HRS is designed 

to precede most other detailed studies: cultural 

landscape inventories, lists of classified structures, 

National Register nominations, and historic 

structure reports (HSRs). 

As it happens, this HRS follows, rather than 

precedes, those more detailed studies. Our 

project methodology has been structured and the 

study written with that fact in mind. At the time 

the Scope of Work was signed, existing studies 

included: 

•	 an early historical study by F. Ross Holland 

(1968), 

•	 two HRSs of Portsmouth (1970 and 1982),

•	 two National Register district nominations 

(Portsmouth [1979] and Cape Lookout Village 

[2000]),

•	 several other National Register nominations 

for specific structures (1972, 1989, 2005),

•	 fourteen HSRs (2003–2006),

•	 two cultural landscape reports (Cape Lookout 

Village [2005] and Portsmouth [2007]), and

•	 an ethnohistorical overview and assessment for 

Cape Lookout and Harkers Island (2007).

The reversed sequence of work done thus far 

was acknowledged in the Scope of Work, which 

stated that “[a] large part of this HRS will be a 

work of synthesis of both NPS documentation 

and other sources identified by the contractor.” 

It also specified, however, that this study should 

provide “additional baseline historical research 

and interpretation of the park’s cultural resources 

. . . [that will] enhance and broaden existing 

National Register documentation as well as provide 

historical background for any future National 

Register work.” No National Register nominations 

were required or undertaken as part of the present 

study.

We have taken as our major task, then, creating 

a synthetic work that uses (but does not simply 

summarize or recount) the best of the existing 

primary research underlying those previous 

studies, bolsters it where needed with additional 

(more limited) primary research of our own, and 

reframes the histories presented there within the 

context of the best available historiography and 

categories of analysis. We have, that is, tried to take 

advantage of our later and broader perspective, 

together with (as Chapter 1 explains at some 

length) more recent historiography, in order to 

think carefully about the historic contexts in which 

CALO’s historic resources can best be understood.

It is important to note at the outset that several 

crucial characteristics of the historic resources of 

CALO have affected our analysis and writing. First, 

those historic resources have been fragmented 

by historical processes: the geographical and 

historical separation of buildings and settlements, 

the wide separation in time (early eighteenth 

to mid-twentieth centuries) of the creation of 

those resources, and the fact that so many of the 

resources that must be considered no longer exist 

(e.g., Shell Castle and its lighthouse, forts, Diamond 

City and other Shackleford Banks settlements, 

numerous Coast Guard-related structures, World 

War II installations). Moreover, the historically 

important contexts are only infrequently 

congruent with the boundaries of the park (e.g., 

the story of Portsmouth is inseparable from that 

of Ocracoke, as the story of slavery and race 

cannot be separated from the history of the coastal 

counties, inland North Carolina, and the larger 

Atlantic world). And finally, one cannot in any case 

base an adequate historic resource study on the 

existing resources alone, especially to the degree 

that by “resources” one means only buildings.

 A central thesis of this study is that seeking to 

comprehend the history of the Outer Banks in 

terms of the geophysical fact (and metaphor) of 

“barrier islands” is fraught with difficulty and 

provides an insufficient and confusing orientation 

for analysis. We have attempted, rather, to set 

the Outer Banks (and hence the history of Cape 

Lookout and its many historic resources) into a 

much broader context, paying special attention 

to the Banks’ myriad and persistent connections 

with broader systems—physical, economic, social, 

political, and cultural. That has resulted in recasting 

the “barrier islands” model as instead a border 

region, a place where worlds regularly come into 

contact.

In addition to examining key details and processes 

of CALO’s history and historic resources, each 

chapter takes up part of that larger task. Doing 

both of these tasks at once (taking account of 

existing studies and material remains sitting on the 
4 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Executive Summary

park’s lands and setting the relevant history within 

a broader framework provided by more recent 

historiography) is not unlike the challenge of the 

honoring both the “preserve and protect” and the 

“use and enjoyment” requirements imposed upon 

all national parks. We have engaged that challenge 

as best we could. Our effort to do so is set out most 

explicitly in Chapter 1; it is implicit in the analysis 

presented in subsequent chapters.

Chapter Summaries

Chapter 1. An Overview of Previous 

Cultural Resource Studies at Cape 

Lookout National Seashore and Some 

New Analytical Possibilities

This chapter examines already-completed CALO 

studies and planning documents as a base for 

conceiving and structuring the HRS, especially 

since the HRS is being done after, rather than 

before, National Register nominations and other 

detailed studies. Our aim is to assess the quality of 

previous research, characterize the primary and 

secondary sources on which it was based, analyze 

the historic contexts under which the extant 

structures and resources were determined to be 

significant in National Register terms, correlate the 

identified “periods of significance” with the actual 

structures remaining, and identify gaps to be filled 

either by this study or by future research. An early 

conclusion is that many (though not all) existing 

studies rest upon a rather narrow and repetitive 

research base that is in some cases years or even 

decades out of date.

This chapter then considers the potential 

usefulness of some long-available but unused 

historical studies and of more recent ones coming 

out of the “new social history” of formerly 

overlooked or disempowered groups. We also 

consider the potential usefulness of recent 

analytical perspectives such as postmodernism, 

transnationalism, regional and cultural studies, 

African American and American Indian (or Native 

American) studies, and others. Especially germane, 

we suggest, are studies dealing with the broader 

history of North Carolina as a whole, maritime and 

coastal history, the Atlantic world, slavery and race, 

commercial development, tourism, gender and 

class, and Outer Banks culture.

Chapter 2. To and From the Most 

Remarkable Places: The Communities 

of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s 

Gateway to an Atlantic World

With an emphasis on Portsmouth, this chapter 

considers the specific history of the communities 

surrounding Ocracoke Inlet in the eighteenth and 

early nineteenth centuries, when the inlet was 

the major point of connection between mainland 

North Carolina and the Atlantic world beyond. 

The chapter argues that characterizing Portsmouth 

as an “isolated” community—as it is frequently 

called—fails to take account of how intertwined 

the community’s history in that period is with the 

economic, political, and social worlds of North 

Carolina, the rest of coastal North America, the 

West Indies, and Europe. The chapter reframes the 

history of Portsmouth, as well, within a broader 

conceptualization of the area around Ocracoke 

Inlet as a set of closely related communities 

including Portsmouth, Ocracoke, and Shell Castle.

Instead of trying to provide a comprehensive 

history of Portsmouth, this chapter teases out key 

parts of the village’s history that were most shaped 

by its role as a major transshipment point for cargo 

entering and leaving North Carolina by sea. Areas 

of focus, then, include trade networks and patterns; 

the labors of both white and African American 

people in the piloting and lightering work that 

dominated the economy there; the relationship 

between Portsmouth resident John Wallace and 

Washington, North Carolina, entrepreneur John 

Gray Blount in the creation of Shell Castle; and the 

implications of Atlantic world connections for the 

large enslaved population at Portsmouth.

Chapter 3. Restless and Storm-Battered 

Ribbons of Sand: Hurricanes and Inlets 

This chapter examines the impact of storms and 

hurricanes upon the location and configuration of 

the inlets; the nature of the sounds as the opening 

and closing of inlets changed their character and 

impacted the economic and social development 

associated with them; and the consequential or 

related histories of populations, communities, 

occupations, and particular built structures. 

More specifically, it inquires into the effects of 

particular storms and hurricanes that have struck 

the southern Banks within the Cape Lookout area 
National Park Service 5

Executive Summary

since the middle of the eighteenth century, when 

Portsmouth was founded. 

Chapter 4. An Eye for the Possible: 

Maritime and Other Economic Activities 

on the Southern Banks 

This chapter argues that economic activity on the 

southern Banks has tended to be episodic and 

opportunistic, dependent upon the availability 

at some historical moment of an exploitable 

resource (whales, for example, or tourists) together 

with an attractive external market—for whale 

oil, waterfowl, bird feathers, fish, or leisure and 

scenery. On occasions when those two crucial 

conditions have come into alignment, an industry 

has arisen and flourished. But when one or the 

other of the conditions wanes or fails, industries 

have declined or disappeared.

Thus, understanding the history of maritime and 

other economic activity on the southern Banks and 

their adjacent waters is a very different task from 

understanding the textile, furniture, or tobacco 

industries of the North Carolina piedmont, all 

of which were both larger and more stable over a 

longer time, however vulnerable each ultimately 

proved to be. For the Outer Banks, therefore, 

one must instead map a historical sequence of 

activities that have appeared, grown, waned, 

and disappeared, each of them marshalling an 

essentially limited resource, adaptively reorganizing 

and redeploying the skills and energies of a limited 

labor pool, and linked to a too-often fickle or 

fragile market.

Specifically, this chapter considers an overlapping 

historical sequence of economic activities that have 

had this episodic and opportunistic character: 

stock raising and agriculture, whaling, fishing 

(with attention to the particularities of individual 

species), shipbuilding, work-boat building, 

commercial hunting or “market gunning,” and 

extralegal maritime activities (piracy, “wrecking,” 

and smuggling). Tourism is reserved for a later 

chapter.

Chapter 5. At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, 

Race, and Class in a Maritime World 

Our examination of slavery, race, and class 

makes five related arguments: that however 

special or “isolated” the Outer Banks has been 

argued to be in some respects, the area cannot 

be understood apart from the race and class 

dynamics, discourses, laws, and customs of the 

rest of the state; that the structure and character 

of maritime endeavors have nevertheless at times 

produced some special configurations of slavery, 

race, and racial categories and discourse; that 

sometimes race and class relations have been 

better than those in the state more generally (e.g., 

among mullet fishermen, as Garrity-Blake has 

argued, or among slave watermen, as Cecelski has 

explained6) and sometimes they have been worse 

(e.g., among slaves forced to dig canals or work in 

the turpentine industry); that since there were no 

stable economic or industrial structures or power 

blocs (as in the plantation system or the textile 

industry) to hold the racial system steady, it has 

flexed and adjusted with the shifting economic 

base (e.g., from shipping to fishing to tourism); and 

that widespread and persistent romanticization of 

Outer Banks culture has blurred essential features 

and details of its racial and class system.

Chapter 6. The Government Presence: 

Revenue Cutters, Lighthouses, LifeSavers, Coast Guardsmen, New Dealers, 

and Others

Since the eighteenth century, the Outer Banks 

have been a prime site of government presence 

and activity. State and federal actions, laws, and 

regulations have partitioned the land; specified its 

uses; established (and done away with) institutions; 

and prompted the erection of buildings, the 

construction of fences and docks, the dredging of 

channels, the building of harbors, the employment 

(and discharge) of personnel, and the purchase of 

goods and services. In the process, government 

decisions, actions, and agencies have functioned 

as major shapers of the economic, political, 

social, and cultural dynamics of the Outer Banks. 

The persistent and highly visible presence of 

government agencies has imparted to their 

buildings, activities, and landscapes a particular 

6 Barbara J. Garrity-Blake, The Fish Factory: Work 

and Meaning for Black and White Fishermen of the 

American Menhaden Industry (Knoxville: University 

of Tennessee Press, 1994); David Cecelski, The 

Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime 

North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North 

Carolina Press, 2001).
6 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Executive Summary

spatially, socially, economically, and culturally 

organizing character.

At their various moments, these dynamics have 

arisen from—and been shaped by—some array 

of five criteria: relatively low population density; 

limited local employment opportunities; longterm presence of agencies offering stable, relatively 

high-status jobs; large iconic buildings; and defined 

institutional landscapes. The importance of any 

particular agency or installation has depended 

upon how fully or durably it satisfied these criteria. 

The effects of these entities, events, and processes 

have been varied, broad, and (sometimes) deep. 

Within the built environment, they have inscribed 

themselves upon the land—some permanently, 

some vestigially, and some in traces now 

buried beneath the sands or washed out to sea. 

Technologies have been introduced and replaced 

or withdrawn. Jobs have come and gone. Social and 

professional networks have formed, flourished, and 

dissolved. Communities have arisen and collapsed. 

In this chapter, we examine a long series of 

governmental entities, events, and processes: 

the Custom House and the Marine Hospital at 

Portsmouth, lighthouses and their keepers, the 

Life-Saving Service, the Coast Guard, and the 

Great Depression and the New Deal.7 The coming 

of Cape Lookout National Seashore itself is 

addressed in a later chapter on tourism.

Chapter 7. From Regulators to Aviators: 

War and the Southern Banks

Many prominent features of landscape and life 

on the southern Outer Banks have come and 

gone. Inlets have opened and closed; islands 

have appeared, reconfigured themselves, and 

disappeared; hurricanes have wiped out homes 

and even whole villages; sounds have gone 

from freshwater to brackish and back again; 

whole industries have appeared, developed, and 

dissolved. 

But government activities have been continuously 

present at least since the early eighteenth century. 

Five times those activities have been associated 

with a war, and in wartime the shoals, islands, 

7 Having already been considered more extensively in 

Chapter 2, the Custom House is treated very briefly 

here, and only in relation to its possible economic 

significance.

inlets, sounds, and rivers take on urgent strategic 

importance. Troop concentrations, forts, 

docks, jetties, communications facilities, gun 

emplacements, barracks, and other buildings and 

appurtenances dominate the landscape and alter 

the character and rhythm of daily life and the 

structure of communities. This chapter provides 

a synoptic overview of the six wars that have 

impacted the area since the late eighteenth century: 

the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the 

Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World 

Wars I and II. 

Chapter 8. Down East, Far West, and 

Hoi Toide: Thinking About Culture and 

the Outer Banks

In recent years, popular discourse about the Outer 

Banks has been unrelievedly positive and romantic. 

But it has not always been so, especially with regard 

to culture. Our aim in this chapter is to map the 

long-wave changes in views of Outer Banks culture; 

to test them, when available evidence permits, 

against historical fact; and to examine in some 

detail one of the most central current elements: 

hoi toide speech. In the process, we will test the 

regional linguistic analogy (to Appalachia) featured 

in the work of hoi toide’s most skillful analyst.

Chapter 9. Outer Banks Tourism and 

the Coming of Cape Lookout National 

Seashore

This chapter chronicles the more than 250-yearlong history of tourism on the Outer Banks. Setting 

our analysis initially against the comparative 

example of tourism development in western North 

Carolina, we first examine the eighteenth and 

early nineteenth-century nodes at Nags Head and 

Ocracoke, both of which attracted wealthy families 

who built summer homes or stayed (with servants) 

in the earliest hotels. We then move to the hunting 

clubs of the last third of the nineteenth century, 

frequented by wealthy northerners brought south 

in comfortable Pullman cars, their immediate 

needs for food and guides supplied by local people 

and their masculine identities bolstered by familiar 

hunting rituals. We conclude by turning to the 

beach pavilions, elegant hotels, and residential 

developments of the early twentieth century; the 

elaborate tourism development schemes launched 

by Cape Lookout Development Company and its 
National Park Service 7

Executive Summary

successors; the stimulus of new roads and bridges; 

the post-World War II boom in tourism; and the 

coming of two national seashores, development 

of which was constrained in some respects by the 

structures, customs, and material and legal remains 

of the two centuries of tourism that preceded 

them.

Overall, we endeavor to show that understanding 

the history of tourism development on the Outer 

Banks requires recourse to frames of analysis 

considerably more complex that those offered by 

familiar notions of tradition-bound “ca’e bankers” 

living an isolated life on miraculously preserved 

“barrier islands,” following the occupationsof their 

maritime ancestors, and speaking the picturesque 

hoi toide brogue.8

Chapter 10. Management, 

Interpretation, and Research 

Recommendations

The Scope of Work asks for this study to identify 

“any need for special history studies, cultural 

landscape reports, or other detailed studies.” The 

study may also, it said, “make recommendations 

for resource management and interpretation as 

appropriate.” In this final chapter, we endeavor to 

respond to both of these requirements, confining 

our recommendations to areas for which our own 

research qualifies us to render judgments. This 

chapter recommends: 

That park interpretation be uncoupled somewhat 

from a cultural-resources-management-dicated 

focus on National Register-defined “historic 

resources” (especially extant physical resources) 

so as to permit more meaningful explanation, 

especially at Portsmouth, of the eighteenth and 

nineteenth-century significance of this site as a 

point of connection between North Carolina and 

the Atlantic world. Especially at a location such as 

CALO, where the landscape itself is perpetually 

8 Local residents sometimes refer to themselves by the 

colloquial term “ca’e bankers.” See for example local 

resident James Newman Willis’s “The Ca’e Bankers 

and Their Brogue,” Down East Community Tour 

(http://www.downeasttour.com/diamond/hist-brogue.

htm), 2002, rpt. from Our Shared Past (Harkers Island, 

NC: Core Sound Waterfowl Museum, 1995), and 

Carmine Prioli and Edwin Martin, Hope For a Good 

Season: The Ca’e Bankers of Harkers Island (Asheboro, 

NC: Down Home Press, 1998).

changing and where buildings and structures are 

subject to relentless natural forces that render 

them by their nature temporary, a focus on a 

rigidly defined notion of physical integrity such 

as that embedded in the National Register and 

related programs does not well serve the project of 

interpreting this site’s history. 

That the NPS update and enlarge the park’s 

analytical and interpretive contexts, themes, and 

perspectives to bring them into line with current 

historical scholarship. Doing so could correct, 

enhance, and deepen historical and cultural 

interpretation across the park as a whole and at 

particular locations, especially through the creative 

use of new digital technologies. In particular we 

recommend that CALO should:

Emphasize connectedness rather than isolation by 

reconceptualizing the park area’s history to include 

not just the Outer Banks themselves but also the 

coastal counties, communities that border the 

sounds, the rest of North Carolina, and the wider 

Atlantic world. This recommendation, we suggest, 

has particular (but not exclusive) relevance to 

Portsmouth.

Much more thoroughly investigate and emphasize 

the ways that race, class, and gender have been 

centrally important in shaping the stories that 

can and should be told at Cape Lookout National 

Seashore. The park should take advantage of 

opportunities to uncover and present histories of 

African Americans and to understand how gender 

shaped the lives of the women and men who have 

lived and worked on the Outer Banks.

Take a careful and critical new look at the 

interpretive requirements and possibilities of 

culture on and proximate to the Outer Banks. 

The best current literature on cultural studies 

has rejected long-held essentializing notions of 

cultural isolation and uniqueness (such as the idea 

of a singular “Outer Banks culture”) in favor of 

analyses that emphasize cultural borrowings and 

sharings, dynamic processes, cultural syncretism, 

and broadly contextualized change. CALO should 

do the same with regard to the many cultures 

that it has harbored. Portsmouth’s eighteenth 

and nineteenth-century position as a key point 

in North Carolina’s maritime trading networks 
8 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Executive Summary

offers exceptional possibilities for exploring crosscultural encounter and exchange.

Incorporate the history of the national seashore 

itself into interpretation. Rather than approaching 

the history of the site as if it ceased when Cape 

Lookout National Seashore came into being, we 

suggest that the park bring these perspectives on 

interconnection, race, class, gender and culture, 

and the region’s history before the park into 

seamless conversation with the dialogues about 

land use and conservation that ultimately led to 

the creation of CALO and that have shaped it for 

the past forty years. Highlighting the connections 

between the pre-park past and the park-dominated 

present could help the public appreciate the park’s 

current management challenges and understand 

the continuities that shape the environment in 

which the park operates. A useful point of entry 

for this task would be to replace the recently 

completed interpretive film. 

That the park undertake further research in 

several of the topical areas mentioned above 

(African American history, women’s history, 

park administrative history), and that it update 

the National Register nominations for the Cape 

Lookout Light Station (1972) and Portsmouth 

Village (1978) to reflect expanded understandings 

of the significance of these sites based on new 

research. 
9

An Overview of Previous 

Cultural Resource Studies at 

Cape Lookout National Seashore 

and Some New Analytical 

Possibilities

Historic Resources in a “Natural” 

Environment

Nature has always had the upper hand on the 

“ribbon of sand” that is now Cape Lookout 

National Seashore (CALO). Part of the everchanging North Carolina Outer Banks, the 

seashore’s barrier island environment has 

commanded human attention and demanded 

respect for centuries. Appropriately, then, the 1966 

federal law that authorized creation of a National 

Seashore at Core Banks and Shackleford Banks 

focused on the area’s “outstanding natural and 

recreational values” and provided that they be 

managed for “public outdoor recreation, including 

conservation of natural features contributing to 

public enjoyment” (P.L. 89-366). 

That emphasis on the natural world has carried 

through to more recent interpretations. In 2007, 

a much-acclaimed new film made for the park 

welcomed visitors with the soothing voice of Meryl 

Streep channeling Rachel Carson. “The shore,” 

Streep nearly whispers, “is an ancient world,” a 

place of the “meeting of land and water,” where 

“in every curving beach and every grain of sand, 

there is the story of the earth.” For the nearly 

thirty minutes that follow, human history (in the 

form of a few picturesque but unoccupied and 

uncontextualized historic structures and the Cape 

Lookout Lighthouse) plays a bit part in a sweeping 

drama featuring sparkling blue water, blowing 

sands, orange sunsets, galloping horses, swooping 

and wading birds, God-like satellite views, 

dramatic helicopter flyovers, new-age music, and 

finally the assurance that “All at last return to the 

sea, to Oceanus.”

Would that it were so. When an NPS team gathered 

at the park in 1967 and 1970 to begin drafting a 

master plan for the park, all had not slipped so 

peacefully into the sea. In converting the parklands 

for recreational use, early park managers found on 

their to-do list a recommendation to “[d]ispose of 

the hundreds of abandoned and junked cars and 

many squatter shacks” remaining on Core Banks.1

The 2,500 junked cars and squatter shacks were 

just the latest residue of a long history of human 

activity on the islands that became the National 

Seashore.2 Like nearly all national park areas in the 

eastern United States, CALO was carved out of 

privately owned lands rather than out of the public 

domain. While most of the permanent residents of 

the islands had already left by the time the national 

seashore was created, protracted land-acquisition 

conflicts with property owners like the Core Banks 

Gun Club (whose property was omitted from 

1 Cape Lookout National Seashore, Master Plan, Cape 

Lookout National Seashore, 1971 (Harkers Island, NC: 

Cape Lookout National Seashore, 1971), 55.

2 National Park Service, Final Environmental Impact 

Statement on General Management Plan / 

Development Concept Plan, Cape Lookout National 

Seashore (Denver, CO: NPS Denver Service Center, 

1982), 28.
10 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

the original acquisition) remind us that creating 

the national parks, especially in the east, entailed 

superimposing Park Service-defined landscapes 

on vernacular ones.3 Deciding how much—and 

what elements—of the former landscape to retain 

and interpret in a new park context is a central 

management challenge.4

Thus, during the decade between the park’s 

authorization in 1966 and its formal establishment 

in 1976, park managers and others could not 

escape the fact that the new park contained 

substantial material remnants of the long 

human history on the islands. Their growing 

understanding of the historic resources in the 

park doubtless came about at least partly due to 

National Park Service (NPS) efforts to comply 

with the newly codified principles of historic 

preservation encompassed in the landmark 1966 

National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), which 

created the National Register of Historic Places 

and housed it within the Park Service. 

The Historic Resource Study and 

CALO Historiography

The NHPA’s key Section 106 required federal 

agencies to take into account how their actions 

would affect historic properties on the Register. 

In 1972, President Richard Nixon’s Executive 

Order 11593 expanded agencies’ responsibilities 

by requiring them to consider impacts on 

properties that might be eligible for inclusion 

in the National Register, even if they had not 

been nominated.5 Additionlly, Section 110 of 

the NHPA (added in 1980) required NPS and 

other agencies to inventory and nominate to the 

3 Candy Beal and Carmine Prioli, Life at the Edge of the 

Sea (Wilmington, NC: Coastal Carolina Press, 2002), 

131–135.

4 See Anne Mitchell Whisnant, Super-Scenic Motorway: 

A Blue Ridge Parkway History (Chapel Hill: University 

of North Carolina Press, 2006); Durwood Dunn, 

Cades Cove: The Life and Death of an Appalachian 

Community, 1818–1937, 1st ed. (Knoxville: University 

of Tennessee Press, 1988); Katrina Powell, The 

Anguish of Displacement: The Politics of Literacy 

in the Letters of Mountain Families in Shenandoah 

National Park (Charlottesville: University of Virginia 

Press, 2008); Arnold R. Alanen and Robert Z. Melnick, 

eds., Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America

(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 

5 See Thomas F. King, Cultural Resource Laws & Practice, 

3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2008), 18–21.

Register all properties that might qualify.6With 

these directives coming on line and the field of 

cultural resources management rapidly developing, 

by the time of the park’s official establishment 

in 1976, the Park Service had responded to the 

statutory requirements and begun serious efforts 

to inventory, contextualize, and understand the 

dozens of historic resources on Cape Lookout.7

 This effort has proceeded intermittently up to 

and including the present study, which was first 

attempted in 2000 by a different contractor.8The 

1997 resource management plan for the park made 

an urgent case that “the lack of a park-wide HRS 

severely limits management efforts to preserve 

historic areas as well as make them accessible 

to a broad range of visitors. Efforts to interpret 

the Banks’ cultural and historical significance 

(lifestyles, livelihoods, etc.) is [sic] impeded by the 

lack of a complete and accurate study.”9

According to the current version of the NPS28 Cultural Resource Management Guideline, 

the historic resource study (HRS) should be 

a “baseline” study conducted “before more 

specialized studies are undertaken.”10 In particular, 

its purpose is at least partly to discover the need 

for and to recommend other, more detailed 

studies, including National Register nominations. 

Additionally, NPS-28 recommends that the historic 

contexts that the HRS identifies should inform 

and shape other studies, such as cultural landscape 

reports.11

On Cape Lookout, however, numerous more 

specialized cultural and historical resource studies 

have already been completed. They were produced 

during a forty-year period, beginning with NPS 

6 National Park Service, Policy 28, Cultural Resource 

Management (1998), Chapter 2, “Cultural Resource 

Management.” This source will hereafter be referred 

to as NPS-28. See also King, Cultural Resource Laws & 

Practice, 28–29.

7 See also, NPS-28, Introduction.

8 Cape Lookout National Seashore, Superintendent’s 

Annual Narrative Report for 2000, December 26, 2000 

(Harkers Island, NC: Cape Lookout National Seashore). 

The contractor was Tidewater Atlantic Research, 

based in Washington, NC.

9 Cape Lookout National Seashore. Resource 

Management Plan for Cape Lookout National 

Seashore, 1997 (Harkers Island, NC: Cape Lookout 

National Seashore), 70. CALO archive.

10 NPS-28, Chapter 2, “Cultural Resource Management.”

11 NPS-28, Chapter 7, “Management of Cultural 

Landscapes.” 
National Park Service 11

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

historian (and original planning team member) F. 

Ross Holland’s Survey History of Cape Lookout 

National Seashore (1968). Most recently, Emily 

Jateff’s meticulous Archeological Reconnaissance 

Survey for Shore Whaling Camps Associated with 

Diamond City (2007); the Portsmouth Village 

Cultural Landscape Report, produced the same year 

by Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John 

Milner Associates, Inc.; and Joseph Oppermann’s 

detailed Cape Lookout Lighthouse Historic Structure 

Report (2008) have enhanced and deepened 

knowledge of the history and resources in the 

park.12

12 F. Ross Holland, Jr., Survey History of Cape Lookout 

National Seashore (Raleigh, NC: Division of History, 

Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation, 1968); 

Emily Jateff, Archeological Reconnaissance Survey 

for Shore Whaling Camps Associated with Diamond 

City, Cape Lookout National Seashore: Final Report

(Harkers Island, NC: Cape Lookout National Seashore, 

2007); Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John 

Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural 

Landscape Report (Harkers Island, NC: Cape Lookout 

National Seashore, 2007); Joseph K. Opperman, 

Cape Lookout Lighthouse Historic Structure Report

(Atlanta, GA: Cultural Resources Division, Southeast 

Region, National Park Service, 2008).

These studies themselves now constitute their 

own historiography of Cape Lookout National 

Seashore. To proceed effectively with the present 

study and not replow much-plowed ground, it 

is important to begin by assessing the quality of 

this previous research, characterizing the sources 

(both primary and secondary) on which it was 

based, analyzing the historic contexts under 

which the extant structures and resources were 

determined (in National Register terms) to be 

significant, correlating the identified “periods of 

significance” with the actual structures remaining, 

and identifying gaps to be filled either by this study 

or by future research. 

While basic data is in place for the majority of 

the park’s resources, the forty years in which 

these studies were done saw major changes in 

the historical profession that have reframed our 

understanding of nearly every facet of American 

history. Cape Lookout’s historic resources need to 

be situated (and in some cases reevaluated) within 

those new frames and contexts. We take that as a 

central task of this chapter.

National Register Work 

Regulatory imperatives have required that much of 

the historical work at CALO focus on documenting 

and nominating historic structures for the National 

Register. Five nominations (covering, it appears, 

approximately eighty-one contributing structures, 

a few of which no longer stand, of “statewide” 

significance) have been written and accepted.13

13 Cape Lookout Light Station (1972, prepared by North 

Carolina State Historic Preservation Office staff); 

Portsmouth Village (1978, prepared by Regional 

Historian Lenard Brown at the NPS Southeast 

Regional Office in Atlanta); Cape Lookout Coast 

Guard Station (prepared by CALO ranger Felix Revello 

in 1988 and listed on the Register in 1989); Cape 

Lookout Village Historic District (2000, prepared 

for NPS by Ruth Little, a private National Register 

consultant in Raleigh, NC); and the Salter-Battle 

Hunting and Fishing Lodge (prepared by Wilmington 

consultant Beth Keane for NPS in 2004 and listed on 

the Register in 2005). See Appendix E.

Counting the number of contributing resources 

has been a challenge. As of Fall 2009, the List of 

Classified Structures for the park included sixty-six 

items; however, this list did not include a number 

of contributing resources included in the 2000 

Cape Lookout Village district nomination, nor did 

it incorporate the four contributing structures from 

the 2005 Salter-Battle Hunting and Fishing Lodge 

nomination.

Figure 1-1. Emily Jateff’s projection of probable location 

of shore whaling camps, 2007. Jateff, Archeological 

Reconaissance Survey, 73.
12 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

These nominations, written between 1972 and 

2004, are inevitably somewhat formulaic, but over 

time they became more detailed and complex both 

in their descriptions of the physical features of the 

remaining structures and in their discussions of 

significance. 

The earliest nomination, not surprisingly, was 

for the park’s most striking man-made feature, 

the Cape Lookout Light Station, a complex of 

five structures consisting of the black-and–white, 

diamond-patterned lighthouse; the keeper’s 

dwelling (1873); a generator house; a coal and 

wood shed; and a small oil house. Written by staff 

at the North Carolina State Historic Preservation 

Office, this nomination runs a succinct four 

pages and is much more cursory than any of 

the subsequent nominations.14 A more detailed 

nomination followed six years later for what 

was from the outset considered to be the major 

aggregation of historic resources, Portsmouth 

Village. Despite dealing with thirty resources, this 

nomination spanned only twelve pages.15

Through the 1980s, the light station and 

Portsmouth Village remained the only recognized 

cultural resources in the park.16 But as time passed 

and circumstances changed, managers recognized 

other sites. Subsequent Register nominations, 

however, emerged not so much from clarity about 

historic significance, as (at least partly) from a 

response to those changing circumstances. For 

instance, the National Register nomination for 

the Coast Guard Station complex was filed six 

years after the U.S. Coast Guard decommissioned 

the Cape Lookout Coast Guard Station (housed 

in a structure built after 1916) in 1982, nearly a 

hundred years after the first Life-Saving Station 

was built at Cape Lookout in 1888.17

14 Cape Lookout National Seashore, Cape Lookout Light 

Station: National Register Nomination, September 12, 

1972.

15 Cape Lookout National Seashore, Portsmouth Village 

National Register Nomination, November 29, 1978.

16 Cape Lookout National Seashore, Resources 

Management Plan and Environmental Assessment, 

1983 (Harkers Island, NC: Cape Lookout National 

Seashore), 4–5.

17 Cape Lookout National Seashore, Cape Lookout Coast 

Guard Station: National Register of Historic Places 

Nomination, September 3, 1988.

Meanwhile, the nomination for the aggregation 

of cottages and other structures south of the 

lighthouse came in 2000 amidst controversy (and 

a lawsuit) involving the NPS and people who 

held twenty-five-year leases on houses they had 

owned prior to their property being purchased for 

the national seashore in the 1970s.18 With these 

leases set to expire between 2001 and 2005, the 

leaseholders formed the Cape Lookout Village 

Historic Preservation Committee and retained 

a consultant to prepare a National Register 

nomination for what they called Cape Lookout 

Village. According to the nomination, the group’s 

“primary goal in seeking listing [was] to ensure 

that the history of the fishing families who lived 

at the Cape will be preserved along with the 

Cape’s heritage as a life-saving settlement,” but 

the effort may have also been aimed at bolstering 

the lawsuit contesting termination of the leases.19

The final nomination, for the Salter-Battle Hunting 

and Fishing Lodge, was completed in 2004 and 

approved for the Register in 2005.20

Although these nominations became longer and 

more detailed over time, they remained isolated 

from evolving historical scholarship relevant to 

framing contexts and thinking about significance. 

The array of secondary sources they cite is 

surprisingly narrow, local, and repetitive. All of the 

studies lean heavily upon books by Outer Banks 

historian David Stick published before 1980, 

especially The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 

1584–1958 (1958). Four also cite either F. Ross 

Holland’s Survey History (1968) or his America’s 

Lighthouses: An Illustrated History (New York: 

Dover, 1972). And two of them reference as a 

putatively authoritative source Dot Salter Willis and 

Ben Salter’s charming but amateurish Portsmouth 

Island: Short Stories and History (1972). 

Only the 2000 Cape Lookout Village and the 2004 

Salter-Battle Hunting-Fishing Lodge nominations 

expand the secondary bibliography at all, and 

then only to include six additional sources, all 

focused tightly either on the local vicinity (e.g., 

18 “Core Banks Cottages Rich in History, Tradition,” 

Coastwatch, Winter 2003. 

19 Cape Lookout National Seashore. Cape Lookout 

Village Historic District: National Register Nomination, 

March 6, 2000, Sec. 8, 30.

20 The conditions that prompted this nomination are 

unclear at this writing.
National Park Service 13

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

Jack Dudley’s Carteret Waterfowl Heritage [1993]) 

or on the North Carolina Outer Banks more 

generally (e.g., Joe A. Mobley’s Ship Ashore! The 

U.S. Lifesavers of Coastal North Carolina [1994]). 

The 2000 and 2004 nominations also circle back to 

include the 1978 Portsmouth nomination and the 

1988 Coast Guard station nomination as sources.21

The primary source research underlying the 

National Register nominations is also relatively thin 

and local. The five nominations taken together cite 

surprisingly few primary sources: Carteret County 

deeds, wills, and vital statistics; Edmund Ruffin’s 

Agricultural, Geological, and Descriptive Sketches 

of Lower North Carolina and the Similar Adjacent 

Lands (1861); fourteen oral history interviews, the 

majority with retired Coast Guard personnel or 

longtime local residents; ten Coast Guard historical 

documents located at the park headquarters; the 

Congressional Record (61st–65th Congress); and the 

U.S. Census for 1880–1920. 

With these limited primary and secondary sources 

as the foundation, what, in the aggregate, do the 

Register nominations identify as the appropriate 

contexts and framing stories for the resources at 

CALO? First, in terms of periods of significance, 

they focus primarily on the period from 1857 

(the beginning of construction of the second—

present—Cape Lookout Lighthouse) to about 

1957, when the Portsmouth Hunting and Fishing 

Club constructed a storage shed to complement 

their property at the Salter-Battle Hunting and 

Fishing Lodge on Sheep Island. Interestingly, 

although the periods of significance thus extend 

back into the nineteenth century, only a handful 

of “contributing” resources (perhaps a dozen out 

21 A different type of redundancy developed when the 

2000 Cape Lookout Village nomination incorporated 

the previously nominated resources of both the 1972 

Cape Lookout Light Station nomination and the 1988 

Cape Lookout Coast Guard Station nomination.

of sixty-six) remain from the nineteenth century, 

while the rest all date to the twentieth century. 22

Moreover, the provenance of the material remains 

is out of balance with the identified areas of 

significance for the various subregions in the 

park, especially with respect to Portsmouth 

Village. There, only perhaps two of about thirty 

contributing resources identified in the Register 

nomination date from what the nominator calls the 

“glory years”—the period when the village, situated 

as it was on the south side of Ocracoke inlet, was 

the key point at which all seaborne commerce 

bound for inland North Carolina via the Pamlico 

and Albermarle sounds passed through the Outer 

Banks.23

Key areas of significance identified in these studies 

include: 

•	 federal efforts to address navigation problems 

that plagued ships passing north and south 

along the hazardous shoals of the “Graveyard 

of the Atlantic” off the Outer Banks, 

•	 the resultant processes of lighthouse building 

and the establishment of lifesaving and Coast 

Guard stations on the Outer Banks, 

•	 the role of the Outer Banks in an evolving 

system of commercial shipping to and 

from North Carolina’s inland ports and in 

twentieth-century coastal defenses (especially 

during World War II), and

22 Based on information contained in the five National 

Register nominations for structures or districts in the 

park, these appear to be Cape Lookout Lighthouse 

(1859); Keeper’s Dwelling (1873); Washington Roberts 

House (1840s–1850); George Dixon House (1887); 

Robert Wallace House (a.k.a. Old Grace House or 

Wallace-Grace House, 1850); Grace Cemetery; Marine 

Hospital Cistern; the Cape Lookout Life-Saving Station 

(1888); and the Portsmouth Life-Saving Station (1894). 

The 2007 Portsmouth Village Cultural Landscape 

Report also identifies the Dennis Mason House (a.k.a. 

the Dave Willis House) as constructed circa 1895. 

For further detailed discussion of some of these 

structures, see John Milner Associates, Inc., and Wiss, 

Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., Cape Lookout Village 

Cultural Landscape Report, Cape Lookout National 

Seashore [Final Submission] (Atlanta, GA: Southeast 

Regional Office, National Park Service, 2005), 3-56–3-

83, and Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John 

Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural 

Landscape Report. 

23 CALO, Cape Lookout Village Historic District: 

National Register Nomination, 2; William S. Powell, 

ed., Encyclopedia of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: 

University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 899–900.
14 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

•	 the development of sport fishing and other 

recreational uses of Core Banks, including land 

development and waterfowl hunting. 

Park Planning Documents

 As federal legislation requires, CALO planning 

documents from 1971 forward address cultural 

resources protection. Some cite primary 

and secondary sources in (generally brief) 

bibliographies, but since the documents are not 

footnoted, it cannot be determined which sources 

were actually used to compile the historical 

narratives the documents generally include. 

The documents rarely advance new research or 

innovative ideas for understanding the park’s 

cultural and historic resources in new ways. 

CALO park planning documents that address 

cultural resources cover a wide span of years, 

beginning with the 1971 Master Plan, and provide 

insight into how park managers’ thinking about 

the park’s historic resources changed (or remained 

static) in light of other ongoing research. The 

1971 plan, which focused heavily on the natural 

environment of the emergent national seashore, 

referred explicitly to planning for historic 

resources only in relation to intentions to “restore 

the historical scene” at Portsmouth Village.24 It 

would be several more years before the collection 

of houses that became Cape Lookout Village (most 

of which were excluded from the original land 

acquisition) would even be part of the national 

seashore.

The 1971 plan did, however, contain a short précis 

on “History of Man on the Islands,” that briefly—

and without citing any sources—discussed and 

inventoried existing resources in less reverent 

tones than subsequent studies would employ. 

“Present-day users have left their mark,” the 

plan observed. Portsmouth featured “a few old 

houses,” while “summer homes and cottages dot 

the landscape at Cape Lookout and on Shackleford 

Banks.” In a few locations, “clusters of weatherbeaten shanties used as fishing camps mar the 

stark scene . . . as do the occasional graveyards of 

broken and rusted beach buggies.” A “lone rod 

and gun club on Core Banks, the lighthouse, and 

the Coast Guard facilities complete the inventory.” 

Meanwhile, the report said, “the vastness of the sea 

24 Cape Lookout National Seashore, Master Plan, Cape 

Lookout National Seashore,1971, 81.

casts its brooding restlessness over these islands,” 

emphasizing “the fleeting existence of man upon 

the scene.”25 A brief list of interpretive themes 

outlined in 1971 lauded “the audacity” of “[man’s] 

establishing towns, earning a living, and raising 

families” in the harsh Outer Banks environment.26

In the early 1980s, after passage of the National 

Parks and Recreation Act of 1978 (16 USC 1a-7(b)), 

which required NPS to conduct comprehensive 

general planning, the park completed its 

General Management Plan (GMP), which was 

finalized in 1982 and approved in 1983.27 By that 

time, more extensive research had been done, 

especially on Portsmouth. Two National Register 

nominations were also in place (the Light Station 

and Portsmouth). Hence the park—as it was now 

required to do under federal preservation laws 

(NHPA and EO 11593)—incorporated historic 

resources planning more fully into its management 

plan and endeavored to identify more interpretive 

themes for both areas. 

Unfortunately, the themes identified were so 

general and obvious as to be completely unhelpful. 

The main interpretive theme for the entire seashore 

was “The Sea.” The suggested theme at the 

lighthouse was “America at Work.” A subtheme 

of “Water Transportation” would call attention 

to stories of lighthouses, lifesaving, and the Coast 

Guard. Meanwhile, planners envisioned restoring 

Portsmouth’s existing structures to a turn-of-thetwentieth -century state and embedding them 

(somewhat unaccountably) in a theme of “Society 

and Social Conscience,” enhanced by a generic 

emphasis on “American Ways of Life.” The plan 

promised that this theme would allow attention 

to “ethnic and religious minorities, occupational 

groups, and economic classes,” but offered few 

specifics beyond “shipping activities through 

Ocracoke Inlet” and “cultural and commercial 

history of the Outer Banks.”28

25 Ibid., 53.

26 Ibid., 57.

27 Final Environmental Impact Study on General 

Management Plan / Development Concept Plan, 

Resources Management Plan and Environmental 

Assessment (1982), 12.

28 National Park Service, Final Environmental Impact 

Study on General Management Plan / Development 

Concept Plan (Harkers Island, NC: Cape Lookout 

National Seashore,1982), 1, 42–44. The plan also 

briefly mentioned commercial fishing and whaling at 

long-vanished Diamond City.
National Park Service 15

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

In its cultural resources bibliography, the GMP 

listed only nine sources, most prominently the 

previous National Register nominations, John 

E. Ehrenhard’s Cape Lookout National Seashore: 

Assessment of Archeological and Historical Resources

(1976), the recently completed Portsmouth HRS, 

and Holland’s 1968 Survey History.

29 The natural 

resources-related bibliography, meanwhile, 

included over fifty works.

Building on the GMP and other NPS directives 

about resource planning, the park in 1983 

issued the Resources Management Plan and 

Environmental Assessment, which reemphasized 

that cultural resources preservation and protection 

(consisting mostly of preventing deterioration) 

were the park’s third priority, behind providing 

recreational opportunities and protecting 

natural resources. The plan focused largely on 

National Register properties (at that time, only 

the light station and Portsmouth Village), the 

park’s small museum and archival collections, 

and archaeological sites (none of which were 

determined to be Register eligible), but also 

included specific and lengthy recommendations 

for cultural resources management projects in the 

park. This may have been the park’s first attempt at 

systematic thinking about its cultural and historical 

resources.30

The plan contained little new research on 

cultural resources, however, and instead 

sought to consolidate existing research and 

make recommendations for moving forward 

29 An unnamed CALO staff reader commented that 

most research and writing undertaken at the time 

focused on natural history and that sources relied 

upon for other aspects of history were drawn from 

limited local park library collections. While we cannot 

evaluate the status of the park’s library in the early 

1980s, it is not accurate to state that little scholarship 

had been done on the North Carolina coastal regions 

by this time. See, for instance, David Stick, The 

Outer Banks of North Carolina, 1584–1958 (Chapel 

Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1958), 

Gary S. Dunbar, Historical Geography of the North 

Carolina Outer Banks (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State 

University Press, 1958); and Harry Merrens, Colonial 

North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century; A Study in 

Historical Geography (Chapel Hill: University of North 

Carolina Press, 1964), none of which were cited.

30 Resources Management Plan and Environmental 

Assessment (1983), 8–9, 115–16; the plan included 

a helpful chronology of archaeological work within 

the seashore’s boundaries, beginning with 1938 

studies by preeminent University of North Carolina 

archaeologist Dr. Joffre L. Coe.

that would fulfill the park’s Section 106 

compliance requirements. Its historical overview 

section incorporated wholesale a long report, 

“Archeological Data,” written in 1982 by a team 

at the Southeast Archeological Center. Drawing 

upon previous National Register work on the 

light station, Dunbar’s late-1950s Historical 

Geography of the Outer Banks, Holland’s 1968 

study, and Ehrenhard’s 1976 work, this subsection 

summarized the history of the Outer Banks. 

Despite its 1982 date, however, its statement that 

Portsmouth had not yet been nominated to the 

Register suggests that parts of it were probably 

written before 1978.31

The knowledge gaps identified in the study 

undoubtedly hindered fully effective park 

management in the era of NHPA and the National 

Environmental Policy Act of 1969 NEPA. The need 

for research and action were especially urgent at 

Portsmouth, where buildings were rotting and 

being overwhelmed by the vegetation that had 

grown up on the island since the state of North 

Carolina had outlawed free-range grazing on the 

Outer Banks in the 1950s. Building stabilization 

had to date proceeded without sufficient historical 

information. In addition to recommending 

detailed historic structure reports (HSRs), the 

plan also argued strongly for rationalizing and 

professionalizing what had until that time been a 

haphazard project of gathering oral histories from 

people knowledgeable about the village. The report 

recommended hiring a full-time GS-05 historian to 

take over and expand upon the limited oral history 

work that had been conducted beginning in 1977.32

The recommended projects aimed to help the 

park comply with its statutory requirements to 

protect and preserve resources. The plan set forth 

budgets, goals, and the requisite alternatives to be 

considered for several specific projects: stabilizing 

the light station, expanding the oral history project 

with informants knowledgeable about Portsmouth, 

31 Resources Management Plan and Environmental 

Assessment (1983), Archaeological Data Section. 

The text of this document states that the historical 

material was excerpted from Dunbar (1958), but its 

bibliography cites the 1956 version of Dunbar’s study, 

Geographical History of the Carolina Banks, which 

was published as a technical report of Louisana State 

University’s Coastal Studies Institute.

32 Cape Lookout National Seashore, Resources 

Management Plan and Environmental Assessment,

1983, 162–172, 173–174.
16 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

producing historic structure reports and a historic 

resource study that would document the 1890–

1920 period at Portsmouth, producing historic 

structure reports for the lighthouse complex, 

reestablishing the historic fence line at the 

lighthouse, and removing overgrown vegetation at 

Portsmouth (partly through purchase of up to eight 

goats).33 Overarching interpretive themes were not 

proposed.

At least two other resource management plans 

followed, in 1990 and in 1997. For archaeology 

at the site, the 1997 plan referred readers back 

to the 1982 Southeast Archaeological Center 

overview. The cultural resources section of the 

plan concerned itself with Portsmouth, the lightstation complex at Cape Lookout, the World War 

II gun emplacement (which had by then nearly 

washed into the sea), the Cape Lookout Coast 

Guard Station, and Diamond City (of which, the 

plan noted, nothing remained).34 The plan cited 

no references for the historical information it 

recounted about these resources; in cases where 

National Register documentation existed, it is 

likely that the information came directly from those 

nominations. 

The 1997 plan returned to the interpretive themes 

identified in the 1982 GMP, most notably “the sea,” 

with focus on Portsmouth and shipping through 

Ocracoke Inlet; commercial fishing; lighthouses, 

lifesaving stations, and the Coast Guard; Diamond 

City and whaling; and the “cultural and commercial 

history of the Outer Banks.” The plan’s “Cultural 

Resource Documentation Checklist” revealed that 

the park was “current and approved” in terms of 

general park planning in a number of areas (e.g., 

GMP and resource management plan). But in 

terms of specific cultural resources work, only the 

National Register documentation, the Cultural 

Sites Inventory, and the Scope of Collection 

Statement were up to date. Recommendations and 

goals placed writing of an HRS for the park at the 

top of the park’s cultural resources management 

priority list.35

33 Ibid., 152–162.

34 Cape Lookout National Seashore. Resource 

Management Plan for Cape Lookout National 

Seashore, 1997, 31.

35 Ibid., 42 and 50.

Specialized Studies

While considerable effort has been expended 

in pursuing National Register documentation 

for relevant resources, several other types of 

specialized studies have also explored and 

documented the park’s resources. In many 

cases (especially in recent years), these studies 

are substantially better researched and more 

comprehensive than the Register nominations. The 

non-Register studies fall into two major categories: 

other key comprehensive studies (such as historic 

resource studies, cultural landscape reports, and 

some archaeological investigations focused on 

particular subregions of the park) and detailed 

historic structure reports on individual buildings 

(all done recently). 

F. Ross Holland, a longtime NPS historian and 

later a nationally recognized expert on the history 

of lighthouses, penned the first important study, A 

Survey History of Cape Lookout National Seashore, 

in 1968.36 This document has ever since been a 

key pillar supporting all of the National Register 

and other work that has been done on the park. 

In a sense, because its purposes were to “furnish 

the necessary general historical data needed for 

preparation of a master plan for the park” and 

to “survey the history of the sites and structures 

within the park,” it has functioned as a historic 

resource study should.37

Holland’s primary and secondary research for 

the Survey History identified the range of sources 

most later studies would also rely upon. Primary 

sources focused on newspaper articles, published 

editions of the colonial and state records of North 

Carolina, Congressional records, several published 

government reports, the Cape Lookout Light 

Station records in Record Group 26 (Coast Guard) 

at the National Archives, annual reports of the 

Lighthouse Board and the Life-Saving Service, 

printed government documents pertaining to the 

Coast Guard, nineteenth-century census records, a 

1903 reprint of John Lawson’s eighteenth-century 

History of North Carolina, and Ruffin’s Agricultural, 

Geological, and Descriptive Sketches (1861).

36 “F. Ross Holland, Jr.,” obituary from the Newsletter 

of the National Coalition for History, September 30, 

2005, http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/16487.html.

37 Holland, Survey History.
National Park Service 17

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

Holland’s secondary research was less impressive. 

Stick’s then relatively recent The Outer Banks of 

North Carolina 1584–1958 (1958) and his older 

Graveyard of the Atlantic: Shipwrecks of the North 

Carolina Coast (1952) buttressed numerous 

footnotes. On North Carolina, Holland consulted 

Robert Digges Wimberly Connor’s by then very 

dated History of North Carolina (1919).38 Kenneth 

E. Burke’s The History of Portsmouth, North 

Carolina from its Founding in 1753 to its Evacuation 

in the Face of Federal Forces in 1861 (1976; an 

expanded version of his B.A. thesis from the 1950s) 

and two or three other books and articles on the 

Civil War, lighthouses, and Ocracoke Inlet, all 

published before 1926, rounded out the list. 

Holland’s study also set the framing of the park’s 

interpretive themes for at least the next thirty 

years. As the main theme, he suggested “man and 

his relation to the sea.” But since a similar theme 

also prevailed at nearby Cape Hatteras, Holland 

suggested that Cape Lookout should emphasize 

the “cultural and economic life of the Bankers.” 

Here should be told, he advised, “how the Bankers 

lived, earned their bread, raised their children, 

and adapted to their environment.” The primary 

focus, he urged, should be on “economic activity, 

especially around Ocracoke Inlet and Diamond 

City.” And since Cape Hatteras stressed lighthouses 

and lifesaving stations, “at Cape Lookout the story 

of lighthouses and life saving stations should have 

an important but considerably lesser role.”39

Holland’s list of interpretive themes ran almost 

word for word in the 1982 GMP and was picked 

up again as late as the 1997 Resource Management 

Plan:

1. Portsmouth and shipping activities through 

Ocracoke Inlet

2. Diamond City and whaling activities

3. Commercial fishing on the Core Banks

4. Lighthouses and lifesaving stations

5. Military activities on the Core Banks

6. Scientists and sea life at Cape Lookout

38 “Robert Digges Wimberly Connor, 26 Sept. 1878–25 

Feb. 1950,” in Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, 

ed. William S. Powell. Chapel Hill: University of North 

Carolina Press, 1979–1996). http://docsouth.unc.edu/

browse/bios/pn0000339_bio.html..

39 Holland, Survey History, 50.

Except that it lacked “scientists and the sea” and 

substituted the more general category of “cultural 

and commercial history of the Outer Banks” 

for Holland’s explicit mention of military and 

scientific activity, the list remained nearly identical 

in later plans.40

Following the Holland study, the park moved 

quickly to commission research on Portsmouth, 

and by 1970, NPS historian George Olszewski 

had produced a draft HRS for the village. But 

delays, caused partly by NPS staff members’ 

preoccupation in the 1970s with work on the 

American bicentennial, prevented this study 

from being finalized until 1982, by which time 

it had passed through the hands of three other 

historians.41

Meanwhile, as part of the park’s efforts to 

comply with Executive Order 11593 and 

provide information for a pending GMP, 

John E. Ehrenhard of the NPS Southeast 

Archaeological Center produced Cape Lookout 

National Seashore Assessment Of Archeological 

and Historical Resources (1976).42 The study 

carefully demonstrated why the park’s 

shifting sands had harbored relatively meager 

aboriginal and prehistoric cultural remnants and 

included extensive field explorations of the few 

archeological resources that were left. It also 

identified several key cultural remnants from 

the historic period: the Diamond City cemetery 

(mostly post-1890 graves, many now removed), 

Diamond City itself, the lighthouse, the World War 

II gun emplacement (already almost covered in 

40 As it appeared later, the list read:

1. Portsmouth and shipping through Ocracoke Inlet

2. Commercial fishing along Core Banks

3. Lighthouses, lifesaving stations, and U.S. Coast 

Guard activities

4. Diamond City and whaling activities

5. Cultural and commercial history of the Outer 

Banks

See for example National Park Service, Final 

Environmental Impact Statement on General 

Management Plan / Development Concept Plan, 

43–44; Cape Lookout National Seashore, Resource 

Management Plan 1997, 42.

41 Sarah Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource 

Study (Harkers Island, NC: Cape Lookout National 

Seashore, 1982), preface.

42 John E. Ehrenhard, Cape Lookout National Seashore: 

Assessment of Archeological and Historical Resources

(Tallahassee, FL: Southeast Archeological Center, 

National Park Service, 1976), x.
18 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

sand), and Portsmouth.43 But Ehrenhard offered 

no new insights about the islands’ historic period, 

and the historical information he presented on 

each of these sites was derived completely from 

other sources. For instance, readers were referred 

to Holland for information on both Diamond City 

and the lighthouse. All information on Portsmouth 

came either from Holland or from Burke’s 1976 

revision of his 1958 History of Portsmouth. And 

(although the lack of footnotes makes this a bit 

unclear) it appears that Ehrenhard took his entire 

discussion of the history of the Banks from the 

colonial period to “modern times” from Dunbar’s 

Historical Geography of the North Carolina Outer 

Banks (1958).44

The next major study to appear—and probably the 

most important and highest-quality single piece of 

historical research ever conducted for the park—

was the Portsmouth Village Historic Resource 

Study, finally completed under Sarah Olson’s byline 

in 1982 (but, as noted above, worked on by four 

historians for over a decade). While it referenced 

some of the other standard studies used by all of 

the other reports (Stick, Dunbar, Burke, Holland), 

it was largely based on new primary research in 

a wide variety of sources. Most impressive was 

the study’s use of National Archives materials. 

Ranging far beyond the sources used by any other 

study, the Portsmouth HRS drew on records of the 

Coast and Geodetic Survey (RG23), the U.S. Coast 

Guard (RG 26), the U.S. Weather Bureau (RG27), 

appointments of postmasters (RG28), Population 

Schedules (RG29), the Bureau of Customs (RG36), 

the Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation 

(RG41), the Department of the Treasury (RG56), 

43 Ehrenhard provides a photograph of the cemetery 

site (ibid., 53) and the following data: “Site Number: 

NPS 5-Diamond City Cemetery. UTM Coordinates: 

3,50,56OE - 38,39,08ON Description: This is the 

site of a small cemetery used by the residents of 

Diamond City, Shackleford Banks. All graves date 

later than 1890. The site is located in the thick woods 

on northwest Shackleford. A fence surrounds a 

portion of this little-used graveyard (Maps 2 & 3). It 

appears from the numerous depressions that many 

burials have been removed for reinterment on the 

mainland.”

44 Ehrenhard, Cape Lookout National Seashore, 24; 

Kenneth E. Burke, The History of Portsmouth, North 

Carolina, from Its Founding in 1753 to Its Evacuation 

in the Face of Federal Forces in 1861, rev. ed. 

(Washington, DC: Insta-Print, Inc., 1976), originally 

completed in 1958 as a B.A. thesis at the University of 

Richmond; Dunbar, Historical Geography of the North 

Carolina Outer Banks.

the Office of the Chief of Engineers (RG77), the 

Public Health Service (RG90), and Public Buildings 

(RG121). Equally probing was research in 

newspapers and clipping files; published primary 

sources (e.g., the twenty-six volume State Records 

of North Carolina); several North Carolina State 

Archives collections (including the John Gray 

Blount papers); the Southern Historical Collection 

at UNC Chapel Hill; and in Carteret County deeds, 

estate records, and wills.

The secondary literature the study drew upon, 

however, was much more circumscribed and, by 

1982, badly out of date. Of the approximately forty 

sources listed in the study’s bibliography, thirtyone predated 1960 and twenty were published 

before 1940. Only two dated from the 1970s, and 

one of those was Ehrenhard (1976), which, as 

noted earlier, drew its entire historical discussion 

from previously published accounts. Nearly all 

of the cited scholarly articles came from a single 

journal, the North Carolina Historical Review.

With this underpinning, the study found its 

strength in detailed descriptions of the village’s 

layout, demographics, and institutions; economic 

activities and coastal trade; government operations 

in the area; and wars and military involvement at 

Portsmouth from its founding in 1753 through the 

end of the nineteenth century. The author admitted 

at the outset that coverage of twentieth-century 

life at Portsmouth was minimal and recommended 

that a follow-up report on the twentieth century be 

programmed.45

Other than the National Register work discussed 

above, however, additional comprehensive 

historical investigations were not commissioned 

until after 2000. In 2005 and 2007, the consulting 

firms of Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., 

and John Milner Associates, Inc., produced 

detailed and lavishly illustrated cultural landscape 

reports (CLRs) for both Cape Lookout Village 

and Portsmouth Village. These reports, drawing 

upon careful research in map and photographic 

records (largely held at the park headquarters 

and in two local repositories in Carteret County) 

and significant on-site field investigations, offer 

considerable concrete guidance on the evolution 

of the on-the-ground historical scene at both 

Cape Lookout and Portsmouth. They pinpoint 

45 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 3.
National Park Service 19

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

changes in the land and topography; past and 

present locations of buildings and numerous 

other minor structures such as fences; and 

changes in circulation networks, land use, and 

the configuration and type of vegetation. With 

numerous paired photographs and sequenced 

maps, they show history unfolding on the land. 

The importance and usefulness of this detailed 

research for interpretive and management 

purposes can hardly be overstated.Yet, the 

historical contexts in which all this change is 

evaluated and discussed have not, in large part, 

changed from those identified in early studies. The 

CLRs, like most of those previous studies, rely 

upon a limited and localized array of secondary 

sources to place their findings in context and 

evaluate significance.

For Cape Lookout Village, the CLR bibliography 

included approximately thirty-one secondary 

works focused primarily or identifiably on history 

(rather than on geomorphology, geology, or other 

scientific topics). This tally does not include 

the seven HSRs for buildings in the village that 

the NPS’s Tommy Jones conducted in 2003. Of 

the thirty-one non-HSR studies, twenty-one 

were published before 1990. About a third were 

published in popular periodicals (primarily North 

Carolina’s mass-market travel magazine The 

State) or were very localized or locally written 

(e.g., Harkers Island United Methodist Women, 

Island Born and Bred: A Collection of Harkers 

Island Foods, Fun, Fact, and Fiction). Perhaps 

another third could be identified as more scholarly 

(published by academic presses or journals, or by 

the Park Service).46

The notes for the historical narrative about Cape 

Lookout Village provided in Chapter 1 of the 

CLR reveal heavy reliance upon just a handful 

of secondary sources: Mrs. Fred Hill’s brief 

and amateurish Historic Carteret County North 

Carolina 1663–1975 (locally published in 1975); 

Pat Dula Davis and Kathleen Hill Hamilton’s The 

Heritage of Carteret County North Carolina (1982), 

a rather random compendium of local information, 

photographs, family profiles, and other stories—

usually undocumented—collected by the local 

46 John Milner Associates, Inc., and Wiss, Janney, Elstner 

Associates, Inc., Cape Lookout Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, R-1 through R-8.

historical society and part of a series of such books 

published on nearly all North Carolina counties; 

Stick’s Outer Banks of North Carolina (1958) and 

North Carolina Lighthouses (1990); Holland’s 1968 

Survey History; and several of the Jones HSRs 

(which we return to below).

Working within these contexts, the Cape Lookout 

Village CLR concurred largely with the 2000 Cape 

Lookout Village National Register nomination 

in conceptualizing the village within the large 

contexts of the connection between built 

environments (especially vernacular structures) 

and natural landscapes, historic settlement 

on the Outer Banks, and maritime history. 

It recommended pushing the time period of 

significance back to the construction of the original 

Cape Lookout lighthouse in 1812 and advised 

attending more closely to the military history of the 

site.47

The historical research underpinning the 

Portsmouth CLR followed a similar methodology 

and used many of the same sources. Of close to 

forty identifiable secondary accounts listed in the 

bibliography, twenty-eight were published before 

1990. About a dozen were accounts in popular 

periodicals or were localized or privately published 

(e.g., Ellen Fulcher Cloud’s Portsmouth: The Way It 

Was [1996]), while perhaps twenty were published 

by scholarly journals, major publishers, NPS, or 

other federal agencies.48 The CLR’s notes for the 

historical narrative about Portsmouth (Chapter 1, 

Site History) rely on the usual secondary accounts: 

Hill, Davis and Hamilton, Stick, Holland, Cloud, 

Burke, and the CALO HSRs.

The CLR concurred with the 1978 National 

Register listing’s evaluation of the Porthsmouth 

area as significant as “the only existing village 

on the Core Banks south of Ocracoke Inlet,” 

and one with an over 200-year documented 

history. It recommended expanding the period of 

significance implied in the 1978 National Register 

listing to encompass the village’s entire history 

from 1753 to 1971, when the last permanent 

residents departed. It also suggested expanding 

the district’s boundary to encompass possible 

47 Ibid., 1-9.

48 Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John 

Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 201–204.
20 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

archeological remains in formerly settled areas 

of Middle Community and Sheep Island. And it 

recommended “weaving [into visitors’ experience] 

interpretation of all significant layers of history that 

have occurred on the site,” listing those layers as 

settlement, lightering, Marine Hospital, Life-Saving 

Station, Coast Guard, and commercial fishing. 49

In the past two years, two additional large-scale 

studies have opened new directions in research at 

the park. Australian archeology Master’s student 

Emily Jateff’s Archeological Reconnaissance 

Survey for Shore Whaling Camps Associated with 

Diamond City, Cape Lookout National Seashore: 

Final Report attempted meticulously but without 

success to locate physical remains of the thriving 

nineteenth-century whaling village of Diamond 

City on Shackleford Banks. And anthropologists 

Barbara J. Garrity-Blake and James Sabella 

searched the extensive oral history collections 

both at the park headquarters and at the nearby 

Core Sound Waterfowl Museum to assemble an 

“Ethnohistorical Overview and Assessment Study 

of Cape Lookout National Seashore Including a 

49 Ibid., 7–8.

Case Study of Harkers Island,” still in draft at this 

writing.

Jateff’s account, though focused soley on 

Shackleford Banks, goes far beyond any previous 

study in relating the history of the area to the 

wider contexts of the colonial and early-national 

evolution of North Carolina’s larger economy 

and of the relationship of North Carolina’s 

whaling industry to whaling in New England. 

Additionally, although she, too, cites several of 

the foundational sources used by everyone else 

(Ehrenhard, Holland, Stick), Jateff takes pains to 

note contradictions among these sources in the 

information they offer about the locations of the 

various communities on Shackleford Banks. She 

also employs a wider range of (generally much 

more recent) secondary sources to inform her 

account than does any previous study. Many of 

these sources were also locally published (e.g., 

Our Shared Past, Diamond City and Ca’e Bankers 

Reunion August 15, 1999: Remembering 100 Years 

Ago, a pamphlet published by the Core Sound 

Waterfowl Museum on Harkers Island), but she 

also references several post-1990 journal articles 

as well. It is notable that hers is the first of any 

of these studies to cite David Cecelski’s The 

Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime 

North Carolina (2001) or William Powell’s earlier, 

but still fairly recent and very scholarly work on 

North Carolina history.50

Garrity-Blake and Sabella, meanwhile, have mined 

underutilized collections of oral histories gathered 

from park-area residents since the 1970s. As it 

presently stands, their draft study focuses on the 

living twentieth-century community at Harkers 

Island. It examines hunting, fishing, economic 

activities, churches, schools, stores, trade, 

transportation, lifeways, histories of hurricanes and 

storms, and the relationship of the community to 

other nearby communities and the NPS. Like other 

studies, it opens with a historical overview, based 

largely on Dunbar (1956), Stick’s Outer Banks of 

North Carolina (1958), and several local sources 

(e.g., Davis and Hamilton, The Heritage of Carteret 

County, and Island Born and Bred: A Collection of 

Harkers Island Food, Fun, Fact, and Fiction). They 

also draw some material from H. Trawick Ward 

and R. P. Stephen Davis’s Time Before History: The 

50 Jateff, Archeological Reconnaissance Survey, 80–85.

Figure 1-2. Archeological work at shore whaling camps on 

Shackleford Banks. Jateff, Archeological Reconnaissance 

Survey, 5.
National Park Service 21

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

Archaeology of North Carolina (1998), which had 

not been cited by previous studies.51

Historic Structure Reports

Simultaneously with the writing of some of the 

later of the above studies, the park embarked on a 

concerted campaign that produced an astonishing 

fourteen new historic structure reports (HSRs) 

in two years. NPS architectural historian Tommy 

Jones researched and wrote all of these verydetailed and heavily illustrated discussions of the 

architectural and structural history of particular 

buildings at both Cape Lookout Village and 

Portsmouth. 

According to the park’s 2003 annual report, the 

ten HSRs written for buildings at Cape Lookout 

were done in compliance with a court-ordered 

settlement between the park and former Cape 

Lookout Village leaseholders who had challenged 

the termination of the twenty-five-year leases 

they had been granted at the park’s creation in the 

1970s.52 The leases, covering fourteen properties 

whose owners had resisted selling their houses 

for the park in the 1970s, had allowed the owners 

to continue to use what had long been part-time 

vacation cottages. In August of 2001, as their 

leases began to expire, the leaseholders (who had 

commissioned the National Register nomination 

for the village in 2000) initiated a legal battle in 

hopes of being able to hold on to their leases. They 

feared that, once the leases expired, the NPS would 

either raze the homes or allow them to deteriorate, 

thus obliterating their families’ heritage. By a court 

settlement, the lessees were allowed to continue 

their leases through September of 2003 while 

the park conducted historical research on the 

structures in anticipation of a planning process to 

determine their future use.53 The HSRs were key 

51 Barbara J. Garrity-Blake and James Sabella, 

Ethnohistorical Overview and Assessment Study of 

Cape Lookout National Seashore Including a Case 

Study of Harkers Island: Draft Report of Phase I 

(Harkers Island, NC: Cape Lookout National Seashore: 

2007).

52 Cape Lookout National Seashore, Superintendent’s 

Annual Report, Fiscal Year 2003 (Harkers Island, NC: 

Cape Lookout National Seashore); see also Warren 

J. Davis, et al., Plaintiff, v. United States of America, 

et al., Defendants. Case No. 4:01-CV-117-H(3). 

September 4, 2002.

53 Jerry Allegood, “Like being in another world,” 

Raleigh News and Observer, August 19, 2001; “Core 

Banks Cottages Rich in History, Tradition” (2003).

elements of the park’s due diligence in conducting 

the research.

The HSRs, although intended to focus primarily 

on architectural details, each included an opening 

section on “Historical Background and Context.” 

These contextual sections are similar in all of the 

reports and based in large part on the same set of 

key sources. Secondary sources include a 1921 

article by Fred A. Olds, David Cecelski’s 1993 

article on mullet camps, Dunbar, Ehrenhard, 

Holland, Stick, and the 2000 Cape Lookout Village 

National Register nomination. Main primary 

sources were Edmund Ruffin’s 1861 study, Carteret 

county deeds and other records, census records, 

the CALO photographic collection, and a set of 

Life-Saving Station Coast Guard journals held 

at the National Archives branch in East Point, 

Georgia.54 Each study differs slightly, however, in 

discussing the homeowners’ history, thus providing 

a window into the twentieth and twenty-firstcentury histories of the families remaining on Core 

Banks. 

Although Jones concluded that the findings at Cape 

Lookout Village did not necessitate a divergence 

from previous management practices and 

interpretive emphases (e.g., “man and the sea”), 

in fact the introduction of Cape Lookout Village’s 

structures into the park’s portfolio of officially 

designated “historic” buildings did introduce 

the prospect of some new themes and stories, 

particularly pertaining to tourism and recreational 

use of the Outer Banks, aborted land development 

schemes, and the changing relationship of the 

Outer Banks to both the mainland and the rest of 

the world in the twentieth century.

Limitations of Existing CALO 

Historiography 

Taken together, these extant studies, often 

constrained more by circumstantial opportunity 

or unavoidable urgency than by the prescribed 

54 David S. Cecelski, “The Hidden World of Mullet 

Camps: African-American Architecture on the North 

Carolina Coast,” North Carolina Historical Review

70, no. 1 (1993): 1–13; Fred A. Olds, “Cape Lookout 

Lonesome Place,” The Orphan’s Friend 46, no. 

26; Edmund Ruffin, Agricultural, Geological, and 

Descriptive Sketches of Lower North Carolina, and the 

Similar Adjacent Lands (Raleigh, NC: Institution for 

the Deaf & Dumb & The Blind, 1861).
22 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

sequences recommended by NPS, are marked by 

primary documentary research of varying scope 

and limited grounding in relevant secondary 

literature. Indeed, a consistent series of fewer than 

ten books, studies, or articles undergirds a majority 

of the “context” provided for all the studies. And 

most of those sources (e.g., Dunbar, Stick, Holland, 

Burke) are now more than forty years old. 

The park’s overarching interpretive frameworks, at 

least as reflected in planning documents through 

1997, tend to follow those first blocked out by 

F. Ross Holland in 1968. Unfortunately, those 

frameworks lack grounding either in the best 

recent scholarship, or in some cases even in the 

new onsite research that has been done, especially 

at Cape Lookout Village. Consequently, they do 

not provide adequate guidance for interpretive 

efforts. 

New Scholarship, New Contexts

A more serious result of this continued reliance 

on a few tried-and-true sources is that the park’s 

research, resources, and internal historiography 

are too often out of touch with developments 

in the larger field of history over the past forty 

years. Much like the sand along the Outer Banks, 

historical scholarship has since the 1960s been 

reshaped by the equivalent of strong scholarly 

winds: the development of a “new social history” 

of formerly overlooked or disempowered 

groups and the advent of postmodernism, 

transnationalism, and other broad interpretive 

perspectives. Yet, unlike the storms and hurricanes 

that have reshaped the coastal landscape, these 

winds have had a relatively small effect upon 

CALO’s historical research, planning, and 

interpretation. 

Thus, although the research that has already been 

completed is quite useful, much of it has not 

been contextualized as broadly as it could and 

should be. Virtually no single study has been well 

grounded in the best published sources available 

at the time it was written, or—more particularly—

informed by potentially useful new perspectives, 

methodologies, and analytical frames. Additionally, 

the contexts delineated in these studies tend to 

be fairly local except as they touch on several 

specific topics, such as the Life-Saving Service, 

the Coast Guard, hurricanes and shifting inlets, or 

lighthouses. Even the rest of North Carolina and 

the East Coast receive scant attention, as do many 

relevant elements of southern and national history. 

The studies of CALO’s historic resources—despite 

the bridges that previous studies have built to the 

institutional histories of the Coast Guard and the 

Life-Saving Service—are nearly as isolated as an 

inland sound following an inlet-closing hurricane.

Fortunately, a great deal of potentially useful 

work lies just outside this fairly constricted frame. 

During the more than thirty years since the 

park was established and the first studies began 

to be written, the historiographical ground has 

shifted, giving us new analytical and interpretive 

possibilities.55The remainder of our study takes as 

one of its central purposes to look at CALO and 

its historic resources through the lens of this work, 

some of it new, some of it long available but never 

used.

What specific possibilities has the shift generated? 

Most importantly, it has generated a reexamination 

of long-established ways of doing history. In the 

process, it has introduced new terminology (e.g., 

“subaltern”), defined and applied new critical 

paradigms (e.g., postmodernism, postcolonialism), 

lent its energies to whole new areas of analysis 

(e.g., environmental history), and drawn upon 

(and to a degree merged itself with) work in a 

variety of traditional disciplines with which it 

shares increasingly permeable boundaries (such 

as anthropology, geography, economics, and 

sociology).56

55 See, for example, John Alexander and James Lazell, 

Ribbon of Sand: The Amazing Convergence of the 

Ocean and the Outer Banks, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: 

University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Ribbon of 

Sand (Cape Lookout National Seashore orientation 

film); Orrin H. Pilkey, Jr., The North Carolina Shore 

and Its Barrier Islands: Restless Ribbons of Sand 

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

56 See, for instance, the University of California 

Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, 

Policy and Management’s extensive environmental 

history bibliography for the American South, 

available at http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/

departments/espm/env-hist/south.html.
National Park Service 23

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

At the same time, this work has over the last forty 

years shifted much of its focus from the customary 

elite (generally male) historical actors to the 

everyday lives and worlds of ordinary people, away 

from the old nation-states to transnational and 

global processes and domains (e.g., Atlantic world 

history), and away from older, dominant urban 

and metropolitan areas to rural and less developed 

ones. Consequently, many new areas of work have 

emerged, defined themselves, and flourished: 

regional studies (Appalachian, Great Plains, New 

England), women’s and gender studies, cultural 

studies, African American and American Indian or 

Native American studies, and others.57

The analysis in the following chapters is framed in 

the context of both the best of the older sources 

and newly available historiography. The emergence 

of these new perspectives, new methodologies, and 

new areas of work offers an excellent opportunity 

to contribute substantially to the mounting 

scholarly and interpretive work on the historic 

57 The large majority of colleges and universities in 

the United States now have (and have long had) 

programs in women’s and gender studies and 

in African American studies. Scores of American 

Indian studies programs may be found virtually 

coast to coast (see http://oncampus.richmond.edu/

faculty/ASAIL/guide/guide.html). New England 

studies programs flourish at the University of Rhode 

Island (http://www.uri.edu/catalog/cataloghtml/

courses/nes.html), the University of Southern 

Maine (http://www.usm.maine.edu/anes/), Boston 

University (http://www.universities.com/OnCampus/

Boston_University_Doctors_degree_American_and_

New_England_Studies.html), and elsewhere. Great 

Plains studies programs operate at the University of 

Nebraska (http://www.unl.edu/plains/) and Wichita 

State University (http://trailfire.com/streamhopper/

markview/88420). The first Appalachian studies 

programs appeared by the mid-1970s, and more than 

twenty of them continue to draw many students at 

Appalachian State University (http://www.appstudies.

appstate.edu/), Virginia Tech (http://www.idst.vt.edu/

appalachia/), the University of Kentucky (http://www.

research.uky.edu/Appalcenter/Appalachian%20

Studies/appalachianstudies.html), and elsewhere. 

Some sense of the new analysis of the region that has 

been undertaken during the past several decades, 

much of it deriving from the reconceptualizations 

of history discussed here, may be gained from the 

Appalachian Studies Association’s website at http://

www.libraries.wvu.edu/bibliography/index.htm. A 

useful entry portal for information on Atlantic world 

studies is maintained by Vanderbilt University (http://

people.vanderbilt.edu/~sue.a.marasco/atlanticworld.

htm). A particularly pertinent program in Atlantic 

world studies is the College of Charleston’s Carolina 

Lowcountry and Atlantic World program (http://www.

cofc.edu/atlanticworld). 

resources and the history of what is now Cape 

Lookout National Seashore. In this chapter, we 

offer some brief glimpses of possibilities to be 

developed in detail in later chapters (the broader 

history of North Carolina, maritime and coastal 

history, the history of the Atlantic world, slavery 

and race, commercial development, tourism, 

gender and class, and Outer Banks culture). 

Reframing this history in this and related ways 

will allow us to reconceptualize and to a degree 

resituate CALO’s historic resources, thus opening 

new interpretive possibilities. 

The Broader History of North 

Carolina

In the existing studies of Cape Lookout and its 

historic resources, one reads repeatedly of things 

one might expect in a coastal region such as the 

Outer Banks: shoals, shipwrecks, and lighthouses; 

opening and closing inlets; pilots and lightering; 

Portsmouth as a port and Shell Castle stores and 

warehouses; naval stores; and canals that did or did 

not get built. One also from time to time (though 

infrequently) is reminded of how crucial the inlets 

were—how after Currituck Inlet closed in 1828, 

all North Carolina shipping not bound into or out 

of Wilmington passed through Ocracoke Inlet and 

how the chance opening or closing of this or that 

inlet by a hurricane could turn a sound from fresh 

to saltwater and change the surrounding economy.

What one gets little sense of, however, is how all of 

this was related to the larger development of the 

rest of the colony and the state, derisively called 

“Lubberland” or “the Rip Van Winkle state” by 

comparison with Virginia (with its Chesapeake 

Bay and port of Norfolk, served by a railway by 

the 1840s) and South Carolina (with its port at 

Charleston). 

In the larger history of North Carolina, the Outer 

Banks, as a problematic transportation bottleneck, 

played a key role in keeping the state’s citizens 

poor and backward. Transportation and commerce 

between the coast and the rest of the state were 

always difficult. Wilmington helped, of course, 

with its huge traffic in naval stores, but Wilmington 

was more than 150 miles south of Portsmouth 

and more than 30 miles inland from the ocean 

by the Cape Fear River, which was navigable for 

less than 90 miles (to Fayetteville). The famous 
24 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Wilmington & Weldon Railroad, completed in 

1840, was of no use for Outer Banks commerce; 

it ran from Wilmington to Weldon (near the 

Virginia border) by way of Goldsboro and Rocky 

Mount, reinforcing early transportation patterns 

in North Carolina that tended to run north-south 

rather than east-west. Politically, frustration 

with the state’s persistent commercial isolation 

propelled the early nineteenth-century program 

of internal improvements initiated by Archibald D. 

Murphey in 1815. Murphey’s program included 

improving transportation (roads and turnpikes, 

canals, river channels, locks), draining swamps, 

and developing markets.58 Within this context, the 

role of Portsmouth and Ocracoke Inlet as a major 

(and for years, the only) reliable avenue of entry 

through the Outer Banks to the early population 

and power centers of the Albemarle region takes 

on substantially greater significance. 

Oddly, considerable information and interpretation 

on this whole set of issues was easily accessible 

at the time the earliest CALO studies were being 

58 William S. Powell, North Carolina Through Four 

Centuries (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 

Press, 1989), 261–263. Murphey’s program ran 

aground for a number of reasons, including the 

chartering of the state’s first railroad in 1834, 

which made water-based transportation far less 

attractive. Beaufort, established in 1715 and named 

an official colonial “port of entry” for collection of 

customs during the eighteenth century, was blessed 

with excellent access to the open ocean, but its 

lack of river or railroad access to North Carolina’s 

interior meant that its role in the colony and state’s 

commercial development was minimal. By the late 

eighteenth century, in fact, Beaufort had been 

eclipsed by Wilmington, New Bern, and Edenton. See 

Merrens, Colonial North Carolina in the Eighteenth 

Century, 142–172, and David S. Cecelski, The 

Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime 

North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North 

Carolina Press, 2001), 156.

drafted, but was not used. The preeminent 

historian Hugh T. Lefler started publishing what 

became a long series of books on North Carolina 

history in the late 1940s, and by the time CALO 

opened, his North Carolina: The History of a 

Southern State (co-authored with Albert Ray 

Newsome) had already been through several 

editions.59 Lefler’s successor, William S. Powell, 

inaugurated his series of comprehensive studies of 

the state’s history in 1976 with the North Carolina 

Gazeteer; even Powell’s North Carolina Through 

Four Centuries is almost twenty years old. By now, 

of course, the potentially useful bibliography on 

the state is very extensive indeed. 

Maritime and Coastal History 

In the existing studies of CALO and its historic 

resources, one encounters some good work on 

certain aspects of maritime history. Reading these 

sometimes quite-detailed materials, however, 

one might conclude that few aspects of maritime 

history are relevant to CALO until the ships appear 

on the horizon and spy the lighthouses, negotiate 

the treacherous shoals and inlets (or fail and are 

rescued by the Life-Saving Service), are piloted 

and lightered, and deal with the Custom House at 

Portsmouth (or evade doing so, smuggling their 

cargoes in as contraband). These are undeniably 

pivotal aspects of CALO’s own sector of maritime 

history. As in other areas, however, the study 

of that history has expanded greatly during the 

past several decades, providing analytical and 

interpretive possibilities not yet available when 

some of the earlier CALO studies were completed. 

The North Carolina Maritime History Council, 

East Carolina University’s Program in Maritime 

Studies, and the Maritime Studies Association, 

all established during the past two decades, are 

suggestive of expanded activities in maritime 

59 Hugh T. Lefler, North Carolina History Told By 

Contemporaries (Chapel Hill: University of North 

Carolina Press, 1948); Hugh T. Lefler and Albert Ray 

Newsome, North Carolina: The History of a Southern 

State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 

1954; revised editions 1963, 1973, 1979); Hugh T. 

Lefler and William S. Powell, Colonial North Carolina: 

A History (New York: Scribner, 1973). 

Figure 1-3. Steamer Neuse taking on naval stores in 

Wilmington, 1870s. Rufus Morgan Collection, North 

Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library.
National Park Service 25

history and of its broad reach.60 NPS now operates 

more than two dozen units with significant 

maritime interest and focus.61

Setting CALO’s maritime history connections 

within the broadest applicable frame would 

deepen its treatment of that history and give a 

sharper point to its interpretation of some of its 

most centrally important historic resources, such 

as Diamond City, the port of Portsmouth, and the 

maritime history of slavery (the latter examined in 

Cecelski’s The Waterman’s Song [2001]).

The Atlantic World

Closely related to the broad field of maritime 

history is the more focused recent work on what 

has come to be called the Atlantic world. That 

work offers an extraordinarily useful perspective 

on the history of the southern Outer Banks. 

Scholars in Harvard University’s International 

Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World 

regularly argue that not only can one gain fresh 

and essential perspectives on local, regional, and 

national histories by linking them with the larger 

Atlantic world, but also that these histories cannot 

be adequately understood in the absence of such 

links.62 Closer to home, the College of Charleston’s 

Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program 

is directly illuminating for the CALO region. 

As we will argue in a subsequent chapter, the 

Atlantic world frame forces a reconsideration of 

the established inland vs.barrier island dualism 

that underlies virtually all available analyses of the 

Outer Banks. To us it seems that a tripartite inland 

/ Outer Banks / Atlantic world conception that 

encompasses both regional and global contexts 

is more useful. For example, the second earliest 

of the CALO National Register nominations 

(Portsmouth Village, 1978) duly notes that the 

village had a substantial slave population and drew 

60 The Council focuses principally on the upper Cape 

Fear, but its members’ interests and activities reach 

into other areas of maritime history. Cape Hatteras 

National Seashore is currently a member of the 

Council (http://www.ncmaritimehistory.org/). For 

information about East Carolina University’s Maritime 

Studies Program, see http://www.ecu.edu/maritime/; 

the Maritime Studies Association maintains a website 

at http://www.ecu.edu/msa/.

61 See http://www.nps.gov/history/maritime/maripark.

html.

62 See the Seminar’s web site at http://www.fas.harvard.

edu/~atlantic/. 

its livelihood from the lightering (presumably by 

slaves) of “seagoing vessels” through Ocracoke 

Inlet.63

But that study was done too early to benefit 

from Cecelski’s excellent analysis of the special 

character of maritime slavery or from recent 

Atlantic world perspectives. Neither “seagoing 

vessels” nor “slaves” denotes an entity generic 

enough to be safely generalized about. Through 

what seas were these vessels going and from where? 

Where did these particular slaves come from, and 

what difference did it make that they came from 

there and not somewhere else, or that they worked 

in a system in which they had direct contact with 

people from other places manning the incoming 

ships? Utilizing newly available perspectives, what 

can be said about the culture the slaves, the vessels, 

and their cargo brought to Portsmouth or about 

the texture of the slaves’ lives in Portsmouth? 

Slavery and Race

Four decades ago, Holland’s study of Portsmouth 

Village noted the presence of significant numbers 

of slaves amidst its inhabitants, and subsequent 

studies of CALO and its historic resources 

acknowledge that slavery was a prominent feature 

of the history of the Outer Banks.64 Subsequent 

CALO studies have presented and re-presented 

the slave vs. free numbers, mentioned slave 

pilots, and commented upon the fate of maritime 

slaves during the Civil War and the departure of 

African Americans from Portsmouth afterward.65

But no study has engaged either slavery or race 

as specifically configured in the CALO region 

broadly or deeply enough to provide the needed 

framework for interpretation. It is especially 

noteworthy that slavery is not mentioned as an 

area of significance in the early National Register 

nominations.

Fortunately for those who need to understand 

the historical context of Cape Lookout and its 

historic resources, one principal focus of Atlantic 

world scholarship has been the trans-Atlantic slave 

trade. Some excellent recent scholarship is useful 

in this regard; yet, virtually none of it is cited in 

63 Portsmouth Village: National Register Nomination; 

Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 85.

64 Holland, Survey History, 40–41.

65 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 85.
26 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

even the most recent CALO studies. Cecelski’s 

The Waterman’s Song is both pointedly applicable 

and stunningly suggestive in its treatment of the 

working lives of maritime slaves, their sometimes 

loose relations with overseers and masters, the 

blurring of racial lines, slaves’ ties to the radical 

politics of the Caribbean and the consequent 

threat of insurrection, the tinderbox racial situation 

in Wilmington (where both slaves and free blacks 

had to wear identification badges), and related 

matters.66 Yet among the CALO historical studies 

that have appeared since Cecelski’s work was 

published, only Emily Jateff’s includes Cecelski’s 

book in its bibliography (Jones’s HSRs include 

a reference to a 1993 Cecelski article on mullet 

camps, but not to the book). Marvin Kay’s Slavery 

in North Carolina, 1748–1775 (1999), meanwhile, is 

useful for the pre-nineteenth-century period, and 

Kevin Dawson’s Enslaved Watermen of the Atlantic 

World, 1444–1888 (2005) provides a still broader 

context both chronologically and geographically. 

Cecelski’s A Historian’s Coast: Adventures into the 

Tidewater Past (2000) offers a perspective on race 

relations at Davis Ridge during the 1930s.

Commercial Development

The contemporary visitor is encouraged to 

encounter Cape Lookout National Seashore as 

an undeveloped “natural” area. Taking a cue from 

the park’s recent orientation film Ribbon of Sand,

romantically narrated by Meryl Streep, one might 

call it Meryl Streep’s Cape Lookout. And many are 

those who have wished (and imagined) that it had 

ever been that way and could remain so. Somewhat 

wistfully, Edmund Ruffin observed the delicate 

tension between a pre-commercial and commercial 

area that was still evident just over a hundred years 

after the founding of Portsmouth. “Except at and 

near Portsmouth, and where actual residents have 

possession,” he reported, 

there is no separate private property in lands, 

on this reef, from Ocracoke to Beaufort harbor. 

But though there are no land-marks, or means 

for distinguishing separate properties, every 

portion of the reef is claimed in some manner, 

as private property, though held in common 

use. If belonging to one owner, the unsettled 

land would be valuable, for the peculiar mode 

of stock-raising in use here. But under the 

66 Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, 124–126, 134.

existing undefined and undefinable common 

rights, the land is of no more value to one 

of the joint-owners, or claimants, than to 

any other person who may choose to place 

breeding stock on the reef. 67

Whether Ruffin knew it or not, and no doubt he 

did, Portsmouth had been the scene of intense 

entrepreneurial and commercial competition from 

its very founding in 1753. As early as 1715, the 

British Lords Proprietors who initially governed 

the colony were trying to get a whaling industry 

started. Nearby Shell Castle Island was the scene of 

frenetic commercial development by the end of the 

century. 

The history of the southern Outer Banks and 

its adjacent mainland is in fact inseparable from 

the stream of commercial development that 

was present from the beginning of European 

settlement. Reading the extant CALO studies, one 

cannot be unaware that there has been commercial 

development of one sort or another throughout 

the modern history of the Banks: boat and shipbuilding, shipping, lightering, piloting, whaling, 

fishing (of every imaginable variety from shrimp 

to dolphin), operating fish houses, hunting, 

storekeeping and warehousing, and allied activities. 

The 1810 census reported that 80 percent of the 

working population in Portsmouth was involved in 

commercial activities related to the sea. 68

Nor is what was going on on the Outer Banks 

themselves anything like the whole story, for 

that activity was part of a much larger pattern of 

maritime and inland commercial development. 

Cecelski’s portrait of the logging town of Buffalo 

City on the Alligator River (the largest town by 

far in Dare County between 1885 and1925) is 

arresting. It was home to more than 300 workers 

who lived under tightly controlled, nearly feudal 

circumstances: paid in scrip usable only at the 

company store, bound by company-made laws 

67 Ruffin, Agricultural, Geological, and Descriptive 

Sketches of Lower North Carolina, 130.

68 The North Carolina Maritime Council’s “List of Ships 

Built in North Carolina from Colonial Times to circa 

1900” contains the names of over two hundred ships 

(the vast majority schooners) ranging up to nearly 300 

tons constructed in Carteret County prior to the Civil 

War (http://www.ncmaritimehistory.org); Wiss, Janney, 

Elstner Associates, Inc., and John Milner Associates, 

Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural Landscape Report, 

21.
National Park Service 27

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

enforced by vigilante justice, employed to work 

ten-hour days for fifteen cents an hour.69

The problem as we see it is at least twofold: (1) 

these strands of CALO’s history are nowhere 

brought together into a coherent interpretive 

narrative, and (2) they are not linked sufficiently 

to more-intensive commercial development that 

flourished in the region stretching away from the 

park on all sides: turpentine and naval stores, 

logging, and tourism (both to the north and to the 

south). They are not, that is, set in the essential 

framework of the development history of the larger 

region of which CALO is a part.

Tourism

One subset of the general complex of commercial 

development that deserves more, and more 

coherent, attention than it has yet received is 

tourism. For a variety of reasons, Cape Lookout 

never drew the attention of tourists to the degree 

that the Banks north of Ocracoke Inlet, where Nags 

Head was known as a resort area at least by the 

1830s, did.70

The National Register nomination prepared for 

Cape Lookout Village more than two decades after 

the one for Portsmouth pays some attention to 

scattered incidents of tourist-related development 

on the southern Banks, as do other CALO studies.71

But no available CALO study attempts to set these 

incidents within a comprehensive discussion of 

tourism as a sector of economic development or 

a broad catalyst of social and cultural change on 

the Outer Banks. What had happened long before 

CALO was established, around Wilmington at 

the end of the nineteenth century and on Nags 

Head and the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, 

is directly pertinent to how policy decisions made 

about CALO itself must be understood. 

Fairly early on, it was decided not to pursue 

tourist-related development at the park, but things 

might have gone another way. The 1963 GDP 

69 David S. Cecelski, A Historian’s Coast: Adventures into 

the Tidewater Past (Winston-Salem: J.F. Blair, 2000), 

105–109.

70 Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 271. Louis 

Torres, Cape Hatteras National Seashore Historic 

Resource Study (Manteo, NC: Cape Hatteras National 

Seashore, ca. 1985), 59.

71 Cape Lookout Village Historic District: National 

Register Nomination.

maps show fairly intensive tourist development 

on Shackleford Banks. A state-built “highway 

causeway bridge” and ferry from Lenoxville Point 

near park headquarters (not on Harkers Island 

but just outside Beaufort) were to bring tourists 

to beach and campground areas and a marina, all 

connected by a road running almost to Barden 

Inlet. A ranger station was to provide oversight.72

Before the park’s establishment, after 1915, the 

Cape Lookout Development Company subdivided 

lands near the lighthouse and sold a few lots for a 

planned summer resort, which failed to come to 

fruition.73

Fortunately, the past several decades have 

witnessed the emergence of a substantial analytical 

literature on tourism.74 This literature can certainly 

be helpful with regard to the larger touristdominated coastal region where CALO is located. 

More particularly, it can help us understand some 

of its tourist-related historic resources (e.g., the 

Coca-Cola House, the Salter-Battle Hunting and 

Fishing Lodge).75 It can also help in understanding 

72 National Park Service, General Development Plan 

Map, Proposed Cape Lookout National Seashore

(Washington, DC: National Park Service Office of 

Resource Planning, 1963).

73 Ibid., 27.

74 Centrally important studies (some focused on other 

regions and periods but nevertheless illuminating for 

CALO’s history) include Warren Belasco, Americans 

on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910–1945 

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979); Catherine Bishir, 

The “Unpainted Aristocracy”: The Beach Cottages 

of Old Nags Head (Raleigh, NC: Division of Archives 

and History, North Carolina Department of Cultural 

Resources, 1978); Dona Brown, Inventing New 

England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth 

Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution 

Press, 1995); Gary R. Mormino, Land of Sunshine, 

State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida

(Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005); Hal K. 

Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the TwentiethCentury American West (Lawrence: University Press 

of Kansas, 1998); Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America 

First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940

(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001); 

Richard D. Starnes, ed., Southern Journeys: Tourism, 

History, and Culture in the Modern South (Tuscaloosa: 

University of Alabama Press, 2003); and Whisnant, 

Super-Scenic Motorway. Orrin Pilkey’s work on the 

environmental consequences of coastal and barrier 

island tourism development (cited in several of the 

CALO works) is, of course, relevant as well.

75 Beth Keane, Salter-Battle Hunting and Fishing Lodge: 

National Register of Historic Places Registration, 

September 22, 2004); Tommy Jones, Coca-Cola House, 

Cape Lookout Village: Historic Structure Report

(Atlanta, GA: Southeast Regional Office, National 

Park Service, 2004).
28 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

its elements of tourist-related history, even where 

no built resources are in evidence, such as the 

“almost happened” history of the Cape Lookout 

Development Company, mentioned repeatedly 

in extant CALO studies but never accorded more 

than a few paragraphs of discussion.76

Gender and Class 

The interpretive wayside in front of the Styron and 

Bragg house (1928) in Portsmouth informs visitors 

matter of factly and without elaboration that 

“Brothers-in-law Jody Styron and Tom Bragg built 

their house using materials salvaged from at least 

two older buildings. Tom, Jody, and Jody’s wife, 

Hub, ran a hunting service out of their new home. 

While Tom and Jody guided hunters out into the 

marshes, Hub cooked the meals and kept house.” 

Like many interpretive statements, this one hints at 

history it does not engage. Much of that history has 

to do with both gender and class, two subjects with 

which much of the historical scholarship of the last 

forty years has been regularly occupied. If there is 

an Outer Banks or “Banker” culture (as many have 

claimed), it is a culture like virtually all others, in 

which both gender and class were and are strongly 

marked and situated within a social and economic 

system for which those markers carry great weight; 

the Styron and Bragg men served as guides for their 

(male) social “betters,” and Hub stayed home and 

cooked for the men.

Commenting as early as 1861 on the depredations 

of “northern interlopers . . . of the lowest 

character and estimation” who were regularly 

hunting on local lands in Maryland and Virginia, 

Edmund Ruffin foresaw the strongly class-marked 

commercial hunting operations that would later 

become widespread on the Outer Banks.77 The 

social and economic status of Ruffin’s marketoriented “interlopers of the lowest character 

and estimation” (or whatever they might more 

generously be called) has not so far as we know 

been studied in detail, but their successors a few 

76 See for example Tommy Jones, Lewis Davis House, 

Cape Lookout National Seashore: Historic Structure 

Report (Atlanta, GA: Southeast Regional Office, 

National Park Service, 2003), 14. See also Cape 

Lookout National Seashore, Cape Lookout Village 

Historic District: National Register nomination, Sec. 8, 

27–28.

77 Ruffin, Agricultural, Geological, and Descriptive 

Sketches of Lower North Carolina.

decades later were well enough off to have had at 

their disposal the required leisure, the necessary 

equipment, and sufficient funds to hire Jody Styron 

and Tom Bragg to guide them to the waterfowl, and 

Hub Styron to have hot meals ready for them when 

they returned.

Not all of the hunters were from the north, to 

be sure, and thus not all were “interlopers” 

of whatever ethical stripe, but their numbers 

were sufficient to support the development of a 

substantial industry of commercial hunting and 

sport fishing on the Outer Banks for many decades. 

Hunting clubs, “rod and gun” clubs, and similarly 

named establishments proliferated after the Civil 

War, and in due time the traffic was sufficient 

to motivate the construction of an airstrip at 

Portsmouth.78 The history of this sort of activity 

is entwined with a number of CALO’s buildings, 

including the Dixon-Salter House, in which the 

Salter Gun Club was established more than a 

hundred years after Ruffin wrote.79

How many people (of either sex) were involved in 

the service economy that developed around such 

institutions has never been calculated, but it would 

have been substantial and it lasted over a very 

long period. When a storm opened Barden Inlet 

in 1933 and sport fishermen gained easy access 

to the ocean, tourists streamed in, and the first 

local motel opened on Harkers Island, no doubt 

employing the first of a new generation of service 

workers.80

The difficulty of discussing the issue of class on 

the Outer Banks is complicated by the difficulty 

attached to its inseparability from race as well 

as gender. Black (slave) pilots in the eighteenth 

century could reasonably be called working class, 

but some evidence suggests that by virtue of their 

78 Exactly when the airstrip was built is not clear from 

the available studies. Olson, Portsmouth Village 

Historic Resource Study, 71–76, says that it was 

after World War I; the Portsmouth Village Cultural 

Landscape Report (31) implies that it was built in the 

1950s. It is clearly evident in aerial photographs from 

the 1960s.

79 See Keane, “Salter-Battle Hunting and Fishing Lodge: 

National Register of Historic Places Registration, Sec. 

8, 6–8 for one recital of details. See also Cecelski, A 

Historian’s Coast, 93–100. Cecelski comments primarily 

upon the hunting between 1880 and the passage of 

regulatory legislation between 1918 and 1927.

80 Garrity-Blake and Sabella, Ethnohistorical Overview 

and Assessment Study, 6.5.1.
National Park Service 29

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

indispensability they may have occupied a class 

position somewhat above other slaves—at least 

far enough above that by 1773 white pilots felt 

threatened enough by their status to complain 

to the North Carolina General Assembly, which 

debated the issue repeatedly during the first 

quarter of the nineteenth century.81

What is abundantly clear is that totalizing local 

residents as “Bankers” (or by other commonly used 

terms) with respect to race or any other defining 

social category is not serviceable analytically. In 

subsequent chapters, we attempt to disaggregate 

that complex to some extent and bring some more 

pointed discussion to its elements.

Outer Banks Culture

While it is not mentioned in the extant studies 

as often as the weather, shipwrecks, or the Coast 

Guard, Banker culture is a recurring (if usually only 

briefly attended to) theme. There is a fair consensus 

that some sort of special or even unique Banker 

culture exists, that it has long been in evidence, that 

it has generally resisted the modernizing changes 

that have swirled around and through it, and that 

it somehow derives from and helps to sustain 

the concrete features and processes of maritime 

life. Such conceptions are ubiquitous. Tourism 

promotion advertisements, popular media, and 

public discourse are replete with discussions of the 

“isolation” of Bankers, of the myths and legends 

about them, of “hoi toide” speech, of attenuated 

(or even absent) “outside” influences, and the 

like.82

Outer Banks culture is considered real enough, at 

least, that the writer of the Cape Lookout Village 

National Register nomination (2000) lamented 

its passing. “It is fortunate,” one reads, “that the 

Cape Lookout National Seashore retains two of 

its historic settlements, Portsmouth . . . and Cape 

Lookout Village . . . . Associated with a culture that 

has completely disappeared, these rare surviving 

Outer Banks settlements are invaluable as the only 

remaining cultural landscapes of the Bankers.”83

81 Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, 49–50.

82 See for example Walt Wolfram, Hoi Toide on the 

Outer Banks: The Story of the Ocracoke Brogue

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

83 Cape Lookout National Seashore, Cape Lookout 

Village Historic District: National Register Nomination, 

29.

While it would be folly to deny that there are 

cultural characteristics special to the Outer Banks, 

since virtually all places and groups have some 

array of them, we are also mindful that a historic 

resource study may too easily default uncritically 

to widely accepted conceptions of the cultural 

systems under discussion. This is particularly true 

where claims of cultural distinctiveness derive 

partly from a perception of physical isolation in a 

harsh environment.

Since cultural studies of the Outer Banks are not 

yet either numerous or highly developed, we 

consider a somewhat analogous region for which 

analysis is well advanced.84By the mid-1960s, the 

Appalachian region had been (mis)understood 

for more than a hundred years as remote, isolated, 

premodern, and culturally special or unique—

not, that is to say, unlike the Outer Banks. How 

that cultural specialness or uniqueness was 

characterized depended upon the commentator’s 

perspective, purpose, and audience. Some depicted 

it in terms of a vaguely conceived nobility, a 

retention of “Elizabethan” speech, special skill and 

creativity (woodcarving, quilting), and preference 

for traditional ways over change or modernity. 

Less positively, others emphasized stubborn selfisolation, suspicion of “furriners,” inbreeding, 

backwardness, and violence and feuding. In either 

case, Appalachia was depicted as a puzzlingly 

static social, cultural, and political island within a 

progressive, dynamic, and relentlessly modernizing 

America.

For good or ill, then, Appalachia was understood 

(like the Outer Banks) as an exception to 

84 Notable exceptions are the work of historian 

David Cecelski and anthropologist Barbara GarrityBlake. Detailed scholarly work on the Appalachian 

region, emerging initially in the early 1970s, has 

been especially sensitive to the pervasiveness (and 

interpretive dangers) of popular and scholarly 

misconceptions of regional culture and cultural 

history. The most complete and accessible portal for 

the scholarship is the website of the Appalachian 

Studies Association. See also Rudy Abramson and 

Jeanne Haskell (eds.), Encyclopedia of Appalachia, 1st 

ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006). 

For our own work in this area, see David E. Whisnant, 

Modernizing the Mountaineer: People, Power, and 

Planning in Appalachia, rev. ed. (Knoxville, University 

of Tennessee Press, 1994), and All That Is Native and 

Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 

and Anne M. Whisnant, Super-Scenic Motorway . 
30 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

An Overview of Previous Cultural Resource Studies at Cape Lookout National Seashore

mainstream values, practices, and development.85

Whole institutions and popular genres were built 

around such conceptions: schools, museums, 

films, music recordings, comic strips, souvenir 

shope mementos, tourist-oriented businesses, and 

cultural festivals. 

Recent analyses of Appalachian regional history 

illuminate aspects of currently dominant 

descriptions of Outer Banks people and their 

culture. A perception of isolation, whether by 

miles of water or by high mountain peaks, leads 

commentators to similar cultural “observations” 

(grounded in research or not): “hoi toide” 

speech and yaupon chopping for Bankers, and 

“Elizabethan” speech and ginseng gathering for 

mountaineers. The derogatory “yaupon-choppers” 

phrase rings with eerie familiarity to scholars 

of the hillbilly stereotype.86 Even the relatively 

recent HRS for Cape Hatteras National Seashore 

(1985) repeats elements of the cultural complex. 

“It was inevitable,” the study notes at one point, 

“that a small segment of society such as the 

Bankers, isolated as they were, would assume a 

culture somewhat distinct and unique from the 

Carolinians of the mainland. One observer in 1749 

noted that he had received intelligence which led 

him to suspect that the Bankers (a set of people . . 

. who are very wild and ungovernable . . . ), would 

come in a body and pillage the ships, etc.”87

But all such received characterizations of complex 

cultural systems must be viewed with caution. 

From the late 1960s onward, scholars and local 

activists challenged such misconceptions and 

misinterpretations of the Appalachian region. 

85 A key early document was Horace Kephart, Our 

Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure 

in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life 

among the Mountaineers (1913). The stream of such 

narratives has continued unbroken ever since. See 

for example Jack E. Weller, Yesterday’s People: Life 

in Contemporary Appalachia (Lexington: University 

Press of Kentucky, 1965). The negative depictions of 

mountaineers flourished anew in the age of television 

(for example in The Dukes of Hazzard [1979–1985]) 

and the Internet (where a YouTube search on hillbilly

returns countless hits).

86 See for example Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A 

Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: 

Oxford University Press, 2004), and Jerry Williamson, 

Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains 

and What the Mountains Did to the Movies (Chapel 

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

87 Torres, Cape Hatteras National Seashore Historic 

Resource Study, 62.

A whole generation of Appalachian scholars 

came to argue in favor of an anti-exceptionalist 

perspective on the region and its history.88

One does not need to strike unsustainably direct 

comparisons between regions to be alerted to the 

dangers of uncritically exceptionalist readings of 

any particular region’s past or present. Nor should 

one fail to grant that elements of difference do 

exist. Hoi toide speech can in fact still be heard, 

Core Sound workboats are still being built, and it 

is still 30 miles from banks to mainland at some 

points. Nevertheless, interaction between the 

Outer Banks border region (as it seems useful to 

conceive of it) and both the mainland and the 

Atlantic world has been and is continuous and 

undeniable. 

Thus on balance it seems best to take an antiexceptionalist approach to understanding the 

culture of those who have made their lives and 

done their work on the southern Outer Banks 

and adjacent sectors of the mainland. While not 

denying or overlooking some markers of persistent 

(or emergent) difference, the area’s history must 

be reframed in relationship to all relevant contexts 

in order to comprehend the cultural system 

within larger systems of which it is a part. In that 

way, culture can be attended to insofar as it will 

help one to understand the structures, buildings, 

objects, and landscapes that constitute the bulk 

of the park’s historic resources. We develop this 

perspective further in later chapters. 

88 See especially Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight Billings, 

and Altina L. Waller, “Taking Exception with 

Exceptionalism The Emergence and Transformation 

of Historical Studies of Appalachia” in Appalachia in 

the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth 

Century, ed. Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight Billings, and 

Altina L. Waller (Chapel Hill: University of North 

Carolina, 1995), 1–24.
31

To and From the Most 

Remarkable Places:

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North 

Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

Off the Beaten Path? The 

Challenge of Understanding 

Portsmouth’s Past

In 1957, North Carolina journalist Carl Goerch, 

founding publisher of the boosterish magazine 

The State and a frequent writer about the Outer 

Banks, profiled the little village of Portsmouth 

for the Raleigh News and Observer. Roadless and 

perched at the north end of Core Banks on the 

south side of Ocracoke Inlet, the town, Goerch 

wrote, was “so inaccessible, so isolated, and so far 

off the beaten path that very few people have ever 

set foot there.” Thirteen mostly elderly permanent 

residents somehow persisted on the island, despite 

having no electricity, no running water, and only 

one telephone among them. Each day, one of them, 

an African American man named Henry Pigott, 

rowed or poled his small craft out into the Pamlico 

Sound to collect residents’ mail and other supplies 

brought by the daily mail boat running from 

Atlantic, North Carolina, to nearby Ocracoke.1

Fourteen years later, Pigott and the little town 

were both dead, and the ghost village was being 

engulfed by the developing Cape Lookout National 

Seashore.2 The town today is little different from 

what Goerch described; indeed, one is hardpressed to imagine a part of North Carolina that is 

more remote. At least two ferry rides and several 

hours are required to get there from anywhere on 

the North Carolina mainland. Portsmouth is no 

longer on the way to anywhere. 

1 Carl Goerch, “Where the Mailman Comes by Boat,” 

Raleigh News and Observer, September 8, 1957.

2 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 94.

It wasn’t always so. The town’s decline was long 

and slow. Its slide started in the mid-nineteenth 

century, when changing physiogeography and 

transportation and trade patterns began to render 

this formerly bustling community obsolete after 

nearly a century when it had reigned as the 

most significant early settlement on the entire 

Outer Banks. At its height in 1860, the town had 

approximately 469 white and about 117 African 

American slave inhabitants, but by 1940, the 

population had dwindled to 42.3

Comprehending Portsmouth’s history requires 

us to marshall all of our powers of historical 

imagination, especially since the physical remains 

of the village mostly date from well after its zenith. 

Indeed, only 2 of the 109 dwellings that may have 

stood at Portsmouth in 1860 are there today: the 

Washington Roberts House and the WallaceGrace House.4

 Most of the rest of what the Park 

Service now preserves there dates from the period 

after 1890; as a 2007 CLR noted, “[t]he site lacks 

integrity . . . for the eighteenth and nineteenth 

century period of significance. Only a handful 

of buildings and structures survive from the 

nineteenth century, and none from the eighteenth 

century.”5

3 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 79, 

93; Burke, The History of Portsmouth, North Carolina, 

57–58. 

4 Tommy Jones, Washington Roberts House, 

Portsmouth: Historic Structure Report [Partial Draft], 

October 2003, 15; Portsmouth Village: National 

Register Nomination, Section 8, 2.

5 Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John 

Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 7.
32 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

Additionally, current land-ownership (and 

conceptual) boundaries hinder any understanding 

of Portsmouth as a part of a larger community 

surrounding Ocracoke Inlet. Most of Portsmouth 

is now owned by the federal government, of 

course, and is administratively part of CALO. But 

the village’s history is intimately tied up with that 

of Ocracoke Village across the inlet, as well as with 

Shell Castle Island, a former commercial center 

in the inlet that now appears to be no more than 

an inconsequential pile of rubble owned by the 

National Audubon Society and maintained as a 

bird sanctuary.6 An understanding of the town’s 

history and significance, then, must place the 

village in its larger context and cannot rest simply 

in a literal reading of its physical remains, which 

are at best only suggestive of what once was an 

intensively developed area. 

It appears that, in fact, the fragmentary remains 

and administrative boundaries and the site’s 

present isolation have hindered understanding of 

the village’s eighteenth and nineteenth-century 

history. Additionally, thinking about the area’s 

history from a point of view that has defined 

historical frames of reference based almost 

entirely upon a modern idea of the “state of North 

Carolina” has produced many accounts that render 

Portsmouth as insignificant and isolated as it now 

appears. The 2007 entry on the Outer Banks in the 

Encyclopedia of North Carolina, for instance, notes 

that in the nineteenth century, “the Outer Banks 

6 Phillip Horne McGuinn, “Shell Castle, A North 

Carolina Entrepot, 1789–1820: An Historical and 

Archaeological Investigation” (M.A. thesis, East 

Carolina University, 2000), 350.

remained remote, physically and culturally isolated 

from mainland North Carolina.”7 Portsmouth plays 

only a bit part in most conventional histories of 

the state, which focus on the Outer Banks mainly 

in their geophysical capacity as “barrier islands”: 

barriers to a state’s settlement, trade, commerce, 

travel, and development. 

 There is no doubt that in some senses the Outer 

Banks were, from North Carolina’s standpoint, 

barriers. Forming a transportation bottleneck, 

they played a key role in keeping the state’s 

citizens comparatively poor and backward in the 

colonial and pre-Civil War periods. Waterborne 

transportation and commerce between the Atlantic 

ocean and the inner coast of the colony or state 

were always difficult, although the fact that the 

Delaware River often froze over for several weeks 

each winter, excluding ocean commerce from 

Philadelphia, reminds us that eighteenth-century 

travel and commerce in other regions of the 

country were also plagued with problems.8

At any rate, a narrative of North Carolina history 

that emphasizes how the state overcame the 

problems presented by the Outer Banks seems 

mostly to cast the area as “distant” and, as progress 

came in the form for example of new railroads, 

increasingly irrelevant. In this telling, the important 

events of early nineteenth-century history are 

those that improved trade and transportation and 

shifted the storyline away from the islands where—

paradoxically—the state’s post-European contact 

story began. 

Part of the key to this familiar narrative of the 

Outer Banks as distant and irrelevant was the 

growth of the port at Wilmington, already North 

Carolina’s leading port by the time of the American 

Revolution, whose huge traffic in naval stores 

peaked in the 1840s. Wilmington was more than 

150 miles south of Portsmouth and more than 30 

miles inland from the ocean, but it was located 

on the Cape Fear River, the state’s only river that 

7 Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 858.

8 Alice Barnwell Keith, “Three North Carolina Blount 

Brothers in Business and Politics, 1783–1812” (Ph.D. 

diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 

1941), 125–126.

Figure 2-1. Washington Roberts House, Portsmouth. Jones, 

Washington Roberts House, 21.
National Park Service 33

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

empties directly into the ocean.9 The famous 

Wilmington & Weldon Railroad, completed in 

1840, further marginalized the Outer Banks. 

As it ran from Wilmington to Weldon (near the 

Virginia border) by way of Goldsboro and Rocky 

Mount, the railroad reinforced early transportation 

patterns in North Carolina that tended to run 

north-south rather than east-west and cut the 

Outer Banks out of the state’s main transport 

routes.10

Perhaps the best port near Core Banks, meanwhile, 

was Beaufort, established in 1715 as one of 

five official colonial ports of entry for customs 

collection during the eighteenth century. Its easy 

access to the ocean made it, according to Cecelski, 

“the most sea oriented port on the North Carolina 

coast” in the antebellum period, but its lack of 

river or railroad connections to the interior meant 

that its overall importance to North Carolina trade 

dwindled over the eighteenth century and did not 

recover in the nineteenth.11

These elements form the core of what is by now 

the customary narrative of the history of North 

Carolina, neatly summarized in the 1963 edition of 

Hugh Talmage Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome’s 

venerable North Carolina: The History of a Southern 

State. North Carolina in the early nineteenth 

century, the authors noted, “was so undeveloped, 

backward, and indifferent to its condition that it 

was often called . . . the ‘Rip Van Winkle’ state.”12

9 Tycho de Boer, Nature, Business, and Community in 

North Carolina’s Green Swamp (Gainesville: University 

Press of Florida, 2008), 55–62; Powell, Encyclopedia 

of North Carolina, 1206–1207; Alan Watson, 

Wilmington: Port of North Carolina (Columbia: 

University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 3.

10 Powell, North Carolina through Four Centuries, 

261–263. The railroad also brought the demise of 

Archibald Murphey’s broad internal improvements 

program, designed to improve transportation and 

communication throughout the state and to end its 

commercial isolation. The program ultimately failed 

for a number of reasons, including the chartering 

of the railroad in 1834, which made water-based 

transportation far less attractive.

11 Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, 156; Merrens, 

Colonial North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century, 

142–172. Cecelski does note Beaufort’s connections to 

New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the 

Caribbean and says that “Beaufort’s prosperity rose 

and fell with shipping . . . and with the fortunes of a 

number of newly emerging fisheries for salted mullet, 

oysters, and terrapin.” There was also considerable 

shipbuilding in the town (discussed in a subsequent 

chapter).

12 Lefler and Newsome, North Carolina, 298.

The lack of adequate ports to accommodate 

oceangoing travel and trade was largely to blame 

for this state of affairs. “A pitiless nature,” Lefler 

and Newsome lamented, “had all but isolated 

North Carolina from the seaways of the world.” 

The coast was “the playground of tempests and 

the graveyard of ships. Sand bars, penetrated 

only by inlets too shallow for ocean-borne trade, 

made commerce hazardous, inconvenient, and 

expensive. On the entire coast, there was not a 

good natural port or harbor.” 13

William S. Powell, the dean of North Carolina 

historians and author or editor of numerous 

basic reference books about the state, followed 

the same line of argument in his 1989 overview, 

North Carolina through Four Centuries. The book 

featured an aerial photograph of the Outer Banks 

on its cover, signaling that perhaps it would place 

the Outer Banks at the center of at least parts 

of the story. But the book’s index contains only 

four references to the Outer Banks (plus three 

additional references to Ocracoke or its inlet). 

Powell, too, characterized the coast’s role in North 

Carolina’s history mainly as a geographic “barrier” 

to the state’s development.14

A more recent comprehensive history of the 

state, Milton Ready’s The Tar Heel State (2005), 

does not index the term “Outer Banks” at all, but 

includes discussion of the “barrier islands” in 

the usual opening chapter on geography’s role in 

state history. After making a cameo appearance 

as the site of early exploration and the lost 

colony, the Banks largely disappear until the 

discussion of early nineteenth-century efforts 

at “internal improvements” aimed at facilitating 

transportation and commerce.15 Similarly, in his 

recently published North Carolina: Change and 

Tradition in a Southern State (2009), William A. 

Link presses the same narrative: the Outer Banks 

was a place of failure and a hindrance to North 

Carolina’s development. Site of the lost colony and 

the “Graveyard of the Atlantic,” foothold for Union 

control of the coast in the Civil War, the Banks had 

to await the dawn of the twentieth century for its 

one moment of triumph, the successful flight of 

13 Ibid., 306.

14 Powell, North Carolina Through Four Centuries.

15 Milton Ready, The Tar Heel State: A History of North 

Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina 

Press, 2005).
34 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

the Wright Brothers’ fragile craft at Kitty Hawk in 

1903.16

Part of the problem with all of these accounts, 

of course, is that they view North Carolina 

from a comparative perspective, duly noting the 

state’s inability to develop a busy and successful 

Atlantic port on the scale of Boston, New York, 

Philadelphia, Norfolk, or Charleston. It is clear 

that as of the late colonial period, North Carolina’s 

export and import tonnage through her own ports 

paled in comparison to these other ports. In 1768–

1769, for instance, nearly 34,000 tons of exports 

cleared the port of Boston, 26,000 tons the port of 

Norfolk, and 31,500 tons the port of Charleston. 

All of North Carolina’s ports together, meanwhile, 

exported only 23,000 tons. As much as one-half 

of North Carolina’s own exports in this period, in 

fact, left the colony overland, and most of that was 

eventually shipped from ports in Virginia or South 

Carolina. A similar pattern prevailed with imports 

as well.17

Reframing Ocracoke Inlet Within 

an Atlantic World Perspective

While there is no denying that the presence of 

the Outer Banks and the lack of good ports and 

easily navigable east-west waterways profoundly 

shaped North Carolina’s early settlement, trade, 

and travel patterns, looking at the Outer Banks 

only from a comparative perspective or from the 

perspective of the rest of North Carolina does not 

do justice either to the early significance of the site 

or to its history as residents of Portsmouth—both 

black and white—experienced it during the town’s 

zenith. Such accounts fail to see that while the rest 

of North Carolina may have been comparatively 

isolated because of the Outer Banks, Portsmouth 

was during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth 

centuries one of the least-isolated parts of the 

state. By virtue of its proximity to Ocracoke Inlet, 

the major passageway through the barrier islands 

from the colonial period until the mid-nineteenth 

century, Portsmouth was a vibrant gateway from 

North Carolina to what historians have come 

rather recently to see as a wider “Atlantic world” 

in which connections fostered by ocean travel and 

16 William Link, North Carolina: Change and Tradition in 

a Southern State (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 

2009), 4–7, 16–24, 140, 192–194, 285.

17 Watson, Wilmington: Port of North Carolina, 11–12.

commerce often had greater significance than state 

or political boundaries. 

To understand Portsmouth, then, we must look at 

it on its own terms in relation to North Carolina 

and, in this wider Atlantic context, as belonging to 

a border region—a region in continual political, 

economic, and cultural dialogue with both the 

colony or state to the west and the larger watery 

world to the north, south, and east. That dialogue 

included the mainland ports of Edenton, New 

Bern, Beaufort, Bath, Washington, and Plymouth 

in North Carolina; the American coastal ports 

of Savannah, Charleston, Norfolk, Baltimore, 

Philadelphia, New York, and New England; the 

expansionist nations of western Europe; and the 

slave, rum, and sugarcane-trading islands of the 

Caribbean. 

Changing our perspective and point of reference 

will allow us to see Portsmouth’s story in a new 

light. Writing about seventeenth-century Virginia, 

April Lee Hatfield explains the transformative 

effect of an Atlantic world point of view: 

Far more than the historians who have 

studied them, seventeenth-century Virginians 

understood that they lived in a world much 

larger than the Chesapeake. Neglecting or 

underestimating the firm links between 

colonies, their impact on Virginia’s history, and 

their relevance for understanding seventeenthcentury English colonists’ perceptions of their 

world, most historians have framed colonial 

history largely within political boundaries . . . . 

Such approaches fail to capture a dimension 

of colonial experience that was mobile, that 

crossed and recrossed the Atlantic Ocean 

and the colonies’ political boundaries, that 

entailed the adoption of a transatlantic and 

transnational sense of geography among 

colonial ‘adventurers,’ that faced outward 

toward the seas and ships at least as intently 

as it looked toward westward and interior 

expansion, and that took for granted the 

circulation of people from diverse ethic and 

national points of origin and the ideas and 

information they brought with them as they 

traveled.18

18 April Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial 

Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: 

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 2–3.
National Park Service 35

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

Among historians, the concept of the “Atlantic 

world” has emerged and gained prominence 

(especially from the 1990s on) as a powerful 

analytical paradigm. Scholars in Harvard 

University’s influential International Seminar 

on the History of the Atlantic World (convened 

by Bernard Bailyn for nearly fifteen years now) 

regularly argue that not only can one gain fresh 

and essential perspectives on local, regional, and 

national histories by linking them with the larger 

Atlantic world, but also that these histories cannot 

be adequately understood in the absence of such 

links.19

Closer to home, the College of Charleston’s 

Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program 

(CLAW, also founded nearly fifteen years ago) is 

directly illuminating for the Cape Lookout region. 

CLAW takes a cue from historian Peter H. Wood’s 

observation (made nearly thirty-five years ago) that 

the lowcountry coast of the Carolinas constituted 

“a thin neck in the hourglass of the Afro-American 

past‚ a place where individual grains from all along 

the West African coast had been funneled together‚ 

only to be fanned out across the American 

landscape with the passage of time.” Woods’s early 

argument has helped inspire such recent work 

as University of North Carolina professor Peter 

Coclanis’s edited collection The Atlantic Economy 

During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

(2005) and Bradford Wood’s This Remote Part 

of the World: Regional Formation in Lower Cape 

Fear, North Carolina, 1725–1775 (2004)—the 

latter based partly upon computer analysis of large 

bodies of disparate data. Both of these studies 

(published in CLAW’s own series) and many 

related ones are pertinent to the history that CALO 

is called upon to understand and interpret for the 

public.

 One of the best summaries of how the concept 

of the Atlantic world has been developed and 

deployed may be found in Georgetown historian 

Alison Games’s article “Atlantic History: 

Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” 

which appeared in 2006 in the American Historical 

Review. Games identifies several sources of energy 

for the expansion of Atlantic frameworks as an 

19 Bernard Bailyn, “Atlantic History Seminar,” http://

www.fas.harvard.edu/~atlantic/. See also Timothy 

D. Hall and T. Breen, Colonial America in an Atlantic 

World: A Story of Creative Interaction (New York: 

Pearson Longman, 2004).

avenue to new historical understanding, especially 

the burgeoning scholarship on the African diaspora 

and transatlantic slave-trading networks and new 

studies of colonial and imperial societies in the 

Atlantic (which benefit from the fact that their 

writers are usually well trained in the use of sources 

in several languages and locales).20

Games argues that effective Atlantic history must 

focus on the multiple means of exchange and 

interaction that oceangoing transit enabled, in 

particular the movement of goods, peoples, and 

ideas.21 Observing that Atlantic history can entail 

a variety of approaches, from large-scale holistic 

studies that investigate entire Atlantic systems 

to small studies investigating a single location 

in an Atlantic framework, Games advocates a 

flexible definition of Atlantic history within which 

historians “work on geographic units that make 

sense for the questions they ask.”22 Additionally, 

she cautions that the extreme variety of particular 

stories within the wider Atlantic region often 

defy neat categorization or identification as a 

unitary “Atlantic culture” or “system.” Effects 

and outcomes in one area or for one people, she 

argues, may have been very different from those in 

another.23

Similarly, although Atlantic world scholars 

generally concur that the concept begins to 

become useful in studying the post-1492 period 

with the extension of the European imperial 

reach into the western hemisphere, Games finds 

less agreement about when the end point for 

the idea’s usefulness occurs. The period during 

which a number of (though certainly not all) 

European colonies attained their independence 

provides one convenient ending point (ca. 1825), 

while the (generally later) end of the slave trade 

in most places provides another. Indeed, from 

the standpoint of global interchange, many of the 

trends identified in Atlantic studies persist today.24

Most important for our purposes is Games’s larger 

point: “The Atlantic, in short, was linked in ways 

that disregard the modern political boundaries 

20 Alison Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, 

Challenges, and Opportunities,” American Historical 

Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 743–744.

21 Ibid., 755–756.

22 Ibid., 746–749 (quotation, 748).

23 Ibid., 751.

24 Ibid., 747, 751–752.
36 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

that have defined departmental field structures 

and specializations. Atlantic history ultimately 

privileges and requires history without borders.”25

Good Atlantic history, Games argues, would “put 

the ocean at the center,” since people “moved 

around the Atlantic, and commodities did as well. 

The ocean was not only the vehicle of circulation, 

but also the unique space within which goods and 

people were created, defined, and transformed.”26

Although the “Atlantic world” perspective is by 

now mature enough within historical studies to 

have begun to merit its own reconsiderations, 

critiques, and sub-arenas of interest, it remains 

a useful perspective for a reconsideration of the 

history of the communities of North Carolina’s 

barrier islands.27

A “History Without Borders” for 

the Ocracoke Inlet Communities

What would a “history without borders” that 

“puts the ocean at the center” and focuses on 

the movement of people and goods look like for 

eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Core 

Banks, Ocracoke Inlet, Ocracoke village, and 

Portsmouth? What if Portsmouth and the inlet 

were placed at the center of the story, rather than 

being viewed from a twentieth-century vantage 

point as off-center and out of the way? 

For one thing, this new perspective requires 

simultaneous attention to at least three contexts: 

the North Carolina context, the intercolonial 

and interstate context of North America, and 

the wider Atlantic context. Extending April Lee 

Hatfield’s argument about Virginia, it is clear 

that boundaries of the world the residents of 

Portsmouth inhabited encompassed and were 

affected by developments in North Carolina’s key 

inland port cities, especially Edenton, New Bern, 

and Washington; the state’s developing deepwater 

25 Ibid., 749.

26 Ibid., 754–755.

27 For a recent set of essays critically evaluating the state 

of Atlantic world historiography, see Jack P. Greene 

and Philip D. Morgan, Atlantic History: A Critical 

Appraisal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 

An excellent recent book that productively employs 

an Atlantic world perspective to reinterpret the 

history of the late seventeenth and early eighteenthcentury settlements in the Albemarle region of North 

Carolina is Noeleen McIlvenna’s A Very Mutinous 

People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660–1713

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 

port at Wilmington on the Cape Fear River; other 

American ports, especially in Philadelphia, New 

York, and New England; and the West Indian 

and British ports that were the destination of 

much of the colony’s and the state’s further-flung 

international trade.28

Despite the fact that seaborne commerce from 

North Carolina was anemic compared with either 

Virginia’s or South Carolina’s robust oceanborne 

trade, it played a crucial role in North Carolina’s 

late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century 

economy. North Carolinians were hardly, as 

Lefler and Newsome posited, “all but isolated . . 

. from the seaways of the world.”29 Rather, North 

Carolina experienced an economic and population 

boom beginning in the early eighteenth century 

that brought into clear focus the need to better 

manage the colony’s waterborne commerce, which 

was growing briskly by century’s end, especially 

after American independence.30 The northern 

Core Banks, Ocracoke Inlet, and the town of 

Portsmouth played a key role in this unfolding 

drama. 

The “lost colony” notwithstanding, North 

Carolina’s earliest successful European settlers 

migrated south overland from Virginia into the 

Albermarle region of what became after 1663 the 

separate Carolina colony, control of which King 

Charles II bestowed upon eight Lords Proprietors. 

For years, the Lords Proprietors mostly ignored 

Albemarle and focused their development efforts 

on growing the more promising deepwater port of 

Charles Town (now Charleston, South Carolina). In 

the late 1680s, the Proprietors separated Carolina 

administratively into two parts, North Carolina, 

based in Albemarle, and South Carolina, based 

in Charles Town. By the early eighteenth century, 

instability and conflict were widespread, both 

within the North Carolina colony and between 

colonists and the weak and ineffective Proprietors, 

on the one hand, and the native peoples who still 

occupied much of the coastal land, on the other. 

European settlement was spreading southward and 

28 Merrens, Colonial North Carolina in the Eighteenth 

Century, 147–154; Joseph Goldenberg, “Names and 

Numbers: Statistical Notes on Some Port Records of 

Colonial North Carolina,” American Neptune 29, no. 3 

(July 1969): 155.

29 Lefler and Newsome, North Carolina, 306.

30 Edwin L. Combs, “Trading in Lubberland: Maritime 

Commerce in Colonial North Carolina,” North 

Carolina Historical Review 80, no. 1 (2003): 1.
National Park Service 37

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

new towns were founded at Bath (1705) and New 

Bern (1710).31 But Albemarle, centered around 

its growing commercial and political center in 

Edenton, remained the political and economic 

power center for the colony until well into the 

nineteenth century, when 1830s constitutional 

reform finally shifted political power to the west.32

With the native peoples decimated, North 

Carolina saw rapid population growth (both white 

and black) and economic growth through the 

eighteenth century. The white population, which 

number 4,000 in 1675, exploded to 40,000 by 1730, 

and by 1770, to perhaps 185,000.33 Migrants from 

Virginia continued to populate North Carolina’s 

coastal plain, where settlement spread south and 

west from Albermarle. Tobacco culture expanded 

through this region. Meanwhile, rice and indigo 

plantations grew up in the southern coastal Cape 

Fear valley region, where South Carolinians moved 

north. Slavery grew entrenched as well, especially 

as the naval stores industry began to thrive in the 

Cape Fear valley region, and the slave population 

of the colony increased from about 1,000 in 1705 to 

about 15,000 by 1754 and 40,000 by 1767. In 1790, 

the slave population stood at 100,000, compared 

to a white population of 288,000.34 A dramatic part 

of the colony’s eighteenth-century growth was 

concentrated in the “backcountry,” or piedmont, 

region, where land was inexpensive and easy 

to get. Thousands of Scotch-Irish and German 

immigrants rushed southward from Pennsylvania 

along the Great Wagon Road, and North Carolina’s 

backcountry population spiked after the 1740s.35

 Towns, of which there had been none in the 

colony’s early years, grew in tandem with 

population. On the coast, after Bath and New Bern 

came Beaufort (1715), Edenton (in the Albermarle 

region, 1722), and Wilmington (1739–1740). New 

31 Link, North Carolina, 25–40.

32 Elizabeth A. Fenn and Joe A. Mobley, The Way We 

Lived in North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of 

North Carolina Press, 2003), 39–41; Powell, North 

Carolina through Four Centuries, 267–281.

33 Link, North Carolina, 53.

34 Ibid., 47–50 ,76.

35 Ibid., 71–79. See also Marjolene Kars, Breaking 

Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in PreRevolutionary North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University 

of North Carolina Press, 2002).

counties and backcountry towns soon followed, as 

the piedmont land boom peaked.36

The village of Portsmouth came into being as 

part of this growth spurt, and in some respects 

its fortunes waxed and waned with both the 

geophysical changes along the Outer Banks and the 

evolving demographics and trade patterns of the 

rest of North Carolina. It was part of a developing 

system of managing the colony’s (and then the 

state’s) expanding networks of waterborne 

commerce.37 As long as the northeastern 

(Albemarle) region of North Carolina still held 

power and economic position, Portsmouth played 

a crucial role as a main point of connection from 

North Carolina through the Outer Banks to the 

world beyond. But when other canals and inlets 

opened up, the port of Wilmington became 

predominant; as a result, population and trade 

shifted south and west and Portsmouth declined. 

Its fortunes tell us much about the changes in 

North Carolina as a whole. 

Oceangoing commerce throughout most of the 

colonial era was organized through ports of 

entry, outposts of the British colonial customs 

service where government inspectors regulated 

colonial commerce through enforcement of the 

British Navigation Acts—checking ships’ cargo 

and collecting appropriate import fees. North 

Carolina had five ports of entry: Port Brunswick in 

the town of Brunswick (the only port with direct 

ocean access, serving the Cape Fear area), Port 

Beaufort in Beaufort, Port Bath in the town of Bath 

(established in 1715 and handling what was already 

becoming extensive traffic through Ocracoke Inlet), 

Port Roanoke in Edenton (serving the Albemarle 

region), and Port Currituck (serving traffic through 

the Currituck Inlet, but in fact a “port in little more 

than name” because the inlet was so shoaled by the 

36 Link, North Carolina, 50; Powell, Encyclopedia of 

North Carolina, 1206.

37 Combs, “Trading in Lubberland,” 1.
38 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

time the port opened that only small vessels could 

navigate it).38

As early as the 1730s, Royal Governor Burrington 

wrote his superiors in Great Britain that 

“Curratuck Inlett is shut up and Roanock [Inlet] 

is so dangerous that few people care to use it but 

go round to Ocacock.”39 Thus, regardless of the 

presence of the two far northern ports, from 

the mid-eighteenth century through the midnineteenth (when the hurricane of 1846 opened 

Hatteras and Oregon inlets to the north), most of 

the oceangoing traffic bound for parts of coastal 

North Carolina north of Beaufort entered through 

Ocracoke Inlet.40 What this meant in practical 

38 Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 899; Stick, 

The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 25–26; Thomas 

Barrow, Trade and Empire: The British Customs Service 

in Colonial America, 1660–1775 (Cambridge, MA: 

Harvard University Press, 1967), 271–272; Mrs. James 

Sherman Pitkin, Mrs. Harry Van Nuys Wade, and 

National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 

Three Centuries of Custom Houses (Washington, DC: 

National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 

1972), xvii; Combs, “Trading in Lubberland,” 13; Alan 

D. Watson, “Pilots and Pilotage in North Carolina to 

the Civil War,” American Neptune 55, no. 2 (1995): 

145–146.

39 Letter from George Burrington to the Board of Trade 

of Great Britain, September 4, 1731, in Colonial and 

State Records of North Carolina, vol. 3, ed. William 

L. Saunders and Walter Clark (Raleigh, NC: P.M. Hale, 

1886–1914), 202–210. 

40 The configuration of the various Outer Banks inlets 

will be taken up in detail in Chapter 3. Gary S. 

Dunbar, Geographical History of the Carolina Banks: 

Technical Report No. 8, Part A (Baton Rouge: Coastal 

Studies Institute, Louisiana State University, 1956), 68; 

Watson, “Pilots and Pilotage,” 143–144.

terms, according to David Stick, was that as of 

the early eighteenth century, “four-fifths of the 

inhabitants of North Carolina were settled in the 

area served by Ocracoke Inlet.”41 And Ocracoke 

Inlet’s importance grew as population and power 

shifted south and west in the late eighteenth and 

nineteenth centuries.42

In the late eighteenth century, additional inland 

port towns developed that relied on traffic through 

Ocracoke Inlet. Washington, on the Pamlico River, 

was chartered in 1782 and eventually took over 

most Pamlico Sound trade from the older town 

of Bath. Plymouth and Camden, meanwhile, 

became important ports of entry for the Albemarle 

region and Elizabeth City became a trading center. 

Further south, Wilmington (which emerged under 

that name in 1739–1740) had already grown to a 

center of interior trade, becoming North Carolina’s 

main deepwater port and eclipsing Brunswick 

Town by the Revolutionary era.43

With the development of new towns and the 

political reorganization that followed the creation 

of the United States after the American Revolution, 

port districts included Wilmington (formerly 

Brunswick), New Bern, Ocracoke, Washington 

(formerly Bath), Edenton (formerly Roanoke), 

Camden, Plymouth, and, for a brief time, 

Swansborough. Wilmington dominated, handling 

80 percent of North Carolina’s exports in 1815.44

Although its importance declined with the rise 

of Wilmington and the opening of other inlets to 

the north, Ocracoke Inlet reigned for over one 

hundred years in the eighteenth and nineteenth 

centuries as the central point of connection 

between North Carolina and the Atlantic world. 

This fact, of course, explains the founding, growth, 

and development of the villages of Portsmouth 

and Ocracoke and the surrounding facilities 

for managing shipping traffic in and out of this 

problematic passageway to and from the Pamlico 

Sound. Ocracoke Inlet, an engineer wrote from 

Portsmouth in 1835, “partakes of the character 

of the mouth of a river; and connecting the vast 

41 Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 34.

42 Watson, “Pilots and Pilotage,” 144.

43 Ibid., 144–145.

44 Watson, “Pilots and Pilotage,” 145–146; Byron Logan, 

“An Historical Geographic Study of North Carolina 

Ports” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at 

Chapel Hill, 1956), 65.

Figure 2-2. North Carolina’s colonial ports of entry. Map by 

Mark Anderson Moore. Combs, “Trading in Lubberland,” 3. 
National Park Service 39

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

waters of the Albemarle, Croatan, Roanoke, and 

Pamlico sounds, with the ocean, its character is 

also that of straits connecting two seas.”45

Portsmouth was founded in 1753, when North 

Carolina’s colonial Assembly passed the act 

chartering and laying out a “Town on Core Banks, 

near Ocacock Inlet, in Carteret County, and for 

appointing Commissioners for completing the Fort 

at or near the same place.” The town and fort grew 

up slowly, mirrored on the other side of the inlet 

by the little village of Ocracoke, at which pilots had 

first been stationed in 1734. A small community 

originally known as “Pilot Town” was growing 

there by the 1770s; perhaps seventy-five people 

may have resided in it by 1790.46

Portsmouth and Ocracoke were never great ports 

of entry. They were too far from population 

centers and didn’t have the requisite deepwater 

45 See Alexander J. Swift’s report from Portsmouth, 

Ocracoke Inlet, North Carolina, dated September 30, 

1835, in Cass, et al., Annual Report of the Secretary 

of War, Showing the Condition of That Department 

in 1835, 24th Cong., 1st sess., 30 November 1835, serial 

ASP020 Mil.aff.613, Doc. 613.

46 “An Act for appointing and laying out a Town on 

Core Banks, near Ocacock Inlet, in Carteret County, 

and for appointing Commissioners for completing 

the Fort at or near the same place,” Acts of the North 

Carolina General Assembly, 1753, in Colonial and 

State Records, vol. 25, 252; Stick, The Outer Banks of 

North Carolina, 300–301; Olson, Portsmouth Village 

Historic Resource Study, 17–18; Alton Ballance, 

Ocracokers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 

Press, 1989), 13–29.

harbors. Rather, these villages served as transit 

points from which knowledgeable people assisted 

ships in navigating the treacherous inlet and 

sailing back and forth to their inland destinations. 

This assistance took two main forms during 

Portsmouth’s heyday from the late eighteenth 

to the mid-nineteenth century: piloting—taking 

the helm of ships in order to guide them across 

Ocracoke’s hazards and navigate them to their 

inland destinations—and lightering—temporarily 

unloading cargo to lighten ships enough so they 

could cross the inlet’s shoals, be reloaded, and 

proceed into the sound or the ocean. Kenneth 

Burke argued in his still-useful study of Portsmouth 

that lightering was the “one word which can 

explain the development of Portsmouth.” In a 

similar vein, it might have been said that piloting 

was the word for Ocracoke.47

Piloting and lightering were crucial because of the 

special difficulties ships faced in approaching and 

navigating Ocracoke Inlet during its eighteenth 

and nineteenth-century heyday. Two key physical 

features were the “bar,” a sandbar that stood 

between the inlet and the ocean, and the “Swash,” 

a sandy shoal that stretched across the inlet’s 

channels at the point where the inlet joined 

Pamlico Sound. Ships entering the inlet from the 

ocean would pass over the bar and be directed 

through one of three possible channels—Teache’s 

Hole, which allowed approach to Ocracoke but 

was, in this period, only passable by smaller vessels, 

or the deeper Old Ship or Wallace’s channels 

leading into Pamlico Sound. (From the 1790s to 

the 1820s, most vessels entering the inlet used Old 

Ship or Wallace’s Channel.) After passing through 

these channels, ships headed inland would have 

to navigate over the Swash, where the water was 

considerably shallower than it had been at the 

bar. Vessels with a draft greater than 7 to 9 feet 

would have to be lightered in order to clear the 

Swash; Olson’s 1982 study noted that larger ships 

that were able to clear the bar often did not even 

attempt to negotiate the Swash. Instead, their cargo 

47 Holland, Survey, 42; Watson, “Pilots and Pilotage,” 

147–148; Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, 47–48; 

Burke, The History of Portsmouth, North Carolina, 9; 

Ballance, Ocracokers, 17–23; Stick, The Outer Banks of 

North Carolina, 300–301.

Figure 2-3. Map of Ocracoke, 1795, by Jonathan Price. 

From North Carolina Historical Review 3 (1936): 633.
40 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

would be transferred to smaller craft for its journey 

inland.48

The configuration and depths of the various 

channels and sandbars changed over time, but 

these variations did not alter the fact that getting 

cargo through such a challenging inlet was 

expensive and time-consuming. An 1819 report 

for state government noted that the voyage from 

the head of the Albemarle Sound (Roanoke River) 

to Ocracoke was “thought to be equal to a voyage 

from Ocracoke to New York or to the WestIndies.”49 Once they arrived at the Inlet, ships 

sometimes had to wait at anchor at the Swash, 

at times for as long as five to ten days, for their 

cargoes to be unloaded and reloaded. This extra 

work and delay, which an 1827 report estimated 

at an average of five days, added to the cost of 

doing business: expenses mounted in the form of 

lightering and piloting fees, wages, food and care 

for sailors, and insurance to cover the increased 

risk of spoilage or storm damage to ships and 

cargo. Before a customs officer was stationed there 

in 1806, the process also opened the door for illegal 

trade as commodities could be unloaded at the bar 

and never reloaded for transit to the designated 

port of entry for customs collection.50

Despite the troubles, a tremendous amount of 

shipping passed through Ocracoke Inlet during 

this period. Two reliable estimates from reports 

created at Congressional request give a sense of 

the magnitude of the traffic: In 1787, nearly 700 

vessels “entered and cleared through the Inlet,” 

compared with 218 that cleared Port Brunswick on 

the Cape Fear. By 1836–1837, according to an 1842 

48 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 

14–17; McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 11–12, 17–22. Olson 

explains, based on research in several sources, that 

between 1730 and 1800 vessels that drew from 13 

to 14 feet of water at low tide could pass over the 

bar; the water deepened a bit for a short while after 

1800. By 1833, however, it had dropped to below 10 

feet. The Swash, meanwhile, averaged 6 to 8.5 feet 

deep before dropping to a low of 3 feet. Similar data 

is provided in McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 11–12, 15–19. 

See also Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, 50

49 Archibald De Bow Murphey, The Papers of Archibald 

D. Murphey, ed. William Henry Hoyt (Raleigh, NC: 

E.M. Uzzell & Co. State Printers, 1914), 125.

50 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 

18; Burke, The History of Portsmouth, North Carolina, 

9; Bland Simpson, The Inner Islands: A Carolinian’s 

Sound Country Chronicle (Chapel Hill: University of 

North Carolina Press, 2006), 81; Keith, “Three North 

Carolina Blount Brothers,” 125; McGuinn, “Shell 

Castle,” 61–72.

Congressional report, approximately 1400 ships 

passed through Ocracoke Inlet in a year “bound to 

various ports.”51

Trade Patterns at Ocracoke Inlet 

in the Late Colonial Period

But what ports were they bound for? For years, the 

main source of information about the contours of 

late colonial trade in North Carolina was Charles 

Christopher Crittenden’s The Commerce of North 

Carolina, 1763–1789 (1936).52 Recent research in 

British customs returns records that Crittenden 

overlooked, however, has enabled a more nuanced 

understanding of the Atlantic trade systems in 

which North Carolina was becoming embedded by 

the end of the colonial period.53

Edwin Combs’s 2003 article “Trading in 

Lubberland” details trade routes and goods 

exchanged through each of North Carolina’s five 

ports of entry during the late colonial period. 

Because nearly all of the cargo brought into 

Roanoke, Beaufort, Bath, and Currituck had to 

enter through Ocracoke Inlet, this research gives 

a clear picture of the connections the residents of 

Portsmouth in that period must have had to the 

world beyond. Imports to Port Roanoke (Edenton), 

the largest and most active port, generally followed 

a pattern of coastwise trade in North America, with 

29 percent of the tonnage arriving there between 

1768 and 1772 coming from Massachusetts alone. 

One merchant, indeed, quipped that anyone 

hoping to develop a profitable trade in tobacco 

from this region needed to “become Bostanized 

or relinquish Dealing.”54 Meanwhile, another 

27 percent of imports into Port Roanoke in the 

same period came from the West Indies, with 

smaller amounts from Great Britain and southern 

Europe. Similar import patterns prevailed at the 

port through 1774.55 Exports from Port Roanoke 

51 McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 9; House Committee on 

Commerce, Marine Hospital – Ocracoke, N.C. (To 

accompany bill H.R. no. 512), 27th Cong., 2nd sess., 

24 June 1842, H. Rept. 889, serial 410; Watson, 

Wilmington, 32.

52 Charles Crittenden, The Commerce of North Carolina, 

1763–1789 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 

1936).

53 Much of the following discussion is based on the 

new research presented in Combs, “Trading in 

Lubberland.”

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid., 8.
National Park Service 41

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

between 1786 and 1774, meanwhile, seem to have 

followed similar patterns, with approximately 35 

percent headed for other North American coastal 

ports, primarily in Massachusetts; another third 

headed for Europe; and the remainder bound for 

the West Indies.56

The other major colonial port to which cargo 

transported through Ocracoke arrived was the 

Port of Bath. Combs’s research reveals that trade 

patterns there differed somewhat from those 

at Port Roanoke. A much greater percentage 

(62 percent) of imports arrived from North 

American ports, with half of those coming from 

New England, especially Massachusetts. Thirty 

percent of imports, meanwhile, came from the 

West Indies, while only a tiny percentage arrived 

from Great Britain. Forty-five percent of Bath’s 

exports, meanwhile, headed for the West Indies, 

with another 44 percent going to other North 

American ports (70 percent of that destined for 

Massachusetts). A modest 7 percent of exports 

were destined for Great Britain.57

Trade patterns at the colony’s smallest port and 

the other port most relevant to Ocracoke, Port 

Currituck, followed similar lines, although they 

were even more constricted to the coastwise 

trade (the source of 86 percent of imports here, 

the largest share of which came from the middle 

colonies). The bulk of the remaining imports 

arrived from the West Indies, while transatlantic 

imports were rare. A majority of exports were also 

bound for North America, primarily New York and 

56 Ibid., 8–10.

57 Ibid., 11–12.

Philadelphia, with most of the rest headed for the 

West Indies.58

What kinds of goods were coming and going 

through Ocracoke Inlet in this period? British 

textiles and manufactured household goods (“iron 

pots, frying pans, and skillets,” for instance) topped 

every merchant’s inventory list. Food items such as 

sugar, molasses, tea, rum, wine, salt, chocolate, and 

various spices were also prevalent. The colony’s 

exports varied from port to port, depending on the 

products that were most prominent near each port. 

Commonly exported products included timber 

products (tar, pitch, turpentine, lumber), deerskins, 

corn and livestock, and tobacco. The timber 

products and naval stores export trade, however, 

centered on Port Brunswick, whose exports did 

not flow through Ocracoke but instead went 

directly to the Atlantic. For the ports most closely 

tied to Ocracoke, major exports included tobacco, 

corn, cheese, fish, deerskins, lumber, and various 

other produce.59

The story of individual merchants in this period 

supports the general picture of trade. Rhode 

Island Jewish merchant Aaron Lopez, for instance, 

launched his ships on thirty-seven voyages to 

North Carolina between 1761 and 1775. His 

vessels, bound for New Bern, Edenton, or 

Wilmington, brought New England provisions, 

including cranberries and rum, finished goods 

from London, and New England finished goods 

(such as Windsor Chairs) to North Carolina to 

exchange for naval stores which were, in turn, 

58 Ibid., 12.

59 Ibid., 13.

Figure 2-4. North Carolina Import and Export Tonnage, 1768–1793. Combs, “Trading in Lubberland,” 4.
42 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

exchanged for English goods or pork, herring, 

or lumber products such as staves to trade in the 

West Indies. Lopez’s efforts, although not entirely 

successful, typified North Carolina’s presence in 

larger trade networks as the colonial period wound 

down.60

Imports through Ocracoke could also have 

included slaves, especially in the mid-1780s, when 

records show slaves coming in from Charleston, 

other American states, the West Indies, and 

Africa. An unusually large number of Africans and 

American slaves from Charleston were brought 

into Roanoke and Edenton to work with Josiah 

Collins’s Lake Company in constructing the canal 

from Lake Phelps to the Scuppernong River.61

Throughout the eighteenth century, most of 

the more than 3,000 slaves brought into North 

Carolina came in with mixed cargo, imported by 

general merchants rather than by specialized slave 

traders. Most of the slaves, furthermore, arrived 

aboard smaller ships from other American colonies 

or states or from the West Indies. In comparison 

with other American colonies, in North Carolina , 

relatively few imported slaves came directly from 

west Africa. The trade in slaves seems to have 

ended by about 1790.62

Shipping traffic through Ocracoke Inlet, therefore, 

was quite vigorous in the late colonial period, and 

the little village of Portsmouth began to come 

into its own, although slowly. While Portsmouth 

was chartered by the colonial assembly in 1753, 

surveyor Jonathan Price reported as late as 1795 

that the town “does not appear to have ever been 

settled” and noted that no vestige then remained of 

the fort (Fort Granville) that had been constructed 

after 1756 and garrisoned from 1758 to 1764.63 Yet 

clearly, there was a town there by the time Price 

60 Virginia Bever Platt, “Tar, Staves, and New England 

Rum: The Trade of Aaron Lopez of Newport, Rhode 

Island, with Colonial North Carolina,” North Carolina 

Historical Review 48, no. 1 (1971): 1–22.

61 For further discussion of the use of slaves in building 

canals, see Chapter 5.

62 Walter E. Minchinton, “The Seaborne Slave Trade of 

North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 71, 

no. 1 (1994): 17, 24–25.

63 Jonathan Price, A Description of Occacock [ie. 

Ocracoke] Inlet: And of Its Coasts, Islands, Shoals, and 

Anchorages, with the Courses and Distances to and 

from the Most Remarkable Places, and Directions to 

Sail Over the Bar and Thro’ the Channels (Newbern 

[New Bern, NC]: Francois X. Martin, 1795), 627; Olson, 

Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, xxxx; 

Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 41–42.

arrived, because the 1790 census recorded 96 free 

white males, 92 free white females, 38 slaves, and 

3 free African Americans residing there.64 It is 

likely that many of the residents, both black and 

white, were involved in the work of piloting, for 

their activities were significant (and sometimes 

contentious and unregulated) enough to attract 

the attention of the colonial and state assemblies, 

which tried various tactics to regulate them from 

1715 into the nineteenth century.65 Portsmouth 

residents also engaged in some fishing and limited 

shipbuilding in the immediate post-Revolutionary 

period, and the village boasted a tavern then as 

well.66

After the Revolution: Shell Castle, 

John Gray Blount, and John 

Wallace

The Revolutionary and early post-Revolutionary 

years were initially disastrous for North Carolina’s 

economy. Recession descended in the 1780s, and 

exports declined. But commercial recovery came 

quickly, and by the late 1780s, the state’s shipping 

volume had exceeded pre-Revolution levels. In 

fact, on a tonnage basis, the volume of the state’s 

exports doubled by 1788 what they had been in 

1769, with Wilmington leading North Carolina 

ports in export tonnage. Although European 

wars in the 1790s and the War of 1812 continued 

to buffet American shipping and commerce, 

North Carolina trade (both foreign and domestic) 

continued to expand, although not as rapidly as 

that of other states.67

The post-Revolutionary commercial boom in 

North Carolina had large implications for the 

communities growing around Ocracoke Inlet, 

as the area drew the attention of one of North 

Carolina’s most active merchants and businessmen, 

John Gray Blount. Together with his on-site 

partner, Portsmouth pilot John Wallace, Blount 

64 Burke, The History of Portsmouth, North Carolina, 23.

65 Watson, “Pilots and Pilotage,” 146–154.

66 McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 39. According to the North 

Carolina Maritime History Council’s “List of Ships Built 

in North Carolina from Colonial Times to circa 1900” 

(http://www.ncmaritimehistory.org/) only four ships 

were ever constructed at Portsmouth (1826–1902). 

Except for one 75-ton vessel, all were small (between 

6 and 30 tons each, compared to an average of 

around 57 tons for all ships built in North Carolina).

67 Watson, Wilmington, 32, 40-45.
National Park Service 43

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

developed the small commercial entrepôt of Shell 

Castle Island after 1789. For more than twenty 

years after the Revolution, the trading empire 

of John Gray and Thomas Blount, Merchants, 

and their collaborative enterprise with Wallace 

at Shell Castle dominated shipping at Ocracoke. 

Portsmouth and Ocracoke, meanwhile, served 

as bedroom communities to this miniature 

commercial metropolis. 

The relationship of Portsmouth to the rise and 

fall of Shell Castle has not previously been well 

understood. Previous histories, including those 

commissioned by NPS, have tended to paint Shell 

Castle as an interesting but fleeting sidelight to the 

central story of Portsmouth. Burke characterized 

Shell Castle as a competitor to Porstmouth but 

dismissed it as a “tiny piece of sand.”68 Holland, 

meanwhile, spoke of Shell Castle mainly as 

“important to the economy of Portsmouth.”69 The 

1978 National Register nomination for Portsmouth 

Village included one short paragraph about Shell 

Castle, but did not clearly relate or integrate its 

story with that of Portsmouth.70

Even the well-researched 1982 Portsmouth 

Village HRS failed to connect several bits of 

information that help us recognize all that Shell 

Castle’s story could tell us about the history of 

the Ocracoke Inlet communities that were linked 

together by virtue of their relationship to this 

crucial trade passageway. The HRS, also focused 

on Portsmouth rather than on the whole complex 

of communities around the inlet, spoke of Shell 

Castle in terms that downplayed the human agency 

and entrepreneurial energy that the enterprise 

reflected, all of which stemmed from the inlet’s 

critical role in state commerce at a moment when 

the maritime economy was growing. 

Noting that the “tiny” port was built by John 

Gray Blount and John Wallace, the HRS stated 

that Shell Castle “owed its success entirely to the 

dramatic changes that had occurred to the inlet 

in the last decades of the 18th century.” Neither 

Blount nor Wallace nor their mainland or trade 

connections, nor the sociopolitical changes that 

may have made Shell Castle attractive are discussed 

in any detail. Meanwhile, a 1795 description of the 

68 Burke, The History of Portsmouth, North Carolina, 23.

69 Holland, Survey History, 42.

70 Cape Lookout National Seashore, Portsmouth Village 

Historic District: National Register Nomination.

Castle commissioned as part of a Blount-Wallace 

marketing campaign is misread as an objective 

description of the place. The study also presents 

the post-1812 decline of the Castle itself as more 

abrupt and less tied to the whole story of the inlet 

than it actually was.71 Even the 2007 Portsmouth 

Village Cultural Landscape Report underplays Shell 

Castle’s significance, dispatching its story—again 

as a side drama of mostly antiquarian interest that 

ended with John Wallace’s 1810 death—in a few 

short paragraphs.72

But new research (not incorporated into the 

2007 study, although it was available) suggests 

that this story should be reframed. Rather than 

being peripheral to Portsmouth, Shell Castle was 

central to the functioning of Ocracoke Inlet during 

the period in which the inlet was still the major 

outlet to the sea for much of North Carolina. Shell 

Castle is key evidence that we should think of 

Portsmouth’s history as part of the larger history 

of an inlet-related community that included 

Portmouth, Shell Castle, and Ocracoke. Nearly 

everything that went on at Portsmouth and Shell 

Castle during the heyday of shipping through 

Ocracoke Inlet testifies to the area’s essential 

connectedness to both a developing North Carolina 

and far-distant places throughout the wider 

Atlantic world.

Intensive primary and archaeological research 

conducted in the 1990s by Phillip McGuinn and 

summarized in his remarkably thorough 2000 East 

Carolina University master’s thesis, “Shell Castle, 

A North Carolina Entrepot, 1789–1820,” sheds 

considerable new light on the story of Ocracoke 

Inlet and Portsmouth as points at which North 

Carolina was intimately and regularly connected to 

the world. The McGuinn thesis is in fact the most 

comprehensive piece of new research to appear on 

the Portsmouth area since Olson’s 1982 HRS.73

 With his brothers Thomas and William, John 

Gray Blount ran one of the most important 

mercantile operations in early post-Revolutionary 

North Carolina. John Gray and Thomas Blount, 

71 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 

50–57

72 Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John 

Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 19–21.

73 McGuinn, “Shell Castle.” We learned of the McGuinn 

thesis from Simpson, The Inner Islands, 81–82.
44 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

Merchants, was founded in 1783 and based in the 

busy port town of Washington, North Carolina, 

on the Tar River, to and from which all shipping 

passed through Ocracoke Inlet, 80 miles nearly due 

east.74 Although the firm originated as a trading 

and shipping company, by the 1790s the Blounts 

managed a far-flung business, trade, and landspeculation empire whose spokes radiated out 

from North Carolina to western lands in Tennessee 

and Alabama and encompassed trade networks 

reaching Boston, New York, Philadelphia, 

Baltimore, Norfolk, and Charleston; the Danish, 

Dutch, French, and British islands in the West 

Indies; and Europe.75

The empire also included several mercantile stores, 

including their main store in Washington, the one 

74 Keith, “Three North Carolina Blount Brothers,” 60.

75 Keith, “Three North Carolina Blount Brothers.”

they developed on Shell Castle island, and others 

in Tarborough and Prospect Mills. The brothers 

also developed a number of small side businesses, 

including grist, flour, and saw mills; a tobacco 

warehouse; a nail factory; a tannery; and cotton 

gins and involved both the internal slave trade and 

financial speculation, and maintained plantations 

growing tobacco and wheat.76 Their work 

depended on a large contingent of slave laborers. 

In 1790, John Gray Blount and his seven siblings 

76 Keith, “John Gray and Thomas Blount, Merchants,” 

195–200; Keith, “Three North Carolina Blount 

Brothers,” 57–81.

Figure 2-5. John Gray Blount’s Lands, North Carolina and Territory South of Ohio River, 1783–1796. Keith, “Three 

North Carolina Blount Brothers in Business and Politics,” 287.

John Gray Blount’s Lands

North Carolina and Territory South of Ohio River

1783-1796

North Carolina

County Entered Issued

Beaufort 160,306 105,376

Bladen 201,506 201,506

Buncombe 384,640 506,880

Carteret (1780) 9,600

Craven 5,320 7,204

Cumberland 66,337 66,337

Hyde 42,560 42,560

Jones 640 640

Montgomery 79,616 79,616

Robeson 127,249 127,249

Tyrrell 150,000 150,000

 Total 1,218,174 1,296,995

South of Ohio River

Davidson County 12,921

Eastern District 1,000

Hawkins County 95,000 95,000

Middle District 5,000 5,000

Sumner County 14,034 14,034

Tennessee County 9,805 10,805

Western District 119,000 126,200

 Total 242,839 363,360

 Grand total 1,461,013 1,660,355
National Park Service 45

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

owned at least 192 slaves, 74 of whom belonged to 

John Gray himself.77

All of these business activities were nearly dwarfed 

by the brothers’ land speculation, which began in 

the 1770s and peaked with the generalized frenzy 

for western lands in the 1790s. Although land 

records make it difficult to ascertain exact figures, 

it is clear that the Blounts’ holdings in North 

Carolina encompassed over a million acres from 

the coast to the far western part of the state. In 

one 1796 transaction, John Gray Blount obtained 

a grant for over 300,000 acres in the section of 

Buncombe County that later became parts of 

the city of Asheville and portions of Yancey and 

Madison counties. Beyond that, the Blounts at 

various times also owned huge tracts in Tennessee 

and what later became northern Alabama. Despite 

the extent of their holdings and their attempts to 

market land through dealers in Philadelphia and 

77 Alice Keith, “John Gray and Thomas Blount, 

Merchants, 1783–1800,” North Carolina Historical 

Review 25 (1948): 195–200; Cecelski, The Waterman’s 

Song, 77; George Henry Smathers, The History of 

Land Titles in Western North Carolina (New York: 

Arno Press, 1979), 43; Keith, “Three North Carolina 

Blount Brothers,” 91; Alice Barnwell Keith, William 

H. Masterson, and David T. Morgan, eds., The John 

Gray Blount Papers, vol. 1 (Raleigh, NC: State Dept. 

of Archives and History, 1952), xix–xxxi. Two sources 

written by Alice Keith conflict slightly in the number 

of slaves owned by John Gray Blount in 1790. Keith, 

“Three North Carolina Blount Brothers,” gives the 

number as 74, while the introductory pages she wrote 

for volume 1 of her edited collection of the John Gray 

Blount papers gives the figure of 70.

Europe, however, the Blounts did not find land 

speculation as profitable as they had hoped.78

Before and during the height of their landbuying adventures, the Blounts, with John Gray 

at the helm, presided over a diverse agricultural, 

manufacturing, trading and shipping empire, 

the success of which hinged on Ocracoke Inlet. 

The inlet was, by 1789, the “site of the largest 

commercial intersection in Eastern North 

Carolina” and a major point of concern for the 

Blounts.79 By themselves or in partnership with 

others, they maintained a small fleet of ships 

(including flats, sloops, schooners, and brigantines) 

used in domestic coastal trade and foreign trade to 

Europe, and especially to the West Indies.80

As their shipping empire developed in the booming 

1780s, the Blounts realized that controlling the 

expensive and time-consuming piloting and 

lightering operations at Ocracoke Inlet would be 

a key to their prosperity. To control lightering, 

increase its efficiency and predictability, and reduce 

their costs, they knew they would need to develop 

wharves, warehouses, and attendant services for 

the crews of the ships delayed in the inlet. They 

78 Keith, “Three North Carolina Blount Brothers,” 

249–309; Smathers, The History of Land Titles, 43.

79 McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 29.

80 Alice Keith, “John Gray and Thomas Blount,” 58–67, 

196; Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource 

Study, 52.

Figure 2-6. Two early nineteenth-century maps showing the geography of Ocracoke Inlet. (1) “A chart of the coast 

of North Carolina between Cape Hatteras & Cape Fear,” with inset map for “Ocracock Bar including Shell Castle,” 

1809, and (2) “To David Stone and Peter Brown, Esq.: this first actual survey of the state of North Carolina taken by 

the subscribers is respectfully dedicated by their humble servants, Jona. Price and John Strother,” 1808. Both from 

North Carolina Maps, University of North Carolina Library. 
46 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

envisioned Shell Castle as a full-service lightering 

and piloting center.81

Identifying a knowledgeable partner on the scene 

at Ocracoke Inlet was central to their plans. As 

their shipping business grew during the 1780s 

and they learned about the problems and costs 

associated with shipping through Ocracoke 

Inlet, the Blounts became acquainted with John 

Wallace. The Blounts employed many pilots to aid 

their ships, but gradually came to favor Wallace 

for piloting, lightering, and storage services. By 

1789, the Blounts and Wallace had negotiated a 

“preferred provider” agreement by which Wallace 

offered favorable rates in return for a monopoly on 

Blount business.82

John Wallace was slightly younger than John Gray 

Blount—in his twenties when their partnership 

developed (Blount was in his thirties). Born in 

1758 to a prominent family that had set down roots 

81 McGuinn, “Shell Castle,”13–14, 27–29, 42, 78–84.

82 Ibid., 43.

in Carteret County in 1663, Wallace had several 

half brothers who had worked as mariners and 

lived on Portsmouth or Core Banks.83 His father, 

pilot David Wallace, one of Portsmouth’s original 

leading citizens, had bought 100 acres of land 

at Portsmouth in 1767, soon after the village’s 

founding, and built one of the town’s earliest 

houses.84 In 1791, John Wallace married Rebecca 

Hall, daughter of another local Core Banks pilot, 

Simon Hall.85

For the ambitious and upwardly mobile Wallace, 

a partnership with John Gray Blount was a path 

from the yeoman class to the higher status and 

more opulent lifestyle that might come by close 

association with a member of North Carolina’s 

“tidewater elite.” His hopes appear to have been 

fulfilled, at least to some extent. In the 1790s, as his 

partnership with Blount flowered, Wallace served 

83 Ibid., 46, 240–241.

84 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 

28–29.

85 McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 46, 240–241.

Figure 2-7. An 1897 map of Ocracoke Inlet produced by the Army Corps of Engineers at the request of Congress shows the 

relationship of the inlet’s chanels, Portsmouth, Ocracoke, and Shell Castle.
National Park Service 47

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

in the state legislature and held several positions of 

political leadership in Carteret County. 86

In looking to establish a footing in Ocracoke Inlet 

in the 1780s, the Blounts quickly determined 

that the existing villages of Ocracoke and 

Porstmouth would not work for the operation 

they contemplated. The land near the water in 

both villages was already settled and developed, 

and neither village could accommodate ships with 

drafts greater than 7 feet. Additionally, both were 

off the path of the main channels through the 

inlet. Better options, they determined, were the 

small islands within the inlet itself, and in 1787 the 

Blounts and John Wallace moved to buy several 

small islands within the inlet. The most valuable 

of these was Old Rock, a twenty-five acre tract of 

“rock on bed of oyster shells and sand possessing 

the solidity of rock.”87

Old Rock, rechristened Shell Castle after 

completion of the purchase in 1789, lay on the 

north side of Wallace’s Channel, at the middle 

of the inlet, strategically placed in deeper water 

between the inlet’s two main navigable channels, 

Wallace’s Channel and Ship’s Channel.88 Although 

not as deep as Ship Channel, Wallace’s Channel 

enjoyed more favorable winds, a “good holding 

ground” of 18 to 21 feet where ships could ride at 

anchor relatively near the island (reducing time for 

taking crewmen and goods back and forth from 

shore), and greater accessibility from Portsmouth. 

It also boasted enough firm rock to support the 

wharves and buildings the partners hoped to 

construct. 

The timing of the purchase of Shell Castle was 

not accidental. Finalizing the purchase just six 

days after North Carolina ratified the new federal 

constitution, the politically astute Blounts and 

Wallace recognized that the creation of the new 

union would create a “huge unified trading area,” 

removing some of the costs and restrictions that 

had hindered North Carolina’s coastal trade. They 

86 McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 41, 276–279.

87 Ibid., 32–33.

88 Keith, “Three North Carolina Blount Brothers,” 

115–118; Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, 77; Burke, 

The History of Portsmouth, North Carolina, 23–24. 

Corps of Engineers map from House Committee on 

Rivers and Harbors, Survey of Ocracoke Inlet, North 

Carolina. Letter from the Secretary of War, transmitting, 

with a letter from the Chief of Engineers, report of survey 

of Ocracoke Inlet, North Carolina, 55th Cong., 1st sess., 15 

March 1897, H. doc. 7, serial 3571, 5.

were now poised to take advantage of the new 

opportunities. 89

Since their plans had been in place before 1789, 

the partners got right to work. By October of 

1790, Shell Castle was well under way. The first 

task was to make the island bigger. Using a “cribstyle” construction technique (in use at the time at 

other wharves in Bath and Swansboro, as well as in 

northern harbors such as Boston and New York) 

in which squared pine timbers were notched and 

fitted together to create a network of tight seawalls 

on two ends of the island, the partners expanded 

the island with a mixed fill of ballast stones, shells, 

and soil. Wallace also worked through 1790–1792 

building the needed wharves, the warehouse, 

and his own dwelling, with lumber, bricks, logs, 

shingles, nails, and other materials he or the 

Blounts shipped in from Washington and Cedar 

Island.90

By 1795, Shell Castle was half a mile long and 60 

feet wide. Warehouses, a lumberyard, a wharf, and 

Wallace’s own “commodious” dwelling surprised 

their owners and survived a hurricane that year, 

after which the newly emboldened partners 

launched another construction wave. Within 

the next two years, additional dwellings were 

added, as well as, by 1797, a separate, two-story, 

1600-square-foot ship’s chandlery store.91

Economic problems due partly to tensions with 

France and the Blounts’ own problems with their 

land speculation operations caused a slump at 

Shell Castle from 1796–1799, but when the national 

economy rebounded after 1800, a final round of 

expansion at Shell Castle commenced as well. A 

new sea wall built of more logs floated up from 

Cedar Island further enlarged the island. By that 

time, the site boasted a warehouse, the store, three 

dwelling houses, a tavern, and at least one other 

building. Wallace wrote to Blount that year that he 

was “the busiest that I ever was in my life” and had 

“40-45 in family,” his entourage on Shell Castle. 

Shell Castle had, according to McGuinn, “reached 

its zenith.”92

89 McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 33–35, 44–45.

90 Ibid., 46–50, 400. Archeological fieldwork has 

confirmed the use of this crib-style technique.

91 Ibid., 50–52.

92 McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 55–57; Keith, Masterson, and 

Morgan, The John Gray Blount Papers, vol. 3 (Raleigh, 

NC: State Department of Archives and History, 1965), 

392.
48 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

The closely related tasks of lightering and piloting 

were the driving engines of work at Shell Castle. 

Lightering could be a simple, even one-day process 

of one lightering boat taking on a portion of 

the main ship’s cargo on one side of the swash, 

allowing the ship to cross, and then reloading 

the original vessel. Larger ships, however, might 

need multiple lighters to offload sufficient cargo, 

as well as additional smaller vessels (themselves 

sometimes referred to as lighters) to carry cargo 

to its destination on the Pamlico or Albemarle 

sounds and return with an outgoing load to fill a 

ship waiting at Shell Castle. Delays thus plagued 

the process. The Blount-Wallace operation at 

Shell Castle began with a single lighter, but by 1792 

included a second one. The shortage of lightering 

vessels may have troubled the Shell Castle 

operation in the 1790s, but by 1800, McGuinn 

notes, the partners appear to have had sufficient 

lighters based at Shell Castle to handle the demand. 

Fees for lightering were unregulated.93

Piloting, meanwhile, which demanded great skill, 

had been fairly heavily regulated by state laws since 

the early eighteenth century. It was not uncommon 

for the master of the lightering vessel also to 

provide piloting services, and many pilots were 

probably slaves. Shell Castle, McGuinn observes, 

was not an entirely advantageous location for 

Wallace’s pilots, since successful piloting depended 

upon being able to see and respond first to a ship’s 

call. Pilots at Shell Castle were too far inland to 

be able to see and respond as quickly to vessels 

coming from the Atlantic side as were pilots at 

Ocracoke and Portsmouth. They were well located, 

however, to respond quickly to requests from 

outward-bound ships coming from the sound 

side.94

Wallace and Blount also developed secondary 

enterprises at Shell Castle: a seasonal mullet 

fishery; a porpoise fishery (producing an 

alternative to whale oil); some limited shipbuilding; 

ship salvage and related storage operations; and 

the ship’s chandlery, or store, where popular 

items included rum, pork, spirits of turpentine, 

candles, nails, soap, lard, whetstones, shoe leather, 

and foodstuffs for locals and departing ships. 

Although the chandlery was initially stocked with 

93 McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 61–64; Cecelski, The 

Waterman’s Song, 47–48.

94 McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 68–72.

goods shipped from the Blounts’ main store in 

Washington, Blount and Wallace later concluded 

that it was cheaper to ship goods from merchants 

in New York City because freight costs were 

lower.95

Shell Castle also offered a tavern where food 

and drink (including the popular “beer 

Porter” imported from Liverpool, New York, 

or Philadelphia), and overnight lodging were 

available. Wallace outfitted the facility with 

Windsor chairs ordered from New York in 1803; 

twenty-two such chairs were found in his estate 

after his death.96

Knowing that their success was contingent 

on the inlet remaining navigable, Wallace and 

Blount actively lobbied state and federal officials 

for navigation improvements at Ocracoke Inlet. 

Although Wallace and Blount were entangled in 

nearly every effort in this regard, from staking 

channels with markers and buoys to dredging, the 

most significant activity was the erection of the 

Shell Castle Beacon. The state of North Carolina 

first authorized a lighthouse on Ocracoke Island 

in 1789, the year Shell Castle was born. But three 

years later, probably due to pressure from the 

Blounts, the U.S. Congress directed the Treasury 

to investigate erecting a lighthouse “on Ocracoke 

island or elsewhere, near the entrance of Ocracoke 

Inlet.” “Or elsewhere” doubtless reflected the 

Blounts’ influence, and a struggle ensued after a 

1794 federal report continued to recommend a site 

on Ocracoke Island (as well as another lighthouse 

north of there at Hatteras). 

Not disposed to give up easily, Wallace and Blount 

mobilized nearly sixty pilots, masters, and ship 

owners trading through Ocracoke to sign a petition 

calling for the lighthouse to be built at Shell Castle. 

Blount forwarded it to his brother Thomas, then 

serving in Congress, who promised to take the 

95 Ibid., 86–89, 93–94, 99–103. McGuinn’s research 

uncovered no evidence to support Stick’s contention 

(in The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 34, 78) that 

either a gristmill or a windmill was present on Shell 

Castle, although he surmises that they may have been 

present at Ocracoke and Portsmouth. See McGuinn, 

“Shell Castle,” 96. Although McGuinn reports some 

shipbuilding at Shell Castle, he provides no details. 

The North Carolina Maritime History Council’s List of 

Ships Built in North Carolina from Colonial Times to 

circa 1900 (http://www.ncmaritimehistory.org/) does 

not list Shell Castle as a location for shipbuilding.

96 Ibid., 92–93.
National Park Service 49

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

matter up with Alexander Hamilton and who 

shortly persuaded the House of Representatives 

to pass a bill endorsing the alternate site. Still, 

Hamilton and other officials pressed the original 

location on Ocracoke Island. 

Ultimately, Thomas Blount convinced Congress 

to authorize construction of the lighthouse on 

Shell Castle. Many difficulties in actually arranging 

for state cession and federal purchase of the 

appropriate lands for the Shell Castle and Hatteras 

lighthouses ensued, and evidence suggests that 

Blount and Wallace were surreptitiously involved 

in buying land where the Hatteras lighthouse 

would be built in order to turn a profit in reselling 

it to the government, a scheme that failed when a 

different parcel of land was bought from a different 

owner. Eventually, however, the land sale at Shell 

Castle went through in 1797–1798, at a price that 

was comparatively high for lighthouse land. 

Ever attentive to their business interests, Blount 

and Wallace were careful to see that proposed 

legislation would include language ensuring that 

no competing enterprises (lightering, storage, etc.) 

would be undertaken on the site of the beacon. 

Corruption, confusion, and attempts to profit from 

the contracting process for the light further delayed 

the project, but contracts for both the Hatteras and 

Shell Castle lighthouses were finally let in 1798. 

The beacon finally rose from the Castle in 1800–

1802 and the Shell Castle lighthouse illuminated 

the channel for ships for the first time in 1803. The 

problem-plagued beacon worked until 1818, when 

lightning destroyed it. 97

The lighthouse rounded out a full-featured 

array of services that reflected the partners’ big 

plans and grand hopes for Shell Castle. They at 

one point anticipated acquiring enough land to 

accommodate 1,000 ships at once.98 While they 

lobbied for navigation improvements, they had also 

marketed Shell Castle aggressively through word of 

mouth, correspondence, publicity brochures and 

charts, and even the nineteenth-century equivalent 

of the promotional coffee mug: an order of customprinted ceramic pitchers emblazoned with a 

drawing of the Castle.

97 McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 134, 147–197, 208.

98 Keith, “John Gray and Thomas Blount,” 196; Olson, 

Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 52.

Some of the key pieces of information we have 

about Shell Castle come to us because of the 

partners’ marketing efforts. Prolific cartographer 

and surveyor Jonathan Price, who ranged across 

North Carolina from the 1790s to the 1810s, 

produced his widely cited 1795 Description of 

Occacock [sic] Inlet, with its useful maps, charts, 

and narrative, while employed by John Gray 

Blount.99 The publication, which optimistically 

asserted that “nature seems to designate this 

spot as the site of a commercial town,” sought to 

reassure readers that the inlet was safe and well 

provisioned. Emphasizing the inlet’s connections 

to the world, the Description included “courses and 

distances to and from the most remarkable places.” 

In subsequent years, Blount commissioned Price to 

create another map of the coast of Ocracoke island 

and new charts of the inlet, which he hoped to 

distribute in ports in Europe.100 Price’s publication 

of another seminal statewide map in 1808 may 

also have been part of Blount’s efforts to generate 

business for the Shell Castle operation and support 

his land-speculation activities.101 In the 1790s, too, 

Blount and his brothers explored prospects for 

selling lots on the island to interested parties in 

Philadelphia and Europe.102

 The Liverpool-ware transfer-print creamware 

pitchers that pictured the “North View of Gov’r 

Wallace’s Shell Castle” give us our only visual 

representation of the Shell Castle enterprise. 

They constituted another pillar of the marketing 

plan—objects useful as promotional gifts to friends 

or business colleagues. The pitchers, four of 

which apparently survive from what seem to have 

been multiple orders Wallace placed, were likely 

produced sometime shortly after 1800. They were 

of a new type that were just becoming popular 

in American in this period; Blount himself had 

ordered others with different images for other 

purposes in the 1790s, and the Blounts’ existing 

99 Price, A Description of Occacock Inlet. See Figure 2-3. 

100 Price, A Description of Occacock Inlet; Olson, 

Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 53; 

McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 115–118; G. Melvin Herndon, 

“The 1806 Survey of the North Carolina Coast, Cape 

Hatteras to Cape Fear,” North Carolina Historical 

Review 49, no. 3 (1972): 242–253; William Stevens 

Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, 

vol. 5 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 

1994), 140–143.

101 Keith, Masterson, and Morgan, eds., The John Gray 

Blount Papers, vol. 3, 22.

102 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 

55–56; McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 119–121.
50 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

trade connections in Liverpool would have made 

it easy for Wallace to procure such items from 

Herculaneum Pottery, the popular Liverpool 

producer that had begun operations in 1796. 

The process involved commissioning a drawing 

and having it applied to the ceramic items through 

a transfer process. These items were produced 

and bought in large quantities by Americans 

mostly between 1790 and 1825. Other prominent 

Albemarle-area gentlemen (including Josiah 

Collins, John Little, and William Blair) also owned 

similar transfer print-ware items, key signifiers of 

the genteel social status to which John Wallace also 

aspired.103

The pitchers are but one bit of evidence that Shell 

Castle was profitable for Blount and Wallace. 

Carteret County tax records for 1803 list Wallace 

as the fourth wealthiest person on the Core Sound 

and the owner of six slaves. Analysis of his house 

on Shell Castle and the records of his estate after 

his 1810 death confirm that he had indeed risen 

103 McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 118, 297–298, 393–394, 

410–418; McGuinn notes that the establishment 

of the date of the pitcher is very complicated, but 

important to understanding the likely accuracy of the 

representation of Shell Castle included upon it.

socially as a result of his partnership with Blount. 

The house, pictured on the Liverpool pitcher, 

fulfilled Wallace’s 1790 prediction in a letter to his 

partner that “you will know I am a great man by my 

fine house.” Completed before 1795, the storyand-a-half dwelling featured clapboard siding, a 

brick chimney, glass windows, a shingle roof, a 

piazza, and a detached kitchen, all characteristics 

of a higher-end early nineteenth-century dwelling. 

In many of these respects, it was quite similar to 

Blount’s own house in Washington.104

Wallace’s other possessions, too, marked him as 

a man moving up. His estate included china for 

serving tea, some silver, a number of pieces of 

mahogany furniture, more than forty books, and 

unusual decorative items such as a portrait likeness 

of George Washington (common at the time in 

the north, but less so in the south).105 Sometime 

after 1790, the entrepreneurial Wallace took on 

the moniker “Governor,” which stuck with him 

through his death, when it was etched on his 

gravestone.106

It took a community of people to make Shell Castle 

run. At its height between 1800 and 1810, perhaps 

forty to forty-five people lived on the island, with 

the rest of the labor force based at Portsmouth and 

perhaps on Ocracoke as well. Although the 1800 

census listed Shell Castle as a separate community, 

there was clearly significant movement back and 

forth between Portsmouth and Shell Castle over 

the years.

In 1800, Wallace, his wife, their five children 

and fifteen slaves lived on the Castle, along with 

another white couple, John Mayo and his wife, 

and their son. Mayo, who built his house on Shell 

Castle around 1800, had worked for the Blounts 

since at least 1794 and helped Wallace run the 

Shell Castle venture. In 1805, he moved back 

to Portsmouth, where he opened a two-story 

“Academy” that appears on the 1808 Price and 

Coles map of the village. He charged tuition and 

room and board for the students and gradually 

increased his wealth; by 1807, he owned two slaves, 

and by 1815, he was also listed as a “retailer of 

spirits.” In 1821, Mayo took a salaried position as a 

customs officer and captain of one of two revenue 

104 Ibid., 49–50, 245, 292–295; “Fine house” quotation is 

found on 290.

105 Ibid., 294–308.

106 Ibid., 250.

Figure 2-8. Liverpool-ware pitcher featuring image of 

Shell Castle Island. North Carolina Museum of History. 
National Park Service 51

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

cutters stationed at Ocracoke. Remaining close 

to the Wallace family, he served as administrator 

of John Wallace’s estate in 1810; his wife was 

later buried in the Wallace family cemetery on 

Portsmouth.107 Other white families involved in 

operating Shell Castle included Richard Tuck and 

his wife Ellen and Josiah Bradley, his wife, and 

3 children. Residents of Portsmouth since 1806, 

Bradley and his family helped manage operations 

for Blount at Shell Castle until at least 1813; by 

1815, he again owned land at Portsmouth, but had 

disappeared from Shell Castle records.108

The community at Shell Castle was interracial, 

with African Americans outnumbering whites. At 

Wallace’s death in 1810, four white households 

on the island: the Wallaces, the Bradleys, and the 

Solomon M. Joseph and Edward Seduce families. 

The 1810 population of the island consisted of 

19 whites and 22 slaves. John Wallace’s widow 

Rebecca owned 14 slaves, Joseph owned 7, and 

Seduce owned one.109 In addition, the rest of the 

Shell Castle “family” included slaves, some hired 

from John Gray Blount, and other clerks, assistants, 

and sailors, some of whom may have lived at 

Portsmouth or elsewhere nearby.110

Ocracoke, by comparison, had 22 white families 

in 1800, along with 16 slaves, while Portsmouth’s 

population was 35 percent slave. The proportion 

of slaves in the population of Portsmouth and 

Ocracoke had increased dramatically since 1786, 

however; just over 50 percent of households near 

Ocracoke owned at least one slave.111

Slaves were key to the lightering and piloting 

work and central to Shell Castle. Wallace bought 

his first slave, a young girl, in 1782. The slave 

pilot Perry, hired from his father after 1792, was 

very important to the operation and occasionally 

piloted some of the Blount-Wallace vessels inland. 

Indeed, Blount hired Perry and another valuable 

slave, Peter, from Wallace’s widow to work with 

Josiah Bradley running the Shell Castle operation 

between 1810 and 1812, after Wallace died.112

At Shell Castle, Blount and Wallace employed at 

least 20 slaves to load and unload cargo, as well as 

107 Ibid., 244–248.

108 Ibid., 248–249.

109 Ibid., 249.

110 Ibid., 245–246.

111 Ibid., 244–245.

112 Ibid., 262–265, 269.

an unknown number of African American pilots 

and boat crews. Slaves also operated the Blount/

Wallace dolphin fishery at Shell Castle.113

To and From Where?

In thinking about the lives of the pilots and 

lighterers, warehouse workers, tavern and 

storekeepers, and slave laborers who made the 

operation at Shell Castle possible—probably 25 

to 40 people living on the island, plus another 

200–350 residents at Portsmouth and still others at 

Ocracoke—it is important to ask what was being 

brought through the inlet, where was it coming 

from, and where was it going?114

In addition to shipping and importing goods 

for themselves, the Blounts served as shipping 

middlemen for other businessmen in several 

eastern North Carolina communities: Bensboro, 

Princeton, Town Creek, Tarboro, Spiers Landing, 

Raleigh, and Greeneville. In the 1790s, Blount 

ships carried tobacco, tar, turpentine, pitch, pork, 

lard, tallow, corn, beeswax, bacon, and peas from 

North Carolina to American ports in Philadelphia, 

Baltimore, Boston, New York, and Norfolk. They 

brought back sugar, coffee, salt, molasses, nails, 

bolts, pipes, weeding hoes, paper, handkerchiefs, 

powder, rum, tea, tumblers, and wine glasses. 

Their trade ties with Philadelphia, New York, and 

Norfolk were especially strong, but they had little 

success developing contacts in either Charleston or 

Savannah.115 Characteristically for North Carolina’s 

trade in this period, the finished goods they 

brought back came to them through other large 

113 Keith, “Three North Carolina Blount Brothers,” 

116; Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, 77; Dunbar, 

Geographical History of the Carolina Banks, 87. 

Dunbar gives the number of slaves at Shell Castle in 

1800 as 15 and in 1810 as 22.

114 Dunbar, Geographical History of the Carolina Banks, 

83; Burke, The History of Portsmouth, North Carolina, 

23. Population figures for Portsmouth are drawn 

from Burke and represent a range from 1790 to 1810.

115 Keith, “Three North Carolina Blount Brothers,” 

133–170.
52 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

American commercial centers, even if they had 

originated in Europe.116

According to the Blounts’ biographer, Alice Keith, 

their domestic trade (especially in the years 1783 

to about 1803) aided in development of a vigorous 

American foreign trade to the West Indies and, 

to a lesser extent, to Europe. The ebbs and flows 

of their West Indian trade, which mirrored those 

of American shippers generally, indicated how 

thoroughly the Blounts’ fortunes were tied up 

in larger Atlantic systems. American shippers’ 

attempts to break into West Indian markets 

116 Murphey, The Papers of Archibald D. Murphey, 

107. Murphey’s 1819 “Memoir on the Internal 

Improvements Contemplated by the Legistature 

of North Carolina,” included on 103–151 in this 

collection, noted that “[h]aving no commercial city 

in which the staples of our soil can be exchanged 

for foreign merchandise, our merchants purchase 

their goods and contract their debts in Charleston, 

Petersburg, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York,” 

107. 

were always shaped by the changing regulations 

imposed by the various colonial powers, who 

of course hoped to dominate the trade of their 

colonies. Yet, despite the difficulties that such 

regulations introduced, the Blounts and other 

American merchants were able to take advantage of 

loopholes or chaotic conditions on the ground to 

manipulate (or sometimes illegally circumvent) the 

regulations and gain entry for American products 

to West Indian ports. Indeed, American trade 

with the West Indies thrived between the 1790s 

and about 1805, when exports to the West Indies 

accounted for 27–28 percent of total American 

exports, and imports from the West Indies made 

up 34–40 percent of American imports.117

Keith’s analysis indicated that from 1784 to 1788, 

the Blounts carried on trade with ports throughout 

117 Keith, “Three North Carolina Blount Brothers,” 

215–217.

Figure 2-9. Map showing Caribbean destinations for Blount ships in the late eighteenth century. Keith, “Three North Carolina 

Blount Brothers in Business and Politics,” 186.
National Park Service 53

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

the British and French West Indies.118 War between 

France and Britain in the 1790s opened even 

more opportunities for American trade with the 

West Indies; the heydey of the Blounts’ West 

Indian trade was 1794 to 1796, years when their 

operation at Shell Castle was beginning to flourish. 

Keith notes, however, that “the resumption of the 

European war in 1803 with the subsequent British 

Orders in Council, the Napoleonic Continental 

System, Jefferson’s Embargo of 1807, and 

continued American restrictions had a repressive 

effect on the Blounts’ trade and shipping to the 

West Indies. Few accounts of voyages to the 

islands in the years from 1803 to 1812 appear.”119

Blount ships bound for the West Indies carried 

mostly lumber products needed for containers 

and building as well as “provisions,” including fish, 

pork, tobacco, butter, lard, peas, bacon, rice, corn, 

fowl, and turkeys. They brought back rum, sugar, 

coffee, molasses, fruits, salt, and cash.120

From 1783 to 1803, the Blounts struggled to crack 

the much more difficult European market. Brother 

Thomas traveled through Europe from 1785 to 

1788 seeking to create ties with merchants there, 

but with little success. Their ships were a bit too 

small to compete effectively, European merchants 

were reluctant to extend credit to Americans, and 

the major American product the Blounts hoped to 

market, naval stores, suffered both from changing 

treaty regulations that limited export possibilities 

and from sloppy preparation and packing that 

lowered its quality compared with Scandanavian 

products. Attempts to market tobacco similarly 

failed, producing only debt for the company. Most 

of the European trade the Blounts were able to 

mount was carried on with a single merchant in 

Liverpool; otherwise, their European efforts were 

disappointing.121

The Blounts’ trading efforts were part of a larger 

revival of American and North Carolina trade in 

the wake of the Revolution. It largely mirrored 

North Carolina’s post-Revolutionary shift from 

trade nearly evenly split between the British Isles 

118 The ports included Guadaloupe, Jamaica, St. Ustatia 

(Eustatius), Turks Island, St. Bartholomew, Bermuda, 

Point Petre in Guadaloupe, Ocracabessa (Jamaica), 

Gustavia (St. Bartholomew), St. Croix, Cape Francois, St. 

Maria, and Grenada.

119 Keith, “Three North Carolina Blount Brothers,” 

192–194, 215–218.

120 Ibid., 207–213.

121 Ibid., 220–248.

and the West Indies to a trade dominated by the 

West Indies and other American states. Indeed, 

although trade grew dramatically, trade with Great 

Britain as a proportion of North Carolina’s imports 

and exports plunged after the war.122 

Shell Castle, Ocracoke Inlet, and 

Portsmouth After John Wallace

Although the Blounts and Wallace were friendly—

Wallace sometimes entertained the Blount 

family when they vacationed on Shell Castle or 

Ocracoke—Wallace was a problematic manager. 

Even in the 1790s, some of his colleagues reported 

to Blount Wallace’s problems with drinking and 

poor record keeping at the Castle. Wallace also 

got entangled with the Blounts’ land speculation 

in the 1790s and lost money. Debt problems 

compounded by 1806, as Wallace failed to pay 

some creditors and was taken to court by several 

merchants. Blount sometimes had to serve as 

a buffer between Wallace and angry business 

associates. And after 1800, poor maintenance of 

buoys, channel stakes, and buildings at the Castle 

began to be reported, along with some social unrest 

(theft, land disputes among residents) after 1805. 

It is possible that Wallace’s health may have been 

declining for several years before his death in 

1810.123

John Gray Blount, however, lived until 1833, and 

continued throughout his life to interest himself in 

keeping Ocracoke Inlet navigable. Some evidence 

suggests that he or some of his family members 

or business associates may even have welcomed 

Wallace’s death, for it provided a new opening to 

expand and revitalize Shell Castle. Blount’s sonin-law, William Rodman, seems to have concocted 

the most elaborate plan, proposing a partnership 

with Wallace’s daughter’s husband James Wallace 

in 1811. The crux of the plan was the notion that 

Shell Castle had underperformed and could, with 

addition of a new pier, fireproof brick warehouse, 

enhanced store, and some additional shipping 

services, become more profitable than ever. The 

perennial idea—first explored in the 1790s—of 

surveying the island and selling lots resurfaced in 

Rodman’s plan as well.124

122 Lefler and Newsome, North Carolina, 253–254; 

Watson, Wilmington, 32–33.

123 McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 29, 252–261, 273–274.

124 Ibid., 314–322.
54 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

McGuinn’s research uncovered no evidence of 

Blount’s response to this plan. But the coming 

of the War of 1812, which shut down trade at 

Ocracoke, caused the plan to be set aside. Blount 

and Shell Castle residents feared for their safety 

and property, especially as British raids harassed 

the area in 1813, and not without reason. In the 

attack on Portsmouth in July of 1813, 2000 British 

soldiers ransacked the village and damaged the 

Shell Castle light. By fall, the British had blockaded 

the port.125

Blount’s correspondence with a New York 

merchant in 1814, however, indicates that he was 

again exploring the idea of selling shares in the 

Shell Castle development or even selling the entire 

site. But no sales contract followed, and Shell 

Castle began, instead, a slow decline. Tax records 

from 1815 show Shell Castle as twenty-five acres 

and valued at $8000 for taxes, one-third of the 

tax value for the entire Ocracoke and Portsmouth 

125 Ibid., 322–326.

district. Wallace’s widow, children, and slaves 

continued to make a living there until around 1820, 

although the widow moved to Portsmouth after 

1818.126

The Shell Castle lighthouse burned down in 

1818. Rebecca Wallace died in 1822, and by 1829, 

John Gray Blount and Wallace’s heirs finally 

divided the remaining assets and property at Shell 

Castle. One of Wallace’s sons retained title to 

the Wallace portion of Shell Castle even after he 

moved to Alabama in 1836, the year a few sailors 

with smallpox were banished to the island from 

Portsmouth’s Marine Hospital. Wallace heirs were 

last mentioned as owning Shell Castle land in 1848.

Meanwhile, in 1838, Blount’s portion of Shell 

Castle was sold to another businessman, who 

planned and may have started a store or stave 

factory on nearby Beacon Island in the 1840s 

126 Ibid., 328–331.

Table 2-1: Table comparing export tonnage from North Carolina’s 

“minor ports” shows Ocracoke’s declining importance after 1835.

Source: Byron Logan, “An Historical Geographic Study of North Carolina Ports” (Ph.D. Diss., University 

of North Carolina, 1956), 90.
National Park Service 55

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

or early 1850s. The 1846 hurricane that opened 

Hatteras and Oregon inlets to the north probably 

demolished what was left of the Castle. While 

Carteret County tax records showed that it still had 

twenty-five acres and a value of $700 in the early 

1840s, by 1855 the once-promising international 

hub of Shell Castle had been reduced to one-half 

acre valued at ten dollars.127

The demise of Shell Castle after 1818, though, did 

not spell the end of Ocracoke Inlet and Portsmouth 

as a key transit point. In fact, shipping traffic at the 

inlet only increased as the early nineteenth century 

wore on. But the downfall of Shell Castle opened 

opportunities for Portsmouth, which, according 

to Burke, “came into its own” in the decades 

after the War of 1812 as it largely took over the 

warehousing and lightering operations previously 

headquartered at Shell Castle. Records also show 

a growing number of ships registered and based 

at Portsmouth in this period. Although most were 

too small to be oceangoing vessels and were thus 

likely involved in piloting and lightering (which 

still engaged much of Portsmouth’s population), 

the size of the ships based at Portsmouth gradually 

increased. And despite (and probably at some 

points because of) what was happening at Shell 

Castle, the early to mid-nineteenth century saw 

the further institutionalization of Ocracoke Inlet 

as a transshipment point. A customs house was 

established at Portsmouth in 1806, and federal 

post offices were placed at both Portsmouth and 

Ocracoke in 1840. In 1847, the federal government 

built a large and elaborate marine hospital at 

Portsmouth.128

The amount of export trade clearing customs 

at Ocracoke increased until 1835, after which it 

dropped off dramatically. Even during the post1812 rise, though, problems loomed. The state 

struggled with ongoing troubles with the main 

Ocracoke channel, Wallace’s Channel, which had 

demonstrated a tendency to shoal up since the 

late eighteenth century. After 1817, state officials 

contemplated a number of schemes to improve 

the channel, and the inlet was a key focus of state 

legislator Archibald D. Murphey’s ambitious 1819 

“Memoir on Internal Improvements,” which urged 

127 Ibid., 328–335, 340 n. 23, 341 n. 32.

128 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 

67–69, 74; Burke, The History of Portsmouth, North 

Carolina, 35–38; Stick, The Outer Banks of North 

Carolina, 87.

state funding of enhancements to transportation all 

over the state.129

While directing his attention to what he thought 

(rightly) to be the most promising ocean 

connection in the state, the inlet at the mouth of 

the Cape Fear River, Murphey devoted several 

pages to recommendations about Ocracoke Inlet, 

still the primary outlet for goods coming and 

going via the Tar, Neuse, and Roanoke rivers. 

Given the “gurgitating quality” of the inlet’s sands, 

Murphey seemed pessimistic about the prospects 

for improving Ocracoke, noting past suggestions 

for using either camels (previously unknown 

thereabouts) or a system of piers, mooring anchors, 

and chains to assist vessels across the Swash, which 

was getting shallower almost by the day.130

But with no other viable outlet, Murphey 

advocated that the state do whatever it could afford 

to improve the inlet.131 Murphey seemed more 

excited by the idea of creating other man-made 

inlets further north along the Outer Banks in order 

to give the Albermarle and Roanoke River valley 

regions their own direct outlet to the sea. He also 

recommended canal systems that would enable 

better use of the ports at Beaufort and Wilmington. 

River navigation should be improved, he 

recommended, and an adequate road system built 

through the piedmont and mountain regions.132

Although political fights derailed or diluted much 

of Murphey’s program, the impulse to improve 

the state’s transportation networks did produce 

a marginally successful campaign to dredge the 

channels at Ocracoke between 1826 and 1837. 

Once again, John Gray Blount (who died in 1833) 

lobbied vigorously for this last-ditch effort to keep 

Ocracoke prosperous in the face of competition 

from new canals (such as, the Dismal Swamp 

Canal, built between 1793 and 1805 and deepened 

in the late 1820s, connecting the Albemarle region 

129 Murphey, “Memoir on Internal Improvements,” The 

Papers of Archibald D. Murphey.

130 Ibid., 126.

131 Ibid., 125–126.

132 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 

17–21; Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 619–

621; Murphey, “Memoir on Internal Improvements,” 

The Papers of Archibald D. Murphey, 126. Although 

the scheme about using camels is mentioned in 

Murphey’s 1819 “Memoir on Internal Improvements,” 

it is not clear what the source of that idea was.
56 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

directly with Norfolk) that directed shipping traffic 

elsewhere. 

When state action failed to materialize, Blount 

lobbied the U.S. Congress in 1827. In 1828, 

Congress approved funding, and dredging and 

jetty construction at the inlet began soon after. 

By 1837, the project had burned through three 

dredges and $133,750 in federal funds, but it failed 

to keep pace with the constant rush of sand back 

into dredged channels each winter.133 Meanwhile, 

from the 1820s to 1860, Wilmington was becoming 

dominant as the state’s major port, not least 

because, once railroad development began in 

earnest in the 1830s, it was the only port with direct 

railroad connection to the interior. 

In 1836, as part of the Whig-sponsored efforts to 

improve transportation in North Carolina, the state 

chartered the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, 

which by 1840 connected the state’s one deepwater 

port with markets in Virginia and cemented its 

advantage over ports that had to be accessed via 

Ocracoke Inlet.134 By value, Wilmington already 

handled over three-quarters of North Carolina’s 

$1.3 million in exports as of 1816.135 By the 1840s, 

133 McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 222–224; Cecelski, The 

Waterman’s Song, 32, 106.

134 Lefler and Newsome, North Carolina, 346–347; Logan, 

“An Historical Geographic Study of North Carolina 

Ports,” 65, 83, 102; Duncan P. Randall, “Wilmington, 

North Carolina: The Historical Development of a 

Port City,” Annals of the Association of American 

Geographers 58, no. 3 (September 1968): 444–446; 

Watson, Wilmington, 46–70.

135 Lefler and Newsome, North Carolina, 300.

it surpassed New Bern (key entry point for trade 

through Ocracoke Inlet) as North Carolina’s 

largest town.136 The value of exports going through 

Wilmington catapulted upward at the same time, 

going from a little over $1 million in 1816 to $4.5 

million (with naval stores and lumber as the leading 

products) by 1852.137

Thus, while the powerful hurricane that hit 

the Outer Banks on September 7, 1846, sealed 

Ocracoke Inlet’s fate by opening two new inlets 

(new Hatteras Inlet and Oregon Inlet) farther 

north on the Outer Banks, other changes had 

already started that would render the area more 

isolated after the Civil War than it had been before. 

The new inlets accelerated that process, with 

Hatteras Inlet replacing Ocracoke as the most 

important passage through the Outer Banks by the 

Civil War era.138

Still, information about shipping through Ocracoke 

Inlet in its last nearly fifty years of preeminence 

(from 1812 to about 1860) indicates that the 

area continued to be a bustling center of activity. 

A widely quoted 1842 Congressional report 

supporting a bill to create the marine hospital 

at Portsmouth gives a snapshot of the area at its 

zenith. The report indicated that a politically 

active group of “sundry owners and masters of 

vessels, merchants, and other citizens residing 

within the district of Ocracoke, North Carolina 

and the ports connected therewith” had inundated 

136 Powell, North Carolina Through Four Centuries, 317.

137 Randall, “Wilmington, North Carolina,” 446.

138 Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 615.

Figure 2-10. Map of railroads and plank roads in North Carolina, 1860. Logan, “An Historical Geographic Study 

of North Carolina Ports,” 88. 
National Park Service 57

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

Occupation 1850 1860 1870 1900

Fisherman 4 25 19 21

Oysterman 1

Mariner 34 48 31

Pilot 23 17 5

Marine Hospital / Surgeon/ 

Physician 3 2 1

Merchant 5 1

Teacher 1 3 2

Boatman / Boatman U.S. 6 1

Carpenter 1

Collector / Deputy Collector 1 1

Farmer 2

Domestic / Servant 13 1 1

Seamstress 2

Clerk 2

Keeper of Light Boat / 

Lighthouse 2 3 1

Grocer 2

Life-Saving Service

Brick mason 1

Table 2-2: Workers in specified occupations listed in federal census for Portsmouth Island

Source: Ellen F. Cloud, Federal Census of Portsmouth Island, North Carolina (Ocracoke: Live Oak Publications, 

[1995?), unpaginated. Cloud reported that no occupations were listed in 1880, and the 1890 census records were 

destroyed in a fire. 

their representatives with petitions requesting 

appropriation for the hospital. The report went 

on to observe that Ocracoke Inlet still served as 

the outlet to the ocean for New Bern, Washington, 

Plymouth, Edenton, and Elizabeth City and their 

hinterlands. 

This report also made the dubious claim that twothirds of all of North Carolina’s exports still passed 

through Ocracoke, an assertion that seems unlikely 

given the rise of the port of Wilmington and 

the fact that much of the trade in and out of the 

backcountry did not pass through North Carolina’s 

ports at all. A count taken in 1836 and 1837, it 

further noted, found that nearly 1400 loaded 

ships sailed through the inlet in one year, “bound 

to various ports.” All of this activity meant that 

“there must be a great accumulation of seamen at 

this place,” especially since “vessels are frequently 

detained by adverse winds for several weeks.” It 

was common, the report said, to find from thirty to 

sixty ships anchored in the inlet at once, delayed 

either by weather or by lightering.139

While Wilmington was by this time overtaking 

Ocracoke in terms of port traffic, at least one 

comparative statistic suggests that the volume 

of traffic through Wilmington in the 1850s 

was not that much larger than it had been 

through Ocracoke when the figures for the 1842 

Congressional report were drawn up in the 1830s. 

Sprunt’s Chronicles of the Cape Fear, published in 

1914, estimated that it was not uncommon in the 

1850s to see 90 vessels anchored in and around 

139 House Committee on Commerce, Marine Hospital—

Ocracoke, N.C. (To accompany bill H.R. no. 512), 27th

Cong., 2nd sess., 24 June 1842, H. Rept. No. 889, serial 

410.
58 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

Wilmington awaiting loading or unloading.140 In 

1854, 814 ships called at the port of Wilmington; 

in 1858, the number was 633, with the majority in 

both years American registered. Still, on the basis 

of tonnage entering and leaving North Carolina 

ports, there is no question that Wilmington already 

vastly outpaced Ocracoke in 1832–1833. That year, 

the tonnage of domestic shipping entering the 

port of Wilmington was the largest of any of the 

state’s ports, at just over 11,600 tons, while only 

335 tons entered at Ocracoke, the smallest amount 

of any of the ports. Ocracoke held its own a bit 

better with domestic shipping leaving the port, 

but its total tonnage (1,368) was dwarfed by the 

22,493 tons leaving Wilmington. Foreign entrances 

and clearances were smaller than domestic traffic 

at Wilmington, but no foreign trade at all was 

noted at Ocracoke. By the late antebellum period, 

Wilmington was the only North Carolina port to 

conduct a substantial volume of foreign trade.141

What Did It All Mean?

Analyzing 1820 census records for Portsmouth, 

Kenneth Burke found that the majority of the men 

there at that time were engaged in commercial 

activities focused on lightering, fishing, and 

navigation, though six worked in manufacturing. 

At that time, as well, most of the ships calling 

Portsmouth their home port were smaller 

schooners not appropriate for seagoing travel 

and probably used as lighters. The size of ships 

based at Portsmouth increased from 1816 to 1839. 

In 1850, the population of 346 whites and 117 

slaves included a majority of the adult white men 

employed as pilots, mariners, and boatmen.142

Thus, during the century when thousands of 

ships going “to and from the most remarkable 

places” passed through Ocracoke Inlet, these 

black and white residents of Portsmouth were not 

fundamentally isolated or particularly provincial, 

but were instead deeply entangled with state, 

national, and international politics, and with the 

social and cultural worlds of other American ports 

north and south, the multinational ports of the 

West Indies, and the inland towns that dotted the 

shores of North Carolina’s huge sounds. 

140 Sprunt is quoted in Randall, “Wilmington, North 

Carolina,” 446.

141 Watson, Wilmington, 67–70.

142 Burke, The History of Portsmouth, North Carolina, 

35–38, 52.

On a large scale, the shifting sands of political and 

economic change in the volatile late eighteenth 

and early nineteenth centuries, when the British 

North American colonies—and other European 

outposts throughout the Americas—gained their 

independence, radically and repeatedly altered 

policies controlling trade and international 

shipping in the Atlantic. Policies emanating 

from England, other European powers retaining 

colonies in the West Indies, the new United States 

Congress, or the North Carolina colonial or state 

legislatures (e.g., levying tariffs or fees, regulating 

piloting, appropriating money—or not—for 

internal improvements, locating or closing customs 

houses or ports of entry, locating lighthouses) 

shaped life at the inlet. Wars—the American 

Revolution, the European wars of the Napoleonic 

era, the War of 1812—altered trade routes, changed 

trade policies, created or broke up trading zones, 

and produced new shipping dangers. 

While they shaped life for everyone in the 

Ocracoke Inlet communities, these Atlantic 

world connections also had specific meanings for 

various subgroups within what were not, after 

all, completely homogenous worlds. For white 

pilots like John Wallace and various members of 

his family, already in the late eighteenth century 

dominating the local economy, the connections 

meant a route to upward mobility through 

ties to inland tidewater elites like John Gray 

Blount. Wallace traveled back and forth to the 

mainland, visiting with his partner Blount, moved 

into positions of local and statewide political 

leadership, and manipulated political systems via 

his and Blount’s connections through Blount’s 

brothers to the benefit of Shell Castle. He furnished 

his “fine house” with material goods brought in 

from northern ports and Europe. 

The local ties with Blount, furthermore, shaped 

the lives of all of the pilots and lightering workers 

associated with Shell Castle, connecting them to 

trade networks up and down the east coast and to 

the West Indies as Blount ships ferried a wide array 

of cargo back and forth. Piloting, lightering, and 

the delays while ships waiting for these activities to 

be concluded offered exceptional opportunities for 

locals to handle goods and interact with mariners 

who had traveled to distant places. 
National Park Service 59

The Communities of Ocracoke Inlet as North Carolina’s Gateway to an Atlantic World

 These ties were especially significant for the 

African American slave watermen, upon whose 

backs much of the work at Ocracoke Inlet fell; the 

slave pilots and other seamen manned all types of 

vessels traveling through the inlet and between the 

inlet and inland ports, and the stevedores unloaded 

and reloaded cargo. As Cecelski demonstrated in 

his groundbreaking The Waterman’s Song (2001), 

the local African American maritime culture in 

North Carolina was “entangled with the distant 

shores of the Atlantic.”143 For the large enslaved 

population at Portsmouth, Ocracoke, and Shell 

Castle, living at an international crossroads meant 

a measure of freedom, access to antislavery 

information, and a real chance at escape. 

Black watermen, Cecelski found, were “key agents 

of antislavery thought and militant resistance to 

slavery.”144 Looking at newspaper advertisements 

for runaways, Cecelski found that, especially 

during the years between the American Revolution 

and the War of 1812—perhaps not coincidentally, 

the years when Shell Castle flourished—North 

Carolina coastal slaves led “highly cosmopolitan 

lives” as “sailors, pilots, boatmen, fishermen, 

stevedores, and maritime tradesmen” who by 

virtue of their work or their travels were intimately 

bound up with ports up and down the eastern 

seaboard and in the West Indies.145

In 1810, 115 slaves, one free black, and 225 whites 

lived at Portsmouth, while 10 slaves and 18 whites 

lived at Shell Castle. The slaves at Ocracoke 

consisted mostly of skilled watermen like bar 

pilots (who lived on site and guided vessels across 

the Swash and bar); river pilots (who navigated 

seagoing vessels to inland ports from Ocracoke); 

lighter crews (who sailed in and out of ports such 

as New Bern and Edenton); and fishermen (who 

ranged up and down Core Banks from their base 

at Shell Castle, hunting mullet and bottlenosed 

dolphins).146

The Ocracoke Inlet communities, as we have seen, 

were heavily invested in the booming post-1790s 

West Indian trade, a key destination for many of 

John Gray Blount’s ships. Cecelski points out that 

blacks made up a “large majority” of the deckhands 

on the vessels traveling from Albemarle to and 

143 Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, 18, 47.

144 Ibid., xvi.

145 Ibid., 18–21.

146 Ibid., 48–49, 77.

from the West Indies. And free blacks undoubtedly 

sailed in and out of Ocracoke, as they made up a 

sizeable percentage of the hands on merchant ships 

sailing from ports like New York and Philadelphia 

after the turn of the nineteenth century.147 Thus, 

the slaves who made up a large proportion of 

the population at Ocracoke Inlet had plenty of 

opportunities for communion with other African 

Americans who could bring radical ideas of 

freedom. 

In the 1790s, news of the slave rebellion in Haiti 

arrived on every West Indian ship, frightening 

North Carolina slaveowners into trying to prohibit 

vessels from Saint-Domingue (the French name for 

Haiti) from entering the state’s ports. In 1800 and 

1802, fear again spread through North Carolina 

when it appeared that plans were spreading (via 

North Carolina’s waterways) for slave uprisings 

in the Albermarle. Soon after black abolitionist 

David Walker’s revolutionary treatise Appeal to the 

Coloured Citizens of the World appeared in 1830, 

black sailors were circulating copies to Wilmington 

and New Bern.148 The next year, Nat Turner’s revolt 

in Southampton County, Virginia, inspired hysteria 

in North Carolina and led directly to new legal 

restrictions on slave and free black watermen in the 

state.149

In addition to being a conduit for radical ideas, 

Cecelski found, North Carolina’s coastal roads 

and waterways conveyed a steady current of 

escapees from slavery to freedom. With a measure 

of autonomy, a hand on the wheel of a vessel, 

access to cargo areas where ships were loading and 

unloading, and opportunities to build relationships 

with sympathetic seamen, black watermen had 

unparalleled opportunities to flee or help others 

aboard a ship out of slavery. Such opportunities, 

Cecelski argued, may have been especially frequent 

on the Outer Banks, where “slaves associated with 

their white counterparts . . . on far more equal 

terms than on the mainland.” 

The high proportion of slaves in the populace, the 

distance from the enforcing slave patrols, the high 

147 Ibid., 28, 42, 53.

148 David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; 

Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens 

of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, 

to Those of the United States of America, Written in 

Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829

(Boston, 1830).

149 Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, 28, 45, 53–56.
60 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

value placed upon black watermen’s skills, and 

the fact of confusing mixed-race heritage (itself 

a product of those Atlantic world connections) 

among many may indeed have produced a more 

fluid system of race relations than pertained on 

the mainland. Whites and blacks in these island 

communities, Cecelski concluded, “seemed to have 

deeper commercial and cultural ties to the ports of 

New England than to mainland North Carolina. 

They crewed, piloted, provisioned, and lightered 

Yankee ships, and drank with, hunted with, and 

married `jack tars’ from the Northeast.”150

While there is no record that any of the slaves in 

Wallace’s Shell Castle family ever attempted escape, 

there are other documented escape attempts 

from and through Ocracoke Inlet between 1793 

and the 1830s. The John Gray Blount papers 

contain other accounts of runaways, including 

several who cleared the Ocracoke bar and made 

it to Philadelphia in 1803.151 Clearly illustrating 

the ties between black watermen and a wider 

world of antislavery activism, the Boston antislavery newspaper The Liberator in 1831 carried 

the story (dateline New Bern) of nineteen slaves 

at Portsmouth who “crossed the bar in a lighter, 

with a view of making their escape to the North.” 

When their departure was discovered, “several 

pilots” pursued them in a sloop, finding the lighter 

wrecked and leaking in “squally” weather. The 

escapees, the paper noted, might have perished 

but for the “timely rescue afforded by the sloop,” 

whose appearance must have been met with mixed 

emotions among the refugees.152

Conclusion

An oft-quoted visitor to Ocracoke Inlet is Virginia 

scientist (and slavery defender) Edmund Ruffin, 

who published his Agricultural, Geological, and 

Descriptive Sketches of Lower North Carolina, 

and the Similar Adjacent Lands in 1861. “The 

occupations of the whole resident population of 

Portsmouth,” Ruffin wrote, 

are connected with the vessels which have 

to wait here. Pilots, and sailors, or owners of 

vessels, make up the greater number of the 

150 Ibid., 140.

151 McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 265–268.

152 Article about slave escape attempt at Portsmouth, 

The Liberator (Boston), April 9, 1831.

heads of families and adult males—and the 

remainder are the few, who as shopkeepers, 

&c., are necessary to minister to the wants of 

the others. If Ocracoke inlet should be closed 

by sand, (which is no improbable event,) the 

village of Portsmouth would disappear—or, 

(like Nagshead) remain only for its other use, 

as a summer retreat for transient visitors, 

sought for health and sea-bathing. Another 

such settlement or village, and supported 

in like manner, is at Ocracoke, north of the 

inlet.153

Of course, Ruffin’s predictions came true. 

Although it took another hundred years, 

Portsmouth very nearly disappeared, and Ocracoke 

came into its own in the twentieth century as a 

summer retreat. The histories of the two villages 

appeared to diverge, masking a shared past when 

they stood on either side of the busiest inlet on 

the entire North Carolina coast—a key border 

region link to, rather than a barrier between, North 

Carolina and the watery world beyond. 

153 Edmund Ruffin, Agricultural, Geological, and 

Descriptive Sketches, 124; “Edmund Ruffin (American 

scientist),” Britannica Online Encyclopedia, http://

www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/512333/

Edmund-Ruffin.
61

Restless and Storm-Battered 

Ribbons of Sand:

Hurricanes and Inlets

As geologist Orrin Pilkey has pointed out 

repeatedly, Cape Lookout National Seashore—

and everything else on North Carolina’s Outer 

Banks—is built upon an only momentarily stable 

configuration of a dynamic system that continues 

to move and change, as it always has, sometimes 

slowly over long periods of time, sometimes 

literally overnight.1 As the Cape Lookout Village 

Cultural Landscape Report notes, Cape Lookout 

and Core Banks have moved more than 4 miles 

to the west in the past 7,000 years, and the Outer 

Banks themselves have moved 40 to 50 miles since 

the sea level began to rise 18,000 years ago.2Hence, 

we must constantly remind ourselves that any map 

of the Outer Banks is no more than a snapshot of a 

brief moment in geological time.

Stretching more than 50 miles from Ocracoke Inlet 

to Beaufort Inlet, CALO includes more than 28,000 

acres of fragile coastal beaches and dunes. The 

park drew nearly 700,000 visitors in 2005, not all 

of whom were as concerned about or interested 

in the natural environment as they might have 

been. But all 28,000 acres are regularly buffeted by 

threatening weather events, the most dramatic of 

which are hurricanes. It is an environment that has 

required constant vigilance and constant repair 

throughout the park’s forty-plus years of existence.

1 Orrin H. Pilkey, Jr., From Currituck to Calabash: 

Living with North Carolina’s Barrier Islands, 2nd ed. 

(Durham: Duke University Press, 1982); Pilkey, The 

North Carolina Shore and Its Barrier Islands; and Orrin 

H. Pilkey, Jr., and Wallace Kaufman, The Beaches 

Are Moving: The Drowning of America’s Shoreline

(Durham: Duke University Press, 1983). 

2 John Milner Associates, Inc., and Wiss, Janney, Elstner 

Associates, Inc., Cape Lookout Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 3-2. 

Our discussion here of the natural environment of 

Cape Lookout National Seashore is limited to the 

impact of storms and hurricanes upon the national 

seashore and its historic resources; the location and 

configuration of the inlets; the nature of the sounds 

as the opening and closing of inlets changed 

their character and impacted the economic and 

social development associated with them; and the 

consequential or related histories of populations, 

communities, occupations. More specifically, 

we examine the effects of particular storms and 

hurricanes that have struck the Outer Banks within 

the Cape Lookout area since the middle of the 

eighteenth century when Portsmouth was founded. 

The storm and hurricane history of the Outer 

Banks has been documented for a long time, 

anecdotally since first settlement and meticulously 

and scientifically for at least a century and a half. 

Jay Barnes’s North Carolina’s Hurricane History

(2001) begins in 1524 and lists more than forty 

major hurricanes in the twentieth century alone—

fourteen of them “notorious” storms that together 

claimed more than 250 lives.3 Not all of the listed 

storms affected the Outer Banks, but some of those 

that did (such as Hazel in 1954, Donna in 1960, and 

Floyd in 1999) have been profoundly destructive. 

Even storms that did not qualify as hurricanes 

could and did impact the Banks dramatically, 

demolishing structures, battering or even erasing 

communities, and opening and closing inlets.

Similarly, the history of the Outer Banks inlets—

not a few of them created by hurricanes—is well 

established and fully documented. No fewer than 

3 Jay Barnes, North Carolina’s Hurricane History, 3rd ed. 

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 

A selective calendar of hurricanes is presented in 

Appendix C.
62 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Restless and Storm-Battered Ribbons of Sand: Hurricanes and Inlets

Figure 3-1. Historic inlets of the North Carolina coast. Dunbar, Historical Geography of the North Carolina Outer 

Banks, 218.
National Park Service 63

Restless and Storm-Battered Ribbons of Sand: Hurricanes and Inlets

fourteen inlets appearing on maps from the 1580s 

through the present have at various times cut 

through the Banks, remaining open anywhere from 

a few decades to hundreds of years.4These inlets 

have been the subject of repeated attention as they 

have opened up, shoaled up, closed again, and 

been dredged (generally fruitlessly) to allow ships 

to pass. Eight of those inlets have existed between 

Cape Lookout and Ocracoke Inlet during historic 

times.5 The preeminently important one for Cape 

Lookout National Seashore is Ocracoke Inlet, 

which we will consider at length below.

Significant Weather Events Before 

1700

North Carolina’s “Cape of Feare” got its name 

from Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano, 

who endured a severe storm nearby in 1524. Two 

years later, Spanish expedition leader Lucas de 

Ayllon lost one of his ships in a “loathsome gale.” 

Dunbar’s historical map of the Outer Banks shows 

seven inlets that opened in 1585, presumably 

opened by the same weather event.6 The following 

year, Sir Francis Drake, trying to replenish 

Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke Island colony, 

encountered a hurricane that wrecked many of 

his ships. The North Carolina coast had a severe 

hurricane in August 1587, and at least four major 

hurricanes hit the Atlantic coast in the fall of 1591; 

one of them struck Roanoke Island.7

Data for the seventeenth century are scarce. 

Jamestown, Virginia was hit by a severe hurricane 

with 12-foot surges in 1667. Ten thousand houses 

were destroyed, and seventy-five people died. The 

same storm hit North Carolina, but details on its 

4 Dunbar, Geographical History of the Carolina Banks, 

218.

5 Cape Lookout National Seashore, Master Plan, 1971, 

40–41.

6 Dunbar, Geographical History of the Carolina 

Banks, 218. The inlets were Old Currituck, Musketo, 

Roanoke, Oregon, Cape, Old Hatteras, and Ocracoke.

7 We think this number is probably low, since there 

is no particular reason why the incidence of such 

events should have been lower in this century 

than in the preceding and following ones. M. Kent 

Brinkley, “The Hurricane History of Colonial Virginia 

to 1775,” The Electronic Journal of Disaster Science

1 (1999) https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~wgreen/

ejem0102.htm. James E. Hudgins, Tropical Cyclones 

Affecting North Carolina Since 1586: An Historical 

Perspective (Blacksburg, VA: The National Oceanic 

and Atmospheric Administration, 2000), 3.

destructiveness are lacking. Hurricanes also hit the 

Outer Banks in 1669, 1670, and 1699.8

Weather, Inlets, and Sounds, 

1700–1799

The first half of the eighteenth century brought 

several major hurricanes to the Outer Banks. 

A violent hurricane that struck the area on 

September 16–17, 1713, ranged from Charleston, 

South Carolina, northward to Cape Fear, where its 

greatest destructiveness was centered, driving ships 

far inland. Another hurricane fifteen years later 

sank many ships, including at least one a few miles 

off Ocracoke. A mid-October hurricane in 1749 

sank nine ships in the same area.9

The first half of the eighteenth century closed 

with the Great Storm of August 18, 1750, which 

Barnes says caused great damage and cut several 

new inlets.10 Two years later, in September 1752, 

a severe hurricane destroyed the Onslow County 

courthouse. Others followed in 1753, 1757, 1758, 

and 1761; the last storm opened a deep inlet 

near Bald Head Island that remained open for 

more than a century. Hudgins provides dramatic 

details of the hurricane of September 6–7, 1769. 

“Unprecedented tides and winds of terrible force,” 

he said,

attended this hurricane on the North Carolina 

coast. . . . [The] Governor spoke of the 

“calamities arising from the extreme violence 

of the late storm” and the destruction of the 

banks of their two rivers. The tide was said 

to have risen [twelve] feet higher than ever 

before and the wind blew so that nothing 

could stand before it. Two-thirds of the effects 

of New Bern were destroyed; houses in town 

were undermined by water and floated away 

or collapsed. One entire street of houses was 

swept off with some of the inhabitants. Many 

thousands of trees were blown down. Many 

houses were said to have blown down in the 

general area, including the Court House of 

Brunswick County.11

8 Hudgins, Tropical Cyclones, 4. The 1699 storm is 

known to have hit South Carolina, and Hudgins thinks 

it likely that it hit the North Carolina coast as well.

9 Ibid., 4–5.

10 Barnes, North Carolina’s Hurricane History, 35. Oddly, 

Dunbar’s map shows no new inlets dating from 1750.

11 Hudgins, Tropical Cyclones, 5.
64 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Restless and Storm-Battered Ribbons of Sand: Hurricanes and Inlets

According to Hudgins, at least a half dozen or so 

hurricanes struck the area between 1775 and the 

end of the century. Pasquotank County was hard 

hit in early September 1775, and New Bern took 

another blow in August 1778, from a storm that 

wreaked major crop damage and brought rains that 

continued for a Biblical forty days and forty nights. 

Wilmington was hit three years later, but details 

regarding storm-related damage are lacking. In 

October 1783, however, another hurricane brought 

extreme damage to the area; its effects reached as 

far inland as Winston and Salem, where it blew 

down fences, trees, and buildings. The center of 

a late-September hurricane in 1785 passed over 

Ocracoke Bar, opening breaks in the sand dunes 

and drowning cattle.

A storm that passed east and north of Cape 

Hatteras on July 23–24, 1788, destroyed a half 

dozen vessels, drove nearly a dozen ashore, and 

dismasted twice that many. Others were stranded 

as winds forced water out of Pamlico Sound. Less 

than a year later, on April 10, 1789, a hurricane 

in the Albemarle Sound area brought tides 9 

feet above normal and hit ships headed out of 

the Chowan River; two lost their entire crews. 

A hurricane on August 2, 1795, drove eighteen 

Spanish ships onto the shoals at Cape Hatteras. 

The century closed with a major hurricane on 

September 5, 1797, whose effects stretched from 

Charleston to Currituck Inlet.12

Nineteenth–Century Hurricanes 

There are dozens of reliable reports of hurricanes 

striking the Outer Banks during the nineteenth 

century. Presumably the dramatic increase 

compared to the previous century had much to do 

with better data gathering. Major storms struck 

around New Bern in 1803, 1815, 1821, and 1825. 

The last of them drove more than twenty vessels 

ashore on Ocracoke Island, and dozens more from 

Wilmington to Cape Lookout. An August 1827 

hurricane broke the Diamond Shoals lightship 

from its anchors at Cape Hatteras and drove it 

12 Ibid., 6–7.

south to Portsmouth.13 In 1828, another storm 

closed New Currituck Inlet, turned Currituck 

Sound from saltwater to fresh, and ended Knotts 

Island’s prospects as a maritime port.14 In August 

1830, another hurricane blew every ship from its 

moorings at New Bern. Three severe hurricanes 

struck within four months in late 1837, including 

the October “Racer’s Storm” that wrecked the 

steamship Home and killed ninety passengers. In 

1839, Olson noted, “a gale, long remembered for 

its severity, washed away almost all of the cattle, 

sheep, and horses at Portsmouth, in addition to 

several houses and gardens.”15 A July 1842 storm, 

one of the severest ever to strike the Banks, brought 

heavy damage from Wilmington to Currituck, most 

severely from Portsmouth northward; another 

followed a month later.16

A hurricane that struck in September 1846 had 

the dramatic effects, creating both Hatteras and 

Oregon inlets, bringing saltwater (and saltwater 

creatures) to the sounds, and, Barnes goes so far 

as to say, “reshap[ing] the geography of the Outer 

Banks.” A decade later, a major storm cleared 

Wrightsville beach of its groves of live oaks, and 

a November 1861 storm scattered seventy-five 

Union vessels off Cape Hatteras, sinking two of 

them. In September 1874, Wilmington suffered 

major damage from a hurricane, including the 

destruction of one-third of the rice crop.17

Improved reporting after 1875 resulted in better 

records of storm intensity, tracks, and related 

indicators. The years between 1875 and 1900 

witnessed nearly forty hurricanes, a number of 

13 The first contract for a lightship in the United States 

was awarded in Hampton, VA, in 1819. PalletMaster’s 

Workshop, “History of U.S. Lightships,” http://www.

palletmastersworkshop.com/lightship.html (2004). 

The first lightships appeared in the early 1820s. USCG 

Lightship Sailors Association International, “Early 

U.S. Lightships,” http://www.uscglightshipsailors.org/

lightships/station_hist/lv_ships/EarlyL.htm (2008).

14 Cecelski, A Historian’s Coast, 21–22.

15 Sarah Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource 

Study, 63.

16 Hudgins, Tropical Cyclones, 8–10; Barnes, North 

Carolina’s Hurricane History, 37.

17 Barnes, North Carolina’s Hurricane History, 34–38; 

Hudgins, Tropical Cyclones, 12–13. Barnes does not 

elaborate on this latter assertion. For commentary 

on Knotts Island resident Henry Ansell’s recollections 

of the 1846 hurricane that devastated the area, see 

Cecelski, A Historian’s Coast, 21–27.
National Park Service 65

Restless and Storm-Battered Ribbons of Sand: Hurricanes and Inlets

them severe.18 One that made landfall on the North 

and South Carolina line in September 1876 was 

the worst Wilmington residents had seen in many 

years. Two years later, another storm brought 100 

mile-per-hour winds to Cape Lookout. An August 

18, 1879, storm made landfall around Wilmington, 

devastated the Beaufort waterfront, and tore up a 

thousand feet of railroad track in Morehead City 

before crossing Pamlico Sound. Signal officers at 

Cape Lookout witnessed the highest winds ever 

recorded in North Carolina—138 miles per hour 

before the anemometer cups blew away, rising to 

an estimated 168 miles per hour. 

A hurricane in September 1881 gave Wilmington 

its severest impact since those of 1822 and 1838, 

and a violent storm two years later pounded 

the city again before bypassing Cape Lookout. 

That hurricane killed fifty-three people in North 

Carolina—the most ever killed by a single storm in 

the state up to that time. An August 1887 hurricane 

wrecked many vessels in Pamlico Sound, and 

another six years later brought record high tides to 

Wilmington, again wrecking a number of vessels.

The 1890s were relatively quiet for the Outer 

Banks, but the decade closed with one of the 

deadliest hurricanes ever to move through the 

western Atlantic; possibly a Category 4 Cape Verde 

storm, the storm was dubbed the San Ciriaco by 

Puerto Ricans, hundreds of whom it killed before 

continuing northwest.19 It struck the Outer Banks 

on August 16–18, 1899, with winds that reached 

140 miles per hour as it crossed the Banks near 

Diamond City. Surges twice (once from the ocean 

side and once from the sound side) covered some 

of the Banks in 10 feet of water and caused heavy 

damage to Shackleford Banks and the communities 

of Portsmouth and Ocracoke, drifting sand over 

gardens, contaminating wells, killing trees with 

saltwater, drowning farm animals, destroying 

houses and fishing equipment, and killing between 

twenty and twenty-five people. The winds also 

18 Barnes, North Carolina’s Hurricane History, 39–61; 

Hudgins, Tropical Cyclones, 13–22. Our account is 

based on these two discussions.

19 Barnes, North Carolina’s Hurricane History, 49–55, has 

an extended account of the San Ciriaco hurricane.

destroyed the Methodist church in Portsmouth; it 

was rebuilt in 1901.20

On Hatteras Island, the Weather Bureau station 

recorded winds in excess of 100 mph and gusts 

of 120–140 miles per hour before its anemometer 

blew away, and barometric pressures at Hatteras 

indicated San Ciriaco may have been a Category 

5 hurricane. The storm drove at least eight vessels 

ashore (including the Diamond Shoals Lightship); 

six others were lost at sea without a trace. One 

of the indomitable Midgett family Life-Saving 

Service surfmen (Rasmus, of the Gull Shoal 

station) received a medal of honor for his role in 

rescuing ten seamen from the 643-ton barkentine 

Priscilla, bound from Baltimore to Brazil. During 

20 The history of the church is not easy to reconstruct. 

Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John 

Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 30, say it was destroyed in a 

hurricane in 1899 and rebuilt in 1901, then destroyed 

by another hurricane in 1913 and rebuilt in 1915. 

Methodist Church records we have consulted provide 

little data.

Figure 3-2. Portsmouth Methodist Church [no date or 

photographer given. Southeast Regional Office archive, 

National Park Service.

Figure 3-3. Shackleford Banks after 1899 hurricane. Jones, 

Gaskill-Guthrie House, 16.
66 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Restless and Storm-Battered Ribbons of Sand: Hurricanes and Inlets

the months following the Great Hurricane of 1899, 

most Shackleford Banks residents moved to the 

mainland, the majority of them to Harkers Island, 

but others to Marshallberg, Broad Creek, Salter 

Path, and elsewhere.21

Hurricanes of the Twentieth 

Century

Hudgins’s discussion of twentieth-century North 

Carolina hurricanes includes nearly sixty storms of 

at least Category 1 strength and numerous tropical 

storms that produced major damage. By no means 

all of those impacted the Outer Banks. More 

than two dozen of them require some discussion, 

however, and the general level of destruction 

increased as the years passed, partly because of 

the steadily increasing development on the Outer 

Banks and the coast in general.22

The first twentieth century hurricane of note was 

a Category 3 storm that skirted the Outer Banks 

on November 13, 1904, passing near Hatteras, 

sweeping away the Life-Saving Station and 

drowning four crewmen; eight others drowned 

when a Pamlico Sound yacht sank. A short but 

severe September 3, 1913, hurricane made a more 

direct hit on Core Banks and Pamlico Sound, 

pushing sound waters inland, causing severe 

flooding at New Bern and Washington, and 

carrying major destruction as far west as Durham. 

The Dewey sank at Cape Lookout, and two 

schooners were stranded near Portsmouth, where 

both the Methodist and Primitive Baptist churches 

were destroyed.23

21 Holland, Survey History, , 7; Tommy Jones, Fishing 

Cottage #2, Cape Lookout National Seashore: Historic 

Structure Report (Atlanta, GA: Southeast Regional 

Office, National Park Service, 2003), 14; Barnes, North 

Carolina’s Hurricane History, 57–61.

22 Barnes’s “Selected Notorious Hurricanes” table lists 

eleven storms between 1933 and 1999 that caused 

a total of 143 deaths and more than $12.5 billion in 

damages. For the first half of the century, he discusses 

ten hurricanes, four of which had serious effects upon 

the Outer Banks. Barnes, North Carolina’s Hurricane 

History, 63–78, chronicles this history. Our discussion 

combines data from Hudgins and Barnes.

23 A new Methodist church was built two years later. 

Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John 

Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 68; Tommy Jones, George Dixon 

House, Portsmouth, Cape Lookout National Seashore: 

Historic Structure Report (Atlanta, GA: Southeast 

Regional Office, National Park Service, 2004), 10.

Thereafter, the Banks were spared major hurricane 

activity for twenty years, but two major hurricanes 

struck in the fall of 1933. The first hit on August 

22–23 over the northern Banks, and the second 

passed through Pamlico Sound on September 15–

16, driving huge surges of water inland, bringing 

up to 13 inches of rain, claiming twenty-one lives, 

and pushing record flooding into New Bern, where 

wind speeds reached 125 miles per hour. When 

the storm passed and the water rushed seaward, it 

washed over Core Banks and opened Drum Inlet. 

Carteret County was especially hard hit; eight 

people drowned, scores were left homeless, and 

livestock perished. Its fishermen, many of whom 

lived close to the water, suffered heavy losses. 

Nearly every home on Cedar Island was washed 

from its foundation, and the visible remains of 

Shell Castle Island were obliterated.24 Twenty-one 

people on the coast were killed, and property 

damage totaled $3 million.

Nearly another dozen years passed before the 

“Great Atlantic” wartime hurricane of September 

14, 1944, passed north of the southern Banks, 

raising water 2 to 4 feet deep in houses on 

Ocracoke, driving the barometer to a record low 

at Cape Hatteras, and eventually raking 900 miles 

of the Atlantic coast. Some 344 people died in the 

sinking of five ships, two of them off the North 

Carolina coast. Damage in North Carolina lay 

mostly northward, from Nags Head to Elizabeth 

City. Catastrophic flooding damaged more than 

80 percent of the houses in Avon. This hurricane 

brought so much damage to Portsmouth that a 

majority of its few remaining residents left, never to 

return.25

24 Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John 

Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 30. One of these hurricanes 

(presumably the second) also severely altered the 

landscape of Sheep Island, adjacent to Portsmouth, 

and damaged the home of the Ed Styron family. They 

moved into Portsmouth and built another house on 

the east side of the village. That small (250-squarefoot) two-room house, which they occupied 

until 1944, is now known as the Ed Styron House 

(ibid.,125). For full documentation and discussion 

of this house, see Tommy Jones, Ed Styron House, 

Portsmouth, Cape Lookout National Seashore: Historic 

Structure Report (Atlanta, GA: Southeast Regional 

Office, National Park Service, 2004). See also Jones, 

George Dixon House, 10, 15, 19.

25 Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John 

Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 125.
National Park Service 67

Restless and Storm-Battered Ribbons of Sand: Hurricanes and Inlets

During a particularly intense two-year period 

in the 1950s, seven hurricanes struck the coast, 

including the infamous Hazel of 1954.26 Hazel, 

which came ashore at Little River, South Carolina, 

on 15 October 1954, was the most destructive 

storm in the history of the state. By the time it made 

landfall at the North Carolina–South Carolina line, 

it had already killed an estimated 1,000 people in 

Haiti. The storm surge at Calabash, which came 

at high tide, reached 18 feet—the highest ever 

recorded—and windspeeds ranged up to 150 mph. 

26 Barnes, North Carolina’s Hurricane History, 80–120, 

discusses the hurricanes of this period. In addition to 

the hurricanes discussed here, Barbara struck between 

Morehead City and Ocracoke on August 13, 1953, 

but it was a weak Category 1 storm and damage was 

not heavy except to crops. Similarly, Carol (August 30, 

1954), although a Category 2 storm, spared the coast 

significant damage, and Edna (September 10, 1954) 

passed safely 60 miles offshore.

In the area from Calabash to Cape Fear, Hudgins 

reported, “All traces of civilization on . . . the 

immediate waterfront . . . were practically 

annihilated.” Tides devastated the waterfront all 

the way to Cape Lookout. Dunes 10 to 20 feet high 

disappeared, and the houses built on or behind 

them ended up as “unrecognizable splinters and 

bits of masonry.” Of 357 houses on Long Beach, 

5 survived.27 Record rainfall stretched inland as 

far as Burlington, and the storm raged northward 

before it finally dissipated on a course toward 

Scandinavia. In North Carolina, the beaches 

in Brunswick County (Robinson, Ocean Isle, 

Holden, Long Beach) were hardest hit. Only two 

of thirty-three Ocean Isle cottages were spared; 

35-ton shrimp trawlers were lifted over the seawall 

and into town in Southport, and all twenty of the 

town’s shrimp houses were destroyed. At New 

Topsail Beach, 210 of 230 cottages were destroyed. 

Cape Fear flooding in Wilmington was higher than 

it had ever been.

Carteret County, which lay 120 miles north of 

landfall, was spared the most severe damage, but 

even so, Hazel was the worst hurricane county 

residents had witnessed in years. While damage 

was greatest in Atlantic Beach, there was little 

damage in the Cape Lookout section. Barnes’s 

rainfall map for the hurricane shows 1 inch or less 

from Bogue Banks northward, although high tides 

flooded large sections of Beaufort and Morehead 

City, and huge waves swept across the causeway.28

The damage totals for Hazel made it the most 

destructive hurricane in state history: nineteen 

people killed, fifteen thousand buildings destroyed, 

thirty counties heavily damaged, and $136 million 

in property losses.

On August 12, 1955, Connie (Category 3) made a 

much more direct hit on Carteret County. Connie 

crossed Cape Lookout with winds below 80 miles 

per hour, so there was relatively little wind damage, 

but heavy rain (12 inches in Morehead City) and 

tides 7 feet above normal brought a lot of flooding, 

and beach erosion was judged by some to have 

been worse than that associated with Hazel. 

27 Hudgins, Tropical Cyclones, 32–33.

28 Map, “Total precipitation and path of hurricane 

Hazel,” in Barnes, North Carolina’s Hurricane History, 

85.

Figure 3-4. Selected hurricane tracks of the 1950s. Clay, et 

al., Land of the South, 70.
68 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Restless and Storm-Battered Ribbons of Sand: Hurricanes and Inlets

Connie was only the first of three hurricanes to 

hit the county within six weeks.29 Residents barely 

had time to recover from Connie before Diane 

arrived five days later, entering at Wilmington and 

moving north-northwest. Since Diane passed well 

southwest of Cape Lookout, winds (again below 80 

miles per hour) had minimal effect, but heavy rains 

and high tides caused extensive flood damage in 

Beaufort, severe beach erosion, and major damage 

to causeways and bridges.30

Hurricane Ione came ashore near Salter Path with 

100 mph winds on September 19 and veered back 

out over the Atlantic soon thereafter, bringing more 

record flooding. Eastern North Carolina had had 

some 30 inches of rain during the past six weeks, 

and Ione brought sixteen more. Forty city blocks 

flooded in New Bern. Numerous highways had to 

be closed, and storm waters carried away several 

spans of the North River Bridge east of Beaufort. 

“The combined effects of Connie, Diane, and 

Ione,” Barnes reports, “were said to have swept 

away all the dunes along the 25-mile stretch of 

beach from Cape Lookout to Drum Inlet,” leaving 

it “as smooth as an airfield.” Drum Inlet itself was 

left choked with sand and unnavigable. Nearly 

90,000 acres of cropland were submerged and 

contaminated by salt water. State officials estimated 

crop damage at $46 million and total damage at $88 

million.31

This period of intense activity included Helene, 

which swept from Wilmington to Hatteras 

across Pamlico sound in September 1958 and 

closed with Donna on September 11, 1960.32

By the time it reached North Carolina, Donna 

had already pounded Florida (twice) with wind 

gusts of 175–200 miles per hour. The storm made 

landfall near Topsail Island, in an area Orrin 

Pilkey, North Carolina’s preeminent critic of 

coastal development, called “one of the least 

desirable places in North Carolina for coastal 

development,”33 with gusts above 100 miles per 

hour. Moving northeastward, it passed over 

Carteret, Pamlico, Hyde, and Tyrrell counties, 

bringing heavy structural damage to coastal 

29 Barnes, North Carolina’s Hurricane History, 108–118.

30 Hudgins, Tropical Cyclones, 34–35.

31 Barnes, North Carolina’s Hurricane History, 116; 

Hudgins, Tropical Cyclones, 36.

32 Barnes, North Carolina’s Hurricane History, 120–132.

33 Pilkey, The North Carolina Shore and its Barrier 

Islands, 29.

communities all the way to Nags Head.34 Carteret 

was on its eastern side; Atlantic Beach, Morehead 

City, and Beaufort were hardest hit. Some of the 

worst destruction occurred along the Morehead 

City-Beaufort Causeway, where rails were left 

hanging over the water. Donna’s “full fury,” Barnes 

says, struck the Outer Banks, but the impact lay 

mostly north of Portsmouth, around and to the 

north of Nags Head and Kitty Hawk. Its total cost 

may have reached $1 billion, and some 170 people 

died in the Caribbean and the United States. 35

The decade following Donna was surprisingly quiet 

except for the so-called Ash Wednesday storm of 

March 7–9, 1962. Not strong enough to be classed 

as a hurricane, the storm nevertheless pounded 

more than 500 miles of the mid-Atlantic coast, 

especially the northern Outer Banks, bringing 

near-record tides to Cape Hatteras and flattening 

dunes from Kill Devil Hills to the Virginia border.36

The state was also spared significant hurricane 

damage through much of the 1970s. Hurricane 

David (September 5, 1979) caused serious beach 

erosion on the southern beaches and very high 

tides on Pamlico Sound, but spared the Outer 

Banks.

The first significant hurricane to strike since Donna 

was Diana, which came ashore near Bald Head 

Island on September 9, 1984. Diana was a relatively 

weak Category 2 storm that happened to hit land 

at low tide, so it was less damaging than it might 

otherwise have been, although damage to southern 

beaches was substantial. Stronger building codes 

and improved evacuation plans helped reduce the 

number of casualties.37

A year later, on September 26–27, 1985, hurricane 

Gloria looked as if it might make landfall at 

Morehead City or Cape Lookout, but actually hit 

at Cape Hatteras. It was a powerful Category 3 

storm, but Gloria hit at low tide and moved rapidly, 

bringing only modest damage to most of the Outer 

Banks, although beach erosion was severe in some 

locations. Hurricane Charley (August 17–18, 1986), 

rated Category 1, hit closer to Cape Lookout and 

34 Hudgins, Tropical Cyclones, 37–38.

35 Barnes, North Carolina’s Hurricane History, 130–132.

36 Ibid., 266–267. See also Aycock Brown, Walter V. 

Gresham, and David Stick, The Ash Wednesday 

Storm: March 7, 1962 (Kill Devil Hills, NC: Gresham 

Publications, 1987). 

37 Hudgins, Tropical Cyclones, 48.
National Park Service 69

Restless and Storm-Battered Ribbons of Sand: Hurricanes and Inlets

moved across Ocracoke, Pamlico Sound, and then 

north to Hyde and Dare counties, but it was shortlived and caused only minor damage.

The relative weakness of Gloria and Charley was 

followed by the massive destruction of Category 

3 Hurricane Hugo on September 21–22, 1989.38

Hugo came ashore at Charleston and moved 

generally northwest, producing record-setting 

storm tides and high winds that knocked bridges 

off their pilings, felled television broadcast towers, 

and destroyed massive amounts of timber. Hugo 

weakened briefly but then regained strength as it 

passed into North Carolina; ultimately, most of its 

destruction lay inland and away from the Outer 

Banks. Twenty-nine North Carolina counties, 

stretching from Brunswick northwest through 

Mecklenburg to Watauga, were declared disaster 

areas; timber losses alone reached $250 million 

and 1.5 million people were without power. 

Losses were also high on the southern coast of 

North Carolina, despite the South Carolina entry 

point and the storm’s northwesterly course. In 

Brunswick County, which caught the worst of it, 

storm surges, severe beach erosion, and damage to 

protective dunes were dramatic. In this one county, 

damage exceeded $75 million. Total destruction 

from Hugo was around $10 billion, making it the 

most expensive hurricane in history.39

Seven years passed before another major storm 

impacted the coast substantially, but the year 1996 

brought both Bertha, on July 12–13, and the much 

larger and more deadly and destructive Fran, on 

September 5–6.40 Bertha came ashore between 

Wrightsville Beach and New Topsail Island as a 

Category 2 hurricane, but it quickly lost strength as 

it moved inland. Nevertheless, it brought 100 mile 

per hour winds to Carteret County and strong tide 

surges, which hit beaches between Cape Fear and 

Cape Lookout and raised water levels in Pamlico 

38 Barnes’s extended discussion is in North Carolina’s 

Hurricane History, 149–156.

39 Ibid., 51.

40 See Barnes, North Carolina’s Hurricane History, 

163–204. Cape Lookout National Seashore, 

Superintendent’s Annual Narrative Report for 1995, 

December 15, 1995 (Harkers Island, NC: Cape Lookout 

National Seashore), 10, notes a successful evacuation 

for Hurricane Felix (August 8, 1995), but provides 

no details. Unfortunately, we have been unable to 

locate a copy of the 1996 Superintendent’s Annual 

Report for Cape Lookout National Seashore, which 

presumably included detailed information on the 

1996 hurricanes’ impact.

Sound. Indeed, most of the storm’s total estimated 

damages of $135 million occurred in coastal 

North Carolina, where summer vacation crowds, 

lingering after the July 4th holiday, complicated 

evacuation efforts.

Fran produced a vastly greater scene of destruction 

than Bertha had. Coastal residents were well along 

with the cleanup from Bertha when Fran hit. As 

the magnitude of the storm became clear, fullscale evacuations were put in motion on North 

and South Carolina beaches. Fran came ashore 

near Bald Head Island as a Category 3 hurricane 

whose 115 mile per hour winds covered nearly 150 

miles. The storm followed a path along the Cape 

Fear River toward the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel 

Hill area, wreaking heavy damages all along its 

path. Although it passed well southwest of the 

Outer Banks, Fran brought heavy storm surges 

to the southeast coast—up to 7 feet at Atlantic 

Beach—and 7.5 inches of rain at some points in 

Carteret County. The storm lost strength outside 

of Raleigh, where it dumped nearly 9 inches of rain 

while causing widespread destruction throughout 

Wake, Johnston, and Wayne counties. Downstream 

communities suffered further damage as inland 

creeks and rivers overflowed and the Corps of 

Engineers had to release millions of gallons of 

water from overflowing reservoirs into the Neuse 

River. 

Fran caused sever damage over a very wide area of 

North Carolina. It was the worst storm in decades. 

New Hanover County beaches were most affected, 

with Wilmington under 6 feet of water at one point 

and suffering from damaging winds for hours. 

Over nine hundred homes were damaged on 

Carolina Beach alone, and Wrightsville Beach had 

11-foot surges. Devastation at Topsail Island was 

enormous, with more than three hundred homes 

damaged and heavy beach erosion wiping out the 

dunes and creating what one local conservationist 

termed “an ecological disaster.” Twenty-one deaths 

were recorded in North Carolina.41

Carteret County’s Emerald Isle and Pine Knoll 

Shores beaches were heavily eroded, though 

only a few homes were lost. Ecological damage 

stretched forward from the storm as pine beetles 

moved into Bogue Banks forests, attacking loblolly 

41 Barnes, North Carolina’s Hurricane History, 187; 

Hudgins, Tropical Cyclones, 57.
70 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Restless and Storm-Battered Ribbons of Sand: Hurricanes and Inlets

pines weakened by salt water and wind. Statewide, 

losses rose to unprecedented levels. The governor 

declared a 100-county state of emergency; fifty 

counties were designated federal disaster areas. 

Farmers suffered $684 million in losses from 

flooded lands, destroyed crops and buildings, 

ruined equipment, and lost livestock. More than 8 

million acres of woodland were damaged—a $1.3 

billion loss. The National Climatic Data Center 

put the total loss to the state at $5 billion or more. 

Extensive damage continued northward through 

Virginia and Maryland.

Unfortunately, the major hurricanes of the 1990s 

were not over yet. Still to come were Bonnie 

(August 26–28, 1998), Dennis (August 30– 

September 5, 1999), and the savagely destructive 

Floyd (September 16, 1999). It was to be, Barnes 

says, “the deadliest Atlantic hurricane season in 

more than two hundred years.”42

After appearing rather Fran-like for a period, 

Bonnie weakened to Category 2 and slowed before 

making landfall near Cape Fear and passing over 

Onslow County. Nevertheless, it dumped heavy 

rains over eastern counties (more than 11 inches 

in Jacksonville) before moving off the Outer 

Banks. Rumors that the storm had opened new 

inlets proved false, but fishing piers fell one after 

the other and scores of docks were ripped out. 

Carteret County’s losses were scattered and minor, 

mostly confined to Emerald Isle. Total damages 

came to perhaps $750 million, much of it in 

damaged crops.43

Hurricane Dennis turned out to be a rather 

meandering event, with a wind field that radiated 

out 200 miles. Two days in, it was downgraded 

to a tropical storm, but it nevertheless brought 

widespread damage. Winds drove waves and 

water onto shore from Cape Lookout northward 

to New Jersey. The storm turned first sharply 

northeast over open water, then directly south, 

and then again to the northwest, directly toward 

Cape Lookout, where it made landfall on Core 

Banks with 91 mph winds on September 4, before 

42 Barnes, North Carolina’s Hurricane History, 205.

43 The Cape Lookout National Seashore 

Superintendent’s Annual Report for 1998 mentions, 

3, that the park was evacuated and closed for Bonnie, 

but provides no other details. The official NOAA site 

provides further information on Bonnie at http://lwf.

ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/reports/bonnie/bonnie.html.

weakening to a tropical depression as it tracked 

toward central North Carolina.

Along with other areas, Carteret County was 

buffeted by elevated tides, serious beach erosion, 

and prolonged flooding, especially where winds 

piled up Pamlico and Core Sound waters, such 

as on Cedar Island. The Outer Banks in general 

suffered from high winds and waves for nearly 

six days. The worst of it lay to the north of Cape 

Lookout, but CALO nevertheless had to be 

evacuated twice—for both passes of Hurricane 

Dennis—and severe damage was done to docks, 

seawalls, and Portsmouth Village.44 Some 1,600 

Banks houses were also damaged, and losses in 

North Carolina and Virginia totaled $157 million.45

The last act of a very difficult decade, Floyd ended 

a five-year stretch that included more hurricanes 

than any similar period in recorded history. The 

year 1999 saw twelve named storms and eight 

hurricanes, five of which were major storms, all of 

which reached Category 4 strength.46 Before it was 

over, Floyd qualified as the greatest single disaster 

in North Carolina history. As it approached 

the Bahamas, it measured more than 400 miles 

across—by any measure, a monster storm. More 

than 1.3 million Floridians fled the state’s southeast 

coast as the storm approached, and coastal 

residents in Georgia, South Carolina, and North 

Carolina followed in massive numbers.

Floyd’s arrival in North Carolina was preceded 

by huge rains across the eastern counties. Before 

it made landfall in the wee hours of the morning 

at Cape Fear, the storm had been downgraded 

to Category 2. As it moved, its center tracked 

over Pender and Onslow counties, thence to 

New Bern, Washington, and into southeastern 

Virginia. Winds gusted above 100 miles per hour 

in various locations. Floyd’s winds were clocked 

at 91 mph at Cape Lookout, matching Dennnis 

44 Cape Lookout National Seashore, Superintendent’s 

Annual Narrative Report for 1999, January 21, 2000 

(Harkers Island, NC: Cape Lookout National Seashore), 

10.

45 Barnes, North Carolina’s Hurricane History, reports 

(217) that new inlets were cut on Core Banks and 

just north of Buxton. The former lay 2 miles north of 

one cut by the Corps of Engineers in 1997, but it was 

difficult to navigate because it was lined with shoals 

and sandbars. 

46 Barnes’s extended discussion of hurricane Floyd is 

to be found in North Carolina’s Hurricane History, 

220–260.
National Park Service 71

An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

almost exactly. Tidal surges ranged up to 10 feet, 

bringing extensive beach erosion, and a number of 

tornadoes touched down. Rains that lasted more 

than sixty hours in some places (just over 19 inches 

fell on Wilmington, and more than 21 inches in 

Raleigh-Durham) brought massive flooding. The 

Neuse, Tar, and Northeast Cape Fear rivers reached 

all-time flood records; other record flood levels (in 

many cases above the 500-year mark) were seen 

on rivers in Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, and 

Pennsylvania. Many major transportation routes 

were blocked by floodwaters and became the 

scenes of many deaths. Vast numbers of stranded 

residents were evacuated. In Carteret County, 

the western beaches were hit by storm surges 

that destabilized cottages and tore at the dunes. 

Emerald Isle was especially hard hit by waves that 

destroyed piers, destroyed seventeen homes, and 

damaged hundreds more. And again, CALO had to 

be evacuated.47

Cleanup and reconstruction problems after Floyd 

were severe. Hundreds of thousands of drowned 

animals were rotting; fifty hog waste lagoons 

were submerged; twenty-four flooded municipal 

waste-treatment plants were dumping raw sewage 

into rivers; streams and rivers carried chemical 

pollutants leached into flood waters; water plants 

and wells were contaminated; 7,300 homes were 

destroyed and more than 60,000 flooded. Only a 

fraction of the damage (estimated to be between 

$5.5 and $6 billion, including perhaps $1 billion in 

agricultural losses) was covered by insurance. And 

fifty-two people had died, most of them trapped in 

vehicles swept away by floodwaters.

CALO suffered heavy damage from hurricanes 

Dennis and Floyd. Some 200 trees were ripped 

out of the ground or irretrievably damaged at 

Portsmouth, and the visitor center there (SalterDixon House) had to be re-roofed. All historic 

structures were flooded, and some lost floors 

and roofs. Several buildings were lost, including 

three barns: one at the Jesse Babb House, another 

between the McWilliams House and the water, and 

a third located near the Life-Saving Station stable. 

Elsewhere in the park, boat docks, picnic shelters 

and signs were damaged or destroyed, and some 

47 Cape Lookout National Seashore, Superintendent’s 

Annual Narrative Report for 1999, 10.

interior walls in the headquarters building had to 

be repaired.48

The year 2003 was nearly catastrophic for the 

National Seashore. “On September 18,” the 

Superintendent reported, 

the eye of Hurricane Isabel passed directly 

over the seashore at Drum Inlet . . . [bringing 

the] worst storm damage the park has received 

in its existence. . . . The park suffered over 12 

million dollars in damage to its infrastructure. 

Significant damage occurred in the northern 

2/3 of the park with particular damage to the 

park concession facilities at Alger Willis Fish 

Camps and Morris Kabin Kamps. Portsmouth 

Village also experienced significant damage 

to a number of historic resources, including 

the George Dixon House.49 Over 400 trees 

were removed from the historic district of 

Portsmouth. The coal shed located adjacent 

to the Keeper’s Quarters and Lighthouse 

was destroyed. Significant shoreline erosion 

occurred at the Lighthouse area and on 

Harkers Island. . . . Recovery efforts continued 

through the end of the year.50

The Superintendent’s report the following year 

reemphasized the damage. “Recovery efforts from 

. . . Hurricane Isabel,” it said, “were a major focus 

of all park activities for 2004. . . . [Over] 6 million 

dollars in repairs will keep the park working on 

these efforts for the next 2–3 years.” Of particular 

concern was beach erosion that threatened the 

lighthouse; plans were under consideration to haul 

in 68,000 cubic yards of sand from Shackleford 

48 Cape Lookout National Seashore, Superintendent’s 

Annual Narrative Report for 2000, 9–10; Wiss, Janney, 

Elstner Associates, Inc., and John Milner Associates, 

Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural Landscape 

Report, 32. Cape Lookout National Seashore, 

Superintendent’s Annual Narrative Report for 2001, 

December 14, 2001 (Harkers Island, NC: Cape Lookout 

National Seashore), said that a final total of 800 trees 

had to be removed in Portsmouth Village.

49 See also Jones, George Dixon House, and Jones, 

Washington Roberts House, 23.

50 Cape Lookout National Seashore, Superintendent’s 

Annual Report, Fiscal Year 2003, 1. The coal shed 

was not a historic structure, but rather a modern 

reconstruction of the original 1939 building.
72 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Restless and Storm-Battered Ribbons of Sand: Hurricanes and Inlets

Banks to widen the beach and build a protective 

berm.51

The next storm to affect the park came on 

September 14–15, 2005. Hurricane Ophelia 

basically tracked the east coast of North America 

from Florida to Nova Scotia, passing just south 

of Cape Lookout and Cape Hatteras. It brought a 

quarter of a million dollars in damage to the park, 

including additional damage to the George Dixon 

house (already heavily damaged by Isabel) and 

to Portsmouth Village exhibits. It also downed 

hundreds more trees.52

Like all east coast states, North Carolina has 

had a sustained, if at times sporadic, history of 

hurricanes. During the nineteenth and twentieth 

centuries, about three quarters of them occurred 

between August and October, but the earliest (in 

1825) came in the first week of June and the latest, 

in 1925, on December 1. The most intense was 

1954’s Hazel (Category 4) and the costliest was 

Hugo (Category 3), which hit in September 1989. 

The highest winds, recorded at Cape Lookout 

on August 18, 1879, reached 168 miles per hour, 

and the most deaths (53) were associated with 

the storm of September 11, 1883. No Category 

5 hurricane has made landfall in North Carolina 

since 1899.53

The history of hurricanes is inseparable from that 

of North Carolina’s inlets, which opened and 

closed (and sometimes opened or closed again) as 

hurricanes raked the coast. We turn now to those 

inlets. 

Ocracoke Inlet

Of the eleven major inlets shown on Dunbar’s 

historic inlets map (Figure 3-1), Ocracoke is the 

only one within CALO boundaries that has had 

51 Cape Lookout National Seashore, Annual 

Superintendent’s Report 2004 (Harkers Island, NC: 

Cape Lookout National Seashore), 1, 2, 5; Cape 

Lookout National Seashore, Superintendent’s Annual 

Report 2005 (Harkers Island, NC: Cape Lookout 

National Seashore), 3–9, lists 58 Isabel-related projects 

undertaken.

52 Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John 

Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 1, 22, 30–31; Cape Lookout 

National Seashore, Superintendent’s Annual Report 

2005, 9.

53 Hudgins, Tropical Cyclones, 60.

major commercial importance.54 Significantly, it 

is also the only one of seven opened (presumably 

by a hurricane) in 1585 that is still open. Sir 

Walter Raleigh entered it in that year en route to 

Roanoke Island. On the Comberford map of 1657, 

it was highlighted as the major approach for ships 

headed toward inland rivers.55 Ocracoke became 

increasingly important after Currituck, Roanoke, 

and Old Hatteras inlets closed in the early 1700s, 

when it became the main route of entry from 

the sea for all of northeastern North Carolina. 

As early as 1755, Royal Governor Arthur Dobbs 

recommended that work be undertaken on the 

inlet. For “moderate expence,” he opined, the 

passage might be made 2 or 3 feet deeper.56

Ehrenhard notes that the inlets most used 

commercially in the eighteenth century were 

Ocracoke, Currituck (Old and New), and 

occasionally Roanoke. Hatteras, he points out, 

“was never very useful for navigation, may have 

begun to close about 1738 and was probably 

completely closed about 1755.” As early as 1728, 

William Byrd had reported that the opening of 

New Currituck in 1713 had hastened the demise 

of Old Currituck Inlet, which closed in 1731. 

Roanoke Inlet, at the lower end of Albemarle 

Sound, was well located but too shallow for any but 

small ships. This left Ocracoke as the most useful 

passage during the period.57

Between 1730 and 1800, ships of 13 or 14 feet draft 

could pass through the inlet, but by 1833, 10 feet 

was the maximum.58 One of Ocracoke Inlet’s two 

54 This inlet’s importance for coastal North Carolina 

shipping has already received considerable attention 

in the preceding chapter. For still further discussion, 

see Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource 

Study. Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina,

8, says that “Between the Virginia line and Cape 

Lookout there have been twenty-five different inlets 

which remained open long enough to acquire names 

and appear on printed maps . . . .” For our purposes, 

the exact number of inlets is less important than 

the indisputably dynamic character of the Outer 

Banks, especially with regard to the appearance and 

shoaling or disappearance of the many inlets. Stick’s 

table of principal Outer Banks inlets appears in The 

Outer Banks of North Carolina, 9. 

55 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 12.

56 Letter from Arthur Dobbs to the Board of Trade of 

Great Britain, May 19, 1755. Colonial Records of North 

Carolina, V, 344-347 (online version: http://docsouth.

unc.edu/csr/index.html/document/csr05-0106).

57 John E. Ehrenhard, Cape Lookout National Seashore, 

26.

58 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 14.
National Park Service 73

Restless and Storm-Battered Ribbons of Sand: Hurricanes and Inlets

channels closed up after 1810.59 Army engineers 

did some work to improve passage in the 1830s, 

but abandoned the effort in 1837.60 Nevertheless, as 

plantations grew, planters depended upon the inlet 

for getting goods in and out, and early passengercarrying steamships used it as well. During the year 

1836–1837, as has often been noted, some 1400 

vessels passed through it.61

After a hurricane in 1846 opened two new inlets 

(Oregon and new Hatteras), Ocracoke declined 

in importance.62 During the Civil War, Union 

troops blocked it with stone-laden vessels, and it 

never regained its importance after the war ended. 

In their succinct article for the Encyclopedia of 

North Carolina, Stick and Angley note usefully 

that the Corps of Engineers made the first of 

many studies of possible “improvements” to the 

inlet in the 1870s. 63 Twenty years later the Corps 

recommended against working on the inlet, but 

nevertheless did undertake some work on the 

channel in the mid-1890s. The channel reshoaled 

quickly, however.64

Use of the inlet began to grow somewhat again in 

the 1930s, and land on both sides of it got some 

protection when it was acquired in 1953 as a part 

of Cape Hatteras National Seashore. Construction 

of the Bonner Bridge in 1964 introduced “wild 

changes” to the inlet, which narrowed it from more 

than 7,700 feet (nearly 1.5 miles) to less than 2,500 

(under a half-mile) and made it more difficult to 

maintain.65

59 Olson discusses the evolution of the northern and 

southern channels in detail in ibid.,14–17.

60 Dunbar, Geographical History of the Carolina Banks, 

68, 87.

61 Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 614–615.

62 Actually Oregon Inlet was reopened by the 1846 

storm, having previously been open for nearly two 

hundred years (1585–1770). Stick, The Outer Banks 

of North Carolina, 279, says the hurricane occurred 

on September 7, 1846, but we have not seen 

confirmation of this precise date elsewhere.

63 Wilson Angley and David Stick, “Inlets,” in Powell, 

Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 614f.

64 Dunbar, Geographical History of the Carolina Banks, 

109–112.

65 Angley and Stick, “Inlets.”
74 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study
75

An Eye for the Possible: 

Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities

on the Southern Banks

Perhaps as early as the 1760s, a windmill for 

grinding corn may have stood at Portsmouth—

maybe the earliest on the Outer Banks—and a 

small salt works was set up in Carteret County in 

1776.1 In other areas of the country, such an image 

might have promised the coming of industrial 

development. But that kind of development never 

happened, either at Portsmouth or anywhere else 

on the Outer Banks north of Beaufort. Indeed, this 

lonely early windmill was not even grinding corn 

grown locally, but corn grown on inland farms and 

exchanged for fish harvested off the coast and out 

of the sounds.

From the early years of settlement on the 

Banks, however, there clearly was some hope 

for commercial development and a sense of the 

need for a reliable source of power to support it. 

Local wind patterns made windmills seem a likely 

option. Windmills had been known in Europe 

since at least the twelfth century; the earliest one 

in the American colonies was built on a Virginia 

1 Sarah Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource 

Study, 69. Olson guesses the windmill may have 

been there since 1774, but Wiss, Janney, Elstner 

Associates, Inc., and John Milner Associates, Inc., 

Portsmouth Village Cultural Landscape Report, 128, 

say that it was sold by John Nelson to Elijah Pigott 

in 1774 and that the last known mention of the 

windmill was in a tax assessment in 1840. Recent 

archeological investigations may have located the site 

of the structure. See also “Where the Wind Does the 

Work,” National Geographic Magazine, June 1906, 

310–317. Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 78; 

Portsmouth Village: National Register Nomination; 

and Keane, Salter-Battle Hunting and Fishing Lodge: 

National Register of Historic Places Registration , Sec. 

8, 4, say that there was a windmill-powered gristmill 

on Shell Castle Island, but others, including Phillip 

McGuinn, have expressed doubt that that was the 

case. A brief mention of the salt works appears in 

a letter from Robert Williams to the North Carolina 

Council of Safety, August 9, 1776, reproduced in 

Colonial and State Records of North Carolina vol. 10, 

739.

plantation in 1621, but it was more than another 

century before one appeared in North Carolina. In 

1715, the General Assembly passed an act giving 

one-half acre of land to anyone who would build 

a windmill to grind wheat and corn. A 1748 deed 

locates a mill in Pasquotank County, and by 1786 

the mill in Portsmouth was joined by another in 

Marshallberg. A decade later, a windmill was built 

in Beaufort, and there were eventually more than 

sixty-five in the county. They proliferated in the 

mid-nineteenth century, but then declined in use 

toward the end of the century, as central-station 

power and steam, kerosene, gasoline, or dieseldriven engines and generators appeared.2

The rise and decline of windmills on the southern 

Outer Banks, betokened a disappointing fact: the 

area has never been a site of major, organized, 

large-scale economic activity that sustained itself 

2 Tucker Littleton, “Pumping and Grinding,” in Stick, 

An Outer Banks Reader, 163–167; reprinted from The 

State, October 1980. See also Torres, Cape Hatteras 

National Seashore Historic Resource Study, 57. 

The eminent State Museum Curator H. H. Brimley 

wrote in the Charlotte Daily Observer in December 

1905 that there was still at least one windmill in 

service at Kinnekeet. See Eugene Pleasants Odum 

and Herbert Brimley, A North Carolina Naturalist, 

H. H. Brimley; Selections from His Writings (Chapel 

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1949), 31. 

The North Carolina Collection at the University of 

North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library has at least 

one additional photograph (79-488) of a Carteret 

County windmill erected around 1870. Owned by 

Jeremiah Jabez Pelletier and later by his son Jeremiah 

Walter Pelletier, it was located at Hatchall’s Point on 

the White Oak River about 2 miles upstream from 

Swansboro. After more than a hundred years, interest 

has revived in the energy-generating potential of 

wind turbines located over shallow waters such as 

sounds in North Carolina’s coastal region. New state 

laws requiring that the state’s utility companies 

produce 12.5 percent of their output from renewable 

sources by 2021 are driving the renewed attention. 

Bruce Henderson, “Carolina Breezes Eyed as Major 

Energy Source,” Charlotte Observer, April 6, 2009.
76 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

Figure 4-1. Location of nineteenth-century windmills on 

North Carolina coast. From Barfield, Seasoned By Salt: A 

Historical Album of the Outer Banks, Map 4, 78.

Figure 4-2. Windmill on Harkers Island, ca. 1904. North 

Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel 

Hill.

over a long period of time. It does not offer the 

large and stable parcels of land, the labor supply, 

or the natural resources (soils, mineable mineral 

deposits, or dammable rivers, for example) upon 

which such activity is characteristically built. 

Consequently, the economic activity that has 

been in evidence has tended to be episodic and 

opportunistic, dependent upon the availability at 

some historical moment of an exploitable resource 

(whales, for example, or a certain species of fish) 

together with an attractive external market (for 

whale oil or waterfowl or bird feathers, say). On 

occasions when those two crucial conditions 

have come into alignment, an industry has arisen 

and flourished. But when one or the other of 

the conditions wanes or fails, it has declined or 

disappeared. Indeed, as early as 1771, a concern 

about the sustainability of the supply of a critical 

resource was already being expressed in a bill 

submitted to the North Carolina General Assembly 

“to prevent the untimely destruction of fish in Core 

sound.”3

3 Minutes of the Upper House of the North Carolina 

General Assembly, January 01, 1771–January 26, 1771, 

vol. 08 (January 3, 1771), 349.

To understand the history of maritime and other 

economic activity on the southern Banks and their 

adjacent waters is thus a very different task from 

understanding the textile, furniture, or tobacco 

industries of the North Carolina piedmont, all 

of which were both larger and more stable over a 

longer time, however vulnerable they ultimately 

proved to be. For the Outer Banks, therefore, 

one must instead map a sequence of activities 

that have appeared and disappeared, each of 

them marshalling an essentially limited resource, 

adaptively reorganizing and redeploying the skills 

and energies of a limited labor pool, and linked to 

an essentially fickle or fragile market. 

This chapter offers a chronicle of these activities.4

Since they usually did not follow each other in a 

neat sequence, our accounts necessarily overlap 

chronologically, though we highlight connections 

where they existed. 

Stock Raising and Agriculture

Virtually all commentators on the history of the 

Outer Banks agree that early settlers migrated 

down from the Chesapeake area in search of 

marsh and island areas for raising stock. When 

they arrived is unclear; almost certainly they were 

there by 1700, and they probably settled earlier in 

4 The somewhat longer-term maritime activities 

related to piloting and lightering through Ocracoke 

Inlet are treated in Chapter 2 on the Atlantic world. 

The Lighthouse Service, the Life-Saving Service, 

and the Coast Guard are treated in the chapter on 

government agencies and activities. 
National Park Service 77

An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

the Currituck area south of the Virginia line.5 As 

economic enterprises tend to go on the southern 

Banks, stock raising was long-lived, continuing 

for decades. David Stick quotes an “unidentified 

reporter” from the turn of the nineteenth century 

who noted that “the Banks are justly valued for 

their advantages in raising stock . . . in considerable 

numbers without the least expense or trouble . 

. . more than that of marketing.” Indeed a major 

object of the British invasion of Ocracoke and 

Portsmouth during the War of 1812 was to 

confiscate hundreds of easily available cattle and 

sheep.6

As the decades passed, however, stock raising 

seems to have declined markedly in importance. 

In his study of barrier island ecology, Paul 

Godfrey notes that the area around Portsmouth 

was denuded by overgrazing as early as 1810, 

and at length became overgrazed beyond its 

ability to repair itself.7 Edmund Ruffin, a keen 

early observer of agriculture and stock raising 

around Portsmouth, noted that the lands between 

Ocracoke and Beaufort harbor, though owned 

privately, were “held in common use,” offering 

vast open grazing lands, but that the cattle, horses 

and sheep that were to be seen were “obtaining 

a poor subsistence indeed.” Nevertheless, he 

observed, “the rearing of horses is a very profitable 

investment for the small amount of capital 

required,” so that there were hundreds of horses 

“of the dwarfish native breed” on the Banks south 

of Portsmouth. Twice a year, he reported, there was 

a festival-like general penning and branding of the 

young colts.8

With regard to agriculture, which some residents 

hoped would offer other modest economic 

possibilities, the news was not good from the 

town’s earliest years. A traveler passing through 

in 1783 reported seeing only “small gardens,” 

and about twenty-five years later another traveler 

commented that livestock seemed overabundant, 

5 Dunbar, Geographical History of the Carolina Banks, 

2, 8, 38; Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 23; 

Ehrenhard, Cape Lookout National Seashore, 23.

6 Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 82, 84.

7 Paul J. Godfrey and Melinda M. Godfrey, Barrier 

Island Ecology of Cape Lookout National Seashore 

and Vicinity, North Carolina, NPS Scientific 

Monograph No. 9, (National Park Service, 1976), 

Chapter 4.

8 Ruffin, Agricultural, Geological, and Descriptive 

Sketches of Lower North Carolina, 130–133.

while “the soil is not used for agricultural 

purposes, more than in Gardens & the raising of 

a few sweet potatoes.” All fresh fruit had to be 

imported because overwashing salt water made it 

impossible to grow fruit trees.9 A half-century later, 

Ruffin observed dismissively that the landscape 

offered only “moderate accumulations of sand . . 

. [which] make a wretchedly poor and very sandy 

soil, on which . . . some worthless loblolly pines 

. . . can grow, and where the inhabitants, (if any) 

may improve for, and cultivate some few garden 

vegetables. No grain, or other field culture is 

attempted south of Ocracoke inlet.”10

Thus during the early years of settlement on the 

southern Banks, two of what appeared to be the 

small array of economic options for residents—

agriculture and stock raising—mirrored each 

other disappointingly. A question many a resident 

no doubt asked was, which will pan out? Which 

might we be able to depend on? The disappointing 

answer was neither. Ruffin’s “wretchedly poor” 

soil wouldn’t grow much of consequence, and 

the livestock quickly overgrazed what vegetation 

managed to grow at all. 

From a longer historical perspective, the latter-day 

romanticizing of the “wild horses” of the southern 

Banks confuses and obscures this history. “The 

Outer Banks of North Carolina is one of very few 

places in America,” one tourism website informs,

where wild horses still roam free, stubbornly 

surviving in this once remote coastal 

environment. Descended from Spanish stock 

which arrived over 400 years ago, these hardy, 

tenacious horses have lived here since the 

earliest explorers and shipwrecks. In previous 

centuries there were thousands of these horses 

roaming the full length of the Outer Banks . . 

. . With the protected status now afforded to 

them, they should remain free to live as their 

ancestors have for centuries.11

9 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 

62–63.

10 Ruffin, Agricultural, Geological, and Descriptive 

Sketches of Lower North Carolina, 126. An excerpt 

from Ruffin’s comments on the horses may be found 

in David Stick, ed., An Outer Banks Reader (Chapel 

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 

150–153.

11 Fred Hurteau, “Wild Horses of the Outer Banks,” 

Outerbanksguidebook.com, http://www.

outerbanksguidebook.com/horses.htm (2003).
78 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

The wild horses, we are encouraged to believe, are 

at once emblematic of the forever-wild landscape 

and somehow analogous to the “remote” Bankers, 

enduring in symbiotic harmony with the wild and 

untamed landscape. 

On the contrary, however—as Edmund Ruffin 

understood more than a century and a half ago—

the horses are the stunted surviving remnant of an 

environmentally ill-advised enterprise, as are some 

of the structures that dot the landscape of Cape 

Lookout Village.12 More appropriate as an emblem, 

one might consider, would be the ghostly trace 

of the whaling center of Diamond City, whose 

scores of houses were wiped summarily from the 

landscape by the great San Ciriaco hurricane of 

1899. 

Whaling

 References to whaling stretch back to antiquity, 

but large-scale whaling arose only in the 

seventeenth century, when Dutch and British fleets 

ventured into the Arctic Ocean. For upwards of 300 

years, the whaling industry provided an array of 

valuable products. Oil extracted from the blubber 

was used as fuel and lubricant. Foreshadowing 

plastics of later times, cartilage (or baleen, 

commonly called “whalebone”) was fashioned into 

corset stays, buggy whips, parasol ribs, and other 

items. Spermaceti oil from the head of the sperm 

whale went into premium candles.13

By the early eighteenth century, New England was 

the center of North American whaling, but some 

activity reached as far south as South Carolina. 

By the early nineteenth century, as Simpson 

and Simpson report, shore-based whaling was 

in evidence only in North Carolina, where the 

proximity of the Outer Banks to the Gulf Stream 

12 Bonnie L. Hendricks appears to greatly overstate 

the case when she argues in The International 

Encyclopedia of Horse Breeds (Norman: University 

of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 64, that “for over two 

centuries the raising of livestock was the most 

important economic use made of the . . . Outer 

Banks” and that the dunes and marshes were “once 

considered the state’s most desirable pasture land.”

13 Marcus B. Simpson and Sallie W. Simpson, Whaling 

on the North Carolina Coast (Raleigh: North Carolina 

Division of Archives and History, 1990), 4–6.

offered fortunate access to the whales’ migratory 

routes.14

Like stock raising, whaling on the southern Outer 

Banks was economically marginal and relatively 

short-lived as a substantial industry, although it 

was in evidence to some degree for perhaps 250 

years. Initially, Banks whaling focused on “drift” 

or beached whales, but later crews, working in a 

six-month season that peaked from February to 

early May when right whales migrated northward, 

chased whales in double-ended rowboats, 

harpooned them, and towed them to shore for 

processing on the beach.15

 By the late nineteenth century, most of what 

whaling there was of whaling in North Carolina 

came to bewas centered primarily on Shackleford 

Banks, but it whaling took place was present in 

some form or other on some portion of the Banks 

from perhaps the 1660s until the last whale was 

killed on 16 March 16, 1916, when North Carolina 

whalers brought in their final kill.16 Holland’s 

early Cape Lookout history says that whaling was 

sufficiently in evidence in North Carolina waters as 

early as 1669 to induce the Proprietors to include 

in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina a 

provision that any whales taken belonged to them.17

By 1681, inhabitants were given a free license to 

take whales for seven years.18

14 Ibid., 1–2. Our account of whaling draws substantially 

upon this prize-winning study. The Simpsons point 

out, 2, that New England whaling was initially 

shore based, but transitioned to open-sea (pelagic) 

whaling, a transition never made in North Carolina 

because of the relative lack of shipbuilding capacity, 

capital, markets, and deepwater harbors. For a recent 

comprehensive treatment of American whaling, see 

Robert E. Gallman, Karin Gleiter, and Lance Davis, 

In Pursuit of Leviathan: Technology, Institutions, 

Productivity, and Profits in American Whaling, 

1816–1906 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 

1997).

15 Simpson and Simpson, Whaling on the North Carolina 

Coast, 4. The Simpsons note, 4, that the open-sea New 

England whalers operated mostly in the “Hatteras 

ground” (between 35–38 degrees north latitude and 

70–75 west longitude).

16 Grayden Paul and Mary C. Paul, “The Last Whale 

Killed Along These Shores,” in Stick, An Outer Banks 

Reader, 153–156, say the last whale was killed in 1898, 

but Simpson and Simpson, Whaling on the North 

Carolina Coast, (49) place it much later, in 1916.

17 Holland, Survey History, 11; Simpson and Simpson, 

Whaling on the North Carolina Coast, 7.

18 Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 24, has an 

account of a 1694 conflict between two North Banks 

men over rights to a beached whale.
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An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

The Simpsons argue that, in fact, shore-based 

whale processing was “well established” (e.g., on 

Colleton [Collington?] Island) by the 1660s and 

1670s and note that the 1681 license was later 

extended to 1691. After the latter extension, court 

records offer evidence of heightened activity and 

conflict over the scarce and valuable resource. 

Shortly thereafter, North Carolina’s surveyor 

general observed the situation and reported in his 

1709 New Voyage to Carolina (quoted in Simpson 

and Simpson) that whales were “very numerous.” 

During the first and second decades of the 

century, the Proprietors regularly urged provincial 

governors to encourage whaling.19

The Proprietors’ injunctions also included 

instructions to encourage New England whalers to 

operate off North Carolina for a modest fee (two 

deer skins per year). As word spread and New 

England whaling captains ventured south, some 

jurisdictional conflicts ensued with Virginia; New 

England whalers also came into conflict with the 

state of North Carolina when captains neglected 

to pay the required tax on their catch or did not 

have proper customs certificates. Broader and 

more protracted conflicts were associated with 

the transition of North Carolina from proprietary 

to royal colony in 1730. By then, whaling was 

so widespread and profitable that whale oil 

had become an accepted form of currency, 

government officials were tempted into fraud and 

19 Simpson and Simpson, Whaling on the North Carolina 

Coast, 7–11. As an example of early conflict over 

the scarce resource, they sketch the 1694 court case 

between whalers Charles Thomas and Mathias Towler.

embezzlement of proceeds, and political factions 

jockeyed for position by exploiting controversies in 

the industry. Whales and the whale tax were such a 

stron source of legal conflict during the 1720s and 

1730s that much of what we know of whaling in 

that period comes from court records.20

Paradoxically, those records do little to clarify the 

actual scale of the industry, and there are almost 

no other available records. The Simpsons speculate 

cautiously that during the early decades of the 

century, some six to nine whales per year may 

have been taken, yielding upwards of 300 barrels 

of oil per year. Further, as whales became scarcer 

off New England, whalers from the northeast 

expanded their southern operations, aided by 

the advent of onboard tryworks, which made 

processing more efficient and allowed ships to 

remain at sea for much longer periods. These 

advantages were somewhat offset, however, by the 

pirates who preyed upon whalers for their valuable 

cargo and the storms that sometimes wrecked 

them.21

The North Carolina whaling industry was quite 

active in the pre-Revolutionary period. On a visit 

to Core Banks in 1755, Governor Arthur Dobbs 

found that New England whalers had developed 

a “considerable fishery” around Cape Lookout. 

The years of the Revolution, with their embargoes, 

20 Ibid., 11–15.

21 Ibid., 15–17. On all of these topics, Simpson and 

Simpson, Whaling on the North Carolina Coast, 

present considerably more detail than we have space 

for here.

Figure 4-3. Thomas Chadwick whaling license, 1726. Jateff, Archeological Reconnaissance Survey, 19.
80 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

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seizures, blockades, and other disruptions, were 

devastating for the American whaling industry. The 

number of vessels operating dropped dramatically; 

annual whale-oil production dropped from 

45,000 to 10,000 barrels. Production and shipping 

revived after the war, with North Carolina whale 

products clearing (mainly) Port Beaufort for the 

middle Atlantic states, England, the West Indies, 

and Guadeloupe. In the late 1780s, shipments left 

Beaufort, Brunswick, and Currituck, bound for 

east coast destinations as well as the West Indies, 

England, and Dublin.22

Information on North Carolina whaling during 

the period between the War of 1812 and the Civil 

War is sparse, but oral traditions suggest that it 

continued to be carried on both by local, shorebased whalers and also by more than forty New 

England offshore vessels. In the 1840s and 1850s, 

Provincetown whalers predominated, though many 

others were also present. The 1850s were years 

of decline, however, as Atlantic whales became 

more scarce and activity shifted to the Pacific. By 

the beginning of the Civil War, the golden age of 

whaling had passed. The discovery of petroleum, 

the rising cost of outfitting ships, the attacks on 

Yankee whalers by Confederate ships, and the 

need to undertake longer and riskier voyages 

put a damper on the industry. Lingering hostility 

after the war kept returning Yankee whalers well 

offshore and held down their take, although some 

continued to work in the area as late as the 1880s.23

In the 1870s and 1880s, whaling continued from 

Beaufort as far north as Cape Hatteras and as far 

south as Little River, but only during a short AprilMay season, with activity concentrated between 

Cape Lookout and Fort Macon. It was still a fairly 

lucrative endeavor, with products from a right 

whale worth $1,200–1,500.

Banks whalers lived in houses constructed of 

rushes and grouped into “camps” (two or three of 

them, of three six-man boat crews each, for a total 

of perhaps 50 to 60 or so) from which they posted 

lookouts. When a whale was spotted, the boats put 

22 Ibid., 21–23. Between the end of the Revolution and 

the War of 1812, Simpson and Simpson, Whaling 

on the North Carolina Coast, conclude, American 

whaling regained much of the dominance it had lost 

during the Revolutionary War.

23 Ibid., 26–29, 35. One Yankee whaler, the Seychelle out 

of Provincetown, was driven completely ashore near 

Cape Lookout light station by a fierce hurricane on 

August 18, 1878 (ibid., 5).

Figure 4-4. Whale-boat tools. Jateff, Archeological 

Reconnaissance Survey, 40. 

Figure 4-5. Whale on beach at Beaufort, before 1894. 

Jateff, Archeological Reconnaissance Survey, 44, 

reproduced from H. H. Brimley, “Whale Fishing in North 

Carolina,” Bulletin of the North Carolina Department of 

Agriculture 14, no. 7 (1894).

Figure 4-6. Cutting blubber on Shackleford Banks, 1894. 

Simpson and Simpson, Whaling on the North Carolina 

Coast, 19. 

Figure 4-7. Trying out oil from whale, 1894. Simpson and 

Simpson, Whaling on the North Carolina Coast, 19. 
National Park Service 81

An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

in and the chase was on. Once the harpoon was 

set with a “drag” attached, the crew waited for the 

whale to “have its run.” Overtaking the tired whale, 

a gunner shot it with a whaling gun and the crew 

towed the animal to shore. Onshore, the blubber 

was cut off and “tried out” in great vats over fires.24

The Banks culture that grew up around whaling 

included the frequent practice of giving names 

to the whales appropriate to the occasion 

or circumstances of their capture: the Little 

Children’s Whale, the Tom Martin Whale, the 

Big Sunday Whale. The best known of them, the 

Mayflower, captured May 4, 1894, was the most 

vigorous fighter ever encountered in the area. 

Before giving up after a six-hour battle, it dragged 

the Red Oar Crew (consisting of Josephus Willis 

and his five sons—an all-whaling family) 6 to 8 

miles out to sea. It alone produced 40 barrels of oil 

and 700 pounds of whalebone. The remainder of 

24 Ibid., 34. 

it hangs in the North Carolina Museum of Natural 

Sciences in Raleigh.25

In recent years, much of the attention to the history 

of whaling near CALO has focused on nowvanished Diamond City. Archeologist Emily Jateff, 

who investigated the area in 2007, says that the 

eastern end of Shackleford Banks was “populated 

by European transplants from at least the late 

seventeenth century,” and that a community on 

the eastern end of the area was first mentioned 

in archival sources in 1723.26 Several small 

communities based in whaling, fishing, crabbing, 

25 Ibid., 37, 40. The state hired taxidermist and naturalist 

H. H. Brimley to prepare the bones for display. 

Portions of his extended account of the entire process 

are available in ibid., 41–44. Brimley hauled another 

specimen (the Mullet Pond carcass) back to Raleigh 

as well and later sold it to the Museum of Natural 

History at the University of Iowa, where it has been 

displayed since 1911 (ibid., 47).

26 Emily Jateff, Archeological Reconnaissance Survey for 

Shore Whaling Camps Associated with Diamond City, 

Cape Lookout National Seashore, 10. We have found 

no corroboration of this thesis elsewhere. Jateff 

conducted her field investigations on October 6–7, 

2006, and embraced only the eastern sound side of 

Shackleford Banks (3).

Figure 4-8. Shackleford Banks whaling communities, 1850–1890. Simpson and Simpson, Whaling on the North 

Carolina Coast, 33. Map by Connie Mason, National Park Service, 1987.
82 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

and the like developed on the sound side of 

Shackleford banks: Wade’s Shore and Mullet Pond, 

east of Beaufort Inlet on the far end; Bell’s Island 

in the middle; and Lookout Woods on the near 

end at Cape Lookout Bight.27 The Lookout Woods 

community (renamed Diamond City in 1885) 

appears to have grown up on two tracts of land 

that Joseph Morse and Edward Fuller bought from 

John Shackleford in1757. The transaction specified 

that whaling privileges in the bay were included in 

the sale. By the year 1764–1765, whalers’ huts and 

tents were in evidence. 

Diamond City came to be the largest of the 

communities. There were perhaps only two dozen 

or so residents i the 1850s, but the census of 1880 

indicates that there may have been as many as 500 

by then.28 The town included family graveyards, 

stores, factories, and a school and stretched almost 

half the length of Shackleford Banks. David Stick 

says that 3,000 or more people sometimes gathered 

at Diamond City in the summer for religious 

camp meetings that might last three to four weeks. 

Perhaps a hundred or so people also lived at 

Wade’s Hammock on the far end of Shackleford 

Banks, and a few other families settled at what was 

called Kib Guthrie’s Lump.29

As whaling waned toward the end of the century, 

however, Diamond City declined. The deadly San 

Ciriaco hurricane of August 1899 put an end to 

it; within a short time, everyone had left for the 

mainland. The hurricane, the decline in the whale 

population, and a change in women’s fashions in 

1907 (ending the demand for whalebone stays) 

ultimately killed the whaling industry in North 

Carolina. Two whales were captured in 1908, and 

27 See Cape Lookout Bight Historical Base Map in 

Appendix A.

28 Ibid., 11.

29 Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 188–189. 

The destructiveness of the 1899 hurricane, the paucity 

of records on the whaling industry, and the rapid 

movement of former Diamond City residents to the 

mainland have made detailed documentation of the 

former community and the surrounding Shackleford 

Banks area difficult. We have presented here a 

consensus view, based on the most detailed accounts 

(primarily that of Simpson and Simpson) we have 

been able to find.

the last whale captured off the North Carolina 

shore was on March 16, 1916.30

Fishing

 It seems unlikely that anyone living on the 

southern Banks, from the earliest inhabitants 

onward, would not in some way or other, to 

some degree or other, have fished for subsistence 

purposes. Fish were simply the most easily available 

and plentiful protein source to be had, and the risk 

from harvesting them, especially from sounds and 

rivers, was small. Surprisingly, however, large-scale 

commercial fishing came fairly late to the Banks. 

David Stick cautions that, contrary to the common 

belief that this scale of fishing has been common in 

evidence since early settlement, fishing remained a 

part-time subsistence activity as late as the midnineteenth century. The census of 1850, the first 

30 Simpson and Simpson, Whaling on the North Carolina 

Coast, 48–49. The last shore crew for Cape Lookout 

whaling disbanded when its gear was destroyed 

by fire in 1917 (50). Commentators differ slightly in 

stating when the last families left Diamond City and 

Shackleford Banks, but generally agree that they 

were all gone by 1903.

Figure 4-9. John White, “Indians Fishing” (1585–1586). 

British Museum.
National Park Service 83

An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

detailed enough to specify occupations reliably, 

shows that in Portsmouth there were seventy 

boatmen, mariners, and pilots, but only four 

fishermen; at Ocracoke, the ratio was fifty-three 

to five. Only on Hatteras Island was commercial 

fishing the most prevalent occupation. 

The decades between the Civil War and World War 

II were the most active for commercial fisheries. 

In 1902, nearly 15,000 of the 23,000 fishermen 

working from North Carolina south to Florida 

were in North Carolina. The state was producing 

roughly 7 million pounds each of mullet, shad, and 

oysters and nearly 19 million pounds of menhaden. 

Totals of all species amounted to more than 67 

million pounds, compared to South Carolina’s 

8 million. Nearly 1,200 fishing vessels operated 

out of Carteret County alone, bringing in over 25 

million pounds of fish (including nearly all the 

menhaden).31

Although every available species was no doubt 

harvested as opportunity presented itself, the 

species-focused sectors of the commercial market 

did not develop at the same time. Which species 

were commercially attractive to fishermen at 

any given time depended upon the ecology of 

availability (which might in turn depend upon 

the salinity of sounds that opened and closed to 

saltwater as storms opened and closed inlets); 

food preferences and traditions; available and 

appropriate processing and storage methods 

(smoking, salting, conversion to fertilizer, 

refrigeration); and shipping options (sail or power 

boats, rail, trucking).32

31 Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 212–213. 

As Stick is careful to point out, these census-specified 

occupations may not have been mutually exclusive; 

respondents could have been (and many probably 

were) involved in more than one occupation, 

depending upon the season or other factors. Statistics 

cited from Report of the Commissioner [of Fish and 

Fisheries] for the Year Ending June 30, 1903, Part 

XXIX (Washington, DC: U.S. Commission of Fish and 

Fisheries, 1905), 345–352, 356, 359.

32 We do not attempt to discuss every species of fish 

that has ever been harvested commercially in North 

Carolina; rather, we confine ourselves to those 

around which a substantial species-focused industry 

has arisen at some juncture.

Dolphin 

Dolphin (or porpoise, as they used to be called) 

skins had been used since Biblical times for making 

sandals, and their hides and oil were highly valued 

for centuries. The oil served as a lubricant, leather 

dressing, or illuminating oil, and was used in 

soap stock.33 But until the 1920s, David Cecelski 

observes, “Most coastal residents considered 

dolphins . . . an exploitable resource at best and 

pests at worst”; they were eventually hunted almost 

to extinction in North Carolina waters.34

The hunting began early. A porpoise fishery was 

established by John Gray Blount and John Wallace 

on Shell Castle Island as early as 1793, using 

their lighter vessel, the Beaver. Other operations 

were in evidence at Beaufort and Cape Lookout. 

Within a decade, Cecelski says, slave watermen 

had established a dolphin factory near Ocracoke 

Inlet. By 1810, “immense herds” of porpoise were 

sustaining a major industry from Hatteras to Bear 

Inlet, in which huge 800-yard-long seines were 

used. A season’s catch could run from 400 to 500 

dolphins, which might produce from 70 to a 100 

barrels of oil. The industry waned during and 

after the Civil War, but one observer reported that 

during the winter of 1874–1875 dolphins were 

so numerous in Hatteras Inlet that the waters 

“seethed and foamed” with them, and the dolphin 

harvesting revived. 

Spurred by active markets in Elizabeth City, 

Norfolk, and Philadelphia, dolphin factories 

sprang up in the 1880s at Creed’s Hill (between 

Hatteras and Frisco), Diamond City, and Rice Path 

(near Salter Path). Absentee ownership was not 

uncommon; owners of two of the installations 

lived in New Jersey and New Bedford. The 

Weekly Record reported three dolphin fisheries 

in Carteret County. Perhaps the best source of 

detailed information on the industry in the 1880s 

33 Ezekiel 16:10 has a reference to porpoise-hide 

sandals.

34 Unless otherwise indicated, our brief account 

here is drawn from Cecelski, A Historian’s Coast, 

81–86; Simpson and Simpson, Whaling on the North 

Carolina Coast, 23–26, 36–37; and Stick, The Outer 

Banks of North Carolina, 230. A rare film produced 

in 1936 tells of Canada’s Mi’kmaq and Maliseet 

peoples’ involvement in the nineteenth-century 

commercial porpoise hunting industry (McCord 

Museum, http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/info/

pressreleases/119z13.html).
84 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

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is the journal of John W. Rolinson, who among 

his several other jobs worked as superintendent 

of Col. Jonathan Wainwright’s dolphin factory 

between Hatteras and Frisco.35 During the 1886–

1887 season, Wainwright’s crews, Cecelski says, 

caught more than 1,300 dolphins, more than 600 

of them in November and 136 on a single day in 

March. Meanwhile, a factory at Hatteras employed 

200 men and caught nearly 3,000 dolphins, and a 

new factory was going up on Harkers Island. The 

future appeared bright in the dolphin business, but 

a low catch two years later did not bode well. The 

market began to decline in the 1890s, the species 

came under legal protection in the 1920s, and by 

1929 the industry had disappeared.

Menhaden 

The menhaden industry is distinct from other 

fishing industries because the fish (a toothless, 

plankton-eating, muscular and bony, foot-long fish) 

are sold not for consumption but for oil, bait, or 

fertilizer. Early settlers placed whole menhaden on 

the ground as fertilizer, and fishermen were using 

them for bait as early as 1824. It was considered 

undesirable for food, but was on occasion shipped 

to the West Indian or Guinean plantation workers 

and briefly to impoverished Europeans during 

World War II.36 Menhaden oil, whose value was 

recognized later, was first extracted by rotting the 

fish in casks. Later, steam extraction was used, first 

in land-based factories and then by oceangoing 

processors. The first floating factory was sent to 

Virginia in 1866.37

Anthropologist Barbara Garrity-Blake notes 

that the menhaden industry has evolved since 

the early nineteenth century, from an egalitarian 

organization composed of independent farmers 

and fishermen (especially in New England) to a 

hierarchical organization of capital-controlling 

manufacturers and wage laborers. It also shifted 

geographically, from New England to the 

southeast, and the workforce, originally composed 

35 Cecelski, A Historian’s Coast, 83–84.

36 Barbara J. Garrity-Blake, The Fish Factory: Work 

and Meaning for Black and White Fishermen of the 

American Menhaden Industry (Knoxville: University of 

Tennessee Press, 1994), 2–6.

37 Rob Leon Greer, The Menhaden Industry of the 

Atlantic Coast: Appendix III to the Report of the U.S. 

Commissioner of Fisheries for 1914 (Washington, DC: 

Bureau of Fisheries, 1917), 5.

of native Yankees and immigrants, became a mix of 

rural southern whites and blacks.38

Previous historians of the Outer Banks have 

agreed that commercial menhaden processing 

began soon after the Civil War when the Excelsior 

Oil and Guano Company of Rhode Island built 

a factory at Portsmouth, but Greer’s 1917 U.S. 

Commissioner of Fisheries report says that a 

factory was established on Harkers Island in 1865.39

George Brown Goode’s 1884 account of the 

Portsmouth factory was pessimistic. “The factory 

was supplied,” Goode reported,

with modern apparatus for cooking and 

pressing the fish, and had experienced 

northern fisherman to handle the seines. The 

menhaden were soon found to be less plenty 

[sic] than had been expected. The average 

school contained less than 25 barrels, and the 

largest haul of the season was only 125 barrels. 

It was found that under the influence of the 

hot summer weather the fish would begin to 

decompose in a few hours, so that the fishing 

was limited to 25 miles on either side of the 

factory. Another difficulty was that ‘outside 

fishing’ could not be prosecuted on account 

of the shoalness of the water at the inlets, and 

the frequency of summer storms . . . . Again, 

the fish taken in the sounds were found to be 

very poor, . . . [T]he average yield of oil was 

only 2 quarts to the barrel, and the largest did 

not exceed 8 quarts. At the close of the third 

year . . . the business was abandoned . . . . Mr. 

Grey gives it as his opinion that it would be 

impossible to make the menhaden fisheries 

profitable along this coast.40

Despite the gentleman’s pessimism, the industry 

did survive and thrive in North Carolina. The 

entire industry began to move south in the 1890s, 

38 Garrity-Blake, The Fish Factory, 1.

39 Greer, The Menhaden Industry of the Atlantic Coast, 

5. Greer provides no further details.

40 George Brown Goode, The Fisheries and Fishery 

Industries of the United States (Washingto,n DC: 

Government Printing Office, 1887), 495–496, quoted 

in Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John 

Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 27. This factory (known on maps 

as Grey’s Factory) was located on Haulover Point 

(Portsmouth Village Cultural Landscape Report, 128). 

Mr. Grey seems to have been the superintendent of 

the factory.
National Park Service 85

An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

and much of it moved to North Carolina, where 

many of the jobs went to black workers.41 As noted 

earlier, the state produced some 18,000,000 pounds 

of menhaden in 1902. By 1912, nearly 150 large 

steam and gasoline-powered menhaden vessels 

were serving forty-eight menhaden processing 

plants (employing more than 2,000 people) on 

the Atlantic coast. North Carolina had twelve of 

them.42 The fish were processed in large screw 

presses. Much of the product was in the form 

of fish meal, used as an additive in poultry and 

livestock feed.43

Menhaden continued to be plentiful, it appears, 

during the early decades of the twentieth 

century. In early December of 1937, “millions 

upon millions” of them filled Topsail Inlet so 

completely that boats could not move, “one of the 

most astonishing sights ever seen on the coast of 

North Carolina,” the Raleigh News and Observer 

reported. The fish also proved vital to the war 

effort, providing lubricant for machinery and 

fertilizer for desperately needed crops. At war’s 

41 Garrity-Blake, The Fish Factory, 16.

42 Greer, The Menhaden Industry of the Atlantic Coast, 

6.

43 Garrity-Blake, The Fish Factory, 11.

Figure 4-10. Menhaden-fishing steamer, before 1917. 

Greer, The Menhaden Industry of the Atlantic Coast, 

Plate I.

Figure 4-11. Industrial menhaden press, before 1917. Greer, 

The Menhaden Industry of the Atlantic Coast, Plate IV.

end, ten menhaden plants in North Carolina (of 

thirty in the entire country) were being served by 

sixty-eight trawlers, guided by airborne spotter 

planes and radios to menhaden schools that 

sometimes stretched for miles.44

By the end of the 1940s, however, the menhaden 

news was mixed. On the one hand, National 

Geographic was sending a crew to the state to 

profile the industry, but on the other hand, catches 

were declining, for reasons no one understood.45

The news remained mixed through the 1960s. 

At some times, catches were good; menhaden 

vessels operating out of Beaufort-Morehead City 

brought in $3 million worth of fish in one week 

in 1961.46 But supply wasn’t the problem. Earlier 

in the year, a delegation of North Carolinians and 

representatives from regional and national fisheries 

organizations had told Interior Secretary Stewart 

Udall that the menhaden industry had “urgent” 

problems because of excessive foreign imports.47

The industry survived, nevertheless, and in 

the mid-1960s, menhaden plants, now fully 

mechanized with larger presses, rotary dryers, 

and centrifuges to extract the oil, were producing 

25,000 tons per year.48 By the mid-1980s, the 

number of processing plants had fallen to three 

(all in Beaufort), and sport fishermen were 

complaining bitterly that the highly capitalized, 

vertically integrated, and still completely 

unregulated menhaden industry was taking too 

many fish of other types.49

The curve of menhaden production between 

1880 and 1970 was quite irregular, with frequent 

sharp peaks and valleys. Production did not rise 

significantly above nineteenth-century levels until 

about 1905, but then it moved sharply upward 

44 Raleigh News and Observer, December 3, 1937; 

January 7, 1945; and December 28, 1947; unpaged 

clippings.

45 Aycock Brown, “Menhaden Catches Declining,” 

Raleigh News and Observer, December 1, 1949; 

unpaged clipping.

46 Norwood Young, “Fish! Fish!,” Raleigh News and 

Observer, December 10, 1961, unpaged clipping.

47 “Washington Hears of Problems,” Raleigh News and 

Observer, March 4, 1961, unpaged clipping.

48 Charles Craven, “Fishing for Menhaden,” Raleigh 

News and Observer, January 3, 1965, III-1; GarrityBlake, The Fish Factory, 24.

49 Jim Polson, “Menhaden in Middle of Fishing Dispute 

Along State’s Coast,” Wilmington Morning Star, 

August 16, 1985, unpaged clipping; Garrity-Blake, The 

Fish Factory, 22.
86 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

through the late teens. It oscillated around 150 

million pounds until the mid-1950s, when it moved 

(albeit jaggedly) toward twice that amount. In the 

1960–1970 decade, production fell precipitously to 

around 100 million pounds. 

Mullet 

The most important fish with regard to economic 

recovery on the Banks during the post-Civil 

War period, Fred Mallison argues, was mullet.50

Mallison quotes a Beaufort observer who in 1871 

reported “enormous” numbers of mullet being 

harvested—up to 500 barrels in a single haul and 

12,000 barrels in a single September day of fishing. 

Salted or smoked and packed in barrels, mullet 

were “savory and saleable.” In 1880, a standard 

barrel brought $2.75 to $3.50. A substantial portion 

of the catch was loaded on schooners, hauled 

across the sound, and traded with farmers for 

corn—five bushels of corn for a barrel of mullet. 

Some mullet fishermen were mainlanders who 

50 Fred M. Mallison, The Civil War on the Outer Banks: 

A History of the Late Rebellion Along the Coast 

of North Carolina from Carteret to Currituck, with 

Comments on Prewar Conditions and an Account of 

Postwar Recovery (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), 

170. Much of our account of the mullet fishing 

industry here is drawn from Mallison, 170–172.

built seasonal camps on the coast and fished with 

the Bankers. 

In the Core Banks-Shackleford Banks area, mullet 

fishing thrived for about two decades, filling a 

demand from inside and outside the state for 

cheap fish. A report on the fishery industries of 

the United States for 1880 said that “the shipments 

of salted mullet from [Carteret County] exceed 

the total shipments from all other portions of the 

Atlantic coast.”51 In the late 1880s, when Carteret 

County was the center of mullet fishing in the 

United States, mullet fishing camps sprang up by 

the score along the sound-side banks from May 

to November, when the fish were running. These 

distinctive, circular, thatched huts with conical 

or hemispherical roofs were featured in National 

Geographic in 1908.52

If a half-dozen men in a small boat chasing a single 

whale with a harpoon and a drag defined one 

end of the spectrum of fishing techniques, mullet 

fishing was far out on the other end: mullets were 

taken in vast numbers in nets—small dragnets in 

the sounds and much larger gill (or sweep) nets or 

seines in open water. The largest nets could be 12 

51 Holland, Survey History, 20–21.

52 Jones, Fishing Cottage #2,11.

Figure 4-12. Menhaden production, 1887–1970. Street, Rickman, and Godwin, History and Status of North Carolina’s Marine 

Fisheries, 25.
National Park Service 87

An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

to 18 feet deep and 900 to 1200 feet long. Sweep 

nets were 200 to 300 feet long and 4 to 6 feet deep.53

One or more small boats would tow the nets out to 

where lookouts had spotted a school, surround the 

fish with the net, beat on the boats to drive the fish 

into the net, then draw the fish-laden nets into the 

boat. 

The process for the largest nets was different. 

One end was attached to a rope on shore, while 

the other end was towed out to the school by 

boat, brought into a circle around the school, 

and then circled back to shore, where fifteen to 

twenty men—sometimes using “backing” seines 

behind the main one to pick up the overflow—

were required to beach the catch. On shore at 

the temporary camps, men would stand at rough 

tables, slitting and gutting the fish before they 

were washed in sea water, salted, and packed in 

barrels. Since the fish bled into the salt, they would 

frequently be unpacked, washed, and repacked 

before sale. Fairly formalized “lay” systems were 

53 Our account of the process is from Stick, The Outer 

Banks of North Carolina, 213–218, which is the most 

detailed we have encountered.

employed to determine how much each man was 

paid from the catch.54

Special conditions and methods at Portsmouth 

gave fish taken and packed there a special niche 

in the market. The foot-deep shoal waters of 

the sound allowed fishermen to surround the 

schooling fish, frighten them into the nets, and 

break their necks, leaving them in the nets until all 

had been killed before loading them into the boats. 

Onshore processing was a matter of great pride: 

removing the backbone, gutting, washing, and 

rubbing off the dark cavity lining. On the market, 

their superior appearance and (many said) better 

taste put them in high demand.55

North Carolina mullet was shipped mainly in 

state and to Virginia and the eastern shore of 

Maryland.56 As the years passed, heavy fishing 

caused the mullet take to decline, and by 1907 the 

only remaining mullet fishery on the banks was at 

Mullet Pond on Shackleford.57 Gross production 

for mullet between 1887 (when it was about 7 

million pounds) and 1970 generally trended 

downward except for two peaks between the late 

1930s and the late 1940s. By 1970, it was down to 

slightly more than 1 million pounds. 

Shad 

Of all the sea creatures, shad commanded the 

highest prices except for turtles. In the early 1840s, 

North Carolina shad were selling for $8.50 per 

barrel in Richmond and Baltimore, when herring 

were bringing $2.62. Forty years later, more than 

3 million pounds of shad were going to market 

annually.58

Crossing from open water into the inlets in 

the spring, shad ascended the rivers to spawn. 

Pound nets—large weirs made of wooden stakes, 

running perpendicular to the shore and designed 

to trap fish in transit and drive them into holding 

54 Stick details a sample arrangement, ibid., 218.

55 Hugh Smith, The Fishes of North Carolina, 2 vols. 

(Raleigh, NC: E.M. Uzzell, 1907), II, 408–409.

56 Ibid., 409.

57 Holland, Survey History, 21.

58 The American Farmer, and Spirit of the Agricultural 

Journals of the Day (May 13, 1840); Southern 

Planter (1841–1866), February 1842, 2; The Atlanta 

Constitution, November 19,1882. References from 

ProQuest Historical Newspapers and American 

Periodicals Series Online.

Figure 4-14. Camp of mullet fishermen on Shackleford 

Banks, before 1907. Note seine-drying roller in 

background. Smith, Fishes of North Carolina, II, facing 

408.

Figure 4-13. Striped or “jumping” mullet. Smith, Fishes of 

North Carolina, II, 180.
88 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

“pounds”—were introduced in the 1860s and 

1870s. They became so numerous that a state law 

had to be passed to allow the fish to migrate.59

Overfishing was already evident along the Atlantic 

seaboard as early as the 1880s, when artificial 

propagation was first undertaken. Yields increased, 

and by 1890, of the nearly 25,000 men employed in 

the industry, nearly a third were in North Carolina. 

They were responsible for nearly a third of the 

entire catch (about 7 percent of it on the Pamlico 

Sound alone). Yields in North Carolina increased 

from about 900,000 fish in 1880 to 1.6 million in 

1888 and then to almost 2.1 million in 1896. That 

year, the Atlantic coast industry employed nearly 

7,000 men, almost 500 of them on the Pamlico 

Sound, where shad fishing had begun as early as 

1873.60

A 1906 report by the North Carolina Geological 

Survey showed that from the high of nearly 9 

million pounds in 1897 (when North Carolina’s 

production was higher than that of any other 

Atlantic state), the take had fallen by 1904 to little 

more than a third of that. Similar declines were 

evident in other states. More pointedly, dramatic 

59 Mallison, The Civil War on the Outer Banks, 171; Mark 

Taylor, “Sharpies, Shad Boats, and Spritsail Skiffs,” in 

Stick, An Outer Banks Reader, 171. For a photograph 

of stream seining of shad near Edenton in 1884, see 

John R. Ross, “Conservation and Economy: The North 

Carolina Geological Survey 1891–1920,” Forest History 

16, no. 4 (January 1973): 26. 

60 Charles H. Stevenson, Shad Fisheries of the Atlantic 

Coast of the United States (Washington, DC: U.S. 

Commission of Fish and Fisheries, 1899), 104–105, 

115–116, 121, 123, 155, 161–162.

decreases had occurred in the northeastern 

Pamlico Sound, the most important shad area in 

the state.61

By the 1930s, shad fishermen, faced with recent 

declines in the harvest, were negotiating with 

state officials about fishing regulations, seeking to 

improve their lot without damaging the supply.62

But the news remained bad. The industry was 

reported “near extinction . . . [after] a century 

of exploitation.” Harvests were only a fifth of 

what they had been during the first quarter of the 

century; all along the east coast, shad production 

had dropped dramatically from the “triple 

menace” of overfishing, dams that prevented fish 

from migrating to spawn, and polluted waterways. 

To address the deficiency, an Atlantic Coast Shad 

61 John Cobb, Investigations Relative to the Shad 

Fisheries of North Carolina (Raleigh, NC: E.M. Uzzell & 

Co., 1906), 10, 17.

62 “Committee Hears Shad Fishermen,” Raleigh News 

and Observer, December 18, 1936, unpaged clipping.

Figure 4-15. Mullet production, 1887–1970. Street, Rickman, and Godwin, History and Status of North Carolina’s 

Marine Fisheries, 25.

Figure 4-16. Shad. Smith, Fishes of North Carolina, II, 126.
National Park Service 89

An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

Conservation Council was formed.63 But it was 

too late. Shad peaked early (between 1890 and 

1900), dropped off dramatically by 1920, and never 

recovered. 

Oysters 

Writing at the turn of the twenty-first century, 

David Cecelski noted that oysters had practically 

vanished from the North Carolina coast. A century 

earlier, oystermen were harvesting 2.5 million 

bushels annually; now the take was only 42,000 

bushels (a nearly 98 percent decline) and not 

a single cannery was still operating. Of all the 

maritime economic enterprises, oystering was the 

shortest-lived and most frenetic.

In 1880, the oyster industry was centered in the 

Chesapeake Bay, where local oystermen were 

harvesting ten million bushels a year—a hundred 

times more than their counterparts in North 

Carolina. A Norfolk-based cannery opened a plant 

at Ocracoke as early as 1877, but others had not 

followed. Local people sometimes bartered oysters 

for corn, but there was effectively no local market 

for them. As Chesapeake stocks declined, though, 

oystermen and cannery officials turned their 

attention south. 

63 R. L. Carson, “Industry That Once Gave Employment 

to 25,000 Now Near Extinction,” Raleigh News and 

Observer, February 28, 1937, unpaged clipping.

The Moore & Brady cannery at Union Point 

“became the first real success,” Cecelski says, 

employing 500 shuckers in 1888. Then state laws 

opened the oyster rocks without restrictions, 

and oyster harvesting “hit like a gold rush in the 

winter of 1889–90.” Canneries based in Baltimore 

built more than a half-dozen plants on the North 

Carolina coast (including one at Beaufort). New 

types of oystering gear (including dredges) opened 

new beds and “brought new life to coastal villages.” 

Schooners from Virginia and further north raced 

for the North Carolina oyster beds, and European 

immigrants from Baltimore ghettoes swarmed 

south to work as shuckers, of whom there were 

1700 in Elizabeth City’s eleven canneries in 1890.

A conflict between North Carolina and 

Chesapeake oystermen moved the legislature 

to ban oystering after the 1890 season, but 

Chesapeake oystermen first ignored the ban and 

then moved to the Gulf of Mexico. By 1898, only 

two North Carolina canneries were still operating 

and the supply was drastically depleted. The boom, 

which had peaked in 1898–1899 at almost 2.5 

million bushels, was generally considered over by 

1909.64

In the early 1920s, rising pollution in the Long 

Island, Chesapeake, and Delaware bays and 

rising prices for oysters brought hopes that North 

64 Cecelski, A Historian’s Coast, 87–92. This account is 

drawn principally from Cecelski.

Figure 4-17. Shad production, 1887–1970. Street, Rickman, and Godwin, History and Status of North 

Carolina’s Marine Fisheries, 24.
90 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

Carolina’s oyster industry might, with planting and 

“intelligent regulation,” experience “tremendous 

expansion.” Adding to those hopes were early 

tests that showed North Carolina oysters free from 

pollutants. By 1929, there were hopes of increasing 

the state’s meager 12,000 acres of beds to perhaps 

a million.65 In 1930, when North Carolina was 

harvesting about a half-million bushels to Virginia’s 

4.5 million, zoologist Robert Coker called oysters 

“one of the great undeveloped resources” of 

the state and explained that North Carolina’s 

low ranking derived from its lack of organized 

oyster farming—preferably, he argued, through 

private leases rather than public ownership and 

development of the beds.66 For at least twenty 

years thereafter, substantial seed oyster and shell 

plantings continued to boost the industry.67

By the early 1960s, however, rumors of oysters 

tainted by urban sewer effluents began to surface, 

harvests were down to a quarter of what they had 

been sixty years earlier, and some doubts were 

being raised about the effectiveness of the state’s 

65 “Planning Vast Future for Tar Heel Oysters,” Raleigh 

News and Observer, December 5, 1929, unpaged 

clipping.

66 “The Oyster Now Moves South,” Raleigh News and 

Observer, December 28, 1924; “Making the Oyster 

Safe,” Raleigh News and Observer, November 13, 

1925; Robert E. Coker, “State Potentially Rich in 

the Oyster Industry” and “Why State Ranks Low in 

Farming of Oysters,” Raleigh News and Observer, 

March 16 and 23, 1930; unpaged clippings.

67 Wade Lucas, “State’s Oyster Industry Hard Hit by Two 

Hurricanes,” Raleigh News and Observer [undated 

clipping, possibly March 18, 1955].

seeding and planting program. By mid-1963 the 

dread news was out: oyster waters were polluted.68

New state revitalization efforts a half-dozen 

years later tried to address pollution, overfishing, 

shifting salinities of growing areas, and inadequate 

state funds for “the oyster war.” But the numbers 

were depressing: the 1971 harvest was about half 

of what it had been in 1962, and state support 

had shifted from commercial to sport fishing. By 

reliable estimates, more than a half-million acres 

of shellfish waters were polluted from industrial, 

residential, and agricultural runoff. Two days 

before the 1971 oyster season started, more than 

60,000 acres had to be closed because of extreme 

pollution.69 Seventeen years later, the Brunswick 

Star-News announced the pollution-induced death 

of the county’s Lockwood Folly River, done in by 

urban sewage and stormwater runoff. The impact 

on the shellfish industry was severe.70

By late 1977, the state’s Director of Marine 

Fisheries was blunt: “The oyster industry is doing 

68 “Oyster Probe Being Waged,” Raleigh News and 

Observer, October 19, 1961; “Scarcity of Tar Heel 

Oysters Discussed,” Raleigh News and Observer, 

February 10, 1963; “Oyster Industry Hit By Polluted 

Waters,” Raleigh News and Observer, July 17, 1963; 

unpaged clippings.

69 Mark Warren, “Pollution Threatens Life of Tar Heel 

Shellfish,” Durham Morning Herald, September 28, 

1972; “C&D Board Closes Polluted Area of State’s 

Coast to Shellfishing,” Greensboro Daily News, 

October 15, 1972; unpaged clippings.

70 Brunswick Star-News, August 13, 1989; unpaged 

clipping.

Figure 4-18. Oyster production, 1887–1970. Street, Rickman, and Godwin, History and Status of North Carolina’s 

Marine Fisheries, 29.
National Park Service 91

An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

nothing but declining.”71 Nevertheless, persistent 

state efforts produced something of a turnaround 

by 1979, with a quarter-million-bushel harvest. It 

was short-lived, however. Pollution continued to 

grow, and within a decade harvests were minimal 

and the culprits were widely recognized: parasites 

(Dermo and MSX), overharvesting, and the 

Red Tide that was assaulting the entire eastern 

seaboard.72

Taking the long view, oyster production showed 

a spectacular rise between 1887 and about 1902, 

but with the exception of a modest bump between 

about 1918 and 1939, it fell steadily thereafter, 

almost disappearing by 1970. 

Shellfish: Clams, Crabs, and 

Shrimp

President Roosevelt’s decision in 1940 to raise 

the tariff on imported canned Japanese crabmeat 

and crab products (more than 11 million pounds 

of which had been imported the previous year) 

brought hope to coastal North Carolina that a new 

industry might arise. By mid-1943, however, the 

North Carolina crab industry was still producing 

only about 500,000 lbs. per year, quite a small 

harvest compared to the Chesapeake-area waters 

to the north, where the state of Virginia had 

created a crab sanctuary to stimulate production.

North Carolina’s returns on its crab harvest during 

the 1940s continued to be modest because of the 

lack of adequate processing facilities, but by the 

1960s the hard blue-crab industry was in a major 

growth mode, with more than 8 million pounds 

harvested and processing plants more numerous. 

71 “N.C. Seeks to Revive Oyster Crop,” Raleigh News 

and Observer, July 12, 1970; “Shellfish Supply Keeps 

Dwindling,” Raleigh News and Observer, June 4, 1973; 

Richard Whittle, “N.C. Oystering on the Decline,”

Raleigh News and Observer, September 3, 1977; 

unpaged clippings.

72 “Oysters Now Making Comeback in State,” 

Fayetteville Observer-Times, April 29, 1979; Charlotte 

Observer, November 19, 1989; unpaged clippings. 

By 1965, the coast’s premier promoter Aycock 

Brown proclaimed that crab was “big business.”73

The story for clams was similar to that for crabs. In 

the 1940s, dredging for clams was a going concern 

yielding about 3 million pounds a year, but the lack 

of picking and canning houses in North Carolina 

resulted in most of the catch being trucked to 

Maryland for processing.74 The state ranked among 

the top twelve clam producers in the late 1940s 

to 1951, but production then declined. A fiveyear study reported in 1954 that clamming had 

emerged as an important North Carolina industry 

as early as the 1830s, with Maryland and Virginia 

buyers coming especially to the Ocracoke Inlet 

area. A processing factory opened at Ocracoke 

in 1898, and by 1902, over a million pounds were 

shipped. For thirty years thereafter, production 

ranged between 200,000 and 400,000 pounds per 

year. When a hurricane opened new inlets that 

raised salinity in Core Sound in 1933, the clam 

population rose. It declined during World War II 

and bottomed out by 1949 before rising again in 

the early fifties as new dredges were put into use.75

During the ninety years between 1880 and 1970, 

clam production varied from a high of about 1.25 

million pounds in 1900 to less than 250,000 in the 

mid-1950s. 

The shrimp industry was slow to start. It began to 

rise after about 1916, had a fairly stable, if low-level 

run in the 1920s, and then turned up sharply in 

the early 1930s before climbing even more steeply 

in the late 1930s and 1940s. On a single day in 

August 1940, seventy shrimp boats hauled 100,000 

pounds from the mouth of Clubfoot Creek in 

73 “State’s Crab Industry May Be Expanded Soon,” 

Raleigh News and Observer, August 29, 1941; “The 

Crab Crop,” Raleigh News and Observer, August 12, 

1944; Wade Lucas, “Hard Blue Crab Industry Shows 

Rapid Growth in North Carolina,” Raleigh News and 

Observer, August 14, 1960; Aycock Brown, “Crabbing 

is Big Business,” Raleigh News and Observer, March 7, 

1965; unpaged clippings.

74 Amy Musk, “A Neglected Tar Heel Resource,” 

Raleigh News and Observer, July 11, 1943; “The Crab 

Crop,” Raleigh News and Observer, August 12, 1944, 

unpaged clippings.

75 Wade Lucas, “Clam Digging Is Showing Decline in 

N.C.,” Raleigh News and Observer, February 13, 1955; 

unpaged clipping. Lucas reported that the Ocracoke 

factory shipped whole clams, clam chowder, and 

clam juice. Lucas quoted University of North Carolina 

Institute of Fisheries mollusk specialist F. S. Chestnutt 

as reporting that the factory shipped more than 1 

million pounds of clam products as late as 1902.
92 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Craven County. At the end of World War II, the 

state commissioned a major study of the industry 

aimed at increasing production and profitability. 

A year later, the Asheville Citizen reported that 

the industry had “ballooned” and that “all the 

fishermen have gone shrimping”; an estimated 500 

boats were active on Pamlico Sound alone. Buyboat operators were buying shrimp for 22 cents a 

pound and selling it for 54, and customers were 

paying 85 to 90. Harvests were surpassing even 

menhaden.76

By 1951, some 1,500 men were working on nearly 

1,200 shrimp boats, and the labor force in the 

packinghouses raised total employment to around 

76 Frank A. Montgomery, Jr., “ Reap the King of Tar Heel 

Seafood Moneymakers,” Raleigh News and Observer, 

May 13[?], 1958; “Huge Shrimp Hauls Reported in 

Craven,” Raleigh News and Observer, August 24, 

1940; “Southport Man to Head Study,” Raleigh News 

and Observer, July 3[?], 1947; “N.C. Shrimp Industry 

Balloons,” Asheville Citizen, September 26, 1948; 

unpaged clippings.

4,000.77 Word was out about the abundant shrimp 

to be had in North Carolina waters. In short order, 

shrimpers from other states moved in, and the 

call went out for restrictions. Such restrictions 

(licensing and taxing out-of-state shrimpers and 

requiring reciprocity from those states) were 

quickly put into place.78 The 1954 season proved to 

be a bonanza. Boats in search of the “white gold” 

were running day and night, expecting a record 

catch beyond even the 5.5 million pounds of the 

previous year.79

After a sharp drop in the later 1950s, shrimp 

catches rose modestly but uncertainly in the early 

1970s. By 1974, however, increasing supply had 

77 “Tar Heel Shrimpers Put in Long Hours,” Raleigh News 

and Observer, August 5, 1951; unpaged clipping.

78 ‘Shrimp Question Still Unsettled,” Raleigh News and 

Observer, January 20, 1954; “Protective Steps Are 

Taken,” Raleigh News and Observer, March 23[?], 

1954; unpaged clippings.

79 Wade Lucas, “Shrimpers Are Ready for Hauls,” 

Raleigh News and Observer, March 28, 1954; unpaged 

clipping.

Figure 4-19. Clam production, 1887–1970. Street, Rickman, and Godwin, History and Status of North Carolina’s 

Marine Fisheries, 29.

Figure 4-20. Shrimp production, 1887–1970. Street, Rickman, and Godwin, History and Status of North Carolina’s 

Marine Fisheries, 28.
National Park Service 93

driven prices down from $2.00–2.50 per pound 

to $1.00, and Governor Holshouser launched a 

campaign to aid the industry, which falling prices 

(as low as 40 to 50 cents a pound), smaller shrimp, 

and higher production costs (the price of diesel 

fuel increased from 18 to 44 cents a gallon) were 

putting shrimpers “in a bind.”80

Loggerhead Turtles and 

Diamondback Terrapins

Loggerhead sea turtles were once hunted for their 

meat, eggs, and fat (which was used for cosmetics 

and medications). Adult males generally weigh 

around 250 pounds, but specimens of up to 1000 

pounds. have been found. Since 1978, loggerheads 

have been protected by the Endangered Species Act 

and other national and international conventions,81

as have diamondback terrapins. The terrapins 

breed in the Roanoke Island marshes and on the 

western shore of Pamlico Sound, and consequently 

were plentiful in the sound.

Commentary on the history of the harvesting of 

turtles and terrapins in the years before they were 

protected by law is surprisingly difficult to come 

by. Mallison says, the supply of diamondbacks 

was already depleted by World War I, no doubt 

because they commanded “the highest price per 

pound of any of the sea creatures.” They had been 

aggressively sought for market at least since 1849, 

when J. B. Etheridge of Bodie Island sold 4,150 of 

them for $750.00 (about 18 cents each). 

80 “Shrimp Season in State May Be Best in 15 Years,” 

Raleigh News and Observer, October 15, 1962; 

“Shrimp Catches Show Big Gains,” Raleigh News and 

Observer, January 25, 1963; “Six-Month Shrimp Catch 

Termed Best Since 1965,” Raleigh News and Observer, 

August 4, 1971; “Shrimp Campaign Launched,” 

Raleigh News and Observer, August 13, 1974; “Tar 

Heel Shrimpers Hurt by Steep Drop in Prices,” Raleigh 

News and Observer, August 18, 1974; unpaged 

clippings. For an extended discussion of the industry, 

see John R. Maiolo, Hard Times and a Nickel a Bucket: 

Struggle and Survival in North Carolina’s Shrimp 

Industry (Chapel Hill, NC: Chapel Hill Press, 2004).

81 Full information on the loggerhead turtle species is 

available at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric 

Administration’s Fisheries Office’s loggerhead 

site, http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/species/turtles/

loggerhead.htm. A summary of rangewide 

protections for the diamondback is available in 

Christina F. Watters, A Review of the Rangewide 

Regulations Pertaining to Diamondback Terrapins 

(Malaclemys terrapin) (Stone Harbor, NJ: Wetlands 

Institute, 2004).

Loggerhead turtles faced a renewed threat during 

World War II rationing of foodstuffs. “Fresh red 

meat which requires no ration points,” the Raleigh 

News and Observer reported in July 1945,

is being eaten by residents of the Outer Banks, 

who are lucky enough to get it . . . . Choice 

steaks may be sliced from the meats . . . and 

OPA [Office of Price Adjustment] are not likely 

to do anything about it due to the scarcity 

of the choice cuts . . . which [come] from 

Loggerheads . . . . 82

Regulation and Long-Term 

Prospects

From fairly early in the history of commercial 

fishing off the Outer Banks, there were were clear 

indications that unregulated commercial fishing 

was not sustainable. The earliest regulatory 

measures had applied only to certain counties, and 

fishermen were wary of statewide laws that might 

curb local practices. But by 1911, Ross reports, the 

state Geological Survey was advocating measures 

to improve the industry. To consider legislation to 

do that, it joined with the Fish Commission and 

the Oyster Commission to call for meetings to 

consider comprehensive measures. But until then 

all regulatory measures had applied only to certain 

counties, and fishermen were wary of statewide 

laws that might curb local practices. Delegates 

from twenty-seven eastern counties formed the 

North Carolina Fisheries Association and backed 

statewide laws, but in short order a group from 

Carteret County joined to defeat the legislation. 

Two years later it passed, however, establishing a 

commission to license and regulate both fisheries 

and fishermen.83

Regulatory measures helped in various ways 

to curb over-fishing and address issues of 

sustainability. Although total fish production 

during the more than nine decades between 1880 

and 1970 rose from about 30 million to just under 

200 million pounds, those somewhat encouraging 

figures did not reflect price fluctuations, dramatic 

differences in value and availability among species, 

the effects of pollution, and other variables critical 

82 Raleigh News and Observer, July 15[?], 1945; unpaged 

clipping, date partly obscured.

83 Ross, “Conservation and Economy,” 25.
94 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

to the health and sustainability of the industry. And 

the environmental and other threats of the closing 

years of the twentieth century were still to come. 

Shipbuilding

 North Carolina has never been a major center 

for shipbuilding, but the activity has been present 

since colonial times, and at various junctures it 

has contributed significantly to the economy and 

job base of the coastal region. The North Carolina 

Maritime History Council has compiled a list of 

approximately 3,100 ships built in North Carolina 

from 1688 to the 1920s. Five of them were built 

before 1700, but all of those were of 6 tons or 

less (three shallops, likely flat-bottomed, and two 

sloops).84 Total output amounted to approximately 

170,000 tons, making the average vessel size about 

55 tons. Vessels ranged from 2 to 545 tons, but only 

about 75 were larger than 200 tons, and more than 

2500 (80 percent) were smaller than 100 tons.85

The earliest of the ships were built at the expected 

locations: Edenton, Bath, New Bern, Beaufort, Port 

Roanoke, and (after 1745) Wilmington. 

Not surprisingly, North Carolina’s entire 

shipbuilding industry virtually shut down during 

the Civil War. Almost 2,000 ships had been built 

by 1860, but only nine were completed between 

84 North Carolina Maritime History Council, List of Ships 

Built in North Carolina from Colonial Times to circa 

1900 (Excel spreadsheet available from “Maritime 

History Research Resources” at http://www.

ncmaritimehistory.org. Unless otherwise attributed, 

data used in this brief discussion are from this source.

85 The median vessel size in the Maritime History Council 

list was approximately 37 tons. Barbour Boat Works in 

New Bern also built wooden minesweepers and escort 

boats. 

1861 and 1865. The industry revived fairly quickly, 

however; seventy-six ships were built between 

1865 and 1870, 126 between 1870 and 1880, 

and over two hundred in the following decade. 

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, smaller 

towns such as Smyrna also produced a substantial 

number of vessels, though Smyrna’s tended to be 

small (in the 10–20 ton range).86

In the table below (data selected from the Maritime 

History Council’s large data set), one can observe 

several salient facts about North Carolina’s 

shipbuilding industry, some with special relevance 

to the Cape Lookout section of the southern banks. 

Shipbuilding at Portsmouth, for example, was 

minimal, focused on small vessels, and confined 

to a relatively short (early) period, while on the 

other side of the inlet at Ocracoke, more vessels 

were built over a longer time, and they tended to be 

considerably larger. Meanwhile, activity at Edenton 

and New Bern, where ships totaling 5,000 to 10,000 

tons were built, was many times greater than at 

either Portsmouth or Ocracoke and continued for 

much longer. The most-productive shipbuilding 

locations south of Portsmouth were Morehead 

City (though production there began late), 

Wilmington, New Bern, Beaufort, and Carteret 

County.87

86 The Maritime History Council lists gives “North” as the 

place of building for a very large number of vessels. 

We have not yet been able to identify this location 

or to determine whether it may be an inclusive 

designation for several individual northern locations.

87 Specific locations in Carteret County are not given in 

the Maritime History Council data. 

Figure 4-21. Total pounds of fish harvested in North Carolina coastal waters, 1880–1970. Street, Rickman, and 

Godwin, History and Status of North Carolina’s Marine Fisheries, 30.
National Park Service 95

Since it leaves off at about 1921, the Maritime 

History Council list does not take into account 

World War II shipbuilding, when Newport News 

Shipbuilding Company operated (under the name 

North Carolina Shipbuilding Company) a large 

yard at Wilmington that employed 20,000 workers 

(at an annual total salary of $50 million) and 

produced 243 vessels, including 125 liberty ships 

and 64 C2-type fast freighters. The first liberty ship 

out of the Wilmington yard was the SS Zebulon B. 

Vance, launched the day before Pearl Harbor.88

88 Powell, Encylopedia of North Carolina, 625, 671, 

1032, 1243. Powell also says that the Meadows 

yard in New Bern built “standardized cargo vessels 

and submarine chasers” as part of the World War 

I effort. For a useful summary of the development 

of and production from the North Carolina 

Shipbuilding Company, see http://en.wikipedia.

org/wiki/North_Carolina_Shipbuilding_Company. 

For some construction records of the Company, 

see http://www.shipbuildinghistory.com/history/

shipyards/4emergency/wwtwo/northcarolina.htm. A 

photo of the SS Zebulon B. Vance under construction 

may be found at http://ncmuseumofhistory.org/

workshops/WWII/LibertyShips.htm.

Work-Boat Building

Parallel with shipbuilding, specialized work-boat 

designs were developed to serve other sectors of 

water transportation. Sometimes adapted from 

existing designs, at times brought in from other 

coastal locations or developed in collaboration 

with working fishermen—or by the fishermen 

themselves—these work boats were excellent 

examples of the synergistic interaction of 

imagination, practical design skill, workmanship, 

and local needs and cultural norms.

The earliest work boats were probably associated 

with whaling, which arose earlier than the other 

species-specific fishing industries. The Simpsons’ 

history of whaling on the coast highlights 

Shackleford boatbuilder Devine S. Guthrie, who 

built his six-man, 20 to 25-foot, double-ended 

lapstrake boats, high in the bow and stern, from 

local timber from a design traceable to fourteenthcentury Basque shore whalers.89 Alford’s 

recent booklet on coastal work boats says that 

experimentation with their forms began as early as 

the mid-1870s.90

In the nineteenth century, as Mark Taylor recounts, 

three adaptive work boat types emerged that 

“evolved in or had have strong links to North 

Carolina coastal waters”: the sharpie, the shad 

boat, and the spritsail skiff.91 The sharpie is 

characterized by seaworthiness, large cargo 

capacity, open work area, and shallow draft. The 

design was introduced into the Outer Banks area 

by Rhode Islander George Ives in 1875, who knew 

of sharpies through their widespread use on Long 

Island. Initially skeptical, Banker fishermen quickly 

took a liking to the sharpie after one bested their 

traditional boats in a race; by 1880 there were 

more than 500 of them in use.92 Sharpies ranged 

from 26 to 36 feet, were crewed by one or two 

men, and were used for either oystering or fishing. 

Characterized by a plumb stem, straight sides, 

flat bottom, and rounded, half-decked stern, the 

boats usually were two-masted, spritsail craft 

which, because they lacked a low-swinging boom, 

89 Simpson and Simpson, Whaling on the North Carolina 

Coast, 44–45.

90 Michael Alford, Traditional Work Boats of North 

Carolina (Beaufort: North Carolina Maritime Museum, 

1990), 1. See also Dunbar, Geographical History of the 

Carolina Banks, 122–124.

91 Taylor, “Sharpies, Shad Boats, and Spritsail Skiffs.” 

92 Alford, Work Boats, 5

Location No. 

Built Years Total tonnage

Avg.

tons

Portsmouth 4 1826–1869 115 29

Bath 10 1727–1888 638 64

Ocracoke 23 1816–1868 1,090 47

Hyde County 83 1805–1887 6,726 81

Smyrna 87 1872–1909 1,085 13

Edenton 87 1722–1908 4,669 54

Morehead 

City 92 1885–1913 1,339 15

Wilmington 92 1746–1897 6,292 68

Currituck 119 1730–1823 5,919 50

Elizabeth City 121 1800–1915 7,891 65

Washington 129 1769–1917 10,779 84

New Bern 148 1779–1903 10,295 70

Carteret 226 1788–1867 13,042 58

Beaufort 242 1725–1913 12,887 53

North 397 1688–1904 23,439 59

1,860 1688–1917 106,206 57

Table 4-1: Ships built in selected North Carolina 

cities, 1727–1917
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offered ample headroom. An inexpensive, solid, 

durable model could be built quickly from local 

pine, oak, cypress, or white cedar. By the 1930s, 

Alford reports, most of the sailing sharpies had 

disappeared or been fitted with engines. Many 

converted sharpies ended up in Florida or the 

Bahamas.93

Modifying the traditional sharpie with more 

powerful double-masted, gaff-rigged main and 

topsails usually used on schooners allowed the 

boats to pull heavy iron oyster dredges. In this 

configuration, which generally ranged up to 45 

feet long, they were known as schooner-sharpies 

or “Core Sounders.” The largest, at 63 feet, was 

built in Beaufort in 1899. Some were used to haul 

fish to the West Indies, returning laden with sugar, 

molasses and rum.94 Core Sounder boats came to 

prominence as the sharpies waned. Narrow, lowrise, round-sterned boats of 36 to 40 feet, originally 

with small engines, they were well suited to sinknet fishing. 

Round-bottom shad boats are traceable in design 

back to dugout canoes used by coastal Indians. 

Early settlers modified them to have broader 

bottoms, keels, and ribs. In that form, they were 

called kunners.95 By the mid-nineteenth century, 

however, logs suitable for such boats had become 

scarce, and boats constructed in such a manner 

were not able to do the work required. In the 

1870s, Roanoke Island builder Washington Creef, 

working off the kunner prototype and aiming to 

come up with a shallow-drafted, relatively small 

(under 27 feet), seaworthy boat that could haul 

heavy loads from pound nets and carried a large 

spritsail and flying topsail suitable for light summer 

breezes, came up with what came to be known as 

the shad boat. In the 1920s, a v-bottom, deadrise 

form of the shad boat replaced the older roundbottom style.96

93 Ibid., 8.

94 Taylor, “Sharpies, Shad Boats, and Spritsail Skiffs.” 

Unless otherwise indicated, our brief description of 

these types is based upon Taylor’s article. See also 

Alford, Work Boats, 7.

95 Dunbar, Geographical History of the Carolina Banks, 

120.

96 Alford, Work Boats, 18–21. Dunbar, Geographical 

History of the Carolina Banks, 121–123, notes that the 

Dough family of Manteo were also major builders of 

shad boats.

Modifications to the shad-boat design around the 

turn of the twentieth century made them attractive 

to waterfowl hunting clubs on the Banks, which 

bought many of them. Their great speed also made 

them attractive to rumrunners during Prohibition. 

Stick reports that they have also been used 

extensively by commercial waterfowl hunters.97

With engines installed, a few remaining shad boats 

were still in use in the 1980s by Manteo-based 

commercial fishermen. In 1987, the shad boat was 

designated by the state legislature as the official 

North Carolina State Historical Boat.

The spritsail skiff was only 16 to 22 feet long, but 

it was the “mule” of coastal clammers, oystermen, 

crabbers, and fishermen. Equipped with a 

centerboard but no keel, it drew only 4 to 6 inches 

of water with the centerboard up, and even with 

several fishermen and a large net aboard it could 

haul several thousand pounds of fish or shellfish. 

Examples of working spritsail skiffs have virtually 

disappeared in recent decades, but renewed 

97 Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 179.

Figure 4-22. Core Sounder work boat. Alford, Traditional 

Work Boats of North Carolina, 15.

Figure 4-23. De Bry engraving of John White drawing 

“The Manner of Makinge Their Boates” (1585–1586). 

British Museum.
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An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

interest in traditional boats has led to a revival of 

the design for recreational use.98

A highly functional Harkers Island boat design 

emerged in the 1920s, partly in response to the 

tendency of the traditional flat-bottomed sharpies 

to snake and vibrate when converted to gasoline 

or diesel power. The Harkers Island design 

emerged from combining other functional aspects 

of sharpies with engine power and the “Harkers 

Island [or Carolina] flare” that threw water away 

from the hull at high speeds. The first such boat is 

usually credited to Bogue Sound vessel repairman 

Brady Lewis, who relocated to Harkers Island in 

1926. Harkers Island boats are used for trawling, 

shrimping, dredging, and recreational fishing.99

Commercial Hunting (or “Market 

Gunning”)

The sound side of the coastal waters of the Outer 

Banks offered, in addition to fish, a compelling 

array of waterfowl used since aboriginal times as a 

source of both food and decorative and ceremonial 

feathers. Commercial hunting of waterfowl did not 

arrive until the mid-nineteenth century, however. 

98 Taylor, “Sharpies, Shad Boats, and Spritsail Skiffs,” 

172–173.

99 This characterization of the boat comes from 

Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 551. Several 

photos of such boats may be seen at http://www.

downeasttour.com/harkers_is/Tia02_vt003_03b.htm.

Figure 4-24. John White, “Indians Dancing Around a 

Circle of Posts” (1585–1586). British Museum.

Ducks for Food and Feathers for 

Hats 

Between 1795 and 1830, Currituck Sound had been 

“freshened” by the introduction of freshwater, 

and new grasses favored by wildfowl began to 

grow. The area quickly became a renowned center 

for hunting. As early as 1861, Edmund Ruffin 

provided an account of commercial waterfowl 

(duck) hunting on the upper Currituck Sound. It 

was, he said, “a branch of industry of considerable 

importance for its amount of profit.” Detailing one 

property owner’s operation, Ruffin said that

[t]he shooting (as a business) on his shores is 

done only by gunners hired by himself, and for 

his own profit, and who are paid a fixed price 

for every fowl delivered to him according to its 

kind, from the smallest or least prized species 

of ducks, to the rare and highly valued swan. 

Mr. B. has employed thirty gunners through 

a winter. He provides and charges for the 

ammunition they require, which they pay out 

of their wages.100

Prices for fowl in the 1880s ranged from $0.25 to 

$1.00 per pair, depending upon the species. 

In 1884, H. H. Brimley, a North Carolina state 

museum zoologist searching for specimens, 

provided a graphic account of the widespread 

practice of gunning from “sink boxes.” Coffin-like 

boxes loaded with ballast to sink them to water 

level were surrounded with 150 or so decoys. From 

the cover of one of these boxes, one or two hunters 

armed with 10-gauge guns with 32-inch barrels 

could bring down as many as 125 birds in a single 

day of shooting. “[A] majority of the inhabitants of 

the shores of the sound,” Brimley reported, “made 

most of their winter’s income directly or indirectly 

from the commercial hunting of wildfowl.”101

By 1880, Cecelski writes, the wholesale slaughter of 

waterfowl and birds had become “commonplace 

and relentless.” The new post-Civil War style 

100 Ruffin, Agricultural, Geological, and Descriptive 

Sketches of Lower North Carolina; quoted in Stick, 

The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 92–93. Stick 

quotes Ruffin’s extended description of how hunters 

operated here.

101 “Market Gunning” in Odum and Brimley, A North 

Carolina Naturalist, 17–23. Quoted from Stick, An 

Outer Banks Reader, 29–32.
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of decorating ladies’ hats with bird feathers 

had added a new market sector to the by-then 

long-established industry focused on waterfowl 

(mainly ducks) as food. Some 82,000 workers 

were employed in the millinery trade. Hunters 

first concentrated on the more colorful birds, but 

when those became scarce they turned to drabber 

species. Still another new sector opened with 

the activities of “eggers,” who peddled coastal 

bird eggs. Within a decade, local families were 

alarmed by the excess depletion of the waterfowl 

population.102

To bring some restraint and responsibility into 

the system, the North Carolina Audubon Society 

was formed in 1902. Some new laws put North 

Carolina at the forefront of efforts to develop an 

effective regulatory system, but Audubon wardens, 

Cecelski says, met “stiff opposition,” and a black 

market in waterfowl soon emerged. The Gunners 

and Fishermen’s League, organized in Currituck 

County, managed by 1909 to strip the legislation 

102 Cecelski, A Historian’s Coast, 93–98.

of enforcement authority. It was not restored until 

federal migratory bird legislation was passed in 

1918 and the North Carolina Game Commission 

was established in 1927.103

Even before they were eviscerated, the new laws 

restricted hunting, but did not eliminate it. A 

wayside sign in the now totally depopulated village 

of Portsmouth advises visitors that as late as 1928,

Brothers-in-law Jody Styron and Tom Bragg built 

their house using materials salvaged from at least 

two older buildings. Tom, Jody, and Jody’s wife, 

Hub, ran a hunting service out of their new home. 

While Tom and Jody guided hunters out into the 

marshes, Hub cooked the meals and kept house.

Extralegal Maritime Activities 

The legitimate maritime work of the Outer 

Banks—whaling, piloting, lightering, commercial 

fishing, keeping lighthouses, dragging Life-Saving 

Service rescue boats down the beach and into the 

surf, manning Coast Guard craft in every kind of 

weather—was (and remains) arduous, physically 

exhausting, frequently dangerous, and on the 

whole neither highly nor reliably paid. People do 

it because it is, when all is said and done, honest 

and interesting work, and above all work that 

is available to support oneself and one’s family. 

Under such conditions, it is hardly surprising 

that, alongside this legitimate maritime economy, 

there has long been an illegitimate, underground 

economy that seemed (to some, at least) to promise 

quicker, easier money. 

We begin, however, with an often-commentedupon borderline-illicit activity that offered not to 

make anyone rich quickly, but perhaps to ease the 

burden of subsistence in a challenging economic 

and physical environment. 

Wrecking 

The legendarily treacherous waters off the Outer 

Banks have been the site of countless shipwrecks 

from the time of early exploration and settlement. 

Even in the absence of hurricanes, the Graveyard 

of the Atlantic turned countless ships into wrecks 

that were either close enough to shore to access 

103 Ibid., 100.

Figure 4-25. Carteret County waterfowl hunters in sink 

box. Dudley, Carteret Waterfowl Heritage, 10.

Figure 4-26. Gunners in blind, Carteret County. Dudley, 

Carteret Waterfowl Heritage, 50.
National Park Service 99

An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

once the storm passed, or (better) left stranded 

on the beaches. Numerous writers have reported 

that Outer Banks residents took advantage of such 

tragic events to engage in “wrecking”: scavenging 

the shipwrecks for salvageable cargo, or the 

passengers’ and crews’ personal effects, or timbers 

and planking that might be put to other uses. 

Some, it has been reported, even lured ships onto 

dangerous shoals by tying a lantern to a pony’s 

neck and leading it along the shore. 

During the Civil War, a Union colonel observed 

that Bankers were “a class of people who subsist 

from fishing and hunting as well as from cargoes 

stranded upon the stormy coast,” and other 

outsiders voiced similar views.104 More than a 

half-century ago, however, Dunbar countered 

that “there are only a few recorded cases” of 

such activity, one on the northern Banks in 1696, 

the retaliatory plunder of marauding Spanish 

ships in 1750, and a couple of instances during 

the Revolution. The rarity of such cases, Dunbar 

concluded, made Bankers “undeserving of their 

reputation.”105

Indeed, had Outer Banks residents engaged in such 

activity with abandon, they would have done so 

104 Torres, Cape Hatteras National Seashore Historic 

Resource Study, 105–106. A version of the story of the 

lantern on the pony’s neck can be found in Harper’s 

New Monthly Magazine, May 1860, 733. 

105 Dunbar, Geographical History of the Carolina Banks, 

41–42. Dunbar’s conclusion is seconded in Impact 

Assessment, Inc., Ethnohistorical Description of the 

Eight Villages Adjoining Cape Hatteras National 

Seashore and Interpretive Themes of History 

and Heritage: Final Technical Report, Volume II 

(Washington, DC: National Park Service, 2005), II, 

421–422.

at their legal as well as physical peril, at least from 

the late eighteenth century onward. Somewhat 

belatedly, the North Carolina legislature in that 

year established wreck districts, administered 

by Commissioners of Wrecks appointed by 

coastal counties. Citizens aware of wrecks were 

obliged to report them to the local commissioner; 

appropriating goods without doing so was subject 

to fine. The commissioner’s duty when a shipwreck 

occurred in his area of responsibility was to collect 

a group of men, go to its aid, and take custody of 

both the vessel and its goods and cargo until proper 

compensation was paid by the vessel’s owners or 

the owner of the goods. Goods unclaimed for a 

year were disposed of at a public sale (or vendue) 

and the money held by the clerk of court. 

Such a process could benefit local residents, who 

could receive modest payment as “salvers,” help to 

remove and guard goods from the ships, or make 

available for purchase desirable goods at bargain 

prices.106 Such episodic activity could hardly have 

provided sufficient, or sufficiently reliable, income 

to have made it a substantial part of the Banks 

economy, however.

Contraband and Smuggling 

Moving contraband and smuggling in North 

Carolina were in evidence at least by the late 

seventeenth century, and they could at that time 

106 Dunbar, 95 n.41, notes that the law was modified a 

number of times and remained on the books at least 

until the 1950s. Dunbar gives the date for the law 

(and its specified procedures) as 1801, but Stick, The 

Outer Banks of North Carolina, 76, reproduces an 

announcement from a vendue master in the State 

Gazette for May 2, 1794. Stick implies that the 1801 

law merely set up wreck districts, the vendue master 

system having been established earlier. The 1899 

version of the law may be found in Public Laws and 

Resolutions of the State of North Carolina Passed 

by the General Assembly (Raleigh, NC: Howards 

& Broughton, 1899), Chapter 79, 209. This law (as 

well as earlier versions of 1838–1846) established 

five districts in Carteret County. The 1917 revisions 

reduced that number to three. James Iredell, A 

Digested Manual of the Acts of the General Assembly 

of North Carolina: From the Year 1838 to the Year 

1846 (Raleigh, NC: Weston R. Gales, 1847), 221 ff., 

and Lucius Polk McGehee et al., Consolidated Statutes 

of North Carolina, Prepared Under Public Laws 1917 

(Raleigh, NC: Commercial Printing Co., State Printers, 

1920), Chapter 134, 1,084ff. The law as it stood in the 

1830s is synopsized in Joseph Blunt, The Shipmaster’s 

Assistant, and Commercial Digest (New York: E. and 

G. W. Blount, 1837), 275–277.

Figure 4-27. “Stripping the Wreck” [before 1902. 

Merryman, The United States Life-saving Service1880, 13. 

Reprinted from Scribner’s Monthly Magazine.
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properly be considered politically motivated 

activities. To promote British mercantilism, 

Parliament had passed the Navigation Acts of 1651 

and 1660 and later the Plantation Duty Act of 1673. 

Taken together, those laws limited trade between 

Great Britain and its colonies to British, Irish, and 

colonial vessels and prohibited some products 

(including tobacco) from being shipped anywhere 

but to England. For economic and political reasons 

(tobacco was a major crop, after all), these laws 

were widely violated.107

More than thirty years ago, Ehrenhard pointed 

out that the very nature of the North Carolina 

coast “invited smuggling throughout the colonial 

period.” Masters of vessels soon realized, he 

observed, “the ease of breaking cargo at the inlets 

and of loading goods onto small boats to be taken 

to any one of the numerous small settlements or 

landings, thereby avoiding payment of customs.”108

107 Lefler and Newsome, North Carolina, 42–43.

108 Ehrenhard, Cape Lookout National Seashore, 28 ff.

In the early eighteenth century, especially in 

the Albemarle, New Englanders were given to 

passing through Roanoke and Currituck inlets 

and offloading their goods without paying 

duties. Noleen McIlvenna’s recent history of the 

Albemarle (1660–1713) explores the widespread 

and systematic smuggling that took place in 

the wake of the passage of the Navigation Acts. 

“[A]lmost all of the colonies on the American 

seaboard ignored [the Acts],” she says, “and set up 

elaborate smuggling operations.” And it happened 

most, and best, McIlvenna points out, in North 

Carolina, where the geography of the coast was 

most favorable. Those who tried to set themselves 

up as customs collectors in hope of personal 

gain “became among the most hated men in the 

colonies.”109 Smuggling also took place at Ocracoke 

in the early eighteenth century, and for twenty 

years, governors urged that a customs house be 

established there. Finally in 1753, the legislature 

109 Noleen McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People,22, 46, 48, 

52–54, 77–78, 89, 98–99.

Figure 4-28. “Attack upon Smugglers by United States 

Revenue Officers at Masonborough, North Carolina” 

(1867), Harper’s Weekly, November 16, 1867, 729. North 

Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at 

Chapel Hill.
National Park Service 101

An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

created the town of Portsmouth partly for that 

purpose.110

Data are scarce on the prevalence of smuggling 

for the next two centuries, but in the mid-1930s, 

coastal journalist Aycock Brown wrote a revealing 

series on the topic. The first installment focuses 

on an account of the smuggling of a million 

dollars’ worth of opium into the state. In other 

installments, Brown detailed the story of a boat 

captain who waxed nostalgic about the money 

he had made during Prohibition, running rum 

through the inlets from offshore vessels. “There 

are also true accounts,” he continues, about “Civil 

War blockade runners, alien smugglers, [and] 

Cape Verde Islanders” who tried to enter without 

passports.111

In the 1970s, North Carolina’s coast again became 

attractive for smugglers, this time Latin American 

smugglers of marijuana. The Associated Press 

reported in December 1977 that the North 

Carolina coast was “becoming the same haven for 

marijuana smugglers . . . that it was for rum runners 

in the 1920s,” according to the U.S. attorney for 

eastern North Carolina. A seizure of a vessel 

several miles up the Cape Fear near Wilmington 

had netted 17.5 tons of marijuana—only one of 

three such recent seizures. The year before, 23 tons 

were seized on Pamlico Sound. State Bureau of 

Investigation director Haywood Starling estimated 

that for every vessel captured, two or three escaped 

detection.112 A May 1981 U.S. Supreme Court case 

(451 US 997 Trapper v. North Carolina) noted that 

Hyde County “is regularly used by smugglers of 

marihuana [sic].”113

Piracy 

Legends about pirates (Blackbeard preeminent 

among them) and the Outer Banks have 

flourished and persisted, perhaps even beyond 

what the historical evidence warrants, but their 

depredations were serious and deserve attention. 

110 Ibid., 30–31.

111 Aycock Brown, “Outer Banks of Carolina Paradise 

for Atlantic Smugglers,” Raleigh News and Observer, 

December 2, 1934; unpaged clipping.

112 Associated Press report in Spartanburg [SC] Herald, 

December 15, 1977, C7.

113 See http://openjurist.org/451/us/997/trapper-v-northcarolina.

Historian of pirates and privateers Lindley Butler 

has observed that the two occupations were “so 

closely intertwined as to be inseparable.” The 

temptation for the captain of an armed privateer 

vessel to veer into piracy was great. In the western 

hemisphere, Butler says, English pirates were 

to a degree tolerated by Great Britain because 

“they could be counted on to defend the British 

West Indian colonies.” Eventually pirates in the 

Caribbean became a menace to the British state, 

however, and were given clemency and pushed 

out. In search of fresh prey, pirates moved to the 

North and South American coasts. As early as 

1665, Virginia Governor William Berkeley reported 

that the waters were “so full of pirates that it is 

impossible for any ships to go home safely.” A 

number of pirates turned up off the North Carolina 

coast.114

The “golden age” of piracy, Lefler and Newsome 

conclude, lasted roughly thirty years, from 1689 

to 1718. As early as 1683, they observe, the Lords 

of Trade complained of the “harboring and 

encouraging of Pirates in Carolina,” and asserted 

that several governors had rewarded and sheltered 

pirates and shared their booty.115 Ehrenhard argued 

114 Lindley S. Butler, Pirates, Privateers, and Rebel Raiders 

of the Carolina Coast (Chapel Hill: University of North 

Carolina Press, 2000), 5–6. Berkeley quotation from 

Donald Grady Shomette’s preface to Shirley Carter 

Hughson, Blackbeard & the Carolina Pirates: The 

Carolina Pirates and Colonial Commerce, 1670–1740 

(1894; reprint, Hampton, VA: Port Hampton Press, 

2000), ix. Hughson, 9, says that the earliest accounts 

of pirates on the Carolina coast date from 1565. The 

literature on pirates and piracy (more than 25,000 

volumes produced so far, worldwide) is very mixed, 

with much of it focused on undocumented legend 

and fantasy. Besides Butler and Hughson, two of the 

most reliable sources are Marcus Rediker, Between 

the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, 

Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 

1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University 

Press, 1987), and Robert H. Patton, Patriot Pirates: 

The Privateer War for Freedom and Fortune in the 

American Revolution, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon, 

2008). Unfortunately, Patton confines his discussion 

to New York, New England, and the West Indies. 

Butler’s analysis is solidly grounded in extensive 

archival and other primary sources such as memoirs 

and diaries, as well as wide-ranging secondary 

materials. Rediker focuses not on specific pirates, 

episodes, or geographical areas, but rather on the 

cultural and working worlds of seamen, including 

those of pirates. See also E. S. Eyck van Heslinga, Jaap 

de Moor, and David J. Starkey, Pirates and Privateers: 

New Perspectives on War and Trade in the Eighteenth 

and Nineteenth Centuries (Exeter: University of Exeter 

Press, 1997).

115 Lefler and Newsome, North Carolina, 62–63.
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that since North Carolina’s commerce was not as 

great as Virginia’s or South Carolina’s, the state 

was not as hostile to pirates as its neighbors were. 

Additionally, as McIlvenna has observed, the 

passage of the widely hated and ignored Navigation 

Acts in the 1680s made piracy more attractive both 

in the Albemarle and in the Charles Town region.116

At the end of the seventeenth century, the Cape 

Fear area, still relatively unsettled and conveniently 

close to Charles Town, a favorite source of plunder 

for the pirates, was regarded as an excellent base: 

proximate to the Cape Fear and Pamlico rivers 

and to Bath, where they could sell directly to 

consumers rather than to the middlemen of New 

Providence in the Bahamas. Even after paying off 

colonial officials in North Carolina, an expected 

cost, they came out ahead.117

The illicit enterprise received a boost, David Stick 

points out, from the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, 

which ended Queen Anne’s War (or the War 

of Spanish Succession) among France, Spain, 

the Dutch and the British. Great Britain agreed 

not to attack Spanish ships, and in return Spain 

recognized British right to colonies in the New 

World. These agreements disestablished many 

privateers. Not illogically, many of them became 

pirates—as many as 2,500 of them operating in the 

Caribbean and on the Carolina coast.118

Except for the coastal hazards that plagued all 

vessels off North Carolina, conditions were 

favorable for piracy, Butler points out: isolated 

backwaters, the weak authority of proprietary 

officials, sparse settlement, the relative poverty of 

the colony, and lax customs regulation. Chesapeake 

Bay pirate Roger Makeele, pursued by Virginia 

Governor Francis Howard, moved south to North 

Carolina.119 Fortunately, the most intense North 

Carolina interval of pirate activity actually lasted 

only about a year (1718).120

116 McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People, 77–78.

117 Ehrenhard, Cape Lookout National Seashore, 29.

118 Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 28–30. 

The vast majority of the 2,500 pirates operated in 

the Caribbean rather than in North Carolina, but 

Shomette, in his preface to Hughson, Blackbeard & 

the Carolina Pirates, xiv, says that by around 1715 “a 

score or more pirate ships were prowling the Atlantic 

coast between Virginia and South Carolina.”

119 Shomette, preface to Hughson, Blackbeard & the 

Carolina Pirates, ix–x.

120 Butler, Pirates, Privateers, and Rebel Raiders, 6–8. 

Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 888.

Among those who operated on the North Carolina 

coast (Captain Pain, Christopher Moody, John 

Cole, Robert Deal, Charles Vane, Richard Worley, 

“Calico Jack” Rackam, Francis Farrington, and 

perhaps Anne Bonny), the most infamous were 

Edward Teach (Blackbeard), and Stede Bonnet.121

Blackbeard, a former privateer, moved up from his 

depredations on the South Carolina coast to the 

Outer Banks in the spring of 1718 with four vessels 

and some 400 crewmen. 

Blackbeard’s demise was directed not from North 

Carolina, where his association with Governor 

Eden allowed him space to operate, but by 

Virginia’s Governor Spottswood, a fierce opponent 

of piracy. Assembling pilots familiar with the 

121 Butler does not mention Bonny, a central figure in 

Capt. Charles Johnson’s [pseudonymn for Daniel 

Defoe?] A General History of the Robberies and 

Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724). Redhaired, Irish, powerfully built Bonny (1698–1782) 

was a ferocious (and reputedly bare-breasted) 

fighter who operated principally in the Caribbean, 

at times with her fellow woman pirate (and lover) 

Mary Read (ca. 1695–1721). On Bonny and Read, see 

Ulrike Klausmann, Marion Meinzerin, and Gabriel 

Kuhn, Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly 

Roger (New York: Black Rose Books, 1997), 191–216, 

and David Cordingly, “Anne Bonny,” in Oxford 

Dictionary of National Biography, online ed. at http://

www.oxforddnb.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/view/

article/39085. Bonny later reformed, married a local 

man in Charles Town, and had eight children. She 

died in South Carolina in 1782. 

Figure 4-29. Blackbeard fights Royal Navy Lt. Robert 

Maynard at Ocracoke Inlet, November 22, 1718. Hughson, 

Blackbeard & The Carolina Pirates (1894), facing 5.
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An Eye for the Possible: Maritime (and Other) Economic Activities on the Southern Banks

hazards of the Outer Banks and outfitting two 

ships at his own expense, Spottswood mounted 

an expedition against Blackbeard. By the time he 

was killed at Ocracoke Inlet on November 22, 

1718, and his head dangled from the bowsprit of 

British Lt. Robert Maynard’s vessel, Blackbeard 

had captured more than two dozen ships.122 Stede 

Bonnet, who was for a brief time in league with 

Blackbeard off the Carolina coast, soon moved 

to Virginia and then back to Cape Fear, where he 

was also captured in the fall of 1718 and hanged in 

Charles Town soon thereafter.123

Despite the demise of the demonic demigods 

of piracy, piratical depredations continued for 

decades to be a cause for public concern in North 

Carolina. In 1736, the General Assembly agreed 

upon a schedule of fees payable to the Register 

of the Court of Admiralty for the trial of pirates: 

issuing warrants for their apprehension, examining 

informers, attending court, summoning witnesses, 

drawing up the sentence, and preparing the 

Warrant of Execution.124

The best efforts of mid-Atlantic opponents of 

piracy notwithstanding, the practice continued at 

some level throughout the eighteenth century. A 

July 18,1792, article in The Pennsylvania Gazette 

describes an incident in Portsmouth six weeks 

earlier. “We have 7 pirates,” said the observer,

brought here by Mr. J. Wallace, who were sent 

from . . . [Richmond] to Newbern two days 

ago. . . . Wallace was informed that a crew 

of men had landed from two boats . . . , and 

had given away their boats, and told that the 

captain of [their] vessel . . . would not leave 

her, altho’ she was then sinking. ... Wallace . . 

. immediately went to examine, and as he was 

going on shore he met two of the pilots in a 

boat carrying 7 of the crew of the Washington . 

. . . [He] learnt that there were two Frenchmen 

122 For a more detailed account of the often-chronicled 

Battle of Ocracoke, see Shomette, preface to 

Hughson, Blackbeard & the Carolina Pirates, xiii, xvi, 

and Hughson, 69–89.

123 Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 28–32. An 

extended account of Blackbeard’s adventures on 

the Banks is in Butler, Pirates, Privateers, and Rebel 

Raiders, 25–50. The year 1718 was the most active 

ever for piracy along the North Carolina coast. Powell, 

Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 888.

124 Acts of the North Carolina General Assembly, 

September 1736. Saunders and Clark, Colonial and 

State Records of North Carolina, vol. 25, 225.

at Portsmouth, who would not come with 

them, and could not speak English. He . . . was 

just able to understand . . . that the crew had 

killed the captain and mate. He then man[n]

ed his pilot boat, and [captured] the others 

. . . . We put them in jail, and in a short time 

after, a lad amongst them called out that they 

were going to murder him. [O]n examination 

he informed that the vessel was a French brig 

from Savannah . . . bound to Bordeaux, laden 

with tobacco and rice, [and] that on Monday 

last the six men now sent to Newbern . . . did 

murder the captain and mate, and threw them 

over-board, then got drunk and plundered 

the captain’s and mate’s chests. They stayed 

on board rioting and quarrelling . . . [until] 

they saw a schooner coming towards them. . . . 

[They] then attempted to scuttle the vessel, but 

could not do it . . . .125

There appears to be no evidence that, however 

lucrative piracy was for the likes of Teach and 

Bonnet, Banks residents ever shared in the booty. 

Blackbeard did, however, pass a portion of the loot 

from a captured French ship to Governor Eden 

(who had already pardoned him for the crime) 

and the governor’s secretary Tobias Knight.126

More broadly, however, one must take care not to 

assume impermeable boundaries between purely 

evil pirates and ethically upright North or South 

Carolinians. More than a century ago, Hughson 

(an early and careful student of piracy) observed 

that the privateers (licensed freebooters) who 

sailed into the Carolinas, ships laden with recently 

seized valuables, 

would scatter their gold and silver about with 

so generous a hand that their appearance soon 

came to be welcomed by the trading classes; 

and by means of their money they ingratiated 

themselves not only with the people, but with 

the highest officials of the government. For 

many years after the founding of Carolina most 

of the currency in circulation was the gold 

and silver pieces brought in by the pirates and 

125 “RICHMOND, July 6. Extract of a letter from a 

gentleman in Washington, (N.C.) dated June 24,” 

Accessible Archives (http://www.accessible.com). 

J. Wallace was presumably John Wallace, local 

entrepreneur and developer of Shell Castle Island.

126 Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 30, 63–64.
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privateers from their cruises in the West Indian 

waters.127

An economic activity related in various ways to 

some of those treated here, and in any case central 

to the early economic development of all of eastern 

North Carolina, was slavery. We turn to that topic 

in the next chapter.

127 Hughson, Blackbeard & The Carolina Pirates, xiii, xvi, 

and Hughson, 69–89.
105

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race 

and Class in a Maritime World

“Slavery always frayed at the sea’s edge,” David 

Cecelski observes in his excellent study of black 

watermen on the North Carolina coast. As an 

arresting example of that fraying, he presents the 

case of Albemarle slave Moses Grandy.1 Grandy 

was born in Camden, a few miles northeast of 

Elizabeth City, around 1786. Camden, adjacent to 

the tobacco-growing, heavy slaveholding counties 

along the Virginia border, was the state’s smallest 

port, and was just over 30 percent black. As a 

child, Grandy had seen one brother sold away and 

his mother flogged for resisting the sale. He had 

watched another brother be flogged and die. While 

still a child, he had been hired out to (and starved 

and beaten by) a number of masters. Later he 

watched helplessly as his own wife was sold away 

from him.2

Because there was a good market for labor in 

shipping and crafts, the labor of free workers was 

costly and scarce, slave labor was overabundant 

on the tobacco plantations (soils were already 

beginning to be depleted by tobacco growing), and 

slave owners could use the additional profit, James 

Grandy and others allowed some slaves, Moses 

among them, to hire themselves out and keep part 

of their wages. Grandy crewed a schooner on 

Albemarle Sound and worked on Dismal Swamp 

canal boats, living away from the plantation for 

weeks at a time. At various times, he also captained 

a canal boat, hiring his own slave crews for the 

runs between Pasquotank and Norfolk, a bustling 

port that drew both free and black labor and 

employed many skilled black artisans. And Norfolk 

was part of a larger system. Ever since Colonial 

1 Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, 36. This brief sketch 

of Grandy is drawn from Cecelski, 31–56.

2 Moses Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, 

Late a Slave in the United States of America (1843; 

Chapel Hill: Academic Affairs Library University of 

North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1996), 8–24 (electronic 

ed., http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/grandy/menu.html).

times, Cecelski points out, Atlantic shipping was 

characterized by “an unprecedented degree of 

racial equality”; black seamen constituted 10 to 20 

percent of crews on New England vessels engaged 

in coastwise trade.

Grandy’s slave status notwithstanding, his relative 

freedom to be away from direct supervision, to 

enjoy social status derived from his skills, and to 

earn money he could keep allowed him to hope 

for freedom for himself and his family. And in that 

he was not different from many commanders and 

crews on canal boats, barges, and other boats large 

and small. Any freedom he had or could work to 

purchase was always conditional, however. Twice 

he paid the specified price for his own freedom, 

only to be sold again.3

Clearly, if we are to understand slavery and race 

in the coastal counties and on the Outer Banks, 

we must frame both within the maritime context. 

Equally importantly, however, race must be 

comprehended in relation to class. Fortunately, 

Paul Escott’s seminal work on class in North 

Carolina during the latter half of the nineteenth 

century offers insight into this complicated 

relationship. Escott argues that however 

fundamental race is and has been to understanding 

the state’s history, “class purposes” and class 

divisions were even more fundamental—to the 

establishment and operation of the slave system, 

to the state’s ambivalent relationship to the 

Confederacy and to its often commented upon 

“internal war,” to the process of reconstruction, 

and to the reemergence of race-biased policy and 

institutions thereafter.4

3 Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, 36–39.

4 Paul D. Escott, Many Excellent People: Power and 

Privilege in North Carolina, 1850–1900 (Chapel Hill: 

University of North Carolina Press, 1985), xv–ix and 

passim. 
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In this chapter, we explore the relationship 

between race and class, and the importance of 

each to the history of the southern Banks and their 

associated counties. Specifically, we argue that 

1. However special or “isolated” the Outer Banks 

have been argued to be in some respects, the 

area cannot be understood apart from the 

race and class dynamics, discourses, laws, and 

customs of the rest of the state.

2. The structure and character of maritime 

endeavors have nevertheless at times produced 

some special configurations of slavery, race, 

and racial categories and discourse.

3. Sometimes race and class relations (e.g., 

among mullet fishermen) have been better 

than relations in the state more generally, and 

sometimes they have been worse (e.g., among 

slaves forced to dig canals).

4. Since there were no stable structures or power 

blocs (as in the plantation system or the textile 

industry) to hold the racial system steady, it has 

flexed and adjusted with the shifting economic 

base (e.g., from shipping to fishing to tourism).

5. Widespread and persistent romanticization 

of Outer Banks culture has blurred essential 

features and details of its racial and class 

system.

Slavery in North Carolina 

There were slaves in North Carolina from the 

outset. The Lords Proprietors tried to encourage 

slaveholding, giving out land proportionally to the 

number of people (slave or free) settlers brought 

with them. Still, slavery grew relatively slowly in 

North Carolina during the early years; by 1712 

there were only about 800 blacks in the entire 

colony. Between 1730 and 1767, however, the 

number grew from 6,000 to 40,000. The first federal 

census (in 1790) listed more than 100,000 slaves 

in the colony (compared to fewer than 300,000 

whites). Even though slaves constituted about a 

third of the state’s population at the opening of 

the nineteenth century, North Carolina’s slave 

population was far smaller than that of neighboring 

states. By 1860, when the North Carolina slave 

population peaked at 331,000, Virginia had about 

491,000 slaves, South Carolina 402,000, and 

Georgia 462,000. These totals gave North Carolina 

and Virginia about 52 slaves to every 100 whites, 

while Georgia had 91, Mississippi 105, and South 

Carolina 140.5

North Carolina’s free black population was 

significant from the 1790s onward, and by 1860, 

it exceeded that of any other southern state 

except Virginia. From about 5,000 in 1790, that 

population had doubled by 1810 and doubled 

again, to nearly 20,000, by 1830. In 1860 there 

were more than 30,000 free blacks in the state. The 

growth had come from immigration, race mixing, 

and manumission. Of the five towns that had 

more than 200 free blacks, three were in coastal 

counties: Wilmington, Elizabeth City, and New 

Bern (the only town with as much as 20 percent of 

its population made up of free blacks).6

Slave laws in North Carolina were stringent from 

the beginning. The Fundamental Constitutions 

of 1669 gave masters absolute power over slaves. 

By 1715, voting and unauthorized travel were 

forbidden, as was (of course) miscegenation. Slaves 

were tried by a jury of slaveholders, and there were 

public executions. Following the Stono Rebellion 

in South Carolina in 1739, a new slave code of 1741 

tightened restrictions further. Slaves couldn’t raise 

their own livestock, carry arms, or trade with other 

slaves. Public whipping, neck yokes, and summary 

hangings were constant threats. A Johnston County 

slave named Jenny was burned at the stake in 1780 

5 John Larkins, The Negro Population of North Carolina: 

Social and Economic (Raleigh: North Carolina State 

Board of Charities and Public Welfare, 1944). 

6 Guion Johnson, Ante-bellum North Carolina a 

Social History (Chapel Hill: Academic Affairs Library 

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1937), 

582–583.

Figure 5-1. Preserved and partly rebuilt slave cabins 

at Ventosa (Walter Clark home) in Halifax County, ca. 

1943. Charles Anderson Farrell collection, North Carolina 

Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 

87-226.
National Park Service 107

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race And Class in a Maritime World

for poisoning her master, and slave heads were 

sometimes displayed on poles as a warning.7

Poisoning a master was extremely risky, obviously, 

but more subtle forms of resistance were pervasive. 

Generally provided only the barest of necessities in 

housing, clothing, and food, slaves supplemented 

their diets by growing small gardens, hunting, and 

fishing. Many of the earliest slaves, brought to 

North Carolina from the West Indies, were already 

English speakers who could and did use their 

considerable familiarity with European culture as a 

basis for resisting, by malingering, theft, purposeful 

carelessness, dilatory behavior, and flight (with 

the Great Dismal Swamp a favorite destination). 

At the same time, slaves were bicultural, and they 

made good use of their non-European cultural 

knowledge and practices, such as herb medicines 

(and poisons), funeral practices, and such cultural 

7 Paul D. Escott, Flora J. Hatley, and Jeffrey Crow, A 

History of African Americans in North Carolina, rev. 

ed. (Raleigh, NC: Department of Cultural Resources, 

Office of Archives and History, 2002), 1–11, 21. Kristi 

A. Rutz-Robbins, “Colonial Commerce: Race, Class 

and Gender in a Local Economy, Albemarle, North 

Carolina, 1663–1729” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State 

University, 2003), 202, says that such trade without a 

master’s consent was made illegal by a 1705 law. 

observances as Jonkonnu during the Christmas/

New Year’s season.8

Retention of indigenous culture proceeded side 

by side, however, with efforts (at least from the 

1730s onward) to Christianize blacks. Emerging 

initially from Anglicanism, the evangelizing effort 

made little progress, but the growth of Methodist 

and Baptist churches brought more success. John 

Wesley had denounced slavery by the mid-1780s, 

and North Carolina Methodists considered forcing 

slaveholders to manumit as a condition of church 

membership. Baptists accepted both black and 

white preachers and permitted slaves to participate 

in worship. The pace of conversions quickened 

during the Second Great Awakening (1801–1805), 

but slaveholders were disturbed by the interracial 

religious meetings.9

Coastal Slavery in the State 

Context

However pervasive it may have been in North 

Carolina, slavery was far from homogeneous in 

distribution across the state. There were generally 

more slaves in the east than in the west, but the 

densest concentrations were on the northeastern 

border, reaching south in a narrow band from 

Northampton, Warren, and Halifax counties 

to Jones County, and in Anson and Richmond 

counties on the central South Carolina border. 

The greatest concentration was in the rice-growing 

8 See Elizabeth A. Fenn, “’A Perfect Equality Seemed to 

Reign’: Slave Society and Jonkonnu,” North Carolina 

Historical Review 65 (April 1988), 127–153. 

9 Escott, Hatley, and Crow, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 26–30.

Figure 5-2. Great Dismal Swamp. Clay, et al. Land of the 

South, 80.

Figure 5-3. Negro baptism at New Bern, ca. 1910. North 

Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at 

Chapel Hill.
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At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race And Class in a Maritime World

lower Cape Fear. Carteret was anomalous within 

the eastern counties; its population (like that 

of many mountain counties) was fewer than 25 

percent slaves in 1860, while Cecelski calculated 

that in 1860 slaves composed 45 percent of 

the population within the nineteen tidewater 

counties.10

Portsmouth was the only area on the southern 

Banks ever to have a substantial slave population. 

By 1790 (almost forty years after its founding), the 

town had 188 whites, 38 slaves, and 3 free blacks. 

A decade later, with Shell Castle flourishing, there 

were fewer whites (142) in the town but more 

slaves (78). By 1810, there were 225 whites and 115 

slaves—about the same number as were there a 

decade later. The population peaked in 1860, when 

there were 117 slaves (averaging nine to a house in 

thirteen slave houses) and 568 whites (living more 

comfortably with 5–6 per house in 105 houses).11

Demographic distribution was more uneven yet. 

By the end of the eighteenth century, 31 percent of 

white families owned slaves, but on the eve of the 

Revolution, nearly two-thirds of the slaves were on 

large plantations.12 As late as 1860, 75 percent of 

white families in New Hanover County owned no 

slaves at all, and 15 percent owned fewer than ten. 

The remaining 10 percent of white families owned 

more than 76 percent of the slaves.13

Two historians in particular have examined the 

substantial differences between coastal area 

slavery and that of the inland plantations. Robert 

Outland has analyzed slavery in the naval stores 

industry, and David Cecelski examined both the 

extraordinarily brutal treatment of slaves forced 

to build canals and the unusual freedoms of slave 

watermen. These cases make it abundantly clear 

that, as Cecelski argues, tidewater slavery varied 

greatly from industry to industry and place to 

place and that there were several distinguishable 

“maritime worlds.”14

10 Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 1048 (map); 

Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, xii.

11 Burke, The History of Portsmouth, 23–59. Population 

figures given in the Portsmouth Village National 

Register Nomination differ slightly from these, but 

reports significantly that in 1790 the town’s leading 

citizen David Wallace, Jr., owned sixteen slaves.

12 Escott, Hatley, and Crow, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 11.

13 Escott, Many Excellent People, 18 (Table 10).

14 Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, xv.

Slaves forced to build canals through eastern 

North Carolina swamps had it even worse than 

those working in other contexts.15 The first ones 

brought in specifically for that purpose arrived in 

1786 to drain a huge swamp around Lake Phelps in 

Washington County (the eventual site of the huge 

and hugely productive Somerset Place plantation). 

Those slaves “came to know a system of discipline 

and punishment,” Cecelski says, “brutal even by 

the usual standards of slavery, one almost unique 

to canal sites.” It was a life “so excruciating that 

some preferred death.” Building canals, Cecelski 

concludes, “was the nightmare of maritime slave 

life.” 

The largest canal project was the 22-mile-long 

Dismal Swamp Canal that connected the Elizabeth 

and Pasquotank rivers, built between 1794 and 

1805 and deepened in the 1820s. Connecting and 

auxiliary canals followed: a six-mile channel from 

the Currituck Sound into the Northwest River; 

a five-mile feeder into Lake Drummond; the 

Clubfoot and Harlowe’s Creek (later New Berne 

and Beaufort) Canal (1795–1828); the 40–60footwide, seven-mile Mattamuskeet canal, one of 

several commissioned by the State Literary Fund to 

raise funds for public education and built by hired 

slaves (1838–1855); the fourteen-mile Albemarle 

and Chesapeake Canal, 61 feet wide and 8 feet 

deep, between North River and Currituck Sound 

(built 1855–1859 with the aid of steam dredge 

boats); a nine-mile bypass around the Great Falls 

of the Roanoke River (including a nearly 1,260 ft. 

cut through solid rock); and numerous others.16

These extended construction into the late 1850s.

This work was, as Cecelski observes, “the cruelest, 

most dangerous, unhealthy, and exhausting labor 

in the American South”—a distinction for which 

there was considerable competition. Canal-digging 

slaves contended not only with backbreaking labor, 

but also with cottonmouths, copperheads, rattlers, 

mosquitoes, ticks, chiggers, and yellow flies. 

Diet and housing were unimaginably bad, sexual 

exploitation of slave women in the camps common, 

15 Our brief discussion here is drawn from ibid., 103–117. 

All unattributed quotations are from this source.

16 For a succinct history of the Clubfoot Creek Canal 

(1766) between the Neuse River and Old Topsail Inlet, 

see James E. White, “The Clubfoot Creek Canal,” 

Journal of the New Bern Historical Society 19 (May 

2006), 3–14. The North Carolina Business History

website (http://www.historync.org/canals.htm) has 

numerous maps of these and other canals.
National Park Service 109

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race And Class in a Maritime World

and escape both unlikely and subject to deadly 

consequences when attempted unsuccessfully. 

Discipline was both absolute and brutal. Not 

surprisingly, new African slaves were sent to the 

canals to “break” them for later plantation work, 

and efforts to augment slave labor with hired white 

labor were generally unsuccessful. 

Perhaps only slightly less exploited were slaves 

in the naval stores industry. Like slaves who built 

canals, those in the naval stores industry had a 

considerably harder life than those on inland 

plantations, Outland has argued.17 The industry, 

earlier situated primarily in the Albemarle, 

shifted south to the Cape Fear in the late 1830s as 

neglected stands of coveted longleaf pines—part of 

a vast swath of such trees that once stretched from 

southeastern Virginia, down through the Carolinas, 

Georgia, and Florida and then west through 

Alabama and Mississippi to the eastern edge of 

Texas—drew turpentine-makers’ attention.18

Heightened demand caused a dramatic expansion 

in the industry in the 1840s and 1850s. As early as 

1840, some 444 North Carolina tar and turpentine 

makers were already turning out more than 95 

percent of the naval stores produced in the United 

States, and by 1860 their numbers had grown to 

1,114. David Sanders’s Palo Alto plantation house 

in Onslow County, built around 1840, stood at 

the center of a 9,500-acre turpentine plantation.19

By the 1850s, Wilmington was the center of the 

industry. 

Naval stores were produced by an “integrated 

workforce” of both owned and hired slaves (almost 

all men, but including a few women and children 

17 The following discussion is drawn entirely from 

Robert B. Outland, III, “Slavery, Work, and the 

Geography of the North Carolina Naval Stores 

Industry, 1835–1860,” Journal of Southern History 62, 

no. 1 (1996): 27–56. Outland, 30, points out that the 

term “naval stores” originally included hemp, flax, 

masts, spars, planking, tar, and pitch, but that by 1800 

it generally referred only to “tar, raw turpentine, and 

their derivatives—spirits of turpentine, rosin, and 

pitch.”

18 Lawrence Earley, Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and 

Rise of an American Forest (Chapel Hill: University 

of North Carolina Press, 2004). See map on 109 and 

131–171 on the destruction of the longleaf pine 

forests.

19 Catherine W. Bishir and Michael Southern, A Guide 

to the Historic Architecture of Eastern North Carolina 

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 

127.

Figure 5-4. Dismal Swamp Canal. Harper’s New Monthly 

Magazine, May 1860, 725. 

Figure 5-5. Map of Dismal Swamp Canal in 1839. North 

Carolina Business History (http://www.historync.org/

images/maps/DismalSwampCanal1839map.jpg).

Figure 5-6. Clubfoot and Harlowe’s Creek Canal, 1839. 

North Carolina Business History (http://www.historync.

org/images/maps/Clubfoot-HarloweCanal1839map.jpg).
110 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race And Class in a Maritime World

as well) managed by overseers or drivers. They 

were extremely poorly clothed, fed, and housed 

(frequently in shed-like lean-tos that were moved 

often) and pushed to the absolute limit of their 

strength or beyond. The plantation slave’s option 

of supplementing a meager diet by growing a small 

garden was not available to the forest worker, and 

drinking water frequently came from streams 

contaminated by industry operations or even from 

the highly contaminated resin boxes themselves.20

Turpentine stills also frequently exploded, 

with lethal results, and wild animals, snakes, 

mosquitoes, ticks, and chiggers were ubiquitous, as 

they were for canal workers.

Organized for the most part by the task system, 

turpentine slaves generally worked alone in widely 

spaced locations. Separated from their families, 

or kept from starting families in the first place, 

20 Outland, “Slavery, Work, and Geography,” 52–53, 

points out that, although it was not understood at 

the time, turpentine is “a local irritant and central 

nervous system depressant.” Ingesting it or breathing 

the fumes could produce a variety of gastrointestinal 

and respiratory problems.

they were lonely and miserable. The hollers they 

devised to achieve some minimal communication 

amongst themselves constituted, as Eugene 

Genovese said, “a piercing history of the impact of 

hardship and sorrow on lonely black men.”21

The turpentine industry continued to thrive 

through the latter decades of the century. Once 

the lumbermen became aware of the vast stands 

of longleaf pine, however, they quickly displaced 

the turpentiners, moving in with their cheap and 

wasteful methods, and the longleaf was doomed; 

150 million board feet shipped out of Mobile, 

Alabama, in 1896 alone.22

Of all the maritime slaves, by far the most fortunate 

(if one can admit the term) were slave watermen.23

In his study of those watermen, Cecelski argues 

that several degrees of freedom (however 

conditional) that were not enjoyed by inland 

plantation blacks were frequently available to slaves 

on the coast, and that both the social patterns 

that emerged during slavery and the culture that 

developed in the later maritime economy have to 

be understood in terms peculiar to that history and 

economy. Cecelski’s analysis of black watermen 

(and hence of race and black-white relations in 

coastal maritime culture) ranges from Moses 

Grandy and his fellow slave boatmen to slave 

fishermen from tidewater plantations; to slave 

and free blacks in the shad, rockfish, and herring 

fisheries; to slave canal builders; to slave watermen 

who helped other slaves negotiate water routes to 

freedom; to black pilots who guided Union vessels 

into Beaufort early in the Civil War.24

Slaves skilled as river pilots could be away from 

their masters for weeks at a time, but far more 

numerous were slave fishermen. Slaves fished 

seasonally, Cecelski explains, after crop chores 

were done. A slave fishermen might fish alone and 

for himself, or with others, to improve his own 

21 Genovese quoted in Outland, “Slavery, Work, and 

Geography,” 46.

22 Earley, Looking for Longleaf, 148, says that the 

industry peaked in 1909 and declined steadily 

thereafter. Mobile figure from Earley, 162.

23 This discussion is drawn from Cecelski, The 

Waterman’s Song, 50–76.

24 Especially notably, Cecelski also includes the 

indomitable black radical Abraham Galloway, born of 

a slave mother and a planter’s son, who came to be 

the most important African American leader during 

the Civil War and Reconstruction. Ibid., 181.

Figure 5-7. Wilmington turpentine distillery, ca. 1850s. 

Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion. North 

Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library. 

Figure 5-8. Carteret County turpentine distillery, 1876. 

Kell, North Carolina’s Coastal Carteret County During the 

Civil War, 12.
National Park Service 111

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family’s diet, for barter, or for his master. Some 

masters sent slave gangs long distances to fish. 

“Command over fishing skills and the relative 

freedom of a fishing beach,” Cecelski says, “could 

alter the usual dynamics of power between slaves 

and masters.” The activity exposed slaves to other 

African American maritime laborers and to a 

more cosmopolitan social system than they would 

otherwise have encountered.

Such slaves met and interacted with other black 

mariners from all over the eastern seaboard, as 

well as from Dutch, British, French, Spanish, 

and Danish colonies in the Caribbean. In such 

a setting, they inevitably developed a broader 

cultural and political awareness and perspective. 

That awareness positioned slaves, and black 

watermen in particular, to focus antislavery and 

insurrectionary sentiment. There was a strong 

and persistent pattern, Cecelski argues, “of black 

watermen serving as key agents of antislavery 

thought and militant resistance to slavery.” 

The Historical Dynamics of 

Slavery and Race

The slightly more than century-long (1753–1867) 

rise and decline of Portsmouth, during which both 

white and black populations waxed and waned, 

reminds us that slavery and racism—as legal and 

demographic facts and as cultural and discursive 

categories—were never static in coastal North 

Carolina. However stable some of their structures 

and features appeared to be in particular sectors 

(canal building, naval stores production, slave 

watermen) for various periods of time, one must 

comprehend the patterns of slavery and racism 

as they change from decade to decade, period to 

period. The balance of this chapter is devoted to 

chronicling those changes, within the state at large 

and the coastal region.

The Revolution and Its Aftermath 

The racial situation in North Carolina, including 

the coastal counties, during the Revolution and 

the decade following was tense and perilous. It was 

generally understood that the south’s large slave 

population rendered it vulnerable to race-based 

civil disturbance as the Revolution approached. 

There were persistent fears that slaves would 

revolt, align themselves with pirates, or instigate a 

war.25

Already in 1774, the North Carolina Provincial 

Congress barred further importation of slaves, 

the first of several pieces of legislation passed 

between 1774 and the 1808 that restricted 

importation of slaves into North Carolina.26

Wilmington’s Committee of Safety twice ordered 

West Indian slaves to be deported, and by June 

1775 had disarmed all blacks, an action Governor 

Martin refused to extend statewide because of 

the potential need for troops. Even after black 

Continental troops distinguished themselves at the 

Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775, southern states 

continued to resist arming blacks, and fears of 

slave revolt spread over the South. As it turned out, 

blacks fought on both sides during the war, and 

took steps to gain their freedom. Those actions, 

historians have observed, “shook southern society 

to its foundations.”27

Leaders among the slaves themselves were well 

aware of the window of opportunity that seemed 

to be opening. Slaves in Pitt County planned 

to revolt in July 1775, but the plot (which had 

originated in Beaufort County) was discovered. 

More than forty blacks were jailed; five were 

whipped and had their ears cropped. The situation 

in Virginia was even worse where blacks comprised 

half of the 2,000 troops in Lord Dunmore’s 

Ethiopian Regiment.28 North Carolina continental 

troops engaged them in the Battle of Great Bridge 

near Norfolk in December 1775, ending the threat 

of a slave insurrection in northeastern North 

Carolina. Slaves nevertheless continued to defect 

to the British in large numbers. Those defecting in 

the Cape Fear area were organized into the Black 

Pioneers company; Admiralty muster rolls in 1776 

contained the names of many black defectors. 

In May, the state’s Fourth Provincial Congress 

25 Ibid., 14.

26 Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 1047. The 

Encyclopedia’s article on slavery in North Carolina, 

written by Jeffrey Crow, notes that another ban on 

slave importation in North Carolina was passed in 

1786, and yet others in 1794 and 1795. The 1795 law 

expressly banned importation of slaves by immigrants 

from the West Indies out of fear of a spreading 

rebellious sentiment.

27 Escott, Hatley, and Crow, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 31. Unless otherwise 

indicated, our précis of race and race relations during 

this period is drawn from this source.

28 Ibid., 33–35.
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debated how to stop the flood of blacks into British 

ranks.

“Wherever the British marched,” historians have 

observed, “slaves followed.” Instigating a slave 

rebellion became official British policy, and in 

June 1779, Sir Henry Clinton, who commanded 

the British army in America, promised in his 

Phillipsburg Declaration that any deserting black 

would have “complete security” behind British 

lines. He later recommended that emancipated 

slaves be given lands taken from rebellious 

Americans. Cornwallis’s invasion of the Carolinas 

in 1780-1781 led to mass defections by slaves, 

whom Cornwallis used to support, maintain 

and feed his army, taking food and other needed 

supplies from sequestered plantations. 

The situation with regard to slaves after the war 

was over was confusing at best. County courts 

continued to be in control of manumission. 

Southern whites blamed religious dissenters 

(Quakers were a major target) and “outside 

agitators” for the troubles with blacks. After 

great insurrections took place in the Caribbean 

in the early1790s, a 1795 law specifically forbade 

importation of any more slaves above fifteen 

years of age from the West Indies, for fear that the 

insurrectionary sentiment would spread.

A black preacher in Pasquotank County was 

accused of fomenting revolt when his collusion 

with black guerilla Tom Copper was discovered. 

Copper himself led a half-dozen blacks in a daring 

raid on the Elizabeth City jail to liberate slaves 

being held there. Another slave plot was discovered 

in Bertie County on 2 June 1802; more than forty 

blacks were either hanged, deported, or were 

whipped and had their ears cropped. Fears spread 

throughout the state. More than 100 slaves were 

jailed in Martin County, and two were hanged.

Such fears were not unfounded. Black bateaumen 

on Virginia rivers “had been implicated among the 

main conspirators in both Gabriel’s Rebellion in 

1800 and even more so in the Easter Plot of 1802,” 

Cecelski explains, and through their travel on the 

rivers they spread insurrectionary plans through 

southeastern Virginia and into northeastern North 

Carolina. African American watermen, “posed 

a constant danger to the power of slaveholders. 

They covertly linked slaves throughout the 

Albemarle Sound vicinity,” sending messages up 

and down the rivers, spreading “political news 

and democratic ideologies from as far away as 

New England, France, and Haiti into local slave 

communities.” Slave fishermen on the Albemarle 

Sound played a central role “in building a regional 

African American culture and in holding together 

the antislavery movements that percolated through 

the Albemarle.” New Bern and Beaufort became 

“the central points for black political organization 

in North Carolina”29 As we have seen in the 

discussion of trade through Ocracoke Inlet, slaves 

on the water in this period would have had ample 

opportunity for contact with sailors (white and 

black) coming and going to the West Indies—a 

major destination for the ships of John Gray Blount 

(see Chapter 2).

The War of 1812 

What happened to slaves and blacks during the 

War of 1812 has not generated much commentary, 

but Sarah Lemmon’s Frustrated Patriots provides 

a few relevant details. Free “men of color” made a 

few gains during the brief war, Lemmon observes. 

They were initially prevented from enlisting in the 

militia except as musicians, but the Militia Act of 

1814 allowed them regular enrollment so long as 

their color was specified. 

Blacks’ most important role (albeit unofficial) 

during the war, Lemmon says, “was in the creation 

of fear on the part of the white man” over the everpresent potential for insurrection. Indeed, the first 

arms placed in the arsenal at Fayetteville in 1790 

were for the purpose of suppressing “insurrection 

among the blacks.” During the War of 1812, 

citizens of New Bern, says Lemmon, “declined to 

hire out their slaves to build a fort on Beacon Island 

lest the British come and take them off.” At least 

two general alarms spurred by fears of insurrection 

accompanied the British landing at Ocracoke, and 

a runaway slave apprehended in Beaufort reported 

that an uprising was in the works in the western 

end of the county.30

29 Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, 45, 56, 81, 96, 191.

30 Sarah Lemmon, Frustrated Patriots; North Carolina 

and the War of 1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North 

Carolina Press, 1973), 196–197.
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Slavery in the Nineteenth Century 

At length, the racial irony of the Revolution became 

clear: the ideology of freedom and independence 

had washed over racial boundaries. For the 

next nearly three-quarters of a century, those 

boundaries were maintained only with increasingly 

tight legal restrictions, local repression, and (at 

critical moments) campaigns of terror.31

Conditions in North Carolina as the century 

turned were not propitious for slave revolts, 

but slave numbers were growing rapidly. The 

approximately 100,000 slaves listed in the 1790 

census jumped to 140,000 by 1800. Despite 

escalating prices (field hands that had cost $300 in 

1804 brought $800 in 1840 and $1,500 to $1,700 in 

1860), numbers continued to grow.32 By 1860 there 

were more than 362,000 slaves, representing over 

36 percent of the population. Large numbers of 

slaves were concentrated in Brunswick and New 

Hanover counties, where they provided hard stoop 

labor in the swampy, mosquito-infested fields of 

the rice plantations. Many others spent their lives 

in tobacco fields on the state’s northeastern border. 

Both men and women slaves lived in execrable 

dwellings, wore rough clothing, ate monotonous 

and nutritionally deficient food, and worked 

(pregnant or not) “sun to sun” under feared 

overseers. Whippings were universal; 39 lashes 

were considered “moderate” and 100 were 

not uncommon. Ears and toes were cut off as 

punishment, and runaways could have their 

Achilles tendons severed. Forced separations of 

families were commonplace, but “Oppression drew 

the slaves together,” Escott, Crowe and Hatley 

observe, “and knowledge of their African origins 

strengthened the bonds between them.”33 As they 

had long done, slaves resisted in every way available 

to them: stealing, doing less than their best work, 

or (despite the dire risk) fleeing. Religion offered 

some consolation and support, as did some native 

rituals, beliefs and cultural practices. 

As early as 1829, North Carolina-born Boston 

clothier David Walker (1785–1830) issued his 

31 This brief recital of salient details is drawn, unless 

otherwise indicated, from Escott, Hatley, and Crow, A 

History of African Americans in North Carolina, 48–69.

32 These average prices are from Powell, Encyclopedia of 

North Carolina, 1046–1047.

33 Escott, Hatley, and Crow, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 51–59, 65.

famous Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a 

Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World,

denouncing slavery, urging blacks toward full 

freedom, and rejecting the colonization schemes 

widely being advocated at the time.34 Copies 

soon appeared in Fayetteville and Wilmington, 

but within a year Walker himself was dead 

amid suspicious circumstances. Rebellion was 

nevertheless afoot in many locations. Less than 

a year after Walker penned his manifesto, Nat 

Turner launched his ill-fated operation in Virginia’s 

Southampton County, which shared a border with 

North Carolina’s Hertford and Northhampton 

counties.35

As the early decades of the century passed, laws 

restricting slaves’ freedom continued to tighten in 

North Carolina, as they did virtually everywhere 

else in the South. New laws in 1826 and 1830 

forbade teaching slaves to read or write. An 1835 

law stripped free blacks of voting rights and of the 

right to own or control a slave (hence removing the 

opportunity for free blacks to buy their families’ 

freedom). Patrollers were given wide discretion in 

dealing with runaways, and the power of masters, 

Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin wrote, had to be 

absolute “to render the submission of the slave 

perfect.”36

In coastal North Carolina, however, the laws were 

frequently and systematically subverted by black 

watermen and the networks they constructed 

and nurtured. From newspaper accounts, slave 

narratives, diaries, court records, and travelers’ 

accounts, Cecelski has reconstructed key details.37

The coastal route to freedom was well known on 

inland plantations, and slaves fled down the rivers 

toward coastal ports—following the Cape Fear to 

Wilmington, the Neuse and Trent to New Bern, the 

Tar to Washington, and the Roanoke to Plymouth. 

Albemarle area slaves headed north to Norfolk or 

Portsmouth through the Dismal Swamp. Escaping 

slaves relied on maritime blacks as informers, 

messengers, and collaborators. Indeed it was 

through Edenton that Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897), 

34 Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles.

35 Escott, Hatley, and Crow, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 49–51. A broader 

consideration of the Civil War itself may be found in 

our later chapter on wars. 

36 Ibid., 49.

37 This brief summary of watermen’s resistance to 

slavery is drawn from Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, 

123–148, which is the source of all quotations.
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author of one of the premier slave narratives, 

escaped in 1842.38 During the early decades of 

the century, laws governing the treatment of 

runaways (and of those giving aid to them) were 

made more severe, and both slaves and free blacks 

in black-majority Wilmington were forced to wear 

identification badges.

The Civil War and Reconstruction 

The Civil War ended slavery, but also brought 

“dangers and difficult choices in the uncertain new 

world of freedom,” Escott, Crowe, and Hatley 

conclude in their trenchant survey of the period.39

When war broke out, some slaves were forced to 

accompany their masters (or masters’ sons) into 

battle as servants, or to build fortifications, but 

some 7,000 slaves fled and enlisted in the Union 

army. Slave watermen provided critical intelligence 

to Union troops preparing to take Roanoke Island 

in late 1861 and in April 1862 helped pilot federal 

troops into Beaufort, which was taken without 

firing a shot. Other black pilots helped as Union 

forces took over Fort Macon, and at other points 

on the Outer Banks. Others commandeered 

an array of small and large vessels and staged a 

38 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 

(1861; Chapel Hill: Academic Affairs Library University 

of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2003), electronic 

edition, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/menu.

html. This website contains links to many related 

documents.

39 Escott, Hatley, and Crow, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 71. Unless otherwise 

indicated, our materials are drawn from 71–93 of this 

useful study.

massive boatlift to carry slaves to federal territory. 

Similar operations, small and large, had collected 

some 10,000 contrabands on the coast by mid1862.40

As they had at the war’s outbreak, some masters 

tried to block news of emancipation, but blacks 

moved quickly to assert their new freedom. In 

Carteret and Craven counties, blacks began their 

struggle for autonomy very soon after General 

Burnside’s troops landed south of New Bern 

in March 1862.41 By January 1865, more than 

11,000 freed blacks had congregated in New Bern. 

Focusing on escape, employment, education, and 

(for some) enlistment in the Union army, they 

began to develop an informal economy and moved 

to rescue still-enslaved friends and family. Those 

who had skills hired themselves out (many to the 

Union army), and some established businesses. 

Northern teachers and freedmen’s societies 

assisted with education, operating makeshift 

schools in churches, barns, and abandoned 

plantation buildings. Unfortunately, such moves 

provoked wrath and retaliation from whites 

(including racist unionists).

40 Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, 157–158. Cecelski 

discusses the role of black pilots in Civil War Beaufort 

at length, 153–177.

41 This brief discussion of the situation in Carteret and 

Craven counties is based upon Judkin Browning, 

“Visions of Freedom and Civilization Opening before 

Thee: African Americans’ Search for Autonomy during 

Military Occupation in North Carolina,” in Escott, 

North Carolinians in the Era of the Civil War and 

Reconstruction, , 69–100.

Figure 5-9. “Freed Negroes Streaming Toward Union 

Lines, New Bern.” Harper’s Weekly, February 21, 1863, 

116. North Carolina Collection, University of North 

Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

Figure 5-10. Distribution of captured rebels’ clothing to 

contrabands, New Bern, 1862. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated 

Newspaper, June 14, 1862, 164. North Carolina 

Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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But blacks were undeterred. In the fall of 1865, 

they staged a major convention in Raleigh “to 

express the sentiments of Freedmen”—“with 

malice toward none, with charity for all,” as one of 

their banners said. The Freedmen’s Convention 

was attended by 117 delegates from half the state’s 

counties. A carefully worded address they sent 

across town to a white convention working to 

revise the state constitution was met with hostility. 

Hundreds of attacks on blacks followed; three New 

Hanover County officeholders were charged with 

beating and shooting blacks. But the Freedmen’s 

Convention took on new life as the North Carolina 

Equal Rights League.42

To proclaim freedom was one thing, but to achieve 

it was another, as became increasingly clear. 

Emancipation did not eradicate generations-long 

class and race prejudice, as Escott reminds us. The 

South’s “massive structure of white supremacy,” 

with its own rituals, emotional attitudes, and 

prescribed behavioral patterns, proved stubbornly 

durable. A spate of court cases before and after the 

war made that abundantly clear. During journalist 

Whitelaw Reid’s tour of the South in 1865–1866, 

Beaufort citizens told him that black suffrage would 

be “very obnoxious to the prejudices of nearly the 

whole population.” Each class of whites had their 

special set of reasons for fearing and resenting 

blacks.43

Such attitudes were soon written into 

Reconstruction laws, which did not allow blacks to 

testify against whites in trials, serve on juries, enter 

into contracts, or keep a gun without a permit. 

Many whites were determined, as Crow, Escott, 

and Hatley put it, to “restore as much of the slave 

regime as possible.” Paul Cameron offered his 

nearly 1,000 former slaves a labor contract that 

amounted to slavery in all but name; when they 

rejected it, he decided to force them off his land. 

At the national level, President Johnson’s 

appeasement of the pre-war power structure over 

the objections of Congress led to his impeachment 

in 1868.44 Johnson’s impeachment seemed to 

hold promise for North Carolina blacks. The 

42 Escott, Hatley, and Crow, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 76–79; Escott, Many 

Excellent People, 124.

43 Escott, Many Excellent People, 113–118.

44 Escott, Hatley, and Crow, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 79–81.

Constitutional Convention of 1868 (which had 

a 107 to 13 Republican majority and included 15 

black delegates) brought an array of changes vital 

to blacks: direct election of judges, abolishment 

of property requirements for holding office, 

dismantling of the elite-dominated county courts, 

and tax-supported public schools (though separate 

for blacks and whites). Republicans swept the 

elections of 1868, bringing reformist William 

Holden in as governor and taking two-thirds of all 

seats in the legislature (including twenty blacks). 

One black was elected county commissioner in 

New Hanover County, and two out of five elected 

commissioners in Edgecombe County were black.45

From the perspective of the prewar elite, the 

decade after 1868 brought even worse. “Prominent 

men of the old elite,” Escott observes, “saw their 

worst nightmare—an alliance among the lower 

classes of both races—materializing under the 

protection of the Federal government” as poor 

whites and blacks turned to the Republican party. 

Determined to regain their privileges, the elite 

focused on white supremacy as what a century 

later would have been called their “wedge issue.” 

Newspapers in eastern counties wrote alarmist 

articles about “Radicals . . . Stimulating the 

Negroes to Apply the Torch to our Homes and to 

take our Property by Force and Violence.” The 

Wilmington Journal warned about miscegenation 

and the integration of juries and schools. Such 

measures, they insisted, would force poor men 

and their children “to be demeaned, debased, 

demoralized and degraded [by a] ruinous social 

equality . . . . [The] money, position and influence 

[of the rich] will keep the negro out of their houses, 

[but] IT IS IN THE POOR MAN’S HOUSE THAT 

THE NEGRO WILL ATTEMPT TO ENFORCE 

HIS EQUALITY.”46

Clearly, conditions for reform were not auspicious 

in a state financially devastated by the war and still 

determinedly racist. Democrats resolved to fight 

reform every step of the way, launching attacks on 

Republican officeholders and fueling an upsurge 

in Ku Klux Klan activity. Klan terror and violence 

(in the form of innumerable beatings, a number 

of hangings and other killings, burnings of blacks’ 

houses and churches, voter intimidation) were in 

45 Ibid., 84–87; Escott, Many Excellent People , 142.

46 Escott, Many Excellent People, 151.
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evidence mainly in the piedmont, but especially in 

counties with large numbers of Republican votes.47

Such developments showed clearly, as Escott 

observes, that “the sentiment of white leaders was 

virtually unanimous . . . against any significant 

improvement in the status of black North 

Carolinians.” The social behaviors enforced upon 

blacks were essentially those of slavery days; those 

who did not observe them were targets of quick 

violence. Blacks in Pender County in 1867 “had 

to submit,” Escott says, to an outlaw band who 

called themselves the Regulators (harking back to 

the Revolution) or leave the county because “no 

redress was available.” When the national Congress 

forced the implementation of black suffrage in 

1867, white North Carolinians saw it as “the 

most appalling of all alternaties.” The Fourteenth 

Amendment (ratified in July 1868) was viewed as 

“an extreme measure designed to embarrass the 

white race.”48

Spurred partly by Klan violence, the tide turned 

against the Republican party and Democrats 

regained control of the legislature in 1870. They 

immediately impeached Governor Holden, 

removed him from office, and passed a series of 

Constitutional amendments aimed at rolling back 

Reconstruction. By 1876, the amendments were in 

place, elite appointed county officials were back in 

power, and the state had been (as the Democrats 

claimed) “redeemed” from the horrors of black 

rule. Only a dozen years after the war ended, the 

election of 1877 put an end to Reconstruction.49

Toward a New South: Black Gains and 

Losses 

Blacks were disappointed in the vacilations of the 

Republican party at the end of Reconstruction, 

but with Democrats fully in control of the political 

47 Escott, ibid., 155, points out that the KKK was but 

one of several terrorist organizations active in North 

Carolina, including the Constitutional Union Guard, 

the Invisible Empire, and the White Brotherhood. 

Escott is also careful to point out that KKK members 

were drawn mainly from the gentry and the middle 

class.

48 Ibid., 126–134. Escott’s reference, 128, to Pender 

County in 1867 is puzzling; the county was not 

created until 1875. Presumably he was referring to 

the northern section of New Hanover County, from 

which Pender was later carved.

49 Escott, Hatley, and Crow, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 88–93.

apparatus, there was no viable alternative to the 

Republicans. When the Democratic Party failed to 

act on programs favored by the progressive, biracial 

100,000-member Farmers’ Alliance, the Alliance’s 

candidates took votes from the Democrats in 

the election of 1892 (which the Democrats won 

anyway, their efforts led by the staunch racist 

Furnifold Simmons [1854–1940], a native of coastal 

Jones County).50

The election of 1894 turned on the pivotal dynamic 

of Republican-Populist (“fusion”) politics. 

Fusionists seated seventy-four delegates in the 

General Assembly to the Democrats’ forty-six. 

Two years later, they elected the very progressive 

Republican governor Daniel L. Russell, who called 

for a major increase in taxes on the railroads and 

declared that people were not “the serfs and slaves 

of the bond-holding and gold-hoarding classes.” 

Russell placed himself on the side of “the producer 

and the toiler,” not the “coupon-clipper.”51

Fusionist victory brought substantial improvements 

for blacks in education, local electoral procedures, 

and taxation. 

The vote in these elections in coastal counties 

reflected both the rise of fusionist politics and 

(subsequently) a return to Democratic rule as the 

racist campaign’s effects solidified. In the 1895 

General Assembly, there were 60 Populists, 56 

Republicans (thus a total of 116 Fusionists), and 

54 Democrats. In the 1896 election, the Fusionists 

won 56 percent of the vote statewide, and the 

Populists by themselves got almost 10 percent.52

In the coastal counties, Fusionists dominated 

the election. They got 43 percent of the vote in 

Currituck, over 59 percent in New Hanover, and 

nearly 71 percent in Washington. Carteret was 

on the low end, but Fusionists still won almost 49 

percent. 

50 The ironies of Democratic / Farmers’ Alliance politics 

in the early 1890s are too complex to engage here. 

Suffice it to say that the Alliance was paradoxically 

dominated by white Democrats, estimated to 

comprise nearly two-thirds of the General Assembly 

in 1891. Whatever its complexion, the Alliance 

addressed serious problems faced by farmers (e.g., 

the crop-lien system and scarce credit).

51 Escott, Many Excellent People, 249.

52 Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 898. Election 

results for this and subsequent elections through 

1908 are presented in Appendix B.
National Park Service 117

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Those totals correlated fairly closely with the black/

white population ratio. Washington County had 

51.4 percent blacks and New Hanover 58 percent, 

but Currituck only 29 percent. Carteret was second 

lowest with about 21 percent. Dare County was 

anomalous, however: with a black population of 

only 10 percent, it voted 53 percent Fusionist (but 

with only a single vote for the Populist candidate).53

Clearly, Fusionists had made major gains. They 

controlled 62 percent of the legislative seats in 

1894 and 78 percent in 1896 (with over 85 percent 

voter participation). These outcomes constituted, 

as Escott says, “a fundamental and severe threat to 

the traditional [racial and class] order.” Josephus 

Daniels’s Raleigh News and Observer (joined by 

other major newspapers) called it lawmaking by 

“low-born scum and quondam slaves”—worse 

than Reconstruction because it came from within 

the state.54

True to form, Democrats responded with racist 

scare tactics. “North Carolina is a WHITE MAN’S 

STATE,” thundered Furnifold Simmons, “and 

WHITE MEN will rule it.”55 Democratic fraud, 

intimidation, vote stealing, beatings of prominent 

53 Population statistics are actually from a slightly later 

date, but presumably are reasonably accurate. The 

North Carolina Election of 1898 (http://www.lib.unc.

edu/ncc/1898/1898.html). Voting percentages are 

from John L. Cheney, North Carolina Government, 

1585–1979: A Narrative and Statistical History

(Raleigh: North Carolina Department of the Secretary 

of State, 1981), 1406–1407.

54 Escott, Many Excellent People , 249–253.

55 Escott, Hatley, and Crow, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 255.

Republicans, and Red Shirt violence followed.56

Virtually inevitably, the infamous Wilmington race 

riot of 1898 ensued.57

In the election of 1900, the results of Democratic 

racist and terrorist tactics were evident. The 

nonwhite population in New Hanover County 

had dropped a bit (from 58 to 51 percent), but 

the Republicans got only 0.1 percent of the vote.58

Black/white ratios in other coastal counties held 

fairly steady, but Republican vote percentages 

dropped dramatically: Washington County, which 

had previously voted 71 percent Republican, 

dropped to 37 percent; Onslow County from 

56 Ibid., 108, 113–115. The mounted, frequently masked, 

and armed Red Shirts, centered in eastern counties 

and with a very strong presence in New Hanover 

County, were the terrorist wing of the Democratic 

Party in the elections of 1898 and 1900.

57 Escott, Many Excellent People, 254–257. The 

Wilmington race riot has been written about so 

voluminously in its postcentennial years that we chose 

not to review it here. Reliable material on it is easily 

available. A succinct article is in Powell, Encyclopedia 

of North Carolina, 1208–1209. Numerous primary 

documents are presented on the website Wilmington 

1898: Debunking the Myths (http://1898wilmington.

com/) and in the centennial volume edited by David S. 

Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson, Democracy Betrayed: 

The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 

The full text of the Wilmington Race Riot Commission 

report is available at http://www.history.ncdcr.

gov/1898-wrrc/report/report.htm.

58 The Populist Party had begun to decline after 1896 

and was only minimally active by 1900.

Figure 5-11. Racist cartoon from Ralegih News and 

Observer , August 30, 1898.

Figure 5-12. “North Carolina’s Womanhood Appeals to 

the Ballot for Protection.” The North Carolinian, October 

13, 1898. Crowe, Escott, and Hatley, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 116.
118 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race And Class in a Maritime World

45 percent to 29 percent (perhaps because of its 

proximity to New Hanover and the 1898 race riot); 

Pender County 55 percent to 18 percent (for the 

same reason, one suspects); Bertie County from 65 

percent to 27 percent; Pasquotank County from 64 

percent to 38 percent; and Carteret County from 

49 percent to 41 percent. Currituck’s Republican 

vote actually rose by 3 percent, but all other 

counties were down, most of them substantially.59

Pushing for a constitutional amendment in 1900 

that would deny blacks the vote, white supremacy 

clubs and Red Shirts threatened and intimidated 

voters. Democratic gubernatorial candidate 

Charles B. Aycock led a propaganda campaign that 

denounced whites who opposed the amendment 

as “public enemies.” Prominent white politician 

Alfred Moore Waddell of Wilmington advised a 

crowd of whites that “if you find a Negro voting, 

warn him to leave . . . . [If] he refuses, kill him, 

shoot him down in his tracks.” Two-thirds of black 

voters turned out, but the amendment carried 

(assisted by voting fraud), and the Jim Crow era 

arrived in full force. The chairman of the House 

Constitutional Amendments Committee was New 

Hanover County lawyer George Rountree, who 

had played a prominent role in the Wilmington 

race riot of 1898.60

By 1904, the electoral situation was even worse. 

Statewide, Republicans still got 38 percent of the 

vote, but among coastal counties there was almost 

no good news to offset the bad. The Republican 

vote in Pender was down to 11 percent, in Bertie to 

10 percent, and in Camden to 8 percent. It dropped 

to less than 5 percent in Currituck and to 4 percent 

in New Hanover. Brunswick County (oddly, given 

its shared border with New Hanover) still gave 

Republicans 40 percent of its vote, but was joined 

in its judgment only by Albemarle area counties 

Dare (45 percent) and Tyrell (41 percent).61

Especially in view of the stubborn durability of 

racial attitudes in the state, Democratic social 

and electoral tactics, and new legal impediments 

introduced following the “separate but equal” 

59 Correlations between vote and black/white 

population figures are not especially significant.

60 Escott, Hatley, and Crow, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 115–117, 259.

61 For exact percentage totals, county by county and 

year by year, see Appendix B.

Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling in 1896, 

blacks still managed to make substantial gains 

during post-Reconstruction years. Focusing 

their efforts around themes of building black 

organizations, working for racial uplift, and 

increasing racial diversity, blacks formed many 

organizations for self-improvement and mutual 

support, some purely social, some serviceoriented or benevolent: the Royal Knights of King 

David, the United Order of True Reformers, the 

Household of Ruth for women, the Masons, the 

Odd Fellows, the Good Templars, the Sons of Ham. 

Other black organizations, especially the North 

Carolina Teachers Association and the North 

Carolina Industrial Association, worked for specific 

changes. The former focused on improving black 

education. The latter promoted economic rather 

than political progress, establishing an Industrial 

Fair that became the most popular social event for 

blacks in the mid-1880s.62

Another progressive dynamic was the rise of 

a black middle class. Editor William C. Smith 

of the black-owned Charlotte Messenger was a 

strong voice for nonpolitical uplift efforts. Groups 

of black businessmen emerged, especially in 

Raleigh and Durham. One such group attempted 

62 Escott, Hatley and Crow, A History of AfricanAmericans in North Carolina, 96–101.

Figure 5-13. “A ‘White Man’s Party’ Democrat Normal 

Institute in Duplin County.” Cartoon. Supplement to The 

Progressive Farmer, October 25, 1898. The North Carolina 

Election of 1898. North Carolina Collection, University of 

North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
National Park Service 119

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race And Class in a Maritime World

(unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to develop the 

Wilmington, Wrightsville, and Onslow Railroad.63

At the national level, electoral gains for blacks were 

modest in the election of 1882, but not completely 

lacking. New Bern, in the so-called “Black Second” 

Congressional District, sent James E. O’Hara to 

Congress (1883–1887), followed by George H. 

White (1897–1901).64

63 Escott, Many Excellent People, 179. On Pennsylvania 

native T. Morris Chester (1834–1892), who served as 

president of the company, see http://www.afrolumens.

org/rising_free/lincoln/chester02.html. Another 

principal was Virginia native and Wilmington resident 

John Holloway, a post office clerk and director of the 

Metropolitan Trust. He served as a member of the 

North Carolina House of Representatives in 1887–1889. 

See 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Report (Raleigh, NC: 

North Carolina Department of Archives and History, 

2006), Appendix A: Biographical Sketches (http://www.

history.ncdcr.gov/1898-wrrc/report/report.htm). For 

the act of incorporation for the railroad, see Laws 

and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina . . . 

1879 (Raleigh, NC: The Observer, State Printer and 

Binder, 1879), Chapter 286, 454–457. The incorporating 

act specified (457) that the state would furnish fifty 

convicts (no doubt many of them would have been 

black) to assist in construction. Sec. 5 of the act 

authorized the corporation to purchase outstanding 

stock of the Wilmington and Seaside Railroad 

Company, incorporated in 1869. William P. Cannady 

was listed as a principal of both companies. Neither T. 

Morris Chester nor John Holloway was among listed 

principals. Earlier (in March 1870) Cannady had been 

involved in incorporating the Cape Fear Building 

Association “for the purpose of facilitating the 

procuring of homesteads by persons of limited means, 

and especially by mechanics and laboring men.” Public 

Laws of the State of North Carolina, Chapter 91, 

150–152. Whether this was a black-owned company 

cannot be discerned from the act itself, but it seems 

likely, since the language does not specifically exclude 

blacks from the groups for whom housing was to be 

built, as it presumably would have had it been white 

owned. One of this entity’s principals, Lawson E. Rice, 

was a county commissioner in New Hanover County 

in 1874. See North Carolina Secretary of State, The 

Legislative Manual and Political Register of the State 

of North Carolina (Raleigh, NC: Josiah Turner, Jr., State 

Printer and Binder, 1874), 92–294.

64 Escott, Hatley, and Crow, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 109. As of 1872, the 

Black Second consisted of a band of ten counties 

running southward from the Virginia line on 

the border of the piedmont: Warren, Halifax, 

Northampton, Edgecombe, Wilson, Wayne, Greene, 

Lenoir, Craven, and Jones. No coastal counties were 

included. For a full discussion of the shape and 

character of the district, see Eric Anderson, Race 

and Politics in North Carolina, 1872–1901: The Black 

Second (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 

1981), 3–33. George H. White was the last southern 

black to serve in Congress until after the 1960s.

Jim Crow and Civil Rights 

The hard-fought and violent Democrat/Fusionist 

struggle of the post-Civil War era made abundantly 

clear that cultural values, social mores, and longestablished, elite-based political alignments would 

not tolerate any general or durable relaxation 

of racial categories and practices. Between 1900 

and the advent of World War II, Escott, Hatley, 

and Crow argue, North Carolina was “hostile to 

[the] civil rights [of blacks] and unyielding in its 

devotion to white supremacy,” especially with 

regard to voting rights, education, and public 

accommodations. Black landownership peaked 

around 1920; the number of black farmers, the 

amount of land they owned, and the number of 

black agricultural workers all declined thereafter. 

Between 1910 and 1930, 57,000 blacks left the state; 

220,000 more followed between 1930 and 1950. 

Eighteen counties had black majorities in 1900; 

half that many remained in 1940. By every social 

indicator (property values, earnings, housing, 

death rates), blacks ranked well below whites. 

In 1933, a state study of racial attitudes among 

public officials in thirty-eight counties showed 

racism to be nearly universal. The superintendent 

of public welfare in Beaufort County criticized 

a Catholic school in Washington because nuns 

treated blacks and whites equally. “It makes them 

too biggety, and they forget their places,” he said, 

agreeing in essence with a Burke County official 

who succinctly declared, “Educate a Negro and 

you ruin a good servant.”65

The Depression was particularly hard on blacks, 

whose pre-Depression circumstances were already 

so far inferior to those of whites, especially with 

regard to education. Pasquotank County native and 

director of the Department of Public Instruction’s 

Division of Negro Education Nathan Carter 

Newbold (1871–1957) reported that conditions 

within black education were “pathetic,” with up 

to 100 students in some classrooms, a high school 

graduation rate at 7 percent, and a thousand 

teachers who were not themselves high school 

graduates; black teachers were paid 25–30 percent 

less than white teachers.66

65 Crow, Escott, and Hartley, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 119–140.

66 Ibid., 135–136.
120 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race And Class in a Maritime World

Unfortunately, most New Deal programs were 

of little benefit to blacks, and some were actively 

hurtful. The National Recovery Administration 

(NRA), intended to regulate industrial wages, 

hours, and prices, did not cover “Negro jobs,” 

some of which were in any case reassigned to 

unemployed whites. The number of blacks in the 

tobacco industry dropped precipitously. Similarly, 

the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) 

was ruinous for many black sharecroppers and 

tenants. AAA policies forced sharecroppers off the 

land, and some landlords stole the AAA payment 

checks they were supposed to share with tenants. 

Nevertheless, blacks in general supported FDR 

and moved from the Republican to the Democratic 

Party. 67

Not surprisingly, given how little the New Deal had 

done for North Carolina blacks, John Larkins’s 

1940 survey for the State Board of Charities and 

Public Welfare painted a picture that was still grim. 

Even though some 13,000 blacks had managed 

to secure work with New Deal programs, and 

slightly over half of all tobacco workers were still 

black, other social indicators pointed to profound 

inequality. There was one physician for about 

every 1,127 white people, and one for every 6,500 

blacks. For dental care the situation was nearly as 

bad: one dentist to about 3,000 whites, and one for 

67 Ibid., 141–145. The NRA was in any case declared 

unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935. 

more than 13,000 blacks. The state was spending 

over $170 per pupil for white schools, but only $57 

per black pupil; of more than 1,300 schools that 

reported having libraries a decade earlier, only 66 

were in black schools. Blacks made up 27.5 percent 

of the population, but more than 50 percent of 

the prison population and over 80 percent of 

those executed for their crimes between 1910 and 

1943. For eastern counties that still had a black 

population of more than 50 percent (Edgecombe, 

Halifax, Bertie, Hertford), these were very serious 

inequalities. Together with Wake County, New 

Hanover accounted for more than a third of 

women prisoners.68

World War II helped stimulate a great black exodus 

from the South; the number of blacks living on the 

land dropped by half between 1940 and 1960, as 

more than 2 million blacks migrated to northern 

and western industrial centers in the 1940s. In 

some ways, racial tensions heightened. A year after 

Pearl Harbor, Fisk University’s Charles S. Johnson 

issued his “Durham manifesto,” calling for black 

voting rights, equalization of school facilities and 

teachers’ salaries, unionization of service workers, 

and equal access to all jobs. The following fall, 

however, Governor Broughton defended the state’s 

record on racial matters, claiming that segregation 

was supported by both races, and dismissed 

demands emanating from the “radical Negro 

press.”69

School Desegregation 

Despite the fact that there were no children in 

school at Portsmouth or elsewhere on Core 

Banks after 1943, it is impossible to understand 

the racial context of the coastal counties in the 

mid-twentieth century without discussing school 

segregation and desegregation.70 Although much of 

68 Larkins, The Negro Population of North Carolina, 15, 

19–39, 50–51.

69 Escott, Hatley, and Crow, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 145–152.

70 Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John 

Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 122. Portsmouth had had an 

academy by at least 1822, and perhaps as early as 

1805, but there seems little reason to assume that 

blacks were allowed to attend, since they were 

excluded from white schools throughout the state 

for more than a century more. John Mayo may have 

opened an academy in Portsmouth in 1805. See 

Philip McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 247–248, and Olson, 

Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 70. 

Figure 5-14. Blue Eagle logo of the National Recovery 

Administration (NRA).
National Park Service 121

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race And Class in a Maritime World

the history of schooling on the CALO portion of 

the Banks involved private schools and academies 

(as it did in the counties to the west), the four 

adjacent coastal counties (Dare, Hyde, Pamlico, 

and Carteret) participated fully in the educational 

(and thus, racial) history of the rest of the state, 

and thus helped set the educational, racial, and 

cultural climate in which Outer Banks students 

were educated. 

As noted earlier, John Mayo, a business associate of 

both John Wallace and the Blount family on Shell 

Castle, opened Portsmouth’s first school around 

1805. The town still had an academy at the time of 

the Civil War, but as population decreased in the 

years thereafter, student attendance dropped off 

as well. The town’s first public one-room school 

building was constructed in 1916 and replaced in 

1927 after wind damage. In a photograph from 

the 1930s now mounted in the restored building, 

teacher Mary Snead Dixon poses with her two 

dozen students (eleven boys and thirteen girls). She 

taught the school’s last group of students in 1943. 

At Cape Lookout, a fishing village, at first seasonal, 

but gradually becoming permanent, began to 

develop in the second half of the nineteenth 

century. Since families who lived there—Willises, 

Guthries, Roses, Hancocks, Nelsons, Gaskills, 

Moores, Styrons—tended to be large, a school 

was built at some point; it was operating at least 

from 1900. As of 1900, the community was more 

populous than Harkers Island, but it declined 

sharply around 1919; sixteen families were still 

living there at the time of the 1920 census. The 

school, in which a teacher from Harkers Island had 

taught as many as twenty-fve students, closed at the 

end of the 1919 school year.71

On Harkers Island, Bostonian missionary teacher 

Jenny Bell had opened an academy in a two-story 

building as early as 1864, but by the turn of the 

century, island residents had built a one-room 

building behind the Methodist church for their first 

public school. A building constructed soon after 

the Cape Lookout school closed was soon crowded 

to capacity. Island population grew so rapidly after 

World War II that by 1957 high school students had 

to be bussed to a consolidated school in Smyrna.72

Thus, schooling on the CALO section of the Outer 

Banks was rudimentary at best, and it had all ended 

by 1943, by which time almost all the population 

had moved to the mainland. The Harkers Island 

part of the story was better, mostly because steadily 

growing population pushed the development of 

public schools on into the twentieth century.

On the adjacent mainland, racial dynamics 

complicated the story. Before 1900, as numerous 

commentators have pointed out for the South 

in general as well as for North Carolina, many 

religious groups and private organizations, as well 

as the Freedmen’s Bureau, founded and provided 

funds for black schools. Their efforts shored up a 

state system that was shabbily inadequate at best. 

Although the state constitution of 1868 required 

a “general and uniform system” of free public 

schools for all children, an 1875 amendment 

required schools to be “separate but equal.” 

Because funding came from counties and local 

communities, however, black education was 

seriously substandard. By 1880, school terms were 

only four months, and 76 percent of blacks were 

illiterate (compared with 45 percent of whites). 

State funds for black schools were not made 

available until 1897, and another decade passed 

71 Dates are uncertain. The census of 1880 was the first 

to record a community on the Cape. Cape Lookout 

Village Historic District National Register Nomination, 

8-21–8-25. A small school with a two-month term 

also operated for a time at Diamond City before the 

community was destroyed by a hurricane in 1899. 

Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates and John Milner 

Associates, Cape Lookout Village Cultural Landscape 

Report, 2-11–2-13. This report also indicates that 

“School was also held on the west end of Shackleford 

Banks at Wade’s Shore,” and that by 1921 only two or 

three families remained in Cape Lookout Village.

72 Garrity–Blake and Sabella, Ethnohistorical Overview 

and Assessment Study , Sec. 6-5-3.

Figure 5-15. Renovated Portsmouth school building 

(1927). Photo by David E. Whisnant. 
122 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race And Class in a Maritime World

before there were funds for a statewide system. 

Public elementary schools for blacks began to 

receive some state funds in 1910, but the first 

public secondary school for blacks did not open 

until 1918. High schools came later still.73

In the 1920s, the Rosenwald Fund (named for 

Sears, Roebuck and Company president Julius 

Rosenwald) embarked on a campaign to build 

black schools. Approximately 5,300 Rosenwaldfunded schools were built in fifteen southern states, 

130 of them in nineteen coastal North Carolina 

counties and 800 statewide, the most in any single 

state. Carteret County received three Rosenwald 

schools, but they were located in Beaufort, 

Morehead, and Newport rather than on the Outer 

Banks. Confronted by southern racial attitudes and 

recalcitrant school boards, the Fund did not see 

73 Escott, Hatley, and Crow, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 153–156. See also 

Ronald E. Butchart, Northern Schools, Southern 

Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedmen’s Education, 

1862–1875 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 

and Thomas W. Hanchett, “The Rosenwald Schools 

and Black Education in North Carolina,” North 

Carolina Historical Review 65 (October 1988), 387–

444. Ehrenhard’s Cape Lookout National Seashore, 57, 

reported that before it was destroyed by the great 

hurricane of 1899, Diamond City had a school that 

was open three months of the year, though it was 

presumably open only to white students. 

the results it anticipated, and the program was shut 

down in 1932.74

By the late 1930s, black activism around the issues 

of voting rights, education, and lynching was 

much in evidence. The 1938 Gaines v. Canada

decision, which challenged the separate but equal 

doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson, required the state 

of Missouri to admit a black student to its law 

school. That decision moved other states to act. 

North Carolina Governor Hoey appointed a 

Commission on Higher Education for Negroes, 

which recommended that graduate programs for 

blacks be established at North Carolina College for 

Negroes in Durham and at A&T Technical College 

in Greensboro. The University of North Carolina 

admitted its first black student in 1955; Duke 

University followed six years later.75

74 Hanchett, “The Rosenwald Schools and Black 

Education in North Carolina,” 387–388. The 

Rosenwald schools were quite unevenly distributed 

among North Carolina counties. Currituck’s and 

Carteret’s three each were on the low end; Halifax’s 

forty-six were on the upper end. The schools were 

also of different sizes and designs; there were sixteen 

types. North Carolina coastal counties that received 

Rosenwald schools included Beaufort (6, at Bayside, 

Chocowinity, Leechville, Pantego, and Riverroad); 

Bertie (18, including Black Rock, Aulander, Indian 

Woods, and Roxobel); Brunswick (11, including 

Leland, Long Beach, Navassa, Pine Level, and St. 

Johns); Carteret (3, at Beaufort, Morehead, and 

Newport); Chowan (5, at Green Hall, Hudson Grove, 

St. John’s, Warren Grove, and White Oak); Craven (7, 

including Bucks, Cove City, Dover, Epworth, James 

City, and N. Harlowe); Currituck (3, at Coinjock, 

Gregory, and Moyock); Dare (1, at Roanoke Island); 

Edgecombe (26, including Acorn Hill, Dixon, 

Lancaster, Providence, and Tarboro); Hertford (10, 

including Mill Neck, Mt. Sinai, Murfreesboro, Union, 

and White Oak); Hyde (2, including County Training 

and Ridge-Englehard); New Hanover (7, including E. 

Wilmington, Masonboro, Oak Hill, and Wrightsboro); 

Onslow (2, at Duck Creek and Marines); Pamlico (4, 

including County Training, Florence, Holt’s Chapel, 

and Messic); Pasquotank (4, including Elizabeth City, 

Model Practice, Newland, and Winslow); Pender (15, 

including Bowden, Canetock, Lillington, Maple Hill, 

and Vista); Perquimans (2, at Hertford and Nicanor); 

Tyrell (2, at Alligator and Scuppernong); Washington 

(2, at Plymouth and Roper) [from Hanchett, 

Appendix, 428–444]. Unfortunately for our present 

purpose, Hanchett’s case studies of Rosenwald schools 

focused on Mecklenberg County. The Rosenwald 

program arrived, of course, as the school-age 

population in the Cape Lookout area of the Outer 

Banks was in sharp decline.

75 Escott, Hatley, and Crow, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 160–163, 173.

Figure 5-16. Three-teacher Rosenwald School, Plan No. 3. 

Hanchett, “The Rosenwald Schools and Black Education in 

North Carolina,” 402.
National Park Service 123

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race And Class in a Maritime World

The Brown v. Board of Education decision of 

1954 forced further reevaluation. The Fort Bragg 

elementary school had already desegregated 

quietly in 1951, but there were hard times ahead. 

Even the final report of the Governor’s Special 

Advisory Committee on Education, which 

included some black members, warned that “The 

mixing of the races forthwith in the public schools 

throughout the state cannot be accomplished 

and should not be attempted.” Governor Hodges 

pushed for (and got) legislation that turned over 

the administration of public schools to the counties 

and cities, thus removing responsibility from the 

state. The move was further buttressed by the 

Pearsall Plan (praised nationally as a “moderate” 

path between two “extremes”), which urged that 

white parents who didn’t want their children to go 

to school with blacks could withdraw them and get 

state grants to send them to private schools. 

The statewide atmosphere of defiance proved 

very resistant to change.76 David Cecelski’s Along 

Freedom Road (1994), focused on local efforts 

to prevent the closing of two historically black 

schools in Hyde County, provides more than ample 

evidence of the pervasiveness in coastal counties 

of the same kinds and levels of racism as were to 

be found in the rest of the state.77 Hyde County’s 

history had been tortured for at least two hundred 

years. Slaves and convicts had dug its canals, and 

a fifty-year timber boom (1870–1920) fizzled 

when the area was logged out. A plan to drain and 

develop Lake Mattamuskeet had failed, the area 

had suffered three major hurricanes in less than 

fifty years (1899, 1933, 1944), and they county’s 

population had been dropping steadily (to below 

7,000 by 1950). Industry had passed the county 

by, as had military-related development that 

had helped nearby areas. Dilapidated buildings 

marked the sites of abandoned towns, and most 

commercial buildings in the county seat of Swan 

Quarter were vacant. Ninety percent of the land 

was owned either by the federal government or by 

76 Ibid., 166–173. On the Pearsall Plan, see David 

Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North 

Carolina and the Fate of Black Schools in the South

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 

24–27.

77 Cecelski, Along Freedom Road. Our brief précis 

of these events is drawn from this source unless 

otherwise indicated. We make no claim for the 

typicality of Hyde County, but the relative absence of 

similarly detailed studies for other coastal counties 

makes Cecelski’s work especially valuable.

timber and agribusiness corporations. Poverty was 

worse in Hyde County than in all but two of North 

Carolina’s one hundred counties.

Hyde County blacks were the worst off of all. In 

1950, no black family in the entire county had 

running water or an indoor toilet, and whites (only 

a third of whom had these luxuries) conspired 

to keep it that way. Blacks could neither buy land 

nor get jobs except seasonal ones in agriculture 

and seafood. The local social order was Jim Crow 

throughout, and violent attacks on blacks were 

fresh in local memory.78 In order to counter these 

racist dynamics, local blacks had created an array 

of community self-help organizations, but open 

dissent seemed too dangerous to attempt, though a 

chapter of the NAACP had been organized. 

Already in the early 1950s, NAACP lawsuits had 

emerged in Pamlico and other eastern counties, 

and Hyde County officials saw the handwriting 

on the wall. In a long belated “separate but equal” 

effort to avoid desegregation, Hyde County’s white 

school leaders made dramatic improvements to 

black schools. But blacks weren’t buying the ploy.79

Cecelski’s principal argument is that in the 

1960s and 1970s, in order to desegregate the 

state’s schools, white officials closed down black 

institutions in a wholesale manner, and that 

whatever benefits accrued to blacks as a result of 

integration in Hyde County and elsewhere, the 

associated costs were high. The desegregation 

process devastated leadership, school cultures, and 

“educational heritage” in the affected communities. 

Black school principals and school administrators 

virtually disappeared, and more than 3,000 black 

teachers lost their jobs. Meanwhile, black students 

frequently found their new circumstances in white 

school markedly inferior to those in their old 

schools: in their new schools, they faced hostility 

from white students, racially biased discipline, 

segregated bus routes, racially based tracking 

into less desirable courses, and low academic 

expectations.80

The costs reached well beyond the school system 

itself. The Ku Klux Klan emerged again in Hyde 

County, which was included in the KKK’s 

78 Ibid., 17–22.

79 Ibid., 23–30.

80 Cecelski details these dynamics in Hyde County, ibid., 

32–39.
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“Province 1.” By the mid-1960s, the Klan was 

borrowing stature from men with considerable 

local standing, and as many as 500 whites were 

attending its rallies. “Communistic” and “antiChristian” desegregation was the basis of wide 

appeal. Significant KKK rallies stretched through 

more than two dozen locations in eastern counties, 

from Jones County all the way to Moyock on the 

Virginia border.81

Hyde County students and their parents 

understood the whole array of these costs. Black/

white political conflict grew markedly from 1966 

onward. For an entire year (1968–1969), black 

students (representing 60 percent of the school 

population) expressed their anger—and their 

objections to the closing of the two local black 

schools—by refusing to attend school at all.82

One of the two closed schools was O. A. Peay, 

which, Cecelski says, was “a source of inestimable 

pride to Hyde County blacks and [a symbol 

of] their aspirations for education and racial 

advancement”83

The furor over the school closings attracted 

the attention of Golden Frinks, whom Cecelski 

calls “the most important civil rights organizer 

in eastern North Carolina in the 1960s” and 

the leader of the remarkably effective Edenton 

Movement for civil rights in 1961, which drew 

its participants from poor, uneducated, rural 

people (unlike other such movements, which 

were composed largely of college students). In 

September 1968, Frinks led fifteen hundred blacks 

in a march in Swan Quarter. Other marches and 

protest meetings followed almost daily, becoming 

more and more confrontational. Many children 

began to attend “movement schools” organized 

in local churches, and many protesters went to 

jail—so many that some had to be sent to jails many 

miles away. 

Marches to Raleigh followed in 1969, by which 

time Hyde County had become the focus of much 

of the civil rights activity in the state. Conflict 

and negotiations dragged into 1970, when at last 

an agreement was reached to operate both the 

81 Ibid., 37–41. A map of the principal Klan rally sites is 

on 38.

82 Ibid., 7–9.

83 Cecelski details the history of O. A. Peay School, as 

well as the controversy over its closing, in ibid., 59–82. 

Quotation is from 68. 

two black schools and the previously white Lake 

Mattamuskeet school, converting all three to 

integrated schools.84

In the months that followed, the Hyde County 

episode spilled over into Wilmington, in what 

developed into the nationally famous Wilmington 

10 case. In 1971, one hundred students gathered at 

Gregory Congregational United Church of Christ 

to protest the closing of an all-black high school 

in Williston in Carteret County. Black students 

demanded that the school be reopened as an 

all-black school, that a course on black history be 

designed for Wilmington schools, and that Martin 

Luther King’s birthday be officially celebrated. 

One of many available snapshots of subsequent 

events captures the essence of the social turmoil 

that ensued:

[T]wo downtown businesses were burned, and 

there was evidence of other arson attempts. 

African American activists were blamed for 

the incidents. Members of the Ku Klux Klan 

and a group called The Rights of White People 

began to patrol downtown Wilmington armed 

and openly hostile to the boycotting students 

and their leaders. On the night of 6 February 

1971, several fires were set, and a small 

downtown grocery store was firebombed. 

When firemen reported to the scene, they 

were shot at by snipers on the roof of the 

Gregory Congregational Church, in which . . 

. a number of students were barricaded. Two 

people were killed and several were injured 

during the battle that raged that night and into 

the next day. Finally, on February 8, National 

Guardsmen forced their way into the church 

only to find it empty.85

The local Board of Education sought a restraining 

order against the Southern Christian Leadership 

Conference (SCLC), which had set up a 

Wilmington office in 1971 and was helping to focus 

opposition to segregation. The battle continued for 

many weeks. Eventually nine black men and one 

black woman (the “Wilmington 10”) were arrested 

for an alleged firebombing. They were tried, 

84 Ibid., 161. Cecelski provides a carefully detailed 

account of this period, Along Freedom Road, 83–161.

85 “February 1971—The Wilmington 10,” http://www.

lib.unc.edu/ncc/ref/nchistory/feb2005/index.html; 

accessed March 24, 2009).
National Park Service 125

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race And Class in a Maritime World

convicted, and sentenced to more than twenty 

years each in prison. Higher courts turned down 

their appeals, and in 1978 Governor James Hunt 

refused to pardon them. Their sentences were 

finally overturned by a federal court of appeals in 

1980.86

The Hyde County, Carteret County, and 

Wilmington events were mileposts in a long 

statewide and national process. In North Carolina, 

segregation was both pervasive (extending even 

to the Bibles used for swearing in in courts) and 

stubbornly ingrained socially, culturally, politically, 

and legally. Protests against these conditions began 

decades before the turbulent 1950s and 1960s. As 

early as 1932, black ministers refused to participate 

in the dedication of War Memorial Auditorium 

in Raleigh, and in 1938 students in Greensboro 

initiated a theater boycott that spread to other 

locations. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) 

emerged in 1942, and a short time later organized 

an interracial bus trip to challenge the Morgan v. 

Virginia decision of 1946.87 Riders were arrested in 

Durham, Chapel Hill, and Asheville, in an action 

that became a model for the freedom rides of 

86 Escott, Hatley, and Crow, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 204–205.

87 Morgan v. Virginia is a landmark (but often 

overlooked) case in civil rights law. In July 1944 in 

Gloucester County, Virginia, nearly ten years before 

the celebrated Rosa Parks case, Irene Morgan 

challenged the Jim Crow law requiring separate 

seating on public conveyances. On June 3, 1946, 

the Supreme Court struck down the Virginia law. 

Encyclopedia of Virginia (Virginia Foundation for the 

Humanities, 2009), http://www.encyclopediavirginia.

org/Morgan_v_Virginia_1946.

the 1960s. The NAACP sponsored some school 

boycotts in the 1940s, and a sit-in at an ice cream 

parlor in Durham followed in 1957, three years 

before the much more famous Woolworth’s sit-in 

in Greensboro.

As citizen actions both for and against segregation 

multiplied in the early 1960s, Governor. Terry 

Sanford in 1963 organized a biracial Good 

Neighbor Council and urged mayors and county 

commissioners to emulate its model at the 

local level. The NAACP’s Legal Defense fund 

represented blacks in desegregation suits, but 

threats from the KKK continued and four activists’ 

homes were bombed in Charlotte. Nationally, the 

March on Washington, the Voting Rights Act of 

1965, and Martin Luther King’s 1968 Poor People’s 

Campaign increased the pressure for change.88 In 

North Carolina, however, desegregation was not 

complete until the 1970s.89

Race, Class, and Work: The 

Menhaden Industry 

In late November of 1990, New York Times music 

critic Jon Pareles sat in the audience at a New York 

recital hall and watched as ten men in dark suits 

and hats filed onstage. They sat in a semicircle, he 

wrote, “singing in sumptuous gospel harmony and 

regularly leaning forward to pull in an imaginary 

fish net.” They were the Menhaden Chanteymen 

from Beaufort, North Carolina, “members of the 

last generation to pull in by hand nets holding 

thousands of menhaden.” Since the 1960s, Pareles 

explained, 

the oily fish . . . [have] been harvested with 

power winches, but the songs that rallied 

the fishermen’s strength have survived. . . . 

They are call-and-response songs, paced like 

slow-rolling sea swells. A single voice or two 

in harmony sing a line that is answered by the 

full chorus . . . with lyrics about the work, the 

weather, harsh captains and women back on 

shore. After each verse, the men pulled with a 

burst of chatter and exhortations like “Let’s get 

the fish up!”

88 Escott, Hatley, and Crow, A History of African 

Americans in North Carolina, 199–203.

89 Ibid., 172.

Figure 5-17. Logo for the Free the Wilmington Ten 

campaign.
126 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race And Class in a Maritime World

The songs are functional, but away from the 

waves and sweat, they stand on their own. The 

lead singers—John Jones, Leroy Cox and John 

Bell—had voices full of rough-hewn dignity and 

gentleness. . . . The cooperation that made it 

possible to harvest menhaden with muscle power 

shines through the music.90

But it wasn’t in fact all cooperation, though there 

had to be a lot of it. How race (and class as well) 

actually played out among menhaden fishermen 

in coastal North Carolina is the subject of Barbara 

Garrity-Blake’s study of race relations in the 

industry.91

The roots of the industry lay in New England, 

where most fishermen were white, the 

cooperatively organized fishing groups were small, 

and the catch was shared equally, usually in the 

form of fish put directly on the fields as fertilizer. 

However, a new way to extract menhaden oil 

(used in paint, soap, miners’ lamps, and tanning) 

was discovered about 1850, exciting the interest 

of profit-hungry entrepreneurs and setting the 

stage for later industrialization of the enterprise. 

By 1860, the first menhaden-cooking factories 

appeared, driven partly by the increasing scarcity of 

whale oil. Near-shore fishing declined, replaced by 

large offshore schooners and sloops served by netsetting purse boats and seines. Faster and bigger 

steamer vessels followed in the 1870s; by 1895, the 

last sail craft in the industry had disappeared. The 

costs of running the steamers in turn drove vertical 

integration in the industry, squeezing out small 

operators. At the turn of the century, production 

(now mostly of fish meal) skyrocketed as the 

number of factories declined. The predominantly 

white labor of the early days was slowly replaced 

by displaced whaling crewmen and then by 

90 Jon Pareles, “Chanteys and Chants of the South,” New 

York Times, November 20, 1990 (http://www.nytimes.

com/1990/11/29/arts/review-folk-chanteys-and-chantsof-the-south.html). Carteret County’s Menhaden 

Chanteymen were brought back together after thirty 

years through the fieldwork of folklorists Mike and 

Debbie Luster in 1988. The Chanteymen subsequently 

performed for the North Carolina General Assembly 

and in the New York concert Pareles attended and 

received the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award 

from the North Carolina Arts Council (http://www.

coresound.com/fa-menhaden.htm).

91 Garrity-Blake, The Fish Factory. Our précis is drawn 

from this source.

Portuguese immigrants, both on the steamers and 

in the onshore processing factories.92

The closing years of the century saw the ominous 

depletion of the menhaden waters of New 

England, and the push south began. By the end of 

the century, Garrity-Blake observes, “both black 

and white men of coastal Virginia and North 

Carolina were hired by newly arrived, Yankeeowned fish oil factories.” Fabulously successful 

Maine menhaden industrialist Elijah Reed led 

the way with his Chesapeake factories (located in 

Reedville, Virginia), but many others followed. By 

1907, ten factories in Beaufort, Morehead City, 

and Southport employed 500 workers and were 

processing 57 million pounds annually. 

Early workers in the Virginia factories were mainly 

white immigrants sent down from Baltimore, but 

further south the work force shifted fairly quickly 

to southern blacks. Whites kept the upper-level 

managerial jobs, however, and (as usual) blacks got 

the lower-level (crewman and processing) work. 

Over the next several decades, as southerners 

replaced northerners as factory owners and 

managers and new technology made the industry 

less labor intensive, a “better mixture” of black/

white labor emerged and the racial line “became 

less rigid.” One reason was that whites and blacks 

experienced a degree of equality in that both 

were “wage laborers for alien industrialists.” As 

the decades passed, Garrity-Blake discovered, 

race relations aboard menhaden vessels came to 

exhibit a “unique quality.”Those relations, she 

argues, “were no simple matter of domination 

and subordination,” but rather a situation “of 

mutual dependency between [almost always white] 

captains and [largely black] crewmen, with power 

at both ends of the hierarchy.”Captains knew 

how to find the fish, and crewmen knew how—by 

harmonizing their efforts (literally, through song) 

and fusing their strength—to corral them and get 

them into the boat.93

On the large mechanized boats, tasks became less 

and less specialized. Older task-based distinctions 

92 Ibid., 4–14.

93 Ibid., xvii–xxi, 1. Garrity-Blake, The Fish Factory, notes 

(58) that on the rare occasions when white crewmen 

were hired, captains viewed them disparagingly. For 

an extended discussion of the captains’ status markers 

and self-understanding, see The Fish Factory, 65–85.
National Park Service 127

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race And Class in a Maritime World

disappeared, so that “[b]y the 1950s, crewmen 

were largely an undifferentiated group, defined 

. . . in opposition to vessel officers.” Captains’ 

annual wages were from two to four times higher 

than those of crewmen.94 Experience was less 

relevant, but race was not. In 1915, Garrity-Blake 

reports, captains, mates, pilots, firemen, and 

engineers were white, but deckhands and cooks 

were black. Officers and crew ate at separate 

tables and slept in separate quarters. Onshore, 

segregation prevailed as well. In Beaufort, black 

crewmen, especially seasonal workers from 

Virginia, were carefully confined to the “nigger 

section,” while industrialists and captains built 

sumptuous homes on Front Street.95 The crude 

racist phrase emphasizes Garrity-Blake’s major 

finding that, regardless of the degree to which the 

arduous and dangerous work on the boats required 

some disregard for traditional racial and status 

boundaries, the work structure in the industry was 

“distinctly stratified.” 

As the industry grew, formerly sleepy coastal 

villages were transformed by the industry, its 

seasonal rhythms, and its pervasive smell. Gender 

relations were transformed as well, as men 

boarded the boats for days, weeks, or months at 

a time. Captains’ wives puttered about the house 

and garden, as most of them long had, but black 

crewmen’s wives took part-time jobs as domestics 

or oyster shuckers and crab pickers.96

In the years after World War II, several 

technological innovations wrought major changes 

in work (and hence, racial) relations: the use of 

spotter planes, the adoption of the power winch, 

and the use of centrifugal pumps to transfer the 

fish into the (newly refrigerated) holds. Captains 

whose literal and functional importance had 

been partly defined by ascending to the crow’s 

nest to spot menhaden schools lost status to the 

spotter planes that radioed in an instant the vital 

intelligence captains had taken decades to acquire 

and were intensely proud of. Power winches used 

to pull up huge nets laden with tens of thousands 

of pounds of fish reduced the need for the labor 

of crews that for many decades had done the work 

94 Ibid., 47.

95 Ibid., 17–18. Garrity-Blake, The Fish Factory, follows 

(18–21) with a detailed discussion of work processes 

that is not relevant to our discussion here.

96 Ibid., 15–16, 27–37. Quotation from local informant, 

37.

by brute strength, coordinated by group songs that 

synchronized force and bolstered will.

The menhaden chanteys Jon Pareles heard in a 

New York concert hall were hauntingly beautiful, 

and they conveyed undeniable truths about the 

working lives of black men in the industry. Early 

New England white menhaden fishermen had not 

sung as they worked; southern blacks added that 

culturally characteristic element when the industry 

relocated.97 But the concert stage version of 

chanteys was inevitably romanticized; the chanteys 

sung on boats to help haul in the nets referenced 

far harsher realities.

Garrity-Blake’s close examination of the 

menhaden chanteys leads to subtle insights into 

racial, status, and work relations in the industry. 

Whereas many captains had a social, cultural—

indeed at times nearly mystical—understanding 

of their work (calling, one might almost say), 

blacks did it for money to care for their families, 

money that was virtually unavailable elsewhere. 

And in contrast to the individualistic posture of 

the white captains, for black crewmen the work 

was a collective effort, pursued in solidarity despite 

the danger of circling sharks, the straw mattresses 

on the bunks, the grueling labor, the treacherous 

weather, the ever-present worry about losing their 

women and authority at home while they were 

away.98

Such conditions, challenges, and fears drove 

the songs. “I left my baby / standing in the back 

door crying,” one said, evoking the rupture in 

the rhythms of home life. Crewmen’s sense of 

helplessness about threats to home life and to 

marriages found an image in a house fire:

Oh, the house is on

fire, fire, fire.

Oh, the house is on fire,

and it all go burning down.

“I got a letter this morning / Hey, hey, honey! . . . 

See you when the sun go down. / I couldn’t read it 

for crying,” said another.99

97 Ibid., 19.

98 Ibid., 87-98.

99 Ibid., 101-102; Library of Congress recording AFS 

14,754.
128 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race And Class in a Maritime World

Singing the chanteys gave pleasure to the singers, 

but it was also necessary to the task. Fishermen, 

Garrity-Blake says,

described working shoulder to shoulder as 

one, singing to make “heaven and earth come 

together,” while focused trancelike on the 

“money” in the net. While singing, crewmen 

lost all track of time, surroundings, and aching 

muscles. “Everybody would pull the same 

time,” someone explained. “You didn’t know 

how much you was pulling. You’d be getting 

about happy there singing them songs, all them 

[fish] in that net . . . everybody feeling good 

and everything.”100

The power winch changed everything: half the 

crews lost their jobs, and the winch did the work 

that had called forth the songs. But older crewmen 

remembered when the songs, which could be 

heard for long distances over the water, would 

mesmerize day sailors and yachtsmen: “[We] start 

singing, heaven and earth would come together. 

People on the shore would turn and listen at ‘em. 

All along the shoreline, just standing there. Then 

people in them yachts bring us whisky and money. 

Whiskey and money!” The order of things was 

turned momentarily upside down, Garrity-Blake 

observes, “the rich . . . held captive by the poor.”101

Retrospective 

The evidence that coastal North Carolina has 

reliably ratified, normalized, and participated fully 

in state and nationwide structures and cultures 

of racism, reinforced by class difference from its 

earliest years until the present is incontrovertible, 

as we hope the foregoing has made clear. And yet 

there has also always been some scattered and 

sporadic evidence that not everyone in all times 

and places stayed within established racial lines. 

In a many-times-reproduced photograph from 

1880, black and white mullet fishermen stand 

before a round, traditional (perhaps Africanderived) fishermen’s shack on Shackleford 

Banks.102 To coastal historian David Cecelski, that 

image revealed “unclear lines of authority” an 

100 Ibid., 105.

101 Ibid., 111.

102 See for example Cecelski, “The Hidden World of 

Mullet Camps,” and Jones, Fishing Cottage #2, Fig. 2.

uncharacteristic “familiarity. Immediately, however, 

Cecelski cautions against exaggerating the extent 

of racial boundary blurring. “For years,” he recalls, 

a “No Niggers After Dark” sign stood at the town 

limits of Atlantic, a few miles from the remarkable 

black community of Davis Ridge, an island of racial 

harmony and cooperation where blacks and whites 

visited, ate, worshipped, sang and played music, 

and fished together. Even more widely, on the 

stretch of the Banks between Ocracoke Island and 

Bogue Banks, black and white mullet fishermen 

worked, lived, and ate together, and when the catch 

was in, shared the profits equally.103

Such blurring of racial lines was in evidence 

from the time of the earliest settlers. Kristi RutzRobbins’s recent meticulously documented study 

of race, class, and gender in the Albemarle area 

economy from 1663 to 1729 shows that black, 

white, and Native American men and women 

had numerous economic relationships and that 

merchants depended upon them.104

Those economic relationships existed side by side 

with interracial personal, familial, and marital 

relationships that were frequently illegal but 

were nevertheless tolerated in the community. 

Rutz-Robbins cites a 1727 case, for example, 

of a mixed-race couple who had cohabited for 

years and another case of a mixed couple who 

married without legal challenge. The record is 

replete with numerous other boundary-blurring 

cases: trading across racial lines (including with 

103 Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, 211. Cecelski’s 

discussion of Davis Ridge is at 203–212. For a broad 

discussion of “sundown towns,” see James Loewen, 

Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American 

Racism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).

104 Rutz-Robbins, “Colonial Commerce.” 

Figure 5-18. Black and white mullet fishermen.
National Park Service 129

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race And Class in a Maritime World

slaves), black-white cohabitations, and marriages 

that were illegal but tacitly accepted. “Such 

marriages and cohabitations,” she says, “blurred 

the boundaries between white and black, created 

free black communities and pointed to ways in 

which interracial contact pushed in oppositional 

ways from the racially restrictive society evolving 

at the time.” The area was, she concludes, “a world 

still flexible in its developing racial hierarchy,” in 

which “economic realities . . . conflicted with legal 

frameworks.”105

Such functional looseness as Rutz-Robbins 

discovered in the record waned as the decades 

passed and anxieties about the black presence 

grew. The relative freedom that slave watermen 

had was undeniable, but carefully circumscribed: 

when all was said and done, they were black slaves 

nevertheless. 

And the ambiguity persisted. Nearly fifteen years 

after the Civil War ended, the first all-black 

Life-Saving Service crew was established at Pea 

Island in Dare County, but the appointment 

did not betoken complete racial harmony. The 

new crew was appointed because half of the 

previous (combined black and white) crew had 

been dismissed for dereliction of duty during the 

M&S Henderson shipwreck of November 1979. 

Black surfman Richard Etheridge’s reputation 

for superb competence led to his appointment as 

the new keeper, but official uneasiness resulted in 

transferring and hiring an all-black crew so that 

Etheridge would not be in the socially untenable 

105 Rutz-Robbins, “Colonial Commerce,” vi–vii, 201–240. 

Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, 12–13, 50, 140, 

comments on the “ambiguity of race relations” in 

later years.

position of commanding whites. Though the 

station was burned down (perhaps by whites) soon 

after the installation of the new crew, the crew 

remained all black until the station was closed in 

1947.106

Epilogue: The Pigott Family and 

Race Relations in Portsmouth 

 In the decades since Portsmouth lost virtually all 

its population, a charming story has taken shape 

with regard to race relations in the town. The story 

centers around the family of Henry Pigott, its last 

(and unfailingly helpful and loyal) black resident. 

106 Dennis L. Noble, That Others Might Live: The U.S. 

Life-Saving Service, 1878–1915 (Annapolis, Md.: 

Naval Institute Press, 1994), 51–54; Joe A. Mobley, 

Ship Ashore!: The U.S. Lifesavers of Coastal North 

Carolina (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives 

and History, 1994), 94-–99. For an excellent extended 

discussion of the Pea Island situation, see David 

Wright and David Zoby, “Ignoring Jim Crow: The 

Turbulent Appointment of Richard Etheridge and the 

Pea Island Lifesavers,” The Journal of Negro History

80, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 66–80.

Figure 5-19. All-Black Pea Island Life-Saving Crew. Mobley, 

Ship Ashore!, 96. Original in North Carolina State Archives.

Figure 5-20. Henry Pigott at about the age of fourteen (ca. 

1910). Cape Lookout National Seashore archive photo.
130 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race And Class in a Maritime World

The fact that Pigott (1896–1971), a descendent 

of slaves, was black and poor but nevertheless “a 

friend to all,” as a plaque in the local Methodist 

church says, does not mean that race and class 

did not exist as markers, but that on Portsmouth 

Island (as everywhere else) they were configured in 

complex ways.

Looking closely at persistent elements of the story, 

one can easily discern several repeated motifs: 

Race relations in the town and on the island 

were harmonious and unproblematic. “Family” 

was the preferred metaphor for describing those 

relations. Racial boundaries were marked more 

strongly in some regards than in others. And blacks 

(reductively embodied at last in the figure of Henry 

Pigott) were content with the old paternalistic 

system. “There were never any segregation rules,” 

writes Ellen Fulcher Cloud in Portsmouth: The 

Way It Was, “except what the blacks imposed upon 

themselves.”107

Sometime after Pigott’s death in 1971, the Park 

Service produced a brochure about him.108 It 

outlined what was to become the standard story: 

Pigott was descended from slaves. His ancestors 

stayed in Portsmouth after most former slaves 

left. His grandmother Rosa Abbot was a jack-ofall-trades (midwife, doctor and nurse, gristmill 

worker) who also fished for her living. Her 

daughter Leah had seven children, of whom Henry 

was one.109 Henry and his sister Lizzie stayed on 

Portsmouth, but the other siblings left. Lizzie 

became the town barber, and both she and Henry 

continued to fish and oyster for a living. Henry 

poled the mail boat to Ocracoke and hauled back 

passengers, provisions, and mail for his neighbors. 

His house (now preserved for tourists to see) was 

painted pink for years because he thought it was 

too much trouble to return the paint for the yellow 

he had ordered. When he died, Portsmouth Village 

lost its last male resident.

107 Ellen F. Cloud, Portsmouth: The Way It Was: Island 

History, vol. 3 (Westminster, MD: Heritage Books, 

2006), 97.

108 “Henry Pigott,” visitor brochure, Cape Lookout 

National Seashore (http://www.nps.gov/calo/

planyourvisit/upload/Henry2000.pdf). The website 

for the Friends of Portsmouth Island mentions Pigott, 

but contains no other mention of blacks, slavery, or 

race. See http://www.friendsofportsmouthisland.org/

history.htm.

109 Cloud, Portsmouth, 98, refers to Rosa as “Aunt Rose” 

Ireland-Pigott. “It is said,” Cloud reports, “that Rose 

took a husband named Isaac.”

Former residents who knew Henry, Lizzie, and 

other family members recalled them fondly and 

spoke of loving them, of their being “nice folks.”110

Henry’s death in 1971 was the final straw for the 

island’s last two remaining residents, Marian Gray 

Babb and Elma Dixon, who decided that, without 

Henry there to help them, they could not stay. So 

they packed up and left, and Portsmouth Village 

became a ghost town.111

Thus with regard to race, the standard story of the 

Pigotts was simple: some slaves came; most left 

at Emancipation, but one family stayed. Several 

generations of them had numerous children, most 

of whom left the island. But two of Leah’s children, 

Henry and Lizzie, stayed and became beloved and 

useful participants in the life of Portsmouth, where 

folks paid no attention to race. It was the best of 

separate but equal paternalism. One does not have 

to push very far, however, to discover that the real 

story was much more complicated and ambiguous 

than the popular one, and that available facts do 

not allow one to resolve the ambiguities.

To probe below the surface of the story, one 

should first recall two facts about miscegenation 

in North Carolina from its earliest days onward: 

(1) it was illegal, and (2) it was ubiquitous. Of its 

illegality there can be no doubt. In 1896, pioneering 

scholar of Afro-American life in North Carolina 

John Spencer Bassett observed that concern over 

the threat (and fact) of miscegenation and crossracial marriage in North Carolina was already 

widespread enough by 1715 to lead to the passage 

of a law that prescribed harsh penalties against 

white servants who had children by blacks or 

mulattoes and against ministers who married 

interracial couples. A stronger marriage law of 1741 

inveighed against “the abominable mixture and 

spurious issue” of such unions.112

It is not surprising, then, that the complexities of 

the situation were not always meticulously noted in 

official records. In their account of the Pigott family 

110 See for example Dot Salter Willis and Ben B. Salter, 

Portsmouth Island: Short Stories, History (Montville 

Publications, 2004), 38–41. A photo of Pigott 

delivering the mail is in Cloud, Portsmouth, 95.

111 Molly Perkins Harrison, It Happened on the Outer 

Banks (Guilford, CT: Twodot, 2005), 92–93.

112 John Spencer Bassett, Slavery and Servitude in the 

Colony of North Carolina (Baltimore, MD: The Johns 

Hopkins Press, 1896), 58; electronic edition at http://

docsouth.unc.edu/nc/bassett96/bassett96.html.
National Park Service 131

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race And Class in a Maritime World

(the most extensive in print), Salter and Willis 

recount that Aunt Rosa Abbott (whom, along with 

her four siblings, everyone “loved very much”) 

had a daughter Leah, who “had the last name of 

Pigott.” Leah had seven children. One son was 

Henry, and one daughter was Elizabeth (Lizzie). 

Salter and Willis say they don’t remember Henry 

and Leah’s father:

They never talked about him, nor did they mention 

who he was or where he was. We never asked. . 

. . [Henry] was not dark in color, he was like an 

Indian in appearance. . . . We never heard about 

a color barrier in those days. There was no need; 

we were all in the work together. . . . The Pigotts 

attended the Methodist Church that we did. They 

visited with us and lived among us. . . . [A] finer 

man I never knew. . . . Neither Henry nor Lizzie 

ever married.113

The thinly veiled hints of illegitimacy and perhaps 

miscegenation are enough to pique one’s curiosity. 

Unfortunately, the documentary base for sorting 

out the nuances is rather thin. One has to make do 

with what is available.114

113 Willis and Salter, Portsmouth Island, 38–39. 

114 In his historic structure report on the Washington 

Roberts house, Tommy Jones noted Roberts’s long 

and close friendship with Joe Abbot (b. 1869), 

who along with his mother and siblings was listed 

in the 1900 and 1910 censuses as mulatto (Jones, 

Washington Roberts House, 11).

Ellen Fulcher Cloud’s fragmentary account of what 

it seems appropriate to call the Abbot-Pigott family 

is replete with suggestions of irregularities in their 

family history. Rose seems to have been a servant 

or slave in the home of well-to-do Earls Ireland, 

and to have stayed on with the Irelands after the 

Civil War ended. By 1880 she had moved out, but 

two of her children (Leah and Dorcus) remained 

with Ireland and were listed in the census of that 

year as his grandchildren. But by the 1900 census, 

the Irelands had moved next door, and Leah had 

moved back in with Rose; Leah is listed as Rose’s 

granddaughter. But if Leah was Rose’s daughter 

and Ireland’s granddaughter, Cloud observes, 

then Rose “had to be the daughter of either Earls 

Ireland or his wife Matilda Ireland.” 

Here the story gets even more complicated. 

Sometime between 1880 and 1900, Cloud 

continues, Rose changed her name from Ireland to 

Pigott, but there was no record of her marrying. By 

1900, Leah had five children, including Henry and 

Lizzie Pigott, whose death certificates list Leah as 

their mother without specifying a father.115

Clearly, these slender threads of evidence in the 

Portsmouth family stories are too fragile to support 

weighty conclusions about the genealogy of the 

Ireland-Abbot-Pigott family system. But some 

evidence available in census records provides 

more than adequate caution against accepting 

the popular but unproblematized accounts of 

post-racial harmony on the island. The census 

records are clear on the matter of the presence 

of blacks (slave and free) on Portsmouth Island. 

Beyond that, it is intriguing to tease out additional 

conclusions about miscegenation and the presence 

of mulattoes. 

In their tabulation of the 1850 census for Carteret 

County, Simpson and Taylor included townshiplevel data on mulattoes.116 Portsmouth had none 

in its list, but Straits had one, and Beaufort had 

115 Cloud, Portsmouth, 98–101. Jones treats these naming 

anomalies conservatively, as possibly at least partially 

the result of confusion in the census enumeration rather 

than as clear evidence of actual lineage (Washington 

Roberts House, 12). In particular, Jones notes, Joe Abbot 

had the surname Ireland in the censuses of 1870 and 

1880, but Pigott in 1900, and then Abbot again in 1910 

(Washington Roberts House, 11–13).

116 Thelma P. Simpson and David R. Taylor, 1850 Federal 

Census of Carteret County, North Carolina (Baltimore, 

MD: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1972).

Figure 5-21. Henry Pigott and Walker Styron, 1955. Cape 

Lookout National Seashore archive photo. 
132 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

At the Sea’s Edge: Slavery, Race And Class in a Maritime World

dozens in the Davis, Dismal, Ellison, Fisher, Green, 

Whittington, Wade, and Windsor families (and 

others). The existence of an impermeable barrier 

against miscegenation in Portsmouth would be 

especially noteworthy, then, since in 1810 the town 

had had half as many slaves as free whites, and 

a quarter as many (463 whites and 117 slaves) in 

1850.117

A comparison cannot be made for 1860, because 

slave census schedules were not separated by 

township, but by 1870, the census enumerator was 

provided with a column for “Color” (White, Black, 

Mulatto, Chinese, and Indian). Nearly all entries 

were coded as white, but six blacks were present 

in the township. Five of them were enumerated 

with the Earls Ireland family: Rose (35, domestic 

servant), Harriet (18, domestic servant), Sarah [?] 

(10), Dorcas (1), Leah, and Elijah [?] (5-year-old 

male). No last names were given for the Ireland 

family blacks, but the horizontal line in the 

surname in the Name column implies that they 

shared the Ireland surname. This gives credence to 

Ellen Fulcher Cloud’s conclusion that the children 

listed were parented by either Earls Ireland or his 

wife Matilda. If that was the case, listing them as 

Black rather than Mulatto reveals some denial on 

the part of either the Irelands or the enumerator, or 

both.118

The 1900 census conveys a more complex picture 

yet of the remaining blacks. Rose’s last name is 

given as Pickett, there are eight offspring (direct 

or step), and there is no adult male who is not 

either a son or stepson. Rose is now 53 years old, 

and the offspring range from a 2-year-old stepson 

to a 30-year-old son. To be enumerated as her 

stepchildren, those five offspring would have to 

have been the children of a man to whom Rose was 

(or had been) married. Additionally, the children’s 

names given in the 1900 census do not match fully 

with those listed in 1870.119

117 John E. Ehrenhard, Cape Lookout National Seashore, 

59–60; Jones, Washington Roberts House, 5–6.

118 Population Schedules of the Census of the United 

States (Washington, DC: National Archives, 

National Archives and Records Service, General 

Services Administraton, 1960–). The single black 

not enumerated with the Ireland family, Parker (a 

20-year-old fisherman), lived with 37-year-old Mary 

Willis and two minor children.

119 Twelfth Census of Population, 1900, Portsmouth 

township. There are twelve children’s names listed in 

the two censuses.

Detailed as they are, census records do not allow 

us to resolve the ambiguities of the racial situation 

in Portmouth. But they do caution one not to 

conclude too easily that the town’s social mores 

did not lie magically outside the social and cultural 

complexities in evidence virtually everywhere else. 

Leah Pigott’s gravestone in a small cemetery and 

her brother Henry’s house remain to tantalize us 

about the complexities of life in Portsmouth. 

Figure 5-22. Gravestone of Leah Pigott (1867–1922) in a 

Portsmouth cemetery. Cape Lookout National Seashore 

archive photo.

Figure 5-23. Henry Pigott House, Portsmouth, restored and 

repainted to the yellow he preferred. Photo by David E. 

Whisnant, 2008.
133

The Government Presence: 

Revenue Cutters, Lighthouses, Life-Savers, Coast 

Guardsmen, New Dealers, and Others

Since the eighteenth century, the barrier-island and 

border-region characteristics of the Outer Banks 

have made the area a prime site of many varieties of 

government presence and activity. State and federal 

actions, laws, and regulations have partitioned the 

land; specified its uses; established institutions; 

and prompted the erection of buildings, the 

construction of fences and docks, the dredging of 

channels, the building of harbors, the employment 

(and discharge) of personnel, and the purchase of 

goods and services. In the process, government 

decisions, actions, and agencies have functioned 

as major shapers of the economic, political, and 

cultural life of the Outer Banks. 

In some respects, these dynamics have not been 

different in kind from those that have occurred in 

many other places and times. Virtually every city 

and town has its local, state, or federal agencies, 

offices, buildings, and officials—courts, public 

records offices, law enforcement agencies, public 

utilities, and the like. Especially in hard times, the 

agencies provide critically important employment. 

With regard to the southern Banks, however, 

we suggest that the persistent and highly visible 

presence of government agencies has imparted 

to their buildings, activities, and landscapes a 

particular spatially, socially, economically, and 

culturally organizing character. To explore this 

thesis fully would require a comprehensive history 

of the southern Banks from the mid-eighteenth 

century onward, a task beyond the scope of this 

study. Short of that, however, one can usefully 

highlight some of the more salient aspects of the 

particular dynamics that developed and persisted 

on the southern Banks around government 

presence. 

Those dynamics appear to arise from some array of 

five characteristic factors: relatively low population 

density; limited local employment opportunities; 

long-term presence of agencies offering stable, 

relatively high-status jobs; large iconic buildings; 

and defined institutional landscapes. The longterm importance of any particular agency or 

installation has depended upon how fully or 

durably it satisfied these criteria. Some satisfied 

more than others, or satisfied them longer, or both. 

Some seemed that they might, but didn’t. In any 

case, a long series of entities, events, and processes 

have contributed in varying degrees to this process: 

the Custom House and the Marine Hospital at 

Portsmouth (1828), lighthouses and their keepers, 

the Life-Saving Service (1871), the Coast Guard 

(1915), several wars, the Great Depression and 

the New Deal, and the coming of two national 

seashores administered by the NPS.1

The effects of these entities and events have been 

varied, broad, and (sometimes) deep. Within 

the built environment, they have inscribed their 

presence upon the land—some permanently 

(like the lighthouses), some vestigially (like an 

abandoned cistern left from a long-vanished 

building), and some in traces now buried beneath 

the sands or washed out to sea (like Colonialera forts or World War II gun emplacements). 

Technologies, for water vessel forms and designs, 

lighthouse lanterns, communications systems, 

gasoline engines, lifesaving devices, have been 

introduced and replaced or withdrawn. Jobs have 

come and gone, increasing and decreasing the 

contribution of public funds to local economies. 

Social and professional networks have formed 

and dissolved, and communities have arisen and 

collapsed. In this chapter we explore, suggestively 

rather than exhaustively, some of these entities and 

1 Successive wartime events and interventions are 

treated in the next chapter, and the coming of the 

two national seashores is treated in a subsequent 

chapter on tourism.
134 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Government Presence

dynamics as they impinge upon the identification, 

maintenance, and interpretation of historic 

resources at CALO.

Portsmouth Custom House, 

Marine Hospital, and Weather 

Station 

The town of Portsmouth, on the south side of 

Ocracoke Inlet, was established in 1753; sale of 

lots in the town began three years later. Since it 

was to be more than ninety years before Hatteras 

Inlet opened, Ocracoke Inlet at that time provided 

primary access to Pamlico Sound, and over the 

next several decades Portsmouth developed into 

an important port town.2

Custom House 

In her 1982 historic resource study of Portsmouth, 

Olson pointed out that “the need for a revenue 

officer at Ocracoke Inlet” was recognized nearly 

twenty-five years before Portsmouth itself was 

established, but no official action was taken until 

1764, almost a decade after the town got its first 

residents. Further legislation, passed in 1770, 

established the inspection point for Ocracoke 

Inlet at Portsmouth. The Ocracoke customs house 

was established in 1806, when Shell Castle was 

flourishing and Ocracoke became an official port of 

entry.

A federal revenue cutter was assigned to the port 

in 1813. At times, the volume of traffic necessitated 

two cutters. Portsmouth resident John Mayo 

(formerly John Wallace’s right hand man at Shell 

Castle) captained one of them for twenty years, 

and five members of the Wallace family took their 

turns as well. Additionally, revenue cutter captains 

usually served as collectors or deputy collectors at 

the custom house. By 1836, more than 1,100 vessels 

were passing through the inlet annually, requiring 

the services of more than ninety local vessels for 

2 Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John 

Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 1–2. The town of Portsmouth, 

together with adjacent Ocracoke and Shell Island, 

receives detailed attention in Chapter 2.

lightering; six years later, the number of vessels had 

grown to 1400.3

Thus it appears that the main economic impact 

of the customs installation derived from what 

we would now call economic multiplier effects: 

direct employment of local residents as customs 

officers, purchase of goods, contracting of pilots 

and lightering boats and crews, and development 

of port-associated businesses and services. And in 

a relatively small town (165 white persons and 98 

slaves in 1800; 25 heads of families) in which 80 

percent of the working population was involved 

in commercial activities related to the sea, such 

activities bulked large. Olson notes that over a 

sixty-year period, five men worked as collectors 

of customs; two men were working on customs 

vessels in 1850, and three in 1860.4

Marine Hospital 

The only other significant institution established 

in Portsmouth before the closing years of the 

nineteenth century was the Marine Hospital, 

opened in 1828. It was one of a series of such 

hospitals authorized as early as 1798 to provide 

care for sick and injured merchant seamen.5 Dr. 

John W. Potts, the first physician employed to 

operate the hospital, rented a small (less than 

400 square foot) windowless and unplastered 

house of perhaps five rooms. Potts left before his 

two-year contract was up and was replaced by 

New Hampshire-born Dr. Samuel Dudley, who 

remained in Portsmouth for more than thirty years 

and became a wealthy man. The initial hospital 

staff included Dr. Dudley, his nurse, and three 

slaves. Although Dudley’s medical qualifications 

were suspect and his dilatory and erratic behavior 

prompted numerous public complaints, he 

continued to serve (off and on) as late as 1844. 

3 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 

67–69. Olson also points out thatcaptains of the 

revenue cutters usually worked as inspectors or 

deputy collectors at the customs house.

4 Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John 

Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 21–23. The port was closed for 

four years during the Civil War, and in 1867 it was 

downgraded to a “port of delivery”; New Bern 

became the port of entry. Olson, Portsmouth Village 

Historic Resource Study, 69. Much of the economic 

and commercial activity associated with the port 

took place on nearby Shell Castle Island, discussed 

elsewhere in this study.

5 Ibid., 69–76. Olds, “Cape Lookout Lonesome Place.”
National Park Service 135

The Government Presence

The need for additional hospital space led to 

the temporary use of a former U.S. government 

boathouse, but repeated entreaties from local 

customs officials spoke of the urgent need for 

better facilities. In June 1842, the Commerce 

Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives 

reported that ships’ captains, fearful of having their 

vessels quarantined at other ports, were dumping 

seamen suffering from contagious diseases at 

Ocracoke Inlet, where they were crowded into 

small makeshift quarters without proper care.6

In 1842, federal funds were appropriated for a new 

hospital building. Land was bought three years 

later, and the 50-by-90-foot, two-story, twelveroom, cypress-shingled building (approximately 

ten times as large as the original hospital) opened 

in 1847. Constructed of pitch pine and featuring 

specially designed glass windows, seven fireplaces, 

and piazzas on two sides, the new hospital was 

the best-built and most-imposing building that 

had ever been built in Portsmouth. Its twelve 

rooms—plastered, whitewashed, and fitted with 

green Venetian blinds—were divided into four 

wards, surgeon’s quarters, servants’ rooms, and 

cooking facilities. Furnishings and medical supplies 

were procured from New York merchants. The 

hospital also boasted what were perhaps the first 

cisterns ever to be built in Portsmouth (wooden 

ones located at each end of the building); a large 

brick cistern, added in 1853 to replace the by-then 

deteriorated wooden ones, brought water directly 

into the kitchen.7

By 1857, the hospital had twelve employees. The 

number of patients fluctuated from none to as 

many as 288 (both local people and seamen) before 

the Civil War. During the war, it served as a military 

6 Commerce Committee, U.S. House of Representatives, 

Report No. 889, to accompany H.R. 512, 37th Cong., 2d 

Session, 24 June 1842, 1–3.

7 Evidence is not consistent on the development of 

cisterns on the island. Lack of freshwater streams 

or springs and the impracticability of wells made 

cisterns the obvious choice for fresh water, but how 

early their use became widespread is not clear. Olson, 

Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study,71–75, 

which includes an extensive discussion of the hospital, 

says that “like other Portsmouth houses,” the original 

house Dr. Potts used for the hospital “had no cistern.” 

hospital under the control of the Federal Medical 

Service.8

Portsmouth Weather Station 

After the Civil War, the U.S. Army Signal Corps 

began to establish weather stations along the 

Atlantic coast. In 1876, one was installed in two 

rooms of the Marine Hospital at Portsmouth, but 

it was short-lived. It closed in 1883, reopened 

for a few months in early 1885, and then closed 

permanently as increasing vessel size rendered 

Ocracoke Inlet less and less navigable.9 For most 

of the time, the station was manned by only 

one person, who at times had a single assistant. 

Interactions with townspeople appear to have been 

strained and infrequent. An 1880 inspection report 

noted that the keeper of the station spent most of 

his time in study and considered local residents “an 

ignorant class of people . . . [who] take no interest 

in the service, further than to make what they can 

from it.”10

8 Mallison, The Civil War on the Outer Banks, 111, 

116. Olson’s meticulously documented Portsmouth 

Village Historic Resource Study, 71–76, offers the 

most detailed account of the hospital, including its 

succession of buildings.

9 Exactly when the Marine Hospital building closed 

is not clear. Portsmouth Island’s History and 

Development (no author given), 5–7, says that it 

closed in 1860, that part of it was used for the 

weather station, 1876–1885, and that it was still 

standing in 1893, but burned down one year later.

10 Report quoted in Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic 

Resource Study, 87–88, from which this précis is 

taken.

Figure 6-1. Brick cistern, Marine Hospital, Portsmouth, 

2008. Photo by David E. Whisnant.
136 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Government Presence

Cape Lookout Light Station and 

the Lighthouse Service

 By all accounts, the central iconic image of the 

Cape Lookout National Seashore landscape is 

the lighthouse. Its 163-foot tower, painted with 

black and white diamonds, dates from 1859, 

when it replaced a much shorter (96-foot) tower 

authorized in 1804 and completed in 1812.11

The known history of lighthouses reaches back 

to the Pharos light, completed at the entrance 

to the Greek harbor of Alexandria in 280 B.C. 

The Romans built several lighthouses, but little 

is known about others until the twelfth century, 

when the Italians emerged as major builders. They 

built one at Pisa in 1157, another near Leghorn a 

half dozen years later, and one at Venice early in 

the fourteenth century. France and England lagged 

the Italians by two centuries. A French lighthouse 

completed on an island at the mouth of the Bay 

of Biscay in 1611 disappeared when the island 

washed away, but the two countries built more 

such structures throughout the seventeenth and 

eighteenth centuries. 

In the New England colonies, some of the first 

illuminated navigation aids consisted of nothing 

more than lighted baskets hung at prominent 

high points, but by the Revolution, at least eleven 

lighthouses had been built. No one knows for sure 

when or where the first one was built, but the Little 

Brewster Island light in Boston Harbor (ca. 1716) 

seems a good guess.12

After the Revolution, Congress placed the 

financing and management of all navigational aids 

under the purview of the Treasury Department, 

where they were overseen directly by the President. 

Washington, Adams, and Jefferson all took their 

turn at managing the young nation’s collection of 

11 This précis of the long and complicated history of 

lighthouses is based, unless otherwise indicated, 

on Dennis Noble, Lighthouses & Keepers: The U.S. 

Lighthouse Service and Its Legacy (Annapolis, MD: 

Naval Institute Press, 1997), 1–20. A much more 

detailed discussion of the history of the sequence of 

Cape Lookout lighthouses than can be presented here 

is available in Oppermann, Cape Lookout Lighthouse 

Historic Structure Report.

12 Tommy Jones, Lighthouse Keeper’s Dwelling, Cape 

Lookout: Historic Structure Report (Atlanta, GA: 

Southeast Regional Office, National Park Service, 

2004). 

lighthouses and other navigational aids, but as the 

number of lighthouses grew, such an arrangement 

became unmanageable. In 1792, an Office of 

the Commissioner of Revenue was created in 

the Treasury Department, and for a decade 

responsibility for aids to navigation was located 

there. In 1795, Congress ordered a survey of the 

coast from Georgia to the Chesapeake Bay and by 

1797 had authorized lighthouses at Cape Henry, 

Cape Hatteras, Shell Castle, and Cape Fear. In 

1804, it authorized one to be erected “at or near the 

[tip] of Cape Lookout.”13

An early challenge was to update the type of lights 

used. The earliest used in the United States were 

either fixed, white lights or those made to rotate by 

clockwork mechanisms. Illumination came from 

candles or coal fires (each with many drawbacks) 

or later from “spider lamps” consisting of four 

wicks in a pan of oil. Reflectors morphed slowly 

toward a parabolic shape capable of reflecting 

parallel beams outward. The three-wick Argand 

design of 1780, the first modern burner, could 

produce 200 candlepower.14

By 1810, Winslow Lewis of Cape Cod had 

developed a much improved “reflecting and 

magnifying lantern” by combining an Argand 

burner with a parabolic reflector and a lens. By 

1815 it had been installed in all forty-nine U.S. 

lighthouses. The following year, Lewis contracted 

to supply oil for all the lighthouses, to maintain 

them, and to report on their condition, making 

him in the estimation of some the de facto 

superintendent of lighthouses.15

The Secretary of the Treasury assumed direct 

responsibility for lighthouses from 1803 to 1820, 

when it passed to the fifth auditor of the Treasury, 

Stephen Pleasonton. Pleasonton was by all 

13 Holland, Survey History, 24–25. For a detailed account 

of the Shell Castle lighthouse, see Chapter 2 above, 

on the Atlantic world.

14 On the Argand lamp, invented by Swiss physicist 

and chemist Aimé Argand in 1780, see Terry Pepper, 

“Seeing the Light: Argand and Lewis Lamps” 

(2007), http://www.terrypepper.com/lights/closeups/

illumination/argand/lewis-lamp.htm.

15 The search for the best illuminant for lights continued 

for years. Lard oil was favored in the mid-1860s 

before a shift to vaporized kerosene, which doubled 

or tripled output. Soon after electric arc lights 

became available in the mid-1880s, conversion of 

lighthouses to electricity began. Most were converted 

by 1930. Noble, Lighthouses & Keepers , 32–35.
National Park Service 137

The Government Presence

accounts a dedicated and conscientious public 

servant, but he was also penurious, overtaxed 

with manifold other duties, and rather lacking in 

imagination. By the time Pleasonton took over the 

official duties in 1820 (which he was to retain for 

thirty-two years), there were fifty-five lighthouses. 

Within twelve years the number had grown to 256, 

plus thirty lightships and nearly a thousand buoys. 

To help him manage the load, Pleasonton 

appointed collectors of customs in districts where 

there were lighthouses as superintendents of lights, 

but the superintendents had little authority since 

he kept such a tight rein on them, for example, 

by allowing them to spend almost no money 

without his approval. The problems deriving from 

Pleasanton’s management style and the prior lack 

of adequate organization were exacerbated by a 

number of factors: Many lighthouse keepers were 

political appointees who had neither the required 

skills nor the interest in doing the job, and much 

of the work was contracted out (the “era of the 

low bidder” those years have been called). And, 

Pleasonton continued to nurture a relationship 

with Winslow Lewis, who soon cornered the 

market on refitting old lighthouses and building 

new ones. His interest in selling the maximum 

amount of oil to the government delayed by years 

the introduction of the much-superior Fresnel lens 

into the nation’s lighthouses.16

Not surprisingly, Congress began to be dissatisfied 

with the condition of the lighthouses. An 1838 law 

divided the Atlantic Coast into six districts, each 

supplied with a naval officer who was to analyze 

and report on the condition of the lighthouses. 

The reports were not encouraging: 40 percent of 

the lighthouses were in poor condition, many of 

the lights were of poor quality, some units were 

redundant, and many keepers were negligent. 

Unfortunately, Congress took no action until 

1845, when it dispatched two naval officers to 

Europe to inspect systems there. But again no 

action proceeded from their report. By 1851, both 

Congress and the public were demanding a better 

system. A high-ranking group of investigators 

produced yet another report, whose 760 pages 

found that essentially nothing was right with 

the system and recommended that it be totally 

revamped and that an autonomous board be 

created to govern and manage lighthouse services. 

16 Lewis died in 1850.

This time Congress finally acted decisively. On 

October 9, 1852, it created the U.S. Lighthouse 

Board, ending Pleasonton’s thirty-two-year rule 

and paving the way for the creation of a modern, 

adequate, well-maintained system. The board 

had its work cut out for it; by then, there were 331 

lighthouses and 42 lightships. The Lighthouse 

Board brought stability, improved equipment, 

published thorough instructions for keepers, 

and raised their level of competence. It divided 

the country into twelve districts, each with an 

inspector, and established central supply depots. 

Some ground was lost during the Civil War, but 

for nearly sixty years the Board steadily improved 

lighthouse service. By 1910, however, the number 

of lighthouses had grown to nearly 1400, and the 

system had become cumbersome, so the Board 

was abolished as a result of the Taft Commission’s 

recommendations on government operations. In 

1915, the Life-Saving Service and the Revenue 

Cutter Service were combined into the U.S. Coast 

Guard.17 Separate organizational identities 

persisted for another twenty-five years, however, 

until President Roosevelt’s Reorganization Plan 

II specified that “the duties, responsibilities, and 

functions of the Commissioner of Lighthouses 

shall be vested in the Commandant of the Coast 

Guard.” The change became official on July 1, 1939, 

marking the official end of the Lighthouse Service. 

North Carolina’s first lighthouse was built at Bald 

Head on Smith’s Island at the mouth of the Cape 

17 See S.2337, A bill to create the Coast Guard by 

combining therein the existing Life-Saving Service 

and Revenue Cutter Service, May 26, 1913 (http://

www.uscg.mil/history/regulations/USCGBill.asp).

Figure 6-2. Shell Castle Lighthouse. Wiss, Janney, 

Elstner Associates, Inc., and John Milner Associates, Inc., 

Portsmouth Village Cultural Landscape Report, 21. 
138 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Government Presence

Fear in 1796; it was replaced in 1818 by a structure 

that still stands as the state’s oldest.18 The next 

two, on Cape Hatteras and Shell Castle Island (a 

55-foot wooden structure) were built in 1803, 

but neither survives.19 Oddly, no Cape Lookout 

lighthouse was authorized when the Cape Fear and 

Cape Hatteras structures were authorized prior 

to 1797.20 Land for a lighthouse on Cape Lookout 

was purchased in 1805, and a 93-foot one was in 

operation by 1812. It had two towers, a brick one 

inside and a wooden one outside, painted with 

horizontal red and white stripes.21

Early lighting installed in the Cape Lookout 

lighthouse proved ineffective, so new lighting 

was installed in 1848. This also proved ineffective 

because the cost-conscious Treasury Department 

bought cheaper Argand lamps rather than the more 

expensive, but superior, Fresnel system, which 

had been the standard in Europe for upwards of 

twenty-five years. The new U.S. Lighthouse Board 

adopted the Fresnel system after 1852.22

18 Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 675. 

Historians differ about the date on which this 

lighthouse was lighted; some say 1795, others 

date it a year later. The website “Bald Head Island 

Lighthouse, North Carolina at Lighthousefriends.com” 

(http://www.lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=349) 

says it became operational on December 23, 1794.

19 Jones, Lighthouse Keeper’s Dwelling, 11. Olson, 

Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 20, says 

the Shell Castle light was badly out of repair by 1809. 

In 1854, the 100-foot tower of the Hatteras light 

was raised and a new Fresnel lens installed. It was 

replaced in 1868–1870 by a new 198-foot lighthouse 

that survives today as the nation’s tallest. Powell, 

Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 675–676. Further 

detail on the siting and construction of these early 

lighthouses is available in Torres, Cape Hatteras 

National Seashore Historic Resource Study, 72–79.

20 Cape Lookout Light Station National Register 

Nomination, 3. Subsequent details are from this 

document. Prepared by the State Department of 

Archives and History in 1972, the nomination is quite 

brief and lacking in detail.

21 Ibid., 3

22 Jones, Lighthouse Keeper’s Dwelling, 11–12. Jones 

notes that this lens was damaged during the Civil 

War and temporarily replaced by a third-order 

Fresnel lens. Opperman’s slightly later Cape Lookout 

Lighthouse Historic Structure Report, 1, does not 

mention a Fresnel lens being installed into the old 

(pre-1859) lighthouse. Opperman notes, 3, that the 

historic Fresnel lens was removed and replaced by 

two 24-inch aero beacons. The historic lens was 

after a time installed in the renovated Block Island 

lighthouse off Rhode Island. Requests for its return 

have not been honored.

 By 1852, the base of the lighthouse was threatened 

with drifting sand and the light needed to be 

considerably higher, so a new, taller structure was 

built. The 169-foot lighthouse went into operation 

on November 1, 1859. Confederate troops 

removed the lens and destroyed sixty-one steps 

of the stairway when all lighthouses went dark in 

1861, but federal forces put the lighthouse back in 

operation by 1864.23 The damage was repaired in 

1867. The new Cape Lookout lighthouse, given its 

distinctive black-and-white-diamond pattern in 

1873, became the prototype for later Outer Banks 

lighthouses. The old one fell to ruin and was pulled 

down sometime after 1868.24

23 Oppermann, Cape Lookout Lighthouse Historic 

Structure Report, I.B.18, says that the removal of the 

lens was reported “as early as May 1862.” Damages 

required that it be returned to France for repairs in 

November 1865. It came back to the lighthouse in 

August 1866.

24 On the new diamond pattern, see Oppermann, 

Cape Lookout Lighthouse Historic Structure Report, 

I.B.19–21. Jones, Lighthouse Keeper’s Dwelling, 12. 

Figure 6-3. Orders of Fresnel lenses and distances 

lighthouses can be seen when equipped with given order 

lens. Southeast Regional Office archive, National Park 

Service.
National Park Service 139

The Government Presence

Figure 6-4. Treasury Department notification to Cape 

Lookout lighthouse keeper William Fulford that he is being 

replaced by John R. Royal, January 17, 1854.25 Southeast 

Regional Office archive, National Park Service.

The Lighthouse Service began electrifying 

lighthouses in 1900, but Cape Lookout continued 

to use oil lamps before converting to incandescent 

oil-vapor lamps in 1912. Generators for 

electrification were installed in 1950, making the 

lighthouse fully automated. An underwater cable 

was laid from Harkers Island in 1982.26

The lighthouse itself was not the only lightstation structure to be built at Cape Lookout. 

The first keeper’s house was built before 1833; it 

was replaced by another in 1873 and yet another 

in 1907 (when a summer kitchen and privy were 

added). And from 1812 onward, “a range of 

ancillary structures,” as Tommy Jones points out, 

“have supported lighthouse operation.” The third 

keeper’s house was either occupied by light station 

personnel or used for Coast Guard functions until 

it was sold and moved for use as a private residence 

in 1958.27

25 Royall served at least until 1861. In February 1875, he, 

along with crewmembers Joseph Royall and Abner 

P. Guthrie, petitioned the federal government’s 

Committee on Claims for payment for his services. 

Journal of the House of Representatives, Congress of 

the United States, February 1, 1875, 357.

26 Oppermann, Cape Lookout Lighthouse Historic 

Structure Report, I.B.18–26, contains detailed 

discussions of all of these modifications. Oppermann 

includes a detailed timeline, 1804–2008, at I.B.33–36.

27 Jones, Lighthouse Keeper’s Dwelling, 2, 19–20. Our 

brief discussion of these ancillary structures is drawn 

from this source, which contains extensive detail on 

the third keeper’s house. A weather station operated 

out of the keeper’s house from 1876 until 1904. After 

construction of the third keeper’s house, the prior 

one became the residence of assistant keepers (ibid., 

18–19).

Any substantial consideration of the lighthouse 

service as a part of the social and cultural history of 

Cape Lookout must pay due attention to the lives 

of lighthouse keepers and their families. Visiting 

Cape Lookout in 1921, Fred A. Olds judged it to be 

“one of the lonesomest places in the country.” The 

landscape was littered with “thousands of rusted 

tin cans,” and a motley assortment of unpainted 

shacks served as houses. Only the lighthouse 

and the Coast Guard station (“the only two real 

places in it all”) relieved the desolate scene.28 Cape 

Lookout was by no means unique in this regard, 

or with regard to the character of the lives of 

the keepers and their assistants who lived at the 

lighthouses. 

“The public’s perception of the lighthouse 

keeper,” writes historian David Noble, “is that 

of a competent, kindly man . . . a favorite uncle, 

puttering around a lighthouse, telling sea stories, 

and worrying about the dark,” but the reality 

was for the most part otherwise.29 Prior to the 

establishment of the Lighthouse Board in 1852, 

training for keepers (not a few of whom were 

political appointees) was poor, and though some 

performed their duties well, many went about them 

lackadaisically. The Lighthouse Board’s reforms 

and a series of civil service reform acts in the 1870s 

and 1880s improved the situation considerably, 

but they could not change the isolation, monotony, 

boredom, and danger that characterized the lives of 

keepers and their families, trapped as they were for 

days, weeks, or months with the same people and 

routines. Such a life sometimes engendered conflict 

between couples and in a few recorded cases led to 

suicide or insanity. 

Mary Louise Clifford and J. Candace Clifford’s 

Women Who Kept the Lights: An Illustrated History 

of Female Lighthouse lists 138 women who were 

lighthouse keepers and 240 who were assistant 

keepers. Two women are reported to have served 

at Cape Lookout—Second Assistant Keeper 

Charlotte Ann Mason Moore (1872–1875), and 

Principal Keeper Emily Julia Mason (1876–1878)—

28 Quoted in ibid., 21, from Olds, “Cape Lookout 

Lonesome Place.” 

29 Noble, Lighthouses & Keepers.
140 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

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but their service has been neither well documented 

nor much studied.30

The U.S. Life-Saving Service 

The Life-Saving Service that eventually came to be 

an effective, justly proud, and important institution 

along the Outer Banks arose belatedly and suffered 

through decades of parsimonious funding and 

administrative uncertainty. Portsmouth was not 

to get a station until 1893. As historian Joe A. 

Mobley explains, the hazards of the Outer Banks 

were well recognized from the early days of 

settlement, but public policies (and funding) for 

dealing with them were very slow in coming.31 It 

was a costly omission, for which volunteers (such 

as the pioneering Massachusetts Humane Society, 

founded in 1785) tried to compensate. In 1790, 

Congress provided funds to build ten cutters for 

coastal service, but their function was limited to 

enforcing customs regulations. Another five years 

passed before they were authorized to help vessels 

in distress.32

30 Our sketch of the “keepers and their lonely world” 

is drawn from Noble, Lighthouses & Keepers, 

86–99. Noble relates some specific cases of these 

extreme reactions to life at light stations. On the 

women keepers, see Mary Louise Clifford and J. 

Candace Clifford, Women Who Kept the Lights: An 

Illustrated History of Female Lighthouse Keepers

(Williamsburg VA: Cypress Communications, 1993). 

On Charlotte Ann Mason and Emily Julia Mason, see 

also NCBeaches.com, “Cape Lookout Lighthouse” 

(2007), http://www.ncbeaches.com/Features/

Attractions/Lighthouses/CapeLookoutLighthouse. 

This information is in some respects at odds with that 

reported by (apparently) the Core Sound Waterfowl 

Museum (http://www.coresound.com/Cape%20

Lookout%20Keepers%20to%201912%20&%20LSS.

PDF), which lists M. J. Davis as Acting Keeper and 

then Keeper, August 22, 1876–July 12, 1878. The two 

lists do agree, however, on the Charlotte Ann Mason 

Moore appointment. 

31 Unless otherwise attributed, the following brief 

account of the history of the Life-Saving Service draws 

heavily from Mobley’s Ship Ashore, 8–24, 76–94, 

138–150. In other sources, the name of the entity is 

sometimes given as Life-Saving Service or Life Saving 

Service. Throughout our study, we follow Mobley’s 

usage (Life-Saving Service). 

32 Those vessels formed something called (variously) the 

Revenue Service, the Revenue Marine, the Revenue 

Marine Service, or the System of Cutters. By 1832 the 

secretary of the treasury was calling it the “Revenue 

Cutter Service.” Thirty years later it became the 

United States Revenue Cutter Service, although that 

title continued to be used interchangeably with the 

usually preferred term Revenue Marine Service until 

1894, when Federal Revenue Cutter Service became 

the accepted name. Mobley, Ship Ashore!, 5.

Colonial officials said that inhabitants of the Outer 

Banks should have the character and temperament 

that would dispose them to aid victims of the 

treacherous conditions, but those officials provided 

no funds to support such aid. Meanwhile, the 

number of shipwrecks and the value of cargo 

lost on the Banks mounted steadily. In 1800, 

North Carolina established “wreck districts,” 

each with a commissioner whose job it was to 

take possession of the cargo, try to determine its 

owner, and if necessary dispose of it at “vendue.” 

In 1801 the vendue masters (as the commissioners 

came to be called) were authorized to recruit or 

deputize coastal residents to assist in the rescue of 

shipwrecked sailors and passengers. 

Several decades later, in 1837, Congress authorized 

the president “to cause any suitable number of 

public vessels adapted to the purpose, to cruise 

upon the coast . . . to afford . . . aid to distressed 

navigators.” Although not specifically authorized 

to do so, the Revenue Marine Service began 

immediately to render such aid. A decade after 

that, the federal government began to fund shorebased lifesaving capabilities by adding $5,000 to 

the lighthouse appropriation each year. The first 

money went to the Massachusetts Humane Society 

to build boathouses and buy rescue equipment 

for Cape Cod.33Responsibility for staffing and 

operating such installations remained in the hands 

of private associations, however. The United States 

Life-Saving Service as a separate entity dates from 

August 14, 1848, when Congress passed the Newell 

Act and appropriated $10,000 for “surf boats, 

rockets, carronades and other necessary apparatus 

for the better preservation of life and property 

from shipwrecks” along the New Jersey shore.34

Between 1848 and 1850, Congress provided 

$30,000 to build facilities and buy equipment for 

private volunteer rescue organizations in New 

Jersey and on Long Island and the Great Lakes. 

Given the extreme dangers of North Carolina’s 

33 For an account of later developments in 

Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey, including 

photographs of some early stations, see Ralph C. 

Shanks, Wick York, and Lisa Woo Shanks, The U.S. 

Life Saving Service: Heroes, Rescues, and Architecture 

of the Early Coast Guard (San Anselmo, CA: Costano 

Books, 1996), 47–64 and 75–107. 

34 Tommy Jones, Life-Saving Station Boat House, Cape 

Lookout: Historic Structure Report (Atlanta, GA: 

Southeast Regional Office, National Park Service, 

2003), 9–10.
National Park Service 141

The Government Presence

infamous Graveyard of the Atlantic, why did so 

much money go initially to New Jersey? It was 

at least partly a matter of politics. The port of 

New York was the nation’s fastest growing one. 

Commercial interests and insurance companies 

were eager to see the approach to New York harbor 

made safer, and powerful city and state politicians 

were willing to back the effort.35

Meanwhile, the toll in North Carolina continued to 

mount. One of the state’s worst maritime disasters 

ever occurred in October 1837, when the Volante 

Home foundered in a hurricane and the bodies of 

ninety men, women, and children were strewn on 

the beach. Further disasters followed in the terrible 

summer storms of 1842, and more than forty 

vessels were lost during the ten years between 1850 

and 1860. 

Finally, in 1854, Congress passed an act that 

provided for “the better preservation of life and 

property from vessels shipwrecked on the coasts of 

the United States.” Ending the long-standing policy 

of merely funding private organizations, the act 

authorized the Secretary of the Treasury to build 

rescue facilities and organize services at federal 

expense and under government supervision. 

Unfortunately, the impetus of the 1854 federal 

legislation was truncated by the outbreak of the 

Civil War. By 1870, as Coast Guard historian 

Howard Bloomfield observed, “All that remained 

of the [Federal] system . . . were some weatherbeaten huts serving as headquarters for keepers 

35 Noble, That Others Might Live, 21.

who had little or nothing to keep.” Lifeboats were 

rotten and crews were decimated.36

Fortunately, the postwar years brought new energy, 

new funds, and broader policy. Federal efforts 

were concentrated on two fronts: building new 

lighthouses on the Atlantic coast and (at long 

last) establishing a Life-Saving Service (under the 

Revenue Marine Service, itself formed within the 

Treasury Department in 1869).37 On the North 

Carolina coast, to augment the relatively new 

(1859) structure at Cape Lookout, lighthouses were 

constructed at Cape Hatteras (1870), Bodie Island 

(1872), and Currituck Beach (1875).38 All were the 

responsibility of the Lighthouse Board, established 

on the eve of the Civil War. 

The hiring of Sumner I. Kimball as head of the 

Revenue Marine Service in February 1871 has 

been called “the single most important event” in 

the history of the Life-Saving Service. Soon after 

taking office, Kimball ordered an inspection of 

installations in New Jersey and on Long Island, 

which proved to be in a deplorable state. The 

report spurred Congress to appropriate $200,000 

36 Howard V. L. Bloomfield, The Compact History of the 

Coast Guard (New York: Hawthorn, 1966), cited in 

Mobley, Ship Ashore!, 22.

37 Noble, That Others Might Live, 24.

38 The 1872 Bodie Island lighthouse was actually the 

third on the site. The first, built in 1848, was only 54 

feet high. The second one, built eleven years later, 

was 80 feet tall and had a third-order Fresnel lens. It 

was completely destroyed by Confederate forces. A 

150-foot lighthouse, which had a first-order Fresnel 

lens, replaced it in 1872.

Figure 6-5. Life-Saving Station on the North Carolina beach, 

ca. 1882. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, February 1882, 

371. 

Figure 6-6. Self-righting lifeboat. Merryman, The United 

States Life-Saving Service–1880, vi. Reprinted from Scribner’s 

Monthly Magazine.
142 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

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for the new Life-Saving Service, which was 

directed to establish stations in states that did not 

yet have them. Kimball reorganized the Revenue 

Marine Service to provide the stations, buy 

equipment (the best he could find), write rules and 

procedures, and establish a system of inspections 

to guarantee a reliable and professional Service. 39

One of Kimball’s shrewder moves was to hire 

former Saturday Evening Post writer William D. 

O’Connor as his assistant. After losing his Post 

job for writing about radical abolitionist John 

Brown, O’Connor came to Washington in 1861and 

rose to be a librarian in the Treasury Department 

before moving to the Revenue Marine Division. 

He loved writing about the excitement, adventure, 

and heroism that were to be found in the lives of 

lifesaving crewmen, and his skills as a writer proved 

crucial to Kimball’s efforts to build a professional 

service. Historian David Noble has called the 

annual reports O’Connor wrote “arguably the 

most exciting reading ever produced by the U.S. 

government.”40 They provided crucial impetus to 

needed federal action. 

A federal act in 1873 led to the building of twentythree new lifesaving stations in 1874 alone. 

Generally, the construction of the new stations 

moved from north to south. Those in North 

Carolina were now joined with Virginia into 

Life-Saving District No. 6. By the end of 1874, 

there were seven stations on the Outer Banks: 

Jones Hill, Caffeys Inlet, Kitty Hawk, Nags Head, 

Bodie Island, Chicmacomico (at Rodanthe), 

and Little Kinnakeet (near Hatteras).41 The new 

stations improved lifesaving capabilities in North 

Carolina, but did not mute increased public and 

39 Noble, That Others Might Live, 24–28.

40 Ibid., 28–30.

41 Jones, Life-Saving Station Boat House, 11.

congressional scrutiny arising from charges of 

incompetence and political favoritism in the choice 

of keepers and the employment of surfmen. Those 

charges led to a federal investigation of District No. 

6 in 1875–1876, which resulted in the dismissal of 

fifteen keepers and surfmen for lack of experience, 

incompetence, and insubordination. Evidence of 

political favoritism and nepotism was abundant.42

Meanwhile, major disasters continued to plague 

the Outer Banks. The Huron and Metropolis

disasters of 1877–1878 focused increased 

press attention on the inadequacies of federal 

lifesaving efforts and led to calls for militarizing 

the service.43 The North Carolina congressional 

delegation joined others in opposing the move, 

which ultimately failed. At long last, in June 1878, 

42 Ibid., 48ff. These lamentable conditions were not 

limited to District No. 6. A contemporary report on 

District No. 5 found similar lacks: five of eight keepers 

were judged incompetent and more than 20 percent 

of the surfmen were unqualified (New York Times, 

January 4, 1878).

43 For a full discussion of these disasters, see Mobley, 

Ship Ashore, 52–90. Mobley notes (76) that “Within 

weeks of the Metropolis disaster, Senator Aaron A. 

Sargent of California introduced a bill . . . to transfer 

the Life-Saving Service from the Department of 

the Treasury to the Department of the Navy, where 

‘proper military discipline’ could be maintained. 

Under the proposed reorganization, the secretary 

of the navy would appoint naval officers to be 

superintendents of Life-Saving activities and transfer 

the keepers and surfmen to the navy to serve 

wherever ordered.”

Figure 6-7. Kinnakeet Life-Saving Station (no date). North 

Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library.

Fgure 6-8. Thomas Nast [presumably Harper’s Weekly

cartoon in wake of Huron disaster, satirizing federal 

government’s failure to provide adequate funds for 

the Life-Saving Service. Caption says “I suppose I must 

spend a little on Life-saving Service, Life-boat Stations, 

Life-Boats, etc.; but it is too bad to be obliged to waste 

so much money.” The 1,020-ton steam/sail Huron was 

only two years old when it went down near Nags 

Head on November 24, 1877. Nearly 100 officers and 

crewmen were lost. Thomas Nast (1840–1902) drew 

cartoons for Harper’s Weekly from 1862 until 1886. 

Southeastern Regional Office archive, National Park 

Service.
National Park Service 143

The Government Presence

President Hayes signed a bill establishing the 

Life-Saving Service as a separate agency within the 

Treasury Department.44

But establishing the agency did not resolve the 

most pressing problems. It was clear that the 

Service in North Carolina had to be improved, 

and quickly. The Secretary of the Treasury 

recommended that enough stations be added to 

bring them to within four or five miles of each 

other; that the annual salary of keepers be raised 

and the number of lifesaving crew members at 

each station be increased to eight; and that the 

active season run from September 1 to May 1.45 As 

a result of his recommendations, ten more stations 

were added in North Carolina in 1878, from Deals 

Island (later Wash Woods) south to Hatteras. Six 

more stations, reaching south to Cape Lookout, 

were added in the 1880s. By 1905, twenty-nine 

lifesaving stations on the North Carolina coast 

stretched from Deals Island near the Virginia line 

to Cape Fear and Oak Island south of Wilmington. 

As a result of Kimball’s diligent and persistent 

efforts, the lifesaving enterprise was on a more 

solid footing than it had ever been. Year after year, 

he argued for increased pay and a retirement and 

disability system for his men. The former was 

granted slowly and modestly; the latter never was 

forthcoming. Thus working for the Life-Saving 

Service remained grueling, dangerous, and poorly 

paid. Surfmen earned $50 per month in 1871; they 

got a $10 per month raise in 1882, but no more 

for the next twenty-five years. They received no 

housing allowance, even when posted to remote 

stations. Some constructed their own modest 

houses near the station; failing that, they frequently 

had to travel long distances home for visits. If they 

managed to bring their families to live with them 

at some of the more remote stations, they would 

likely lack medical care and perhaps schooling for 

their children.46

44 Noble, That Others Might Live, 32.

45 Mobley, Ship Ashore!, 72–76. Whether the crew size 

was enlarged or not is unclear. Noble, That Others 

Might Live, 36, says that a seventh man was added to 

the usual six in 1885. 

46 Noble, That Others Might Live, 137–141. These 

conditions would have been somewhat better for 

crewmen who lived near the Portsmouth station in 

North Carolina. In “The Mighty Midgetts of Hatteras” 

in David Stick, An Outer Banks Reader, 190, Don 

Wharton says that in the early years of the Service, 

the Midgetts and others took lifesaving jobs because 

they paid better than fishing.

Figure 6-9. Outer Banks lifesaving stations built, 1878. 

Mobley, Ship Ashore!, 82. 

Figure 6-10. United States lifesaving station on the 

Eastern Coast. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. 

February 1882, 362.

Some surfmen tried to augment income by offseason fishing or farming, but after the active 

Life-Saving Service season was lengthened in 1884 

(August 1 to June 1), fishing was no longer possible. 

Workdays and weeks were long, and playing 

checkers and cards could relieve only so much of 

the tedium.47

47 Noble, That Others Might Live, 36–56, 137–138. Noble, 

60, notes that unfortunately detailed records of the 

lives of station personnel are scarce. 
144 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

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Figure 6-11. Outer Banks lifesaving stations built 1880–1888. 

Mobley, Ship Ashore!, 100. 

Figure 6-12. Distribution of lifesaving stations on the North Carolina coast, 1905. Powell, Encyclopedia of North 

Carolina, 674. Map by Mark Anderson Moore. 

Keepers were treated somewhat better, but not a 

great deal. They were paid only $200 per year in 

1876; by 1892 they were making $900 per year, 

approximately twice as much as a $60-per-month 

surfman who worked only part of the year. They 

were allowed to live with their families in the 

station, however. Some keepers’ tendency to treat 

their crews “with all the authority of an oldtime 

sailing ship captain” could lead to tension and 

conflict among the surfmen, whose working lives 

were already difficult. 

It is therefore somewhat surprising that it was not 

uncommon for several generations of families, such 

as the Greys, Stowes, Ethridges, Scarboroughs, and 

Midgetts in North Carolina, to remain in the LifeSaving Service.48 As conditions changed over the 

years, however, more and more left. In the absence 

of pay increases, some surfmen found that they 

could fish for part of the year, work in the growing 

coastal tourist trade during the remaining months, 

and still make more money than the U.S. LifeSaving Service paid them for far more arduous and 

dangerous work.49

48 On the Midgett family and the Life-Saving Service, 

see Wharton, “The Mighty Midgetts of Hatteras,” 

188–190.

49 Noble, That Others Might Live, 56.
National Park Service 145

The Government Presence

After the turn of the century, some administrative 

and technological innovations further improved 

the Service nationwide. Lyle guns for propelling 

rescue lines further and with more accuracy 

appeared in 1878; new beach carts and horses and 

ponies to pull them decreased response times.50

Now better equipped and staffed with bettertrained crews, the Service in North Carolina 

showed outstanding courage in responding to the 

wreck of the British steamship Virginia (May 2, 

1900) and the 577-ton barkentine Olive Thurlow 

(1902). From the Portugese barkentine Vera Cruz 

VII (May 8, 1903), they rescued approximately 400 

passengers and crew, the largest number ever from 

a single vessel.51

50 Ibid., 87, 138–140. Shanks, York, and Shanks, The U.S. 

Life-Saving Service, 67. For an extended discussion 

of the development of the Lyle gun (as well as its 

predecessors), see Noble, That Others Might Live, 

105ff.

51 Noble, That Others Might Live, 142ff. On the Olive 

Thurlow wreck, see “Wreck Survivors Here; How the 

Barkentine Olive Thurlow Went to Pieces at Anchor,” 

New York Times, December 12, 1902, 6. This article 

says that the vessel was wrecked “in Cape Lookout 

Cove.” The rescue was carried out by the crew from 

Cape Lookout. 

New gasoline-powered surfboats and lifeboats 

also boosted crews’ speed and efficiency.52 The 

American Motor Company introduced the first 

outboard motor as early as 1896, but they did 

not become reliable until 1905. The keeper of the 

Portsmouth Life-Saving Station had already bought 

a powered boat by 1904, however, as had some of 

his crew, who used them to avoid being isolated 

during the active season. The Cape Lookout station 

received a powered boat in the fall of 1909, but the 

Portsmouth station did not get one until more than 

two years later.53

 The advent of ship-to-shore radio in 1916 also 

aided lifesaving efforts and reduced both the 

frequency of shipwrecks and the loss of life. 

Marconi had received a patent for wireless 

telegraphy in 1896. The first ship-to-shore message 

in U.S. history was sent in 1899, and by 1905 

52 Mobley notes in Ship Ashore!, 143, that the first 

powered lifeboat in North Carolina took part 

in rescuing seamen from the German steamship 

Brewster on November 29, 1909. Noble, That Others 

Might Live, 33, 148ff., reports that the Service began 

experimenting with gasoline-powered boats as early 

as 1899 and that a shift toward their use was under 

way by 1905. By 1912, seventy motor lifeboats and 

sixty power surfboats were in operation. During the 

Service’s final year (1915), there were eighty power 

lifeboats and 150 surfboats.

53 Tommy Jones, Portsmouth Life-Saving Station, Cape 

Lookout: Historic Structure Report (Atlanta, GA: 

Southeast Regional Office, National Park Service, 

2006), 12. See also William D. Wilkinson, “The 

Standard 36-Ft. Motor Lifeboat of the U.S. Life 

Saving Service—1907,” Nautical Research Journal 11 

(Summer 1960), 46, 49.

Figure 6-13. Lifesaving station on the North Carolina 

beach (no specific location given). Harper’s New Monthly 

Magazine, February 1882, 371.

Figure 6-14. Lyle gun for propelling rescue lines. Southeast 

Regional Office archive, National Park Service.
146 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

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Japanese ships at sea were communicating with 

each other by radio.54

During its relatively short independent life, the 

Life-Saving Service left an indelible imprint on the 

southern Banks. In an economy in which regular 

salaried jobs were rare, it provided reliable income 

for several generations of Outer Banks families; its 

grounds and buildings were stabilizing icons; and 

its crews and keepers were important anchors of 

social networks.55 In a coastal county like Carteret, 

which in 1890 had only a few more than 2,200 

adult male residents, the Life-Saving Service did 

not have to provide large numbers of jobs to have 

a significant impact upon employment.56 In her 

historic resource study of Portsmouth, Sarah 

Olson notes that “From the late 19th century to 

well into the 20th century, Portsmouth’s livelihood 

54 Tony Long, “Aug. 23, 1899: First Ship-to-Shore Signal 

to a U.S. Station,” Wired, Aug. 23, 2007, http://

www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/08/

dayintech_0823. For a somewhat more detailed 

discussion, see Jones, Portsmouth Life-Saving Station, 

10–11.

55 Jones, Lewis Davis House, 15, is careful to note that 

the crews did not necessarily live adjacent (or even 

near) to the stations. Especially after the advent of 

gasoline-powered boats, some commuted from as far 

away as Morehead City. 

56 U.S. Census (http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/

stats/histcensus/php/county.php).

was linked to the U .S. lifesaving station, and 

most of the inhabitants were directly or indirectly 

associated with it.”57

 It appears likely, then, that the twenty or so jobs 

provided by the stations at Portsmouth, Core 

Banks, and Cape Lookout might have supported 

more than a hundred people.58 And since the 

population of Portsmouth itself was only slightly 

more than 200 at the time, the local impact of 

six to thirteen regular jobs would have been 

considerable, both economically and socially.59

“The keepers of the Portsmouth station, like the 

keepers of many other lifesaving stations,” a prior 

scholar has noted, “were respected members 

of the community. One member of the crew at 

Portsmouth in 1899 reflected that not only was his 

superior F. G. Terrell looked up to by the entire 

station crew, but that even the community at large 

looked on him as President.”60

The iconic physical facilities of the Life-Saving 

Service (and subsequent entities) were familiar 

to the entire population of the Outer Banks. 

Long after the organizations they housed were 

57 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 93.

58 Some of the scant information available on the Core 

Banks station (1896) may be found in Holland, Survey 

History, 36, and Jones, Portsmouth Life-Saving Station 

, 9. 

59 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 90, 

says that the Portsmouth crew averaged ten or eleven 

men, but ranged from six to thirteen, and that there 

was “rarely a year when the crew did not include 

some Portsmouthers.” Olson’s figure is higher than 

that given by Noble, who says the crews included 

seven to eight men.

60 Ibid., 88ff. On the importance of government 

employment to residents of Harkers Island, see 

Garrity-Blake, Ethnohistorical Overview and 

Assessment Study, 6.5.18.

Figure 6-15. Motor lifeboat, 1908. Southeast Regional 

Office archive, National Park Service.

Figure 6-16. Portsmouth lifesaving crew in the 1920s. Cape 

Lookout National Seashore archive 
National Park Service 147

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Figure 6-17. Drawing of Cape Lookout Life-Saving Station. National Park Service, Denver Service Center. 

phased out, many of the core buildings and 

related outbuildings remained, frequently 

moved and adapted to other uses. At length, they 

came to constitute a major part of the historic 

resources of CALO. In not a few cases, private 

residences constructed or occupied by keepers 

or crewmembers, such as the 1910 McWilliamsDixon house in Portsmouth, augmented the official 

landscape.61

61 See for example Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, 

Inc., and John Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth 

Village Cultural Landscape Report, 68, 125, on the 

McWilliams-Dixon House, constructed ca. 1910 by 

keeper Charles McWilliams.

Figure 6-18. Cape Lookout Life-Saving Station, 1893. 

Jones, Life-Saving Station Boat House, 10. Cape Lookout 

National Seashore archive. 

The Cape Lookout Life-Saving Station, about a 

mile and a half southwest of the lighthouse, opened 

in early 1888 and was manned by a keeper and a 

crew of seven. The main building is a two-story, 

22-by-45-foot (2000+ square feet), cross-gabled, 

wood-framed structure built on low, wooden piers. 

A rear porch was added before 1905; a two-story 

front porch followed in the 1920s. Some interior 

alterations and three dormers brought it to its final 

configuration.62 A new boathouse was added in 

1892, and other outbuildings were added during 

the next four years.63

Summarizing the building’s iconic and historical 

importance, architectural historian Tommy Jones 

notes that the station “is one of three nineteenth62 Jones, Cape Lookout Life-Saving Station, 61.

63 Ibid., 33. The history of the structures that at 

various times constituted the Life-Saving Station 

is complicated. See Table 2: Structures at the LifeSaving/U.S. Coast Guard Station, in John Milner 

Associates, Inc., and Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, 

Inc., Cape Lookout Village Cultural Landscape Report, 

2-21. More than twenty structures comprise the list; 

nine of them (including three boathouses) were built 

before the advent of the U.S. Coast Guard in 1915. 

Jones, Life-Saving Station Boat House, 27–34, provides 

a detailed discussion of the building; its deterioration, 

demolition, and replacement; and historic and 

modern modifications of the various boathouses. See 

37 for a discussion of the 1924 (“old”) boathouse, 

now a private residence.
148 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Government Presence

century buildings that remain in the Cape Lookout 

Village Historic District and it has played a major 

role in the history of Cape Lookout.” During 

the thirty years before it was replaced in 1917, 

Jones says, “the station remained a landmark, a 

source of shelter during storms and of assistance 

during all kinds of emergencies.” The station’s 

post-1917 history is an excellent example of the 

serial adaptive reuse of such structures: In 1919, 

it became a radio compass station for the Navy, 

and from 1921 until 1939, it housed a Navy radio 

station; after 1939, it passed to the Coast Guard, 

which used it until 1957. It was then sold for use as 

a private residence.64

The Portsmouth station, established in 1893—

five years after the Cape Lookout station—on 

the already federally owned grounds of the old 

Marine Hospital, was apparently intended to 

occupy the hospital building.65 But that building 

burned down (possibly at the hand of local 

arsonists, perhaps in order to force the building 

of a new facility) before it could be occupied.66 In 

any case, a new building designed in the Rhode 

Island-derived Quonchontaug style of architect 

64 Jones, Life-Saving Station Boat House, 28. A timeline 

for the structure is on 35–36.

65 The new hospital building opened in 1847 and closed 

in 1860. The main building was used as a weather 

station from 1876 until the mid-1880s. “Portsmouth 

Island’s History and Development” (unidentified, 

undated typescript in CALO archive), 5–7.

66 Ibid., 28, on the status of arson as an item in “local 

tradition.”

George R. Tolman was constructed in 1894.67

It was the largest building ever constructed in 

Portsmouth, and as Tommy Jones notes, it has 

remained a landmark on the island for over a 

century. It is still “the best-preserved example of 

some twenty-one “Quonochontuag” stations that 

the Life-Saving Service built along the eastern 

seaboard between 1891 and 1904.”68 It eventually 

had several associated outbuildings (including a 

kitchen, stables, oil and coal storage building, and 

warehouses).69

Like many other lifesaving stations, the 

Portsmouth station was used briefly during the 

Spanish-American war to provide coastal watch 

for the Navy, but no sightings of the Spanish 

67 See Mobley, Ship Ashore!, 29–52 for a discussion of 

the earlier lifesaving station buildings further north 

on the Outer Banks. On the design of the stations, see 

Wick York, “The Architecture of the U.S. Life-Saving 

Stations,” Log of Mystic Seaport 34 (1982): 3–20; also 

in Shanks, York, and Shanks, U.S. Life Saving Service, 

211–249. York examines station architecture from the 

1840s onward and includes a biographical statement 

on J. Lake Parkinson, the first Life-Saving Service 

architect, as well as other Service architects. A small 

rendering of the Rhode Island station is reproduced in 

Jones, Portsmouth Life-Saving Station, 9. An excellent 

capsule biography of Tolman appears on 9–10. Jones’s 

historic structure report contains excellent, fully 

documented detail on all aspects of the station’s 

construction, operation, and history. 

68 Jones, Portsmouth Life-Saving Station, 1–10. 

69 Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John 

Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 188ff. Statement on ancillary 

buildings is from an undated and unidentified 

document, “Portsmouth Island’s History and 

Development” in Cape Lookout National Seashore 

files.

Figure 6-19. Portsmouth Life-Saving Station, ca. 1903–

1915. Cape Lookout National Seashore archive.

Figure 6-20. Portsmouth Life-Saving Station in the 1920s. 

Cape Lookout National Seashore archive. 
National Park Service 149

The Government Presence

fleet occurred.70 In 1937, the Coast Guard 

decommissioned the Portsmouth station and then 

reactivated it briefly during World War II; during 

the reactivation, the station underwent major 

rehabilitation by the Navy, including the addition 

of a detached kitchen. It was used as a hunting club 

after the war before being returned to government 

ownership when Cape Lookout National Seashore 

was authorized in 1966. A recent renovation 

resulted in the full restoration of the building. 

Over the more than four decades of its life, the 

U.S. Life-Saving Service worked in a constantly 

changing environment whose evolutions predicted 

the Service’s demise. The number of lighthouses 

in the country increased from 333 in 1852 to 1462 

in 1913, thus increasing navigational precision on 

ships. Sails were increasingly replaced by engines, 

and wooden ships by steel. Ships became both far 

stronger and far less subject to the mercy of the 

winds. The higher speed of gasoline patrol and 

surfboats allowed fewer stations to serve larger 

areas.71

In sum, the Life-Saving Service provided the public 

a more than acceptable return on its modest and 

inconsistent investment: more than 28,000 ships 

and upwards of 180,000 people had benefited from 

its services.72 In the years leading up to World War 

70 Jones, Portsmouth Life-Saving Station, 8, 27. For 

information on the use of the Coast Guard during 

Prohibition, see Harold Waters, Smugglers of Spirits: 

Prohibition and the Coast Guard Patrol (New York: 

Hastings House, 1971).

71 Noble, That Others Might Live, 147–149.

72 Jones, Life-Saving Station, 15, and Life-Saving Station, 

Cape Lookout Village: Historic Structure Report

(Atlanta GA: Southeast Regional Office, National Park 

Service, 2004), 22.

I, however, it became increasingly clear that a more 

consistent, substantial, and professional service 

was called for. The existence of the Life-Saving 

Service as a separate entity ended in January 1915, 

when it was merged into the newly formed United 

States Coast Guard. The Cape Lookout LifeSaving station became Coast Guard Station #190 

(technically a “lifeboat station”).73 Freddie Gilkin, 

who had become keeper of the Life-Saving Service 

station only a few months earlier, remained to head 

the Coast Guard Station.74

The still unwritten part of Life-Saving Service 

history concerns the role of women. No women 

were employed by the Service, but many 

participated in its work in vital and sometimes even 

heroic ways.75 The indefatigable young Martha 

Coston, widowed at twenty-one when her inventor 

husband died after inhaling chemical fumes, 

finished his work on the Coston Night Signals 

that became ubiquitous in the Service. As early as 

1880, the Women’s National Relief Association 

was providing supplies for shipwreck survivors 

(especially clothing and blankets) to lifesaving 

stations. Other women built fires on the beach to 

guide and warm surfmen during rescues, helped 

to launch boats, and in dire circumstances rode 

in them to assist surfmen, and cared for their 

husbands and children while living at sometimesisolated stations.

The U.S. Coast Guard

 The Coast Guard had its origin in a May 1913 act 

(S.B. 2337), signed into law in January 1915, that 

combined the Life-Saving Service with the Revenue 

Cutter Service to create the United States Coast 

Guard.76 The statute placed the Coast Guard within 

the Treasury Department, but stipulated that it would 

operate as a branch of the Navy during war time. 

73 Cape Lookout Coast Guard Station National Register 

Nomination, Item 7. 

74 Jones, Cape Lookout Life-Saving Station, 22.

75 The most substantial (though still brief) treatment 

of women’s role in the Service that we have 

encountered is in Shanks, York, and Shanks, U.S. 

Life Saving Service, 123–128, upon which our few 

comments are based.

76 This brief précis of Coast Guard history draws 

substantially upon Jones, Portsmouth Life-Saving 

Station, 16–17. Materials not otherwise attributed are 

from this source. For a brief account of the evolution 

of the Revenue Cutter Service, see Noble, That Others 

Might Live, 150–153.

Figure 6-21. Portsmouth Life-Saving Station after 

renovation, 2006. Cape Lookout National Seashore 

archive. 
150 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Under this stipulation, the Coast Guard operated 

under the U.S. Navy, which improved its 

performance and strengthened its law enforcement 

capabilities. At the same time, technological 

changes continued to alter lifesaving methods and 

improve navigation, ship-to-shore communication, 

and weather forecasting. These changes and the 

increasing predominance of diesel-powered steel 

vessels allowed ships to operate further offshore, 

reducing the number of accidents from treacherous 

shoals. Coast Guard airplanes extended tracking 

and rescue capabilities even further.

77

With the passage of the Volstead Act in 1919, 

the Coast Guard’s interdiction of “rumrunners” 

claimed a disproportionate share of its resources. 

On the Outer Banks, in particular, conditions 

dictated that their success in doing so was meager 

indeed. But the mission persisted until the repeal of 

prohibition in 1933. 

In July 1939, as war broke out in Europe, the 

Coast Guard absorbed the Lighthouse Service, 

which dated from 1910.78 Prior to the United 

States’s entry into the war, the Coast Guard began 

its wartime duties by carrying out “neutrality 

patrols,” but in 1940 it became responsible for port 

security. A month before Pearl Harbor, the Navy 

assumed control of the Coast Guard, which soon 

began landing troops on overseas beachheads. 

Inactive stations (including the one at Portsmouth, 

deactivated in 1938, and the Core Bank one, 

deactivated in 1940) were reactivated to provide 

coastal security. By early 1946, however, the need 

had passed, and the Coast Guard was handed 

77 Mobley, Ship Ashore!, 4, 150, 161. A Coast Guard air 

station operated briefly (1920–1922) at an abandoned 

Naval air base in Morehead City (ibid., 161–163).

78 The history of lighthouse services is administratively 

complicated. In 1789, all lighthouses, which had 

previously been constructed and maintained by 

individual colonies, were turned over to the federal 

government. From 1820 to 1852, when the U.S. LightHouse Board was established, they were controlled 

by the Auditor of the Treasury. In 1910, the Bureau of 

Lighthouses (alternately, the U.S. Lighthouse Service) 

was formed; it oversaw lighthouses until they were 

transferred to the U.S. Coast Guard in 1939. Michigan 

Lighthouse Conservancy, “Lighthouses: A Brief 

Administrative History,” The United States Lighthouse 

Service (2010), http://www.michiganlights.com/

lighthouseservice.htm.

back to the Treasury Department.79 On the Outer 

Banks, the Guard was never to regain its prewar 

prominence; advancing radio technology, already 

in evidence by the late 1930s, reduced the need for 

physical installations on the coast. 

The presence of the Coast Guard on the Outer 

Banks left a wealth of historical resources. Like 

its predecessor the Life-Saving Service, some 

of whose buildings it took over and used, the 

Coast Guard made its mark upon the landscape 

of what was to become Cape Lookout National 

Seashore. Almost immediately after the passage of 

the 1915 legislation that created the Coast Guard, 

renovation of the former Cape Lookout LifeSaving station for Coast Guard use began. By late 

1916, a new main building to replace the original 

station (built in 1887 and already moved to a new 

location) was under construction. A rickety old 

boathouse was sold and a new one constructed. 

Over the next several years, interrupted at times 

by the exigencies of World War I, the Coast 

Guard installation was the scene of additional 

renovations, new construction (including, a stable, 

a galley, and a mess hall), and alterations to both 

grounds and existing buildings.80

Near Portsmouth station, both the Roy Robinson 

House (1926) and the Jesse Babb House (1935) 

were occupied by Coast Guard employees. Babb 

was a cook and machinist at the Coast Guard 

station, and Robinson headed the station from 

79 On deactivation of Portsmouth and Core Banks 

stations, see Wiss, Nanney, Elstner Associates, Inc., 

and John Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village 

Cultural Landscape Report, 31. In 1967, the Coast 

Guard moved from the Treasury Department to the 

new Department of Transportation and, in 2003, to 

the new Department of Homeland Security. In recent 

years, the Coast Guard has been pressed into service 

in the interdiction of the drug trade, response to oil 

spills and similar environmental threats, pirate attacks 

against cruise ships, hurricane response, and rescue.

80 Tommy Jones, Coast Guard Station Boat House, Cape 

Lookout National Seashore: Historic Structure Report

(Atlanta, GA: Southeast Regional Office, National 

Park Service, 2004), 15–20, presents a detailed 

discussion of these changes. On the galley and mess 

hall and a 32 by 50 foot equipment building that was 

added in 1940, see Cape Lookout Coast Guard Station 

National Register Nomination, Item 7, 3–4. The site 

included several other small structures as well.
National Park Service 151

1925 to 1931.81 At Cape Lookout, the Lewis-Davis 

house was built from two relocated fishing shacks 

around 1920 by Coast Guard employee James C. 

Lewis. It contains some of the earliest examples 

of the cape’s historic architecture and illustrates 

how residents have adapted and reused buildings. 

Tommy Jones notes that the house “is especially 

significant for its associations with Carrie Arrendel 

81 Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John 

Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 65, 68. For details on the Jesse 

Babb House, see 68ff. Several other structures were 

associated with the house: a kitchen, a garage, 

a generator house, and a privy. The Dixon/Babb 

cemetery is also related.

Davis, whose store and dance hall on the Bight 

were focal points for life at the Cape in the 1930s 

and 1940s.”82 The Gaskill-Guthrie house (ca. 1915) 

was home to Clem Gaskill, who worked for the 

Coast Guard for several years (1917–1920), and 

to Odell Guthrie, a Coast Guard employee for 

upwards of twenty-five years after 1919.83

As late as the mid-1950s, the Coast Guard 

maintained a major presence on the Outer Banks. 

Dunbar’s 1955 map shows seventeen active 

stations (out of twenty-five that had been active at 

some period) between Cape Lookout and Wash 

Woods near the Virginia border.84 The Portsmouth 

station remained in use until 1937 and the Core 

82 Jones, Lewis Davis House, 43. The following brief 

discussion is based entirely upon this report.

83 Tommy Jones, Gaskill-Guthrie House, Cape Lookout 

National Seashore: Historic Structure Report (Atlanta, 

GA: Southeast Regional Office, National Park Service, 

2004), 1. Jones’s analysis of the house includes 

considerable biographical detail on both Gaskill and 

Guthrie. In the 1930s, the house was rented out.

84 Dunbar, Historical Geography of the North Carolina 

Outer Banks, 89. 

Figure 6-22. Cape Lookout Coast Guard Station, 1917. 

Cape Lookout National Seashore archive. 

Figure 6-23. Drawing of Jesse Babb House. National Park Service, Denver Service Center.
152 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Government Presence

Figure 6-24. Coast Guard Stations on the Outer Banks. Dunbar, Historical Geography of the North Carolina Outer 

Banks, 89.
National Park Service 153

The Government Presence

Banks station until 1940, but the Cape Lookout 

station was not decommissioned until 1982.85

The impact of the Coast Guard on local 

employment and the economy, as well as on social 

structure, the cultural landscape, and cultural 

identity was long-lived and important. If one 

considers that, on average, some twenty stations 

were active on the Outer Banks at any one time 

and that perhaps six to ten men were attached 

to each, it might be reasonable to conclude that 

between 120 and 200 men were gaining their 

livelihoods from the Coast Guard at any time. If 

most were married and had families of four to five, 

then Coast Guard operations were supporting 

from a minimum of nearly 500 (120 families of 

four) to a maximum of 1000 (200 families of five) 

people.86 The National Register nomination for 

the facility notes that “[m]ost, if not all, of the early 

crew men of the USCG station were from the local 

communities of Harkers Island, Marshallburg, 

Gloucester, Beaufort, etc. . . . Almost every ‘old’ 

family has relatives who served at this station and 

called it ‘home.’ Local people are very aware of 

their lifesaving legacy. They are proud of the history 

85 The National Register nomination for Cape Lookout 

Coast Guard Station, Item 8, 3, notes that the Core 

Banks station, built by the Life-Saving Service in 1897 

and later used by the Coast Guard, was “lost to fire 

and erosion of the site.”

86 The Cape Lookout Coast Guard Station National 

Register nomination says that the new station was 

designed “to accommodate a crew of nine.” Our 

estimate here may be low. This National Register 

nomination indicates that although the station was 

designed to house nine men, in later years it housed 

“21 or 22 men” (Item 7, 6).

of heroism and the hardships associated with 

the service of their family members. This station 

remains an important physical link to their past.”87

The Great Depression and the 

New Deal

The years between the two great wars of the 

twentieth century were not especially good ones 

for the Outer Banks, especially on their southern 

end. The dramatic booms that came to Charlotte 

and Asheville in the 1920s were driven by 

speculative development schemes not in evidence 

on or near the Banks. In the mid-1920s, only 

Wilmington and New Bern (and to a lesser extent 

Beaufort) were served by good roads, and even 

those did not extend either far out from the town 

centers or toward the Banks. 

Although the two-lane wooden Wright Memorial 

Bridge across Currituck Sound had opened in 

1930 and the Wright Brothers Memorial in 1932, 

the growth of tourism that had long been centered 

around Nags Head was still hampered through 

the 1930s by the lack of adequate bridges and allweather roads. The tourism-related development 

that would be spurred by the development of 

Cape Hatteras National Seashore (toward the 

establishment of which there had been efforts since 

87 Ibid., Item 8, 2. For the history of heroism within 

the Coast Guard, see Dennis Noble, Rescued by the 

U.S. Coast Guard: Great Acts of Heroism Since 1878 

(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2005).

Figure 6-25. North Carolina Highways, ca. 1924. Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 566. Map by Mark Anderson Moore. 

North Carolina Office of Archives and History.
154 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Government Presence

the late 1920s) lay both further north and twenty 

years in the future.88

Meanwhile, the state in general was hard hit by the 

Depression. Nearly 100 banks closed in the 1920s, 

and nearly 200 between 1930 and 1933 (88 of them 

in 1930 alone). Growing mortgage debt (especially 

on speculative projects), declining automobile 

sales, rampant speculation in stocks and bonds, 

poor banking practices, and declining farm income 

combined to bring on the “crash” of October 1929. 

North Carolinians suffered severely as the state 

budget was reduced by a third. Workers in coastal 

counties did not even have access to the textile 

and tobacco industry jobs that had proliferated 

88 A federal legislative act of July 10, 1930, (46 Stat. 

1021) addressed the necessity of preserving national 

shorelines for recreational use. See Cameron Binkley, 

Cape Hatteras National Seashore: Administrative 

History (Atlanta, GA: Southeast Regional Office, 

National Park Service, 2007), 2. 

following the Civil War (low-paying and oppressive 

though many such jobs were). Those industries 

were confined primarily to the piedmont; only a 

few mills were located in Wilmington, New Bern, 

and Elizabeth City. The situation was worse for 

tobacco factories: there were none closer than 

Rocky Mount, Wilson, and Goldsboro. 

 All of the state’s core industries were hit hard. 

Cotton that had sold for 30 cents a pound in 1923 

brought only 61⁄2 cents in 1932; state receipts from 

the crop fell by two-thirds between 1929 and 1933. 

Tobacco fared no better. The furniture industry, 

the fourth most important in the state, contracted 

dramatically, but the textile industry was hardest 

hit. Rapid changes in clothing styles, foreign 

competition, falling demand, labor unrest due to 

falling wages and adverse changes in work rules, 

and aggressive union organizing put major pressure 

on the industry. Along with numerous other 

towns and cities, Wilmington witnessed serious 

Figure 6-26. Distribution of textile mills in North Carolina, 1896. Map by LEARN NC from data in North Carolina and 

Its Resources (Raleigh, NC: State Board of Agriculture, 1896), 192–196.

Figure 6-27. Distribution of tobacco factories in North Carolina, 1896. Map by LEARN NC from data in North Carolina 

and Its Resources (Raleigh, NC: State Board of Agriculture, 1896), 192–196.
National Park Service 155

The Government Presence

labor violence. Textile workers’ general strike of 

1934 brought hundreds of thousands out of the 

plants and into the streets all over the South.89 In 

virtually every county, mortgages were foreclosed 

and land was sold for nonpayment of taxes. Diets 

took a turn for the worse, and children suffered 

malnutrition.90

Following a 1930 advisory study he had requested 

from the Brookings Institution, Governor O. Max 

Gardner took dramatic steps. New state agencies 

moved to improve control over and efficiency 

in state purchases and personnel; a revamped 

Department of Labor and a reorganized state 

Board of Health addressed critical needs; a Local 

Government Act stabilized the credit of towns and 

counties; and the state took over the task of road 

maintenance from the counties.

Unfortunately, such approaches, while appropriate, 

were slow to improve the lives of ordinary people. 

In the short term, direct relief efforts were quickly 

put into place. Governor Gardner’s “Live at 

Home” program encouraged the conversion 

of crop land from tobacco and cotton to food 

crops, and agricultural extension agents urged 

people to grow their own gardens. A new Council 

on Unemployment and Relief organized relief 

89 This strike was later the subject of George Stoney’s 

celebrated 1995 film, Uprising of ’34 (1995).

90 Powell, North Carolina Through Four Centuries

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 

481–495.

committees in 88 of the state’s 100 counties, using 

funds from the Federal Reconstruction Finance 

Corporation.91 Statistics compiled by the Council 

showed that percentages of people on relief were 

about 30 percent higher in the southern Outer 

Banks counties than in noncoastal metropolitan 

counties and more than 50 percent higher than 

in the state as a whole. Except for New Hanover 

County, which included Wilmington, Carteret 

County had the highest rate of relief recipients (17 

percent) of the five coastal counties.

Emergency employment programs took a variety 

of forms throughout the state.92 In eight coastal 

counties, including Carteret, oyster-planting 

projects added nearly $60,000 to local payrolls. 

Eighty-three men from coastal counties improved 

facilities at agricultural experiment stations; others 

worked on pest control projects, reworked the city 

docks; built gymnasiums in Morehead City and 

Beaufort and a biological laboratory in Beaufort: 

and repainted the Carteret County courthouse, 

on which county finances had not allowed any 

work for years. Vastly larger projects at Fort 

Macon, Camp Glenn (the National Guard camp at 

91 A detailed discussion of the state’s efforts in this area 

is available in J. S. Kirk, Walter A. Cutter, and Thomas 

W. Morse, Emergency Relief in North Carolina: A 

Record of the Development and the Activities of the 

North Carolina Emergency Relief Administration, 

1932–1935 ([Raleigh, NC: Edwards & Broughton], 

1936), from which our summary details are taken.

92 The particular implications of New Deal programs for 

blacks were treated briefly in the previous chapter.

Southern Banks 

County Population

Persons 

on Relief

% on 

Relief

Metropolitan 

County Population

Persons 

on 

Relief

% on 

Relief

Brunswick 15,818 2,572 16.2 Wake 94,757 8,198 8.7

Carteret 16,900 2,880 17.0 Mecklenberg 127,971 11,509 9.0

New Hanover 43,010 8,545 19.9 Guilford 133,010 12,865 9.7

Onslow 15,289 1,035 6.8 Forsyth 111,681 9,261 8.3

Pender 15,686 1,073 7.0 Buncombe 97,037 14,886 15.3

Average 13.4 10.2

Statewide 8.3 8.3

Table 6-1: Persons on relief in southern coastal North Carolina counties, 1932–1935

Source: Adapted from J. S. Kirk, Walter A. Cutter, and Thomas W. Morse, Emergency Relief in North Carolina: A Record of the 

Development and the Activities of the North Carolina Emergency Relief Administration, 1932–1935 (Raleigh, NC: Edwards & 

Broughton, 1936), 54.
156 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

The Government Presence

Morehead City), and Fort Bragg employed nearly 

9,000. Consistent with gender norms of the period, 

women (25 percent of them heads of families) 

cooked, sewed, cleaned, did clerical work, and in 

Carteret County tied nets for fishermen.93 Under 

the Rural Rehabilitation Program, some Carteret 

County families were relocated onto subsistence 

farmsteads.94

Between April 1934 and March 1935, in any 

case, nearly $95,000 in relief payments poured 

into Carteret County, just under 1 percent of 

the funds expended statewide. More than three 

times as much was allocated for the Wilmington 

area.95 Necessarily, the Carteret County money 

flowed to inland areas, since by the 1930s almost 

no one except Coast Guard crews and lighthouse 

keepers still actually lived on the southern banks. 

Diamond City, which once had perhaps as many 

as 500 residents, had blown away in a hurricane 

more than thirty years earlier, and Cape Lookout 

Village, which until around 1920 had had as many 

as eighty residents, was little more than a collection 

of seasonal cottages.96 Portsmouth’s population 

had been declining steadily since 1870; even then, 

it had had scarcely more than 200 residents and by 

the 1950s it had only about a dozen.97

A major entity involved in relief efforts throughout 

the nation was the Civilian Conservation Corps 

(CCC; 1933–1942), established to provide 

employment and training to young men 17 to 25 

years old. Nationwide, some 120,000 enrollees 

worked out of 600 CCC camps.98 There were sixtyone camps in North Carolina. Projects undertaken 

by the corps included landscaping, erosion control, 

trail building, fire prevention, and park facilities 

93 A photo of the women at work is in Kirk, Cutter, and 

Morse, Emergency Relief in North Carolina, 260.

94 The Morehead City gymnasium may be seen in ibid., 

100, the biological laboratory on 122, the Beaufort 

gymnasium on 222, and the city docks work on 232.

95 Ibid., 85, 92, 95, 150, 180, 232, 240, 261–263, 300.

96 John Milner Associates, Inc., and Wiss, Janney, Elstner 

Associates, Inc., Cape Lookout Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 4-17.

97 Portsmouth Village National Register Nomination.

98 Binkley, Cape Hatteras National Seashore: 

Administrative History, 8.

construction.99 A major CCC project was the North 

Carolina Beach Erosion Control Project, run out 

of Camp Virginia Dare at Manteo, which grassed 

142 million square feet of the coast and planted 2.5 

million seedlings.100 Unfortunately, of the twentythree camps set up by the NPS in North Carolina, 

seventeen were in the mountains and only three 

were on the Outer Banks—two at Cape Hatteras 

and one at Fort Macon—leaving the southern 

banks with no installation.101

Predictably, the CCC project ran afoul of local 

racial mores.102 State and local politicians requested 

that no “colored” CCC units be established. 

Bruce Etheridge, Director of the North Carolina 

Department of Conservation and Development, 

told Rep. Lindsay Warren that if a “colored” camp 

were established, 

the people locally will bitterly resent it and I fear 

that trouble may arise. Placing myself in their 

position, I know that I should resent it to the 

better [sic] end. Two hundred or more strange 

and wild negroes placed in a small community 

such as Buxton, just what their action might be is 

unknown.

99 Powell, North Carolina Through Four Centuries, 490. 

A good brief history of the CCC may be found in John 

C. Paige, The Civilian Conservation Corps and the 

National Park Service, 1933–1942: An Administrative 

History (Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1985), 

Chapter 1.

100 Dunbar, Geographical History of the Carolina Banks, 

162–163; Binkley, Cape Hatteras National Seashore: 

Administrative History, 12. Binkley gives much higher 

figures: more than 4 million feet of sand fences, 284 

million square feet of grass, and 3.5 million shrubs 

and trees planted. The project was intertwined with 

contemporary discussions about creating a national 

park on the Outer Banks.

101 Paige, Civilian Conservation Corps. Harley Jolley’s 

more recent tabulation of the CCC units set up in 

the state by other entities (state parks and forests 

agencies, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Soil 

Erosion Service, the Soil Conservation Service, and 

the Tennessee Valley Authority) counts approximately 

150 units. About two dozen of them were in coastal 

counties (Dare, Onslow, Craven, Hyde, Beaufort), but 

Carteret had none. Harley Jolley, That Magnificent 

Army of Youth and Peace: The Civilian Conservation 

Corps in North Carolina, 1933–1942 (Raleigh: Office of 

Archives and History, North Carolina Department of 

Cultural Resources, 2007), 139–143. Curiously, Jolley’s 

list does not include the Cape Hatteras and Fort 

Macon units.

102 Binkley, Cape Hatteras National Seashore: 

Administrative History, 17ff. Our account is drawn 

from Binkley.
National Park Service 157

The Government Presence

Warren replied that he was “shocked and 

surprised” that such a move would even be 

contemplated, adding that “it would be best to have 

no camp at all than to have a negro camp.”103

As in the rest of the state and nation, the 

Depression in eastern North Carolina lingered 

until the advent of World War II. The major 

development with regard to government presence 

on the southern Banks after World War II was the 

coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore, which 

we reserve for discussion in the subsequent chapter 

on tourism.

103 Ibid., 17–18. Etheridge, Warren, and others of like 

mind prevailed. The camp was all white.
158 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study
159

From Regulators to Aviators: 

Wars and the Southern Banks

Many prominent features of landscape and life 

on the southern Outer Banks have come and 

gone. Inlets have opened and closed; islands 

have appeared, reconfigured themselves, and 

disappeared; hurricanes have wiped out homes, 

dunes, and even whole villages; sounds have 

gone from freshwater to brackish and back again; 

whole industries have appeared, developed, 

and disappeared. But government activities in 

their various forms and manifestations have 

been there continuously at least since the early 

eighteenth century. Five times they have been 

associated with a war, and in wartime the shoals, 

islands, inlets, sounds, and rivers take on urgent 

strategic importance. Troop concentrations, forts, 

docks, jetties, communications facilities, gun 

emplacements, barracks, and other buildings and 

appurtenances dominate the landscape and alter 

the character and rhythm of daily life as well as the 

structure of communities. 

This chapter provides a synoptic overview of the 

five wars that have affected the area since the late 

eighteenth century: the American Revolution, the 

War of 1812, the Civil War, and World Wars I and 

II. 

The Revolutionary War

 Several years before the outbreak of the 

Revolution, Carteret County militia had seen 

action in battles against the backcountry rebel 

group, the Regulators. Leaving New Bern in 

late April of 1771, the militia marched for two 

weeks toward Hillsborough. In mid-May, they 

encountered the rebels and, according to the 

record, won “[a] Signal & Glorious Victory . . . 

over the Obstinate & Infatuated Rebels at about 

Five Miles Distant from the Great Alamance 

camp under the conduct & valour of our Noble & 

Victorious General Tryon.”1

Although the Regulators are sometimes 

understood as precursor America patriots, a 

strong argument can also be made that, rather than 

seeking independence, these much-abused, oftenindebted backcountry farmers hoped to convince 

royal authorities in North Carolina to enforce 

British laws and crack down on corruption among 

local backcountry officials. Meanwhile, many of 

the eastern leaders who collaborated with British 

governor William Tryon in crushing the Regulator 

uprising (1764–1771) later emerged as leaders of 

the American independence movement in North 

Carolina. For our purposes, knowing that Carteret 

County militiamen marched against the Regulators 

reinforces arguments made in earlier chapters that 

the residents of North Carolina’s coastal counties 

were often drawn into the larger sociopolitical 

dramas that convulsed North Carolina.2

As early as 1774, three years after the Battle of 

Alamance, in which the Carteret County militia 

helped secure the “glorious victory,” an antiBritish provincial assembly was formed in North 

Carolina and delegates were dispatched to the 

First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. By the 

time the first shots of the Revolution were fired at 

Lexington and Concord in April 1775, the royal 

governor had already asked for weapons.3 By the 

end of May, the Mecklenburg Resolves had been 

passed, denying legitimacy to all British laws. 

Within a few weeks, the Crown’s Fort Johnson was 

attacked and burned down in the state’s first act of 

1 Order Book for the Carteret Regiment in the military 

campaign against the Regulators . . . April 23, 1771–

June 23, 1771 in Colonial and State Records of North 

Carolina 8:584–585 (online version, http://docsouth.

unc.edu/csr/index.html/document/csr08-0219).

2 See Kars, Breaking Loose Together.

3 Unless otherwise indicated, this brief précis of the 

Revolution in North Carolina is based upon Powell, 

Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 40–44.
160 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

From Regulators to Aviators: Wars and the Southern Banks

war. Before the end of August, the third Provincial 

Congress formed a government and authorized 

two army regiments, some of whose troops saw 

action in South Carolina before the end of the 

year. On February 27, 1776, Patriot troops dealt 

the British a humiliating and costly defeat in the 

Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge in Pender County. 

Although it was a relatively minor battle, Moore’s 

Creek Bridge boosted patriot morale in the south 

in the same way that Lexington and Concord 

had in the north.4 State delegates to the Second 

Continental Congress (April–May 1776) were 

authorized to join with other colonies to declare 

independence. 

There was little fighting in North Carolina during 

the first four years of the war, except in the west 

among the Cherokees. The land battles that 

followed all took place to the west of the Outer 

Banks, and the major ones (King’s Mountain, 

Guilford Courthouse, Cowpens) occurred far 

away. After retreating from Guilford Courthouse to 

Wilmington to be resupplied, Cornwallis departed 

for Virginia, where he lost decisively to General 

4 Michael A. Capps and Steven A. Davis, Moores Creek 

National Battlefield: An Administrative History

(Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1999), 

Chapter 1.

Washington at Yorktown in October 1781. The last 

British troops left Wilmington in mid-November. 

Although the Outer Banks were effectively 

untouched by the land battles, Ocracoke Inlet was 

the focus of persistent naval interest and action. 

Since the inlet provided the sole passage into the 

Albemarle, Currituck, and Pamlico sounds and 

had a low-water depth of 13 to 14 feet, controlling 

it was vital to both sides in the conflict. “When 

war broke out,” historian Norman Delaney has 

concluded, “no other subject of naval interest 

was as important to North Carolina as the 

defense of Ocracoke Inlet. It was considered the 

most important inlet of the Revolution” to the 

Continental Congress and to both North Carolina 

and Virginia. Following the British blockade of 

the Delaware and Chesapeake bays, Ocracoke 

Inlet handled southern Virginia shipping, which 

came through the inlet, passed through the sounds 

into the Chowan River and then to South Quay in 

Virginia, from which goods were carried to Suffolk 

by wagon and by boat up the Nansemond into the 

James. 

War actions reached Ocracoke Inlet on April 14, 

1776, when the British captured the merchant 

sloop Polly, which was then recaptured two days 

later by five whaleboats “manned by sundry pilots 

Figure 7-1. Revolutionary War campaigns and battles in North Carolina. Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 

42. Map by Mark Anderson Moore. North Carolina Office of Archives and History.
National Park Service 161

From Regulators to Aviators: Wars and the Southern Banks

and other inhabitants of Ocracoke.”5 Despite their 

efforts, the British were unable to blockade the 

inlet during the war. Of six military companies 

it stationed on the coast early in 1776, North 

Carolina’s Provincial Congress placed one at 

Ocracoke Inlet. It saw little if any action and was 

disbanded in the fall of 1777 because of the lack 

of affordable provisions. Trade remained free of 

British interference until early 1778, but British 

raids for food and supplies continued. By late 

1778, the situation for local Banker men was so 

desperate that they appealed for exemption from 

military service so they could protect their families 

from harassment and plunder. Meanwhile, some 

local pilots were using their knowledge and skill 

to hijack goods and supplies being sent in by the 

British for their troops. In piratical style, they may 

also have been, as one ship’s captain complained, 

appropriating goods intended for rebel troops.6

A major defensive strategy was to construct 

row galleys (the Washington and the Caswell) 

to supplement the state’s three armed vessels. 

The action was considered important enough by 

Virginia that the state supplied most of the funds, 

but cooperation became contentious when Virginia 

monopolized the galleys for its own defense. The 

Caswell finally arrived in early spring 1778, but it 

was redirected to east Florida with the Virginia 

fleet in December. Arguments between North 

Carolina Governor Caswell and Virginia Governor 

Patrick Henry over ownership and use of the 

vessel dragged late into the year, by which time 

both galleys were in poor repair. By mid-1779, the 

Caswell lay at the bottom of the inlet, its bottom 

rotted out.7

Defensive efforts on the water were augmented by 

the construction and manning of several forts. The 

earliest colonial fortification constructed on the 

Outer Banks appears to have been Fort Granville, 

built on Ocracoke Island in response to increasing 

attacks by Spanish privateers. The fort was built 

in the mid-1750s in connection with the founding 

of Portsmouth and was garrisoned by 1758. It was 

5 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 39.

6 Norman C. Delaney, “The Outer Banks of North 

Carolina During the Revolutionary War,” North 

Carolina Historical Review 36, no. 1 (January 1959): 

1–16, 2–5, 10–14; Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic 

Resource Study, 40.

7 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 

41–45.

abandoned at the close of the French and Indian 

war in 1764.8

Related fortification efforts extended south to Cape 

Lookout. After the opening of the Revolution, 

French Captain de Cottineau arrived at the Cape to 

offer his services to General Washington. Finding 

Cape Lookout Bay an attractive but completely 

unprotected harbor, he urged that a fort be built 

there, to be manned by North Carolina troops. De 

Cottineau also provided the money to build the 

fort—Fort Hancock, it was called—and the guns 

to defend it. It was nearly complete (including 

barracks and powder house) when de Cottineau 

sailed north to aid General Washington. The 

garrison may have included between fifty and sixty 

men, who remained on duty for two years before 

the state ordered it closed in 1780. No trace of it 

now remains.9

Since records of these early forts are so sparse, 

one can only conjecture about their role within 

the local social or economic context, which no 

doubt included some interaction between garrison 

troops and local people, probably some purchase 

of provisions and services, perhaps some adaptive 

reuse of abandoned structures or equipment. 

Whatever their importance, the influence of the 

forts was in every case short-lived. From our 

historical vantage point, the scant record of them 

serves mainly to remind that governmental activity 

began early on the Outer Banks and has remained a 

8 Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 40–42; 

Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 

31–33; Dunbar, Geographical History of the Carolina 

Banks, 46. The state Assembly provided for a garrison 

of fifty-three men, but the actual number fluctuated 

from year to year. In 1762, there were only twentyfive and the number declined dramatically thereafter. 

John Hill Wheeler reported that as early as 1712, “a 

fort was built on Core Sound, named in honor of 

Governor Hyde, to protect the inhabitants.” John 

Wheeler, Reminiscences and Memoirs of North 

Carolina and Eminent North Carolinians, Electronic 

ed. ([Chapel Hill]: Academic Affairs Library University 

of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001), 110. This fort 

was also mentioned by Francis Hawks, History of 

North Carolina: With Maps and Illustrations, 3rd ed. 

(Fayetteville, NC: E.J. Hale & Son, 1859), 543.

9 David Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 

57–62; Cape Lookout Village National Register 

Nomination, 20; Holland, Survey History, 9. The May 

4, 1780, order to close the fort appears in Saunders 

and Clark, Colonial and State Records of North 

Carolina (Goldsboro: Nash Brothers, 1898), 389. North 

Carolina state historical marker C-55 on S.R. 1355 

(Harkers Island Road) in Carteret County says that the 

fort was located “four miles south.”
162 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

From Regulators to Aviators: Wars and the Southern Banks

central feature of the social, economic, and cultural 

system.

The War of 1812 

Barely twenty-five years after the close of the 

Revolution, the United States was again at war 

with Great Britain. The War of 1812 had a rather 

muddled set of causes: the entanglement of U.S. 

shipping in the conflict between France and 

Great Britain (resulting in seizure of U.S. ships, 

impressment of seamen, and shipping embargoes), 

the desire of the United States to gain control of 

Canada and Florida, and the perception that the 

British were giving guns and ammunition to the 

Indians to help them oppose westward settlement. 

Sarah Lemmon, a historian of North Carolina’s 

involvement in the war, argues that the state was 

not strong in its support for a national declaration 

of war. What support there was issued from 

resentments dating back to the Revolution and to 

what North Carolinians considered Great Britain’s 

insults to national honor. That was sufficient, 

however, to make many citizens consider the event 

the state’s “second war for Independence.”10

As war approached, Congress passed laws to 

augment state militias, which had been the nation’s 

chief defense since the 1790s. North Carolina 

had 50,000 militia troops, of which the president 

requisitioned 7,000, but only a small number 

were actually called up. They served from early 

August until December of 1812, but conditions 

of service were harsh. Clothing and shelter were 

in short supply, especially as the days dragged on 

and the nights turned colder. Rough log houses 

that were quickly thrown up provided scant relief. 

Circumstances had not improved measurably by 

1814 and 1815, when men who marched away 

in summer clothing found themselves ill clad for 

winter, with no winter clothing supplied. 

For defense, the states were divided into six 

(later nine) districts, each under a major general. 

Congress seemed to want to run the war at the 

lowest possible cost, and attacks on Canada took 

priority. The major fronts on land were Upper 

and Lower Canada, the Northwest (against the 

British and Indians), in Alabama against the Creeks, 

10 Sarah Lemmon, Frustrated Patriots, 6–23.

and in defense of New Orleans.11 Initially, only a 

hundred men were allocated to North Carolina. 

Since in 1812 the United States had virtually no 

navy, coastal defense was a challenge. North 

Carolina’s response to the minimal measures 

being taken for its defense was, Lemmon says, 

“one of dissatisfaction, of anger, and initially of 

hopelessness.” North Carolina’s Select Committee 

on Claims charged years later, in 1833, that “The 

first great object which led to the formation of the 

Union was to provide for the common defense. The 

defense of North Carolina had been overlooked 

by the public authorities. Our sea coast was 

blockaded, and our defenceless towns threatened 

with destruction.”12

Whatever defense North Carolina was going to get 

obviously had to focus on the coast in general and 

on Ocracoke Inlet in particular, as well as at Fort 

Hampton (near Beaufort) and Fort Johnston (near 

Wilmington).13 The inlet was the only one deep 

enough to allow cargo-carrying ships (so long as 

their draft was no more than 8 feet) to pass, and 

at the outset of the war it was defended only by a 

single revenue cutter operating out of Portsmouth. 

The first British ship (deceptively flying American 

colors) attempted to pass through the inlet on May 

21, 1813, but was repelled. In mid-July 1813, 2,000 

British soldiers attacked Portsmouth, the village 

of Ocracoke, and nearby Shell Castle Island. Soon 

after their barges landed, citizens surrendered, 

assured by British commander Cockburn that 

“no mischief shall be done to the unoffending 

inhabitants.” What was taken from them, he 

promised, would be compensated. At Portsmouth 

he thereupon loaded up two hundred head of 

cattle, four hundred sheep, and sixteen hundred 

fowl “for the Refreshment of our Troops & Ships.” 

Learning that no other booty worthy of attention 

seemed to lie in the Pamlico Sound area, Cockburn 

departed for Norfolk. Residents later claimed 

that his troops ripped up their feather beds, 

11 Ibid., 96.

12 Ibid., 26–44. Select Committee statement quoted from 

44.

13 See Lemmon’s map, ibid.,121. Olson, Portsmouth 

Village Historic Resource Study, 87, notes that 

Ocracoke Inlet was important not only to North 

Carolina, but also as an alternate route for Virginia 

shipping after Norfolk was closed by the Chesapeake 

blockade.
National Park Service 163

From Regulators to Aviators: Wars and the Southern Banks

stole clothing, and even tore up law books in the 

customs office.14

To prevent further outrages, a fort on nearby 

Beacon Island was hurriedly authorized, but 

construction did not begin until months later.15

Once it was built, men serving in the hastily 

constructed fort, Lemmon reports, “had no 

wood for fires, and indeed no fireplaces; their 

only clothing was summer homespun. Of the 

451 men stationed there, only 180 were in good 

health and able to report for duty.” Conditions 

were no better at Wilmington, where every soldier 

needed clothing and rations were short. The state 

legislature appropriated $10,000 for relief—an 

amount totally inadequate for the needs reported 

by commanders. Private contractor Jarvis & Brown 

of New Bern was providing rations at fifteen cents 

apiece (12 ounces of pork, a pound and a quarter 

of beef, 18 ounces of bread or flour, and a gill of 

something alcoholic), but who was going to pay 

for them was not clear. Many of the troops were 

ill, especially at Beacon Island, where men had 

worked for months in mud and water, building 

fortifications. Two hundred out of a total of six 

hundred were ill during the winter of 1814–1815. 

Not surprisingly, desertion rates were substantial.16

Fortunately, as Lemmon notes, “Most of America’s 

glory in the War of 1812 came on the sea.” Since 

the American navy had a pathetically small fleet, 

much of that glory was gained by privateers, 

private vessels authorized to act as warships by 

seizing British ships, selling both ship and cargo, 

and retaining the proceeds. British warships and 

privateers preyed on North Carolina ships, as 

14 Lemmon, Frustrated Patriots, 120–133. For additional 

details of the British military action at Ocracoke and 

Portsmouth, see Sarah McCulloh Lemmon, North 

Carolina and the War of 1812 (Raleigh: Division of 

Archives and History, North Carolina Department 

of Cultural Resources, 1971), 39–41; and Olson, 

Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 67–69.

15 Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John 

Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 22. The report of abuse by soldiers 

comes from Cloud, Portsmouth, 48–52. Cloud’s source 

for her reference to the fort is the Pettigrewe family 

papers and Keith, Masterson, and Morgan, The John 

Gray Blount Papers, letter of Blount to Governor 

William Hawkins, May 25, 1813. A somewhat longer 

account of the British raid is in Olson, Portsmouth 

Village Historic Resource Study, 57–58. Lemmon, 

Frustrated Patriots, 139, says that construction began 

during the summer of 1814.

16 Lemmon, Frustrated Patriots, 76–92.

well; seven American ships were seized in as many 

months in 1813. 

North Carolina’s own privateer hero was 

Swansboro native Captain Otway Burns, 

whose Snap Dragon operated off Ocracoke and 

Newfoundland and in the Caribbean Sea. Burns’s 

total take from his capture of forty-two ships 

amounted to perhaps $4 million. After the war, he 

became a Beaufort businessman, state legislator, 

and builder of the state’s first steamboat, the 

Prometheus, which ran on the Cape Fear River. 

Burns is memorialized in the names of the village of 

Otway to the north of Harkers Island and the town 

of Burnsville in the west (which placed a bronze 

statue of him on the town square in 1909).17 His 

grave in Beaufort is marked by a cannon from the 

Snap Dragon. No privateers sailed out of Beaufort, 

but a few prizes were brought in there, as they were 

to Portsmouth.18

On the home front, the progress and details of 

the war were murky at best, unless one lived near 

the forts or camps. The British occupation of 

Washington, DC, and the burning of the Capitol 

caused widespread anguish. Prices were depressed 

because American shipping was barred from 

European markets, hurting farmers who needed 

to sell their produce. Meanwhile, prices for things 

17 Another statue stands in Swansboro’s Centennial 

Park.

18 Lemmon, North Carolina and the War of 1812, 22–26, 

and Frustrated Patriots, 143–160. An early celebration 

of Burns’s life was Walter Burns, Captain Otway 

Burns, Patriot, Privateer and Legislator (New York, 

1905), which carries a photograph of his Beaufort 

grave opposite 63. For a fuller narrative of Burns’s 

privateering, see Butler, Pirates, Privateers, and Rebel 

Raiders, 73–94. In 1842, Burns retired to Portsmouth 

and built a house there. Upon his death in 1850, the 

house was used for a time by the Marine Hospital. On 

Burns’s house in Portsmouth, see Olson, Portsmouth 

Village Historic Resource Study, 71. See also Jack 

Robinson, Remembering a Local Legend: Captain 

Otway Burns and His Ship Snap Dragon ([Wilmington 

NC: Lulu], 2006); Tucker R. Littleton, Late Laurels for 

a Local Hero: The Ceremony for the Unveiling of the 

Otway Burns Statue, Swansboro, North Carolina, 

May 6, 1983: Souvenir Program (Swansboro, NC: The 

Committee, 1983); and Burns, Captain Otway Burns. 

Burns was also the focus of Ruth Peeling [pseud.], 

Captain Otway Burns, Firebrand of 1812: Historical 

Drama in Three Acts (1968). Ruth L. Peeling Barbour 

(1924–) became a writer for (and later editor of) The 

Beaufort News and its successor the Carteret County 

News-Times (1952–1975). She also wrote a historical 

novel, Cruise of the Snap Dragon, and other historical 

dramas. Her papers are in the North Carolina State 

Archives. 
164 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

From Regulators to Aviators: Wars and the Southern Banks

people needed to buy went up and for those they 

needed to sell went down; sugar doubled in price 

while tobacco and cotton prices fell by half. A 

drought in 1813 lowered water levels so severely 

in the Cape Fear that boats from the interior could 

not get to Wilmington, exacerbating the foodsupply problem. And to make matters even worse, 

a typhus epidemic in the final months of the war, 

driven partly by troops returning from Virginia 

and Maryland, killed three or four people out of 

each hundred who became ill.19 The economic and 

health impacts of the war were not relieved by warrelated industrial activity, little of which occurred 

in the state.

Civil War

 North Carolina’s involvement in the Confederacy 

and in the Civil War itself was ambivalent and 

conflicted. Citizens, by no means all of whom were 

committed to southern independence, complained 

about the Confederate government’s policies on 

taxes, impressment and conscription, restraints 

on civil liberties, and its general inattention to 

their needs. The governor himself challenged the 

constitutionality of the draft. Open class divisions 

and conflicts and internecine struggles were much 

in evidence.20

Civil War history in its most familiar form—a 

chronicle of leaders, tactics, strategies, and 

momentous battles—is not central to this study 

insofar as the southern Outer Banks are concerned, 

since most of the coastal military action occurred 

either on Roanoke Island or between Beaufort 

and Wilmington. The impact of the Civil War on 

the economy, social structure, and cultural life of 

the southern Outer Banks merits examination, 

nevertheless. 

North Carolina was still overwhelmingly rural in 

1860. Only six towns had more than 2,000 people; 

Wilmington, the largest, had about 9,500, and 

Raleigh had fewer than 5,000. What industrialscale production there was—textile mills in 

the piedmont and naval stores predominantly 

in Harnett and Cumblerland counties—lay far 

19 Lemmon, Frustrated Patriots, 187–199. 

20 Paul D. Escott, “Unwilling Hercules: North Carolina in 

the Confederacy” in The North Carolina Experience: 

An Interpretive and Documentary History, ed. Lindley 

S. Butler and Alan D. Watson (Chapel Hill: University 

of North Carolina Press, 1984), 265–271.

from the Outer Banks. Fewer than a third of 

the state’s yeomen farmers owned slaves, and 

nearly 90 percent of those owned nineteen 

or fewer; 744 large planters owned more than 

fifty. Slaves constituted about one-third of the 

state’s population of about one million. Property 

requirements that kept many whites from voting 

had only recently been abolished. The public 

school system was primitive, giving North Carolina 

the highest white illiteracy rate of any state, and the 

state university enrolled fewer than 500 students.21

Moreover, the election of 1860 showed a majority 

of North Carolinians to be Unionist in their 

sympathies. A majority of white voters even 

refused to hold a convention they feared would 

lead to secession. After the war began, a majority 

of voters supported the Confederacy, but the state 

led all confederate states in desertions, signs of 

disaffection, and internal political disunity. Yeomen 

and poor people protested the inequity of laws 

that exempted owners of twenty slaves from war 

service. Evasions of conscription grew, as did 

refusals to pay taxes.22

After the Confederate States of America formed 

in February 1861, North Carolina tried for several 

months to remain neutral, finally seceding on 

May 10. Paradoxically, a war the state had entered 

reluctantly claimed a vast number of its citizens and 

21 William Harris, North Carolina and the Coming of 

the Civil War, rev. ed. (Raleigh: Division of Archives 

and History, North Carolina Department of Cultural 

Resources, 2000), 1–7.

22 Escott, Many Excellent People, 32–49.

Figure 7-2. Issuing rations to the inhabitants of 

Wilmington, April 1, 1865. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated 

Newspaper, April 1, 1865, 24. North Carolina Collection, 

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 
National Park Service 165

From Regulators to Aviators: Wars and the Southern Banks

major portions of its wealth. The state’s location 

entirely within the boundaries of the Confederacy 

increased the burdens placed upon it as the 

Confederacy contracted and had to turn more and 

more to its core for men and supplies. This anomaly 

contributed to rising protests within the state about 

the war and Confederate policy. Conscription laws 

favored the rich, desertion rates soared, calls for 

peace rang out, and rumors circulated that the 

state might leave the Confederacy. Even states’ 

rights theory was mobilized to oppose the central 

Confederate government.23

As the war progressed, North Carolina’s oftenchronicled “internal war” developed as well. The 

notorious Home Guards rained violence and 

repression upon the citizenry while the secret 

Unionist Heroes of America urged them to further 

resistance, encouraged by the voices of pacifist and 

unionist Moravians and Quakers. There was a food 

riot in Salisbury in March 1863; others followed 

in Yadkin and Yancey counties. “Violence and 

desertion spread all over North Carolina,” Paul 

Escott observes, including Columbus, Bladen, and 

Robeson counties in the east.24

The state’s entire textile production was diverted to 

the production of military uniforms. Class divisions 

were sharpened by the exemption from military 

service of slaveholders who owned twenty or 

more slaves. Those who remained at home (mostly 

women and children) faced shortages, rampant 

inflation, confiscatory raids by military troops, 

and the lack of any social support whatever. With 

23 Escott, “Unwilling Hercules,” 267–268.

24 Escott, Many Excellent People, 59–78. A newspaper 

clipping and brief précis of the Salisbury riot may be 

found at http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/ref/nchistory/

mar2005/index.html.

regard to military service and battle casualties, 

historians’ figures are stark: the state fielded nearly 

135,000 men out of a white population of just over 

600,000 (and only 115,000 of voting age)—onefifth of the total fielded by all eleven Confederate 

states. Nearly 20,000 of those men died in battle, 

and as many more died of wounds and disease, 

accounting for a quarter of all Confederate 

losses. Thus, nearly one out of every three North 

Carolinians who went away to war never came 

home. 

Fort Oregon, built by free blacks employed by the 

state, had a garrison of a hundred Confederate 

soldiers. It was solidly built and provided 

with substantial armament (accounts differ 

concerning how much and of what types). Its 

strategic usefulness was dubious, however, and 

by late September 1861 it had been abandoned 

by the troops and lay substantially in ruins. Fort 

Hatteras (completed mid-June of 1861) was more 

strategically important and useful. It was heavily 

armed and capable of sheltering three hundred to 

four hundred men. Fort Clark, completed in July 

1861 and situated about 700 yards north of Fort 

Hatteras, was much smaller and less heavily armed. 

A Union engineer judged it “of little importance.” 

Lacking adequate firepower, both forts fell 

before Union forces in only two days. They were 

subsequently armed more heavily and pressed 

into Union service, but a strong storm soon cut 

a channel between them and compromised their 

usefulness. They continued to be occupied by 

Union troops for months thereafter, however.25

25 Torres, Cape Hatteras National Seashore Historic 

Resource Study, 90–101; John Barrett, The Civil War 

in North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North 

Carolina Press, 1963), 34. Barrett discusses the entire 

operation against Hatteras on 30–47. 

Figure 7-3: View of Fort Hatteras just before the 

surrender. Harper’s Weekly, September 21, 1861, 597. 

Figure 7-4: Bombardment of Forts Hatteras and Clark 

by the United States fleet, 1861. Harper’s Weekly, 

September 14, 1861. 
166 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

From Regulators to Aviators: Wars and the Southern Banks

After Union forces were defeated in July at 

Manassas, Federal authorities turned their 

attention to eastern North Carolina, with Union 

commanders hoping to control the coastal sounds, 

and hence their tributary rivers, which would yield 

control over the eastern third of the state, including 

the strategically important Wilmington and Weldon 

railroad. To control the sounds, they had to control 

the Outer Banks.26 To defend the area, Confederate 

commanders quickly constructed several new 

forts to augment existing Forts Macon (on Bogue 

Banks), Johnson and Caswell (at the mouth of 

the Cape Fear). New fortifications included Fort 

Oregon on the south side of Oregon Inlet; Fort 

Ocracoke, apparently also called Fort Morgan, a 

mud fort on Beacon Island (portions of which may 

have been constructed during the War of 1812); 

and Forts Hatteras and Clark on the east side of 

Hatteras Inlet. In addition, some five hundred 

Confederate troops were housed in barracks on the 

beach; there were others at what was called Camp 

26 John Barrett, North Carolina as a Civil War 

Battleground, 1861–1865 (Raleigh: Division of 

Archives and History, North Carolina Department of 

Cultural Resources, 1980), 16–17.

Washington, probably on Core Banks outside 

Portsmouth.27

When Union forces arrived at Ocracoke on 

September 16, 1861, Fort Morgan was deserted, 

as was Camp Washington. Fort Clark took the first 

Federal bombardment and fell promptly, leaving 

Hatteras Inlet under Union control (the first Union 

victory in the war and its first successful use of the 

blockade). Fort Oregon was abandoned without a 

fight. In an attempt to block Ocracoke Inlet, three 

schooners were chained together and sunk at its 

entrance.28

Even as Union military operations proceeded, 

Federal strategy emphasized the possibility 

of restoring the state to the Union, in view of 

widespread reports of Union sympathy among 

the citizenry. By late 1861, however, that hope 

had been set aside in favor of a military approach 

concentrating initially on control of Roanoke 

Island, whose capture would allow Union forces to 

proceed through Goldsboro to Raleigh. The assault 

opened in January 1862, and within a month the 

island fell.29

Those who opposed the war or questioned 

Confederate policy found something of a 

friend in Zebulon B. Vance, elected governor 

of North Carolina in 1862. Vance supported 

the Confederacy, but he also heard the voices 

of protest from within the state. He objected to 

conscription, granting more exemptions than any 

other governor; protested the appropriation of 

private property for war purposes; pointed out the 

inequities of tax policy and challenged Confederate 

control of international shipping by setting up a 

system of blockade runners to provide supplies for 

the state’s soldiers; and hoarded food and clothing 

needed by Lee’s army.30

27 Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 117–119; 

Torres, Cape Hatteras National Seashore Historic 

Resource Study, 90; Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic 

Resource Study, 85–86.

28 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 

85–86.

29 Barrett, North Carolina as a Civil War Battleground, 

21–30. A more detailed account of the Roanoke 

Island campaign is available in Mallison, The Civil War 

on the Outer Banks, 63–86, and in Barrett, The Civil 

War in North Carolina, 58–59 and 66ff.

30 Escott, “Unwilling Hercules,” 269–270.

Figure 7-5. Raising the Union flag at Washington, NC, 

1862. Engraving by Angelo Wiser. Harper’s Weekly, April 

19, 1862, 252. North Carolina Collection, University of 

North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
National Park Service 167

From Regulators to Aviators: Wars and the Southern Banks

But Vance could (and would) do only so much. 

The impact of the war on Portsmouth, as upon so 

many other places, was considerable. The twenty 

years before the war had been Portsmouth’s best. 

It was the site of the Marine Hospital, a Customs 

House, an academy, and more than a hundred 

houses. More than two dozen men were employed 

as pilots, and about three dozen as “mariners.” But 

early Union victories on Hatteras Island induced 

the Confederates to abandon and partly destroy 

Fort Ocracoke on nearby Beacon Island in August 

1861, leaving Portsmouth defenseless. Union 

forces completed the destruction of the fort a short 

while later. With Ocracoke Inlet closed to shipping, 

Federal troops had only to burn the previously 

accumulated military supplies to complete the 

devastation. 

After his initial pivotal engagements, General 

Ambrose Burnside led his troops southward.31

Union forces soon controlled New Bern, 

Morehead City, and Beaufort. Fort Macon, 

although defended by 450 men and more than fifty 

heavy guns, fell as well. At the mouth of the Cape 

Fear, formidable Fort Fisher, the largest earthen 

fort anywhere in the world at the time, fell three 

years later and Confederate forces immediately 

abandoned nearby Fort Caswell. Wilmington 

finally fell in late February 1865. The ironclad CSS 

Neuse, built to liberate New Bern and other coastal 

towns, never engaged in battle.32

“Freedom for Themselves”: Black 

Soldiers 

An additional important aspect of North Carolina’s 

involvement in the Civil War was the recruitment 

and service of black soldiers.33 The Federal 

government in 1861 had turned down offers by 

31 See William Marvel, Burnside (Chapel Hill: University 

of North Carolina Press, 1991).

32 This brief précis of the state’s role in the Civil War 

draws heavily from Powell, Encyclopedia of North 

Carolina, 235–240. On Fort Fisher, see Charles M. 

Robinson, Hurricane of Fire: The Union Assault on 

Fort Fisher (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 1998), 

and Rod Gragg, Confederate Goliath: The Battle of 

Fort Fisher, updated ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana 

State University Press, 2006).

33 This brief treatment of black soldiers is drawn 

principally from Richard M. Reid’s detailed narrative 

and analysis in Freedom for Themselves: North 

Carolina’s Black Soldiers in the Civil War Era (Chapel 

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

blacks to enlist, and both public and military 

reactions to the very idea that black soldiers should 

be brought into the ranks were strongly negative. 

General William T. Sherman marked the most 

negative possible position with his comment that 

“It is an insult to our Race to count [blacks] as part 

of the quota” of enlistees. “A nigger is not a white 

man,” he declared, “and all the Psalm singing on 

earth won’t make him so.”34

As the war slogged forward, however, views 

and policies changed. Eventually 179,000 black 

soldiers and 9,500 black sailors served in the war 

effort.35 Over a fairly long period, four regiments 

emerged from North Carolina. How each was 

raised, trained, and deployed depended upon 

public racial views and attitudes (in both the North 

and the South), a constantly shifting set of local 

and national circumstances and politics, and the 

progress of the war and its changing strategic and 

tactical needs and objectives. Not surprisingly, the 

process of raising, training, and deploying the black 

regiments differed state to state and from time 

to time.36 A series of fairly swift and easy Union 

victories on the coast, combinded with the influx 

of thousands of freed inland blacks to coastal cities 

and counties, reinforced the logic of employing 

blacks in the war effort.37

Recruiting in eastern North Carolina, under the 

command of Brigadier General Edward A. Wild, 

proceeded under General Order No. 143, which 

34 Reid, Freedom for Themselves, xiii.

35 Ibid., xii.

36 Ibid., 20–21.

37 Ibid., 8–13.

Figure 7-7. General Burnside on the road from New 

Bern to Beaufort. Kell, North Carolina’s Coastal Carteret 

County During the Civil War, 15.
168 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

From Regulators to Aviators: Wars and the Southern Banks

established the Bureau of Colored Troops in May 

1863. Wild was already at work establishing the 

first three black North Carolina regiments before 

the Bureau was established. Pulling officers first 

from Massachusetts troops not yet deployed or 

who were finishing their service in North Carolina, 

Wild, working from New Bern and Washington 

and employing recruiting posters and rallies, 

raised his first North Carolina Colored Volunteers 

(NCCV) regiment quickly, even though wartime 

demands for black labor had raised wages higher 

than the military could pay.38

Black troops (from Louisiana) first saw action 

on May 27, 1863, and the NCCV regiment was 

not far behind. After intensive training, they 

were deployed to Charleston, departing in such 

haste that essential gear and equipment was left 

behind and the formation of a second regiment 

was disrupted.39 Following their service in South 

Carolina, the regiment was transferred to Florida 

in February 1864, where it encountered more 

extensive action, especially in the Battle of Olustee, 

where black soldiers were generally (though 

not universally) agreed to have distinguished 

themselves in action. An additional burden borne 

by black troops after battle was the hostility of 

some Confederate troops, who sought out, abused, 

and murdered wounded soldiers.40

38 Reid’s account of recruitment and training is quite 

detailed; ibid., 19–65. Unfortunately, Reid does not 

offer county-by-county totals for recruitment.

39 Reid has a detailed narrative of the Second 

Regiment’s South Carolina service, 67 ff.

40 Reid, Freedom for Themselves, 78–97.

By mid-August 1863, a change in command 

scaled down efforts to recruit black soldiers in 

North Carolina, and the still-forming Second 

Regiment was sent to Fort Monroe in Virginia to 

be combined with Virginia troops, where poor 

policy and management dramatically reduced 

recruitment. The Second was finally mustered into 

service at the end of October 1863, though major 

deficiencies in equipment and training persisted.41

The Second Regiment saw its first action in 

December, when it moved into Pasquotank, 

Currituck, and Camden counties to free slaves 

and engage growing and aggressive Confederate 

guerrilla bands.42 Pasquotank, roughly half 

black and half white, had the largest free black 

population in the state (over 1,500). In Camden, 

about 3,000 whites held more than 2,000 blacks 

in slavery; in Currituck, about 4,700 whites held 

about 2,500 blacks. A surgeon of strong abolitionist 

convictions who had already seen service as a 

soldier of fortune in the Crimean War and lost 

an arm at South Mountain in 1862, Wild led his 

1,800-man “African Brigade” (as it was referred 

to in official military correspondence) with great 

zeal and determination. His expedition was viewed 

as significant enough to be covered by major 

newspapers, including the New York Times. 

The counties Wild hastened to had been plagued 

by Confederate guerrillas since the fall of Elizabeth 

City to Union forces in February 1862. Murder and 

public executions were daily affairs, and whites 

were split in their sympathies. Wild’s initial aim 

was to match his treatment of local people to those 

sympathies, but his methods shifted as his troops 

struggled with the chaos of the local situation, 

publicly hanging one guerrilla in Hinton’s 

Crossroads before moving north into Camden and 

Currituck. Though wary of the African Brigade, the 

guerrillas (mostly young and poor) harassed and 

ambushed Wild’s troops mercilessly. Frustrated, 

Wild began to move against Unionists and neutral 

citizens. Local people of all persuasions soon 

41 In February 1864, the First NCCV was renamed the 35th

U.S. Colored Troops (USCT).

42 This brief account of the Second Regiment’s action 

is based entirely upon Barton E. Meyers, “A More 

Rigorous Style of Warfare: Wild’s Raid, Guerilla 

Violence, and Negotiated Neutrality in Northeastern 

North Carolina” in North Carolinians in the Era of 

the Civil War and Reconstruction, ed. Paul D. Escott 

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 

37–68. All quotations are from this source.

Figure 7-8. Recruiting office for contrabands on 

Market Street, Wilmington, NC. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated 

Newspaper, April 1, 1865, 25. North Carolina Collection, 

University of North Carolina Library.
National Park Service 169

From Regulators to Aviators: Wars and the Southern Banks

organized to declare community safety and stability 

more important than political loyalty, of whatever 

stripe. What they wanted, they said, was to be “let 

alone.” 

By late December, Wild turned his troops back 

north to Virginia, estimating that he had helped 

some 2,500 blacks (slave and free) to escape the 

counties. He had also sent trainloads of materials 

north, and burned guerrilla camps. They are 

“most reliable soldiers,” he said of his troops. 

Unfortunately, one of them, Private Samuel Jordan, 

was executed by the guerrillas on January 13, 1864. 

Two weeks later, most of the guerrilla bands were 

organized as the Sixty-Eighth North Carolina State 

Troops. 

Raising and training the Third North Carolina 

Regiment proved even slower and more difficult 

than the formation of the first two. The Third’s 

first companies were mustered in in January 1864, 

hampered by inadequate training and supplies 

and suffering discrimination from white troops.43

A fourth regiment, the North Carolina Colored 

Heavy Artillery (NCCHA), was formed in February 

1864, but was never trained or equipped properly. 

Never gaining a full complement of troops, it was 

used mainly as a logistical labor force.44

Action seen within both North Carolina and 

Florida by the NCCV/USCT regiments included 

raids into the interior to free slaves and search for 

refugees, recruits and supplies, as Wild had done 

43 Reid’s full discussion of the experience of the Third 

Regiment may be found at 153–185.

44 Ibid., 28–57. A chapter-long discussion of the 

regiment’s experience is presented at 187–214.

earlier with his African Brigade. Reid’s extensive 

and careful analysis of black Civil War soldiers 

led him to conclude that their service “triggered a 

transformation of attitudes toward racial policies 

and African Americans.” Blacks who hadn’t been 

allowed to enlist in 1861 gained praise from whites 

four years later for their crucial contributions 

to Union victory. By March 1865, even the 

Confederate army was trying to enlist them. 

Unfortunately, such changes in views and attitudes 

did not long survive the war itself.45

The War Winds Down 

After the fall of Wilmington in February 1865, the 

Outer Banks remained under Union control.46 As 

that control solidified, steps were taken to recruit a 

volunteer Union force from among local residents, 

to be organized as the First North Carolina 

Union Volunteers (disparagingly referred to as 

“Buffaloes”). Companies were raised in a number 

of coastal towns, though not at Portsmouth; 

their terrorist and guerrilla tactics were widely 

despised.47

New federal regulations placed import and export 

fees on goods from the area. Those wanting to sell 

goods to Union troops had to swear an oath of 

loyalty to the United States. There were no further 

battles in North Carolina after Burnside’s actions 

ended in 1863, but raids and skirmishes continued 

for many months, and citizens lacked money, jobs, 

and access to commerce.48 In the latter months 

of the war, restrictions on local people relaxed, 

and some trade resumed, improving economic 

circumstances, despite the deteriorated condition 

of many vessels that had been laid up for several 

years.

After the battle of Bentonville in March 1865, 

hostilities ceased, but social and economic life 

on the southern banks was very slow to recover. 

45 Ibid., 324–328. 

46 John Milner Associates, Inc., and Wiss, Janney, Elstner 

Associates, Inc., Cape Lookout Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, , 2–8.

47 John Inscoe, “Buffaloes,” in Powell (ed.), Encyclopedia 

of North Carolina, 154. Mallison, The Civil War on 

the Outer Banks, 195–204, contains a (probably 

partial) list of Outer Banks soldiers, including those 

who served in the First Union Regiment (five from 

Portsmouth, and seventy-six from Hatteras). Ten 

Portsmouth men served in the Confederate army.

48 Ibid., 114–127.

Figure 7-9. Colored troops freeing slaves in Camden 

County, early 1864. Harper’s Weekly, January 23, 1864. 

North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina 

Library. 
170 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

From Regulators to Aviators: Wars and the Southern Banks

Portsmouth actually never recovered. Between 

1860 and 1870, population dropped from 568 (plus 

117 slaves) to 220, the lowest level since 1810; of 

the one hundred children who had been in school 

at Portsmouth in 1860, only four remained. The 

Marine Hospital closed soon after the war, and the 

Customs House followed in 1867.49

Several factors kept the local impact of the 

war from being greater than it was, however: 

the relative absence of vital military, industrial, 

or urban targets on the Banks (at least north 

of Beaufort, with the exception of Roanoke 

Island); the ease with which Union forces had 

taken control; and the focal importance of the 

Wilmington & Weldon Railroad (and hence the 

port of Wilmington) for moving military supplies 

brought in from Europe by blockade runners.50

Shipping patterns were permanently altered, 

however, by the building of the Albemarle and 

Chesapeake Canal (1855–1859), which linked 

Albemarle Sound with the Chesapeake Bay. The 

approximately one thousand vessels that passed 

through it in 1860 grew to more than 3,600 by war’s 

end, and to more than 6,000 by 1875.51

49 Burke, The History of Portsmouth, 37–66 (school 

attendance figure on 65).

50 For an account of the shifting loyalties of Bankers 

who lived north of Ocracoke Inlet, see Torres, Cape 

Hatteras National Seashore Historic Resource Study,

105–109.

51 Mallison, The Civil War on the Outer Banks, 162 

(table). The twenty-year total (1860–1880) exceeded 

90,000 and more than 50,000 of those were large 

steamers and schooners.

As in the rest of the country, the aftermath of 

the Civil War on the Outer Banks was fully 

as important as the war itself. Its political, 

cultural, and economic dimensions came into 

conflict immediately, for example, in the quest 

of individuals for scarce federal jobs. Men 

contended hotly for positions as customs officers, 

postmasters, or lighthouse keepers. In this conflict, 

their wartime ideas, sympathies, and affiliations 

(Unionist or Confederate, Buffalo or not) were 

salient factors.52

It also became clearer than it had ever been that 

fishing offered the best hope for reliable income. 

Mallison highlights the steady growth of fishing 

employment after 1860, accelerating after 1870.53

In Portsmouth, many men who had previously 

been mariners or pilots turned to commercial 

fishing. A menhaden processing plant operated at 

Harkers Island from 1865 to 1873, the Excelsior Oil 

and Guano Company briefly operated a processing 

plant at Portsmouth (1866–1869), and a Rhode 

Island company operated a plant at Oregon Inlet 

for a short while. The best commercial prospect, 

however, was salted mullet, which was both 

shipped out and traded inland for corn, the latter 

milled in the increasing number of windmills 

operating on the Outer Banks. Shad harvested 

in pound nets also took on major economic 

importance, as did clams. Per pound, diamondback 

turtles brought the highest price. And by the 

1880s, Portsmouth was also a hub of the oystering 

industry on the Banks.

Revived coastal shipping in the postwar years also 

spurred lighthouse construction and the building 

of new lifesaving stations as the incidence of 

shipwrecks increased. Tourist-related development 

got a new boost, as well, but virtually all of it was 

concentrated either on the northern banks (Nags 

Head and north) or south of Beaufort.

Export trade was slow to revive, as Mallison 

demonstrates, but inland trade recovered more 

quickly, with shingle-making offering major 

opportunities, as did timbering and sawmilling 

(though these required much more capital input 

than did shingle-making). Vast stands of timber 

drew northern lumbermen, as Mallison says, “like 

52 Ibid., 163–165.

53 The account of postwar conditions and developments 

is based primarily upon Mallison, The Civil War on the 

Outer Banks, 169–190.

Figure 7-10. Citizens of Wilmington taking the oath of 

allegiance. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 1, 

1865, 25. North Carolina Collection, University of North 

Carolina at Chapel Hill.
National Park Service 171

From Regulators to Aviators: Wars and the Southern Banks

ants to a picnic.” The spectacularly successful John 

L. Roper Company came to operate numerous 

mills just inland from the banks. As these ventures 

flourished, so did the demand for shipping (both 

passenger and freight), much of it supplied by the 

S. R. Fowle Company and others, who built and 

launched dozens of large steamers and schooners.54

Substantive social and political changes ensued 

from the new state constitution of 1868, which (in 

Mallison’s précis)

prohibited slavery and secession . . . repudiated 

Confederate debts . . . ordained universal 

manhood suffrage and abolished property 

qualifications for voting and holding office . . . 

established a uniform system of public schools 

. . . abolished debtor prison, established a 

uniform system of justice, addressed the 

method of electing county officers, and 

secured the rights of married women.55

Unfortunately, such bright promises were to be 

frustrated, delayed and subverted by decades of 

Reconstruction politics and reactionary social, 

political, and cultural attitudes, institutions, and 

policies.56 Portsmouth, meanwhile, was—whatever 

the postwar dynamics—steadily losing population, 

from 341 in 1870 to fewer than half that in 1900, 

while Ocracoke, Hatteras, Nags Head, and Atlantic 

all grew.

Spanish-American War 

In response to President McKinley’s call for troops 

following the sinking of the USS Maine in February 

1898, North Carolina raised two regiments of 

white troops. It also raised one black regiment, as 

did three other states. War was officially declared 

on April 20, 1898.57

54 Ibid., 182–184 presents detailed tables on the increase 

and distribution of shipping, virtually all of which 

appears to have passed through Edenton, New Bern, 

and Beaufort.

55 Ibid., 186.

56 We consider the large matter of race relations, central 

to the postwar period, in Chapter 5.

57 This brief account of the war is drawn, unless 

otherwise indicated, from Powell (ed.), Encyclopedia 

of North Carolina, 1043–1044, and Joseph F. Steelman, 

North Carolina’s Role in the Spanish-American War

(Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural 

Resources, 1975).

The first of the two white North Carolina 

regiments, consisting of troops from western 

counties (where enthusiasm for the war was 

far higher than in the east), assembled at Camp 

Bryan Grimes outside Raleigh. Others were sent 

to Camp Cuba Libre at Jacksonville. Conditions 

in the two camps were not identical, but troops 

were in general plagued by bad weather, sickness 

(including typhoid fever, malaria, yellow fever, and 

dysentery), poor training, insufficient supplies, 

inadequate and spoiled food, and antiquated 

equipment. Not surpisingly, discipline was poor, 

morale low, and desertion frequent. Delayed pay 

forced some Camp Cuba Libre troops to beg on the 

streets of Jacksonville. Within less than six months, 

half the troops (especially from the Second 

Regiment) had been sent home. It had not been 

a happy episode. Charges and countercharges of 

political favoritism, mismanagement, maltreatment, 

and the like emanated from all sides, and bad 

feelings lingered for years.58

The black Third Regiment faced all of the 

problems experienced by the white regiments, 

as well as many others deriving from their race. 

North Carolina’s Governor Russell exerted 

considerable political pressure in Washington to 

win authorization to raise black troops, and he 

endured political insults at home once he had 

embarked on the recruitment. Three companies 

arrived at Fort Macon at the end of May and 

established Camp Russell. Seven other companies, 

with a total of more than 1,000 men, followed in 

mid-July, forming the Third Regiment commanded 

by black legislator James H. Young, former editor 

of the Raleigh Gazette. Although some black 

troops considered repression and racism at home 

more important than military intervention in 

Cuba (especially after the November race riot in 

Wilmington), others saw the war as an opportunity 

to prove their courage and patriotism. On the 

whole, they were certainly not moved by the 

jingoism and “heady patriotism” about the war 

reflected in the media. Newspapers across the state 

published insulting and degrading articles about 

the black regiment.59

The black troops’ stay at Fort Macon (actually 

chosen because of the relatively small local 

58 Steelman, North Carolina’s Role in the SpanishAmerican War, 19–21.

59 Ibid., 24–25.
172 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

white population) was fraught with difficulty, 

although the food was better than at the white 

encampments. The white community viewed the 

black troops “with a mixture of curiosity, suspicion 

and disdain,” says Fort Macon historian Paul 

Branch. A local Methodist church charged twentyfive cents to take parishioners by boat to see the 

black troops. Other reactions were more hostile 

than curious. The Morehead City Pilot reported 

that the troops were being permitted “to roam at 

large all over this city in squads of five to twenty, 

unaccompanied by any commissioned officer; to 

drink liquor, quarrel and fight among themselves 

and with others; to remain away from the camp 

overnight reveling in places of disrepute outside of 

the city limits . . . .” Other whites complained that 

the troops were “insolently defying the authority 

of our city government, and insulting our citizens 

by their impudence and offensive language and 

conduct.” Whatever problems (actual or imagined) 

that appeared were seized upon and magnified by 

the state’s racist Democratic newspapers.60

Despite, having experienced such hostility and 

abuse in order to offer their service, the Third 

Regiment’s soldiers did not get to prove themselves 

in battle. Peace came in mid-August, and in midSeptember North Carolina’s black troops moved to 

Knoxville, Tennessee, and then to Macon, Georgia 

for the winter. With regard to local white hostility, 

the troops’ experience with the city of Macon 

repeated their earlier experience at Fort Macon. A 

total of about 4,000 black troops were stationed at 

Macon, and their presence incited a great deal of 

hostile reaction from whites, especially toward the 

North Carolina troops, who were commanded by 

black officers, contrary to a longstanding military 

policy requiring that black troops be commanded 

by white officers. Four members of the regiment 

were killed by white civilians, who were all 

eventually acquitted by white juries. 

The Third Regiment returned to Raleigh in January 

1899, hounded throughout their journey by 

hostile police and newspapers. They disbanded 

in February, after which the legislature enacted a 

60 Paul Branch, “Fort Macon and the Spanish-American 

War. Part II: Preparing the Fort for War” (originally 

published in The Fort Macon Ramparts [Spring 

1999]; online version at http://www.clis.com/friends/

SpanAmer-2.htm)

special law banning them from service in the State 

Guard. 61

World War I 

With the approach of World War I, the state 

registered nearly a half-million men for the draft 

(including more than 140,000 African Americans) 

and initially called up more than 60,000. More than 

86,000 North Carolinians eventually served, and 

nearly 2400 died (just under 3 percent of those 

who served). 

The war made relatively little physical impact upon 

the Banks. A relatively modest number of Carteret 

County’s men went to war. Army enlistments 

totaled about 314 (244 white and 70 Negro); about 

283 (all white, under the segregation laws of the 

time) served in the Navy. About a dozen men died 

(2 percent of the total), either in battle or from 

disease.62

Virtually all war-related action occurred offshore 

as a result of attacks by German submarines against 

U.S. and British shipping. Hostile submarine 

action in North Carolina waters was initiated by 

U-151, which had operated off the northeastern 

coasts in the spring of 1918 before heading south. 

On June 5, U-151 torpedoed the British steamer 

Harpathian near Knotts Island. It also torpedoed 

three Norwegian vessels off Currituck Beach and 

a Cuban ship near Nags Head. U-151 was soon 

replaced by six other submarines that operated on 

the east coast. Another U-boat, U-140, sank four 

other ships off Little Kinnakeet and Cape Hatteras 

and torpedoed Diamond Shoals Lightship No. 71. 

61 Steelman, North Carolina’s Role in the SpanishAmerican War, 26–27. For a detailed discussion of 

black troops before, during, and after the war, see 

Anthony L. Powell, “An Overview: Black Participation 

in the Spanish-American War” (http://www.

spanamwar.com/AfroAmericans.htm). Unfortunately, 

Powell focuses on black troops from other states. 

See also Edward Van Zile Scott, The Unwept: Black 

American Soldiers and the Spanish-American War

(Montgomery, AL: Black Belt Press, 1996).

62 “World War I Carteret County statistics,” North 

Carolina State Archives, Adjutant General’s Papers, 

Box 84.1. We are grateful to David Montgomery 

of the History Place and to Sion R. Harrington, 

III, Military Collection Archivist, North Carolina 

State Archives, for assistance in assembling these 

surprisingly elusive statistics.
National Park Service 173

Most infamous of all was U-117, which torpedoed 

the British tanker Mirlo off Cape Hatteras, 

leading to a heroic, six-hour rescue of her fortytwo surviving crew members by the legendary 

Midgetts (five of them, led by John Allen “Captain 

Johnny” Midgett) of the Chicamacomico station. 

Fortunately, the rescue crew was equipped with a 

gasoline-powered self-bailing surfboat and draft 

horses to drag the boat six hundred yards to the 

launch site.63

World War II 

World War I had been, at least for the United 

States, a brief war, and its impact on the southern 

Banks was comparatively small and brief. But 

World War II was a different matter entirely. By 

late 1939, military recruiting stations were opening 

63 Mobley, Ship Ashore!, 155–161. Another U-117 

was built later and saw service in World War II. A 

contemporary development that could have had a 

major effect upon Carteret County, but apparently 

did not, was the influenza epidemic of 1918–1919, 

which infected approximately a million North 

Carolinians and killed nearly 14,000. Wilmington was 

hard hit, as were several other coastal towns and 

counties. Transactions of the Medical Society of the 

State of North Carolina, Sixty-Sixth Annual Meeting

(Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton Printing Co., 1919), 

1–5, included in W. S. Rankin, ed., Annual Report of 

the North Carolina State Board of Health (Raleigh, 

NC, 1919).

across the state, and after the Selective Service Act 

was passed in September 1940, Governor Clyde R. 

Hoey declared that “America is now thoroughly 

aroused and patriotically united.” In May 1941, 

President Roosevelt proclaimed an “unlimited 

emergency,” and German and Italian consulates 

were soon closed as the United States committed 

to aiding Great Britain. In September, more than 

400,000 men participated in unprecedented 

military exercises across the middle of the two 

Carolinas.64

After Pearl Harbor, all efforts were directed toward 

the war. The mild southern climate, relatively low 

land costs, and low population density argued (as 

did powerful southern legislators) for establishing 

military bases in southern states, and nearly twenty 

were sited in North Carolina, a number of them 

close to the Outer Banks. By war’s end, more than 

two million troops had trained at more than one 

hundred facilities in the state.65 World War I-era 

Fort Bragg became the largest artillery post in the 

world; more than 100,000 troops eventually trained 

64 Powell, North Carolina Through Four Centuries, 

499–500; Lefler and Newsome, North Carolina, 587.

65 Powell, North Carolina Through Four Centuries, 500; 

Sarah Lemmon, North Carolina’s Role in World War 

II (Raleigh, NC: State Department of Archives and 

History, 1964), 12–14; Powell, Encyclopedia of North 

Carolina, 1231–1233.

Figure 7-11. World War II military installations in North Carolina. Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 1232. 

Map by Mark Anderson Moore. North Carolina Office of Archives and History.
174 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

From Regulators to Aviators: Wars and the Southern Banks

on its 122,000 acres.66 Both Camp Lejeune and 

the Marine Air Station at Cherry Point opened in 

1942, the latter partly because long stretches of 

beach offered excellent opportunities for simulated 

landings. More than 60,000 men got their training 

at Camp Davis in Onslow and Pender counties, 

which came to serve as temporary home to more 

than 100,000 artillery trainees. Camp Mackall, 

adjacent to Fort Bragg, trained glider pilots, 

and New Hanover County’s Blumenthal Field 

became a base for coastal patrol bombers and 

fighter training. Elizabeth City’s Coast Guard Air 

Station (opened in 1940) provided coastal and 

antisubmarine patrols (though vastly insufficient 

ones, as it turned out); Weeksville Naval Air Station 

(1942) was a blimp base for the same purposes; 

Seymour Johnson Air Base was located near 

Goldsboro. 

North Carolina’s war production efforts were 

extraordinary, even in the context of such 

extensive national commitment. The war 

production boom began in late 1940, and some 

$2 billion in federal funds flowed into the state. 

Following the governor’s wartime slogan (“No 

idle labor, no idle land, no idle machines”), 

some factories built rockets, bombs, and radar 

equipment; others turned out airplane assemblies. 

Submarine chasers came down the ways at 

Elizabeth City, and mine sweepers at New Bern. 

Wilmington’s shipyards turned out large numbers 

of vessels, including the first Liberty Ship, launched 

the day before Pearl Harbor. The North Carolina 

mountains offered new sources for critical minerals 

no longer available from abroad, including half 

of the nation’s mica. Forest and agricultural 

production went up dramatically; to alleviate the 

labor shortage, some POWs were put to picking 

cotton and harvesting peanuts.67 North Carolina 

delivered more textile goods to the effort than any 

other state, and the Ethyl-Dow plant at Kure Beach 

manufactured all the tetra-ethyl lead used in the 

war.68

The production boom had a positive economic 

effect as federal funds flowed, builders bought 

supplies and paid workers, and troops and their 

66 Lemmon, North Carolina’s Role in World War II, 

11–14.

67 Lemmon, North Carolina’s Role in World War II, 20–

24; Powell, North Carolina Through Four Centuries, 

502.

68 Lefler and Newsome, North Carolina, 589–590.

families bought goods and services. The downside, 

however, was that it was difficult to provide 

housing, food, equipment and supplies, and 

entertainment for so many troops so quickly, and 

vice (including gambling and prostitution) and 

social costs (e.g., divorce) mounted. Additional 

stresses issued from the rationing of sugar, shoes, 

coffee, meat, cigarettes, tires, and other essential 

goods.69

An early sign that the Outer Banks were going to 

be a site of major military activity was the large 

numbers of ships sunk by German submarines 

off the North Carolina coast during the first half 

of 1942, beginning with the Alan Jackson on 

January 18.70 Efforts were made to keep news of 

the carnage from the public, but as 287 men died 

in sinkings off Hatteras alone (giving the area the 

name “Torpedo Junction”), burning oil slicks could 

be seen offshore, bodies washed up on beaches, 

and strict blackouts within twenty miles of the 

coast emphasized the danger, there was no hope of 

keeping the danger secret.71 Ocracoke Navy man 

Jim Baum died when the Caribsea was torpedoed; 

his framed license washed up on the beach.72

Until the United States belatedly learned how 

to mount adequate defenses (finally adopting in 

May 1942 the convoy system that the British had 

been using since World War I) and the carnage 

decreased, it had been, as Cheatham aptly termed 

it years later, “the Atlantic turkey shoot.” Surfacing 

offshore after sunset, as Cheatham describes it,

the U-boat commanders could see—through 

binoculars—people walking around porches of 

homes close to the water. They saw sleepy little 

fishing villages and resort towns with lights 

blazing. Even the buoys and lighthouses were 

69 Lemmon, North Carolina’s Role in World War II,

18–27.

70 Timeline on U.S. Naval Air Station (LTA) Weeksville, 

North Carolina, website ( http://www.elizcity.com/

weeksnas/timeline.htm). This source places losses at 

seventy-five. James Cheatham, The Atlantic Turkey 

Shoot: U-Boats Off the Outer Banks in World War II

(West Columbia, SC: Wentworth Printing, 2002), is the 

most thorough examination of submarine warfare 

off the Outer Banks. Cheatham, 11, puts the number 

much higher: “over 200 ships” sunk between January 

and the end of April 1942.

71 Lemmon, North Carolina’s Role in World War II, 

49–51.

72 Ballance, Ocracokers, 196. Ballance’s narrative 

contains considerable detail about Ocracokers’ 

encounters with the effects of submarine warfare.
National Park Service 175

From Regulators to Aviators: Wars and the Southern Banks

in full operation, as well as radio stations to 

provide navigation assistance.73

A U-boat commander reported incredulously that 

There was . . . no evidence that the 

Americans were switching over to wartime 

conditions. . . . [Ship captains] chatted . . . over 

[the radio] and . . . the coastal defense stations 

sent out . . . details of rescue work in progress, 

of where and when aircraft would be patrolling 

and the schedules of anti-submarine vessels.74

With regard to the southern Banks, the war had 

a number of related impacts. Barbara GarrityBlake and James Sabella note, for example, that 

the opening of the Cherry Point Navy Air Station 

offered jobs with steady pay and benefits to 

Harkers Island residents.75

The war brought numerous changes to the Core 

Banks. Cape Lookout Bight, now protected by 

a submarine net, became a shelter for convoys 

going to Europe, and troops from the 193rd Field 

Artillery were assigned to defend it. Emplacements 

for heavy guns followed soon. The Portsmouth 

Coast Guard Station was reactivated and coast 

watch personnel stationed at Core Banks and Cape 

Lookout stations as well. More than 400 acres 

73 Cheatham, The Atlantic Turkey Shoot, 13. Cheatham 

discusses the convoy system at length, 24–28.

74 Ibid., 13–14.

75 Garrity-Blake and Sabella, Ethnohistorical Overview 

and Assessment Study, 6.5.18.

near the Cape Lookout Coast Guard station were 

appropriated for wartime purposes. Local lore has 

it that the “Coca-Cola house” in Cape Lookout 

village was the scene of Saturday night dances for 

troops.76

At war’s end, the southern Banks slowly returned 

more or less to their prewar state. Military 

personnel departed, and most of the Cape Lookout 

property they had used passed back to Coast 

Guard control.77 The buildings that comprised the 

military base were dismantled for salvage.78 On 

top of a sand dune along the main road that once 

served the military camp in Cape Lookout Village, 

the remains of a machine-gun nest stood a halfcentury later as a silent reminder of the 360,000 

North Carolina troops who had served in the war, 

and of the thousands who lost their lives.79

76 John Milner Associates, Inc., and Wiss, Janney, Elstner 

Associates, Inc., Cape Lookout Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 2-15; Jones, Fishing Cottage #2, 19; 

Jones, Lewis Davis House, 17–22; Wiss, Janney, Elstner 

Associates, Inc., and John Milner Associates, Inc., 

Portsmouth Village Cultural Landscape Report, 30; 

Cape Lookout Village National Register Nomination, 

C3.

77 Jones, Life-Saving Station , 28. Jones notes that the 

Army’s lease on 95 acres south of the Coast Guard 

station expired in 1949.

78 Ibid., sec. 7, 4.

79 Powell, North Carolina Through Four Centuries, 500, 

says that about 4,000 died, but Lefler and Newsome, 

North Carolina, 589, say they totaled approximately 

7,000. Cape Lookout Village Historic District National 

Register Nomination, sec. 7, 3–4, 13.
176 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study
177

Down East, Far West, and Hoi Toide:

Thinking About Culture and the Outer Banks 

 In recent years, popular discourse about the Outer 

Banks has been unrelievedly positive and romantic. 

But it has not always been so, especially with regard 

to culture. At various times, Bankers have been 

disparaged as unkempt and uncouth pre-moderns, 

reviled as unprincipled “wreckers” who steal 

the clothing and valuables of shipwreck victims, 

honored and decorated as lifesaving surfmen and 

Coast Guardsmen, romanticized as whalers and 

fearless fishermen.

This chapter maps some long-wave changes in such 

views, tests them (when available evidence permits) 

against historical fact, and examines in some detail 

the most central current in current view: hoi toide

speech. In the process, we will examine a regional 

linguistic and cultural analogy (to Appalachia) 

featured in the work of hoi toide’s most skillful 

analyst.

From Depraved “Adamites” 

to Unforgettable Folks: The 

Conundrum of Outer Banks 

Culture 

In North Carolina, the locales most often 

represented as offering the spiritual and cultural 

boons of travel and exploration are the western 

mountains and the coastal counties, especially 

the Outer Banks. Oddly, two regions are 

associated more deeply and frequently than one 

might suppose. Consider an eloquent statement 

distributed by the Core Banks Waterfowl Museum 

on Harkers Island:

It is not an easy place to get to, Core Sound. 

The region begins where most folks’ 

geographic knowledge of North Carolina ends 

. . . . It is wild country over there on the Banks. 

Not a soul lives there. It was not always so.

These are the two ways to get here: ... Either 

way, it’s a trip through time and space, into 

the heart of North Carolina’s true Down East. 

This is a place fashioned by the sea and sand 

and wind, and the people who call it home. 

Here, history is a patchwork quilt of ancient 

whaling stories and round-stern workboats, 

crabpots and clam rakes, and waters where 

fishermen and hunters navigate their boats by 

the church steeples rising over the mainland. 

And waterfowl, always waterfowl. . . . 

There is no other place like Core Sound. There 

are no other stories like these ... [told by] 

unforgettable folks . . . [rooted] in a necklace 

of working communities with one foot in the 

water and the other on land. . . . Knowing 

where you are Down East means knowing that 

the beam from the Cape Lookout lighthouse 

flashes every 15 seconds . . . . To the sons and 

daughters of the Bankers, it means home. . . . 

[T]here is no way of drawing a line between 

who you are and the world of marsh and beach 

and tangled piney woods .... [H]istory and lore 

cling to this sliver of coastal North Carolina 

like barnacles to a skiff bottom.1

The themes are beguiling: a wild and remote place, 

mysterious and appealing, inhabited by people who 

know and love it deeply, reachable only by magical 

space-time travel. Compelling history infused with 

irresistible lore. A fusion of nature and culture that 

brings uncommon happiness, commitment, and 

knowledge. A sphere of meaningful work. Families 

that endure. A home one belongs in, returns to 

perennially, and never tires of telling engrossing 

stories about.

This wholly positive construction of the Banks 

has become so normalized in popular discourse 

that it is rarely challenged. But that has not always 

1 Core Sound Waterfowl Museum, “This Is Core Sound” 

(http://www.coresound.com/coresound.htm).
178 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Down East, Far West, and Hoi Toide: Thinking About Culture and the Outer Banks

been the case. Indeed it appears that almost the 

only widely agreed upon “fact” is that the Outer 

Banks is “remote” and “isolated,” and therefore 

to be understood as “different.” As such, they are 

comprehensible only in terms not applicable to 

mainstream society. Whether those terms should 

be negative or positive is not a completely settled 

issue, but in the early years, they were frequently 

negative.

As early as 1728, Virginian William Byrd, a 

member of the commission to survey the disputed 

Virginia-North Carolina boundary, described 

a “marooner” couple living in a “rude bark 

habitation” near Currituck Inlet. The man “neither 

sowed nor plowed,” and the woman stole milk 

from a neighbor’s cow. He had only his long 

beard for clothing, and she her long hair “like 

one of Herodotus’s East Indian pygmies.” Thus, 

Byrd said, “did these wretches live in a dirty state 

of nature, and were mere Adamites, innocence 

only excepted.” On Knott’s Island, by contrast, 

William Harding’s plantation had plentiful healthy 

stock, including large sheep. Royal Governor 

Gabriel Johnston (1734–1752) shared Byrd’s view 

of Outer Banks residents, referring to them as a 

“set of people who live on certain sandy Islands 

lying between the Sound and the Ocean, and who 

are Wild and ungovernable, so that it is seldom 

possible to Execute any Civil or Criminal Writs 

among them.” Those people, Johnston claimed, 

“would come in a body and pillage [wrecked] 

ships.”2

Such negative characterizations of Outer Banks 

residents remained durable for many years, 

though the image of stalwart Banks fishermen 

and boatsmen was emerging as well in the midnineteenth century. A hundred and fifty or so years 

after Governor Johnston castigated Outer Bankers 

for pillaging wrecked ships, however, the northern 

press again took up the theme. Following the wreck 

of the Metropolis off Currituck in January 1878, 

the press railed against the local people who it said 

2 Byrd quotation from David Stick, An Outer Banks 

Reader, 7–10. Stick quotes from William K. Boyd (ed.), 

William Byrd’s Histories of the Dividing Line betwixt 

Virginia and North Carolina (Raleigh: North Carolina 

Historical Commission, 1929), 38–50. Johnston quoted 

by Joe A. Mobley, Ship Ashore!, 10.

(groundlessly, as it turned out) robbed victims of 

their valuables.3

Twenty years later, as the bitter electoral battle 

between old-line Democrats and their Republican 

challengers raged, Democratic stalwart A. W. 

Simpson dismissed Hatteras Island Republican 

voters as “Yeopon choppers, Mullet-Gillers, 

and Beach-Combers”—all sharply derogatory 

terms.4 As many commentators have noted, the 

Democrats of the period were not highly selective 

in their use of epithets, but their choice in this case 

nevertheless bespoke confidence that “Yeopon 

Choppers” (a local variant of “white trash” in use 

since the 1820s) would resonate sufficiently to have 

the desired effect.

Somewhere on a spectrum reaching from William 

Byrd’s naked and depraved Adamites to the Core 

Sound Waterfowl Museum’s “unforgettable folks . . 

. with one foot in the water and the other on land,” 

watching the nearest lighthouse flash “Home” 

every fifteen seconds, lie the multiple (and tangled) 

truths about life and culture on the Outer Banks.

3 Mobley, Ship Ashore!,, 74. Mobley has a fairly 

extensive discussion of these charges and of their 

refutation.

4 Stick, An Outer Banks Reader, 176–177.

Figure 8-1. An eminent Banker. Harper’s New Monthly 

Magazine, May 1860, 733.
National Park Service 179

Down East, Far West, and Hoi Toide: Thinking About Culture and the Outer Banks

The New York Times Comes to Harkers 

Island: 1924

In the spring of 1924, New York Times

correspondent G. S. Carraway ventured to Harkers 

Island in search of some truths.5 Her visit came 

at a key cultural moment: after the close of World 

War I, midway into the Jazz Age, and prior to the 

Great Depression. Visiting such a place, “removed 

decades and leagues from the coast [Beaufort] in 

habits and customs,” Carraway said, “a visitor . . . 

might easily think that he was in a foreign country.” 

“Very few Americans,” she continued,

have ever heard of the place; fewer have 

ever been there. Up until ten years ago the 

inhabitants were isolated, illiterate and almost 

barbarous. There were no laws, no roads, 

no schools. The natives [have] squatted on 

the little land that they desired for their rude 

shacks . . . . Marriage with outsiders was so rare 

that the race was beginning to lose its strength 

and vitality.

On the other hand, Carraway granted, the area 

was a nearly idyllic “haven of beauty,” with lowgrowing water oaks, “their branches sloping 

gradually higher in perfect ascension . . . . jungles 

of yapon [sic] trees with . . . scarlet berries . . . 

undergrowth with wild flowers . . . [and] winding 

byways . . . meander[ing] invitingly through the 

woods.” There were few crops, she observed, but 

some people had good gardens and a few chickens. 

The idyllic natural scene was in some respects 

matched by a healthy social order. The “oldfashioned natives,” she reported, “are original 

and interesting . . . wholesome and kind-hearted 

people.” Their health was good, except for some 

malaria and hookworm (a nearly universal plague 

of the time) among the children. Early marriage 

and large families were the norm, longevity was 

common, and the death rate low. The adults, she 

said, were “easy-going, good natured, congenial 

and contented. As a rule . . . [they are] intelligent 

and shrewd, with hard common sense and a keen 

sense of humor.” They were “peaceful, law-abiding 

citizens, rarely ever getting in trouble or court,” 

5 G. S. Carraway, “Quaint Harkers Islanders Live 

Without Government,” New York Times, June 1, 1924. 

All quotations in our discussion are from Carraway’s 

article.

little whiskey was made or drunk, and they knew 

“Bible stories and old legends.” 

Music (played on parlor organs, a lone piano, a 

couple of fiddles, mouth harps, and an accordion) 

formed Harkers Islanders’ “chief pleasure.” The 

richest inhabitants, Carraway observed, owned 

Edison cylinder phonographs.6 Some had organs, 

and there was at least one piano. At local square 

dances, Carraway was surprised to observe, “the 

whiskered old fishermen with their thin, wiry wives 

are marvelously light and graceful.”

But Carraway was more skeptical and ambivalent 

than this idyllic portrait would indicate. Parlor 

organs not withstanding, the “main musical 

instrument” on Harkers Island, she was careful 

to point out, “is the tin dishpan . . . beaten 

rhythmically with both hands,” and accompanied 

by combs covered with tissue paper and sometimes 

a kerosene funnel used as bugle. As it turned out, 

dishpan drums, tissue-covered comb trumpets 

and kerosene funnel bugles pointed the way—for 

Carraway, at least—to a dark underside of Harkers 

Island culture. Fishing was the only industry, she 

reported, and it could be very lucrative, but “all 

of this money is spent, extravagantly and foolishly 

at times, or is buried.” Men spent so much of 

their time fishing, Carraway said, that “the heads 

of many are box-shaped, cut square, with the 

forehead sloping abruptly backward” (rather apelike, one wonders if he was thinking). 

Back at home, the men were idle, “usually 

whittling or loafing” while the women did all the 

work. Worse, “[m]any of the fishermen go dirty 

and unkempt,” and shoes were “only a recent 

acquisition.” Tobacco “often takes the place of 

food,” with the men smoking and chewing, and the 

women (and even four to five-year old children) 

dipping or using snuff. “Hardly any of the adults 

are educated,” Carraway said. Superstitions were 

rife, and people were “great believers in ghosts, 

‘h’ants,’ and the like.” There were church services, 

but “babies squall, boys eat oranges, peanuts and 

6 The Edison cylinder phonograph was invented in 

1877. Early tinfoil cylinders wore out rapidly, and 

were replaced first by wax cylinders in 1902, and 

then by hard plastic ones after 1906. Disc recordings 

appeared in 1908 and quickly became dominant; 

cylinders were last manufactured in 1929. Thus in 

1924, Harkers Islander cylinder machines would have 

been examples of still current – but not the latest – 

technology.
180 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Down East, Far West, and Hoi Toide: Thinking About Culture and the Outer Banks

candy, the girls primp and giggle, and the adults 

talk or chew, occasionally spitting on the floor.”

With regard to Harkers Island culture, then, 

Carraway judged that it was a very mixed bag. 

“During the last decade,” she reported, “rapid 

strides have been taken in the direction of progress 

and prosperity.” Although there were “none of the 

so-called modern conveniences and no prospects 

of any, . . . [there] was a regular mail and passenger 

boat from Beaufort, and a school in a modern, new 

building.” Older inhabitants “heartily disapprove 

of these changes,” s he said, preferring to “retain 

their primitive and peculiar customs and manners 

of living,” but there were ten automobile owners, 

“the flappers are demanding the latest styles in 

clothes and bobbed hair,” and the children are 

doing “remarkably well” in school. 

Hoi Toide (or Not): Defining and 

Promoting the Culture of the 

Southern Banks After World War II

The decades following Carraway’s New York 

Times article were times of great change for the 

southern Banks, and not necessarily in a positive 

direction. Portsmouth had been in decline ever 

since the Custom House closed in 1867, and all 

but a few stalwart residents had left after major 

hurricanes in 1933 and 1944. Diamond City was 

completely wiped out by the San Ciriaco hurricane 

of 1899, a year or so after the last whale had been 

caught. Lifesaving and Coast Guard stations had 

come and gone, as had wartime population surges. 

A planned tourist development on Shackleford 

Banks had never materialized. The mostly postCivil War commercial fishing industry had waxed 

and waned; menhaden production had continued 

to rise, but shad fishermen were catching only a 

fraction of what they had in 1900. And Core Banks 

was littered with the rusting hulks of automobiles 

converted to fishing buggies by rising numbers of 

sport fishermen. And at least from World War II 

onward, many long-time residents had been drawn 

away from the Banks to steady jobs at military 

installations in the surrounding area.7

During the more than three-quarters of a century 

since Carraway presented his ambivalent picture of 

7 Garrity-Blake and Sabella, Ethnohistorical Overview 

and Assessment Study, 6.5.18.

Harkers Island, the popular image of Outer Banks 

culture has shifted in a more positive direction. 

Several factors have contributed to the shift: the 

post-World War II emphasis on tourism and the 

intensive tourism promotion efforts of coastal 

counties, towns, and chambers of commerce 

(especially those of Aycock Brown in Dare 

County); the arrival of two major national seashore 

parks; the rise of multiculturalism with its emphasis 

on the value of non-mainstream cultural systems; 

and the growth of heritage tourism in the 1990s.8

Contemporary tourist promotion sites on the 

Internet invite visitors to make “a historic and 

cultural pilgrimage through the [area’s] rich 

past,” to explore its “rich maritime legacy,” and 

to understand its “unique place in American 

history.”9 At one level such language is no more 

than the standard tourist-attraction boilerplate, 

of which examples abound from innumerable 

“attractions.” But like many such promoters, Outer 

Banks marketers advance a historical basis for their 

claims. They posit, for example, that through much 

of its long history, the area’s isolation contributed 

to its uniqueness. 

And indeed the area is almost always described as 

isolated. During the Civil War, a Colonel Hawkins, 

Union commander of the area between Ocracoke 

and Oregon inlets after the battle on Hatteras 

Island, observed that “The islanders mingle but 

little with the world. . . . [A]pparently indifferent 

to this outside sphere, they constitute a world 

within themselves.”10 A century later, local Carteret 

8 The Town of Nags Head’s promotional website says 

the town explicitly links two of these factors. The 

town, it says, “is working to build a community 

populated by diverse groups whose common bond 

is a love of the Outer Banks. . . . We recognize 

that those who have lived on this land before us 

have forged our path and that we must learn from 

them and respect their memory” (http://www.

townofnagshead.net/). On Aycock Brown, see Aycock 

Brown and David Stick, Aycock Brown’s Outer Banks

(Norfolk, VA: Donning, 1976), and Stick, An Outer 

Banks Reader, 201–202. On heritage tourism, see 

Stephen W. Boyd and Dallen J. Timothy, Heritage 

Tourism (New York: Prentice Hall, 2003), and Betty 

Gray, Washington / Beaufort County Cultural Heritage 

Tourism Initiative Final Report (Washington, NC: 

Washington Tourism Development Authority, 2001).

9 Outer Banks of North Carolina Official Site: Fact 

Sheet (http://www.outerbanks.org/visitor_services/

outer_banks_news/outer_banks_of_north_carolina_

fact_sheet.asp).

10 Quoted in Louis Torres, Cape Hatteras National 

Seashore Historic Resource Study, 106.
National Park Service 181

Down East, Far West, and Hoi Toide: Thinking About Culture and the Outer Banks

County ferry operator Josiah W. Bailey described 

Cape Lookout as “isolated, wave washed, and 

windswept . . . unfamiliar to present generations.” 

“Bypassed by time,” he said, “[it] remains largely 

as it was when first observed by the . . . explorers 

of the sixteenth century.”11 And one could cite 

innumerable other examples. 

Another frequently invoked basis for popular 

characterizations of Outer Banks culture is the 

existence of putatively stable, multigenerational 

maritime occupations (frequently family-based), 

including fishing, lighthouse keeping, and work 

for the Life-Saving Service and Coast Guard—the 

latter two groups especially appealing because 

their occupations frequently required heroic 

action. And there is indeed some historical basis 

for these claims of culture-defining importance 

for particular occupations, as we have noted in 

previous chapters. The 1790 Carteret County 

census includes many family names (Davis, 

Roberts, Dixon, Fulsher/Fulcher, Gaskin, Lewis, 

Salter, Styron, Wallace, Willis) still in evidence, 

more than two hundred years later, in the same 

traditional occupations listed then.12

There are, however, several problems with these 

definitional and promotional claims. One is that 

the claim of isolation is easily falsifiable for every 

period of Outer Banks history, especially from the 

eighteenth century onward, as we have been at 

pains to point out in the foregoing chapters. The 

arrival of the first slaves, who—whatever else they 

were—were undeniably cultural others, ended 

anything that might legitimately have been called 

cultural isolation on the Banks. And Cecelski’s 

analysis of the world of slave watermen shows 

conclusively that the area was anything but isolated 

or monocultural afterwards. Slavery was, and 

remained throughout its existence in the maritime 

world, a domain of cultural exchange at odds with 

any notion of isolation. Persistent Atlantic world 

trade and communication, in which slaves played 

a key part, created and sustained important and 

durable linkages that worked against isolation. 

11 Josiah W. Bailey, “Cape Lookout—Place That Time 

Passed By,” Carteret County News-Times, December 

28, 1965, unpaged clipping.

12 U.S. Census for 1790, Carteret County (ftp://ftp.uscensus.org/pub/usgenweb/census/nc/carteret/1790).

Even though one might justifiably observe that 

the coastal counties of North Carolina were, as 

we pointed out in a prior chapter, excluded from 

the growth of textile mills, tobacco factories, or 

furniture manufacturing that shaped so much of 

the history and social structure of the adjacent 

piedmont region, they were the locus of the naval 

stores industry which developed after 1700 and 

of much of the state’s forest products industry 

(especially shingles, staves, and sawn lumber), both 

of which were de-isolating in their effects.13

Claims for a stable, coherent and durable 

Outer Banks culture (however defined) are 

also historically problematic. This is true, the 

record makes clear, even within the commercial 

fishing industry itself, long-lived as it has been. 

Commercial fishing did not arrive to any extent 

on the Outer Banks until after the Civil War, and 

its various sectors, each with its own identifiable 

season, fishing technology, labor patterns, and 

work culture, have waxed and waned continuously 

and dramatically. Four of the major commercial 

fishing sectors (clams, menhaden, mullet, and 

shad) arose in a clump at the end of the century, 

but followed distinct developmental curves. Clam 

production peaked very quickly and declined 

fairly slowly, descending to less than half of peak 

production levels by the 1970s. Commercial shad 

fishing followed a similar pattern: early emergence 

(ca. 1895), quick peak, and steady decline from the 

1930s on, falling to about one-ninth of its highest 

level by the 1970s. Mullet fishing also arose in the 

1890s, peaked early (around 1900), and by the 

mid-1930s was on a steady decline toward about a 

sixth of its peak level. Menhaden fishing, present 

to some degree in the mid-nineteenth century, 

became a major industry in the 1890s, reached its 

highest level around 1918, and by the 1960s had 

dropped to about half that level. Its technology, 

13 On commercial lumbering see Merrens, Colonial 

North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century, 93–97; 

Peter C. Stewart, “The Shingle and Lumber Industries 

in the Great Dismal,” Journal of Forest History 25, no. 

2 (1981): 98–107; and Cecelski, A Historian’s Coast, 28, 

105–110. Cecelski sketches the history of Buffalo City 

(1885–1925) on the Alligator River, a long-abandoned 

sawmill village. Once home to 300 people, it was the 

largest town in Dare County, with its own general 

store, school, churches, and hotels. Book-length 

analyses of the industry are available in de Boer, 

Nature, Business, and Community in North Carolina’s 

Green Swamp, and Lawrence Earley, Looking for 

Longleaf.
182 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Down East, Far West, and Hoi Toide: Thinking About Culture and the Outer Banks

using much larger vessels and consequently larger 

crews and onshore factory processing, was quite 

distinct from that of any other sector.14

Thus, although one might legitimately claim that 

commercial fishing has long been a basis for 

certain aspects of Outer Banks life and culture, 

even a cursory analysis of that generically totalized 

industry leads quickly to an awareness of change 

and diversity that have profound social and 

cultural effects. To expand the time frame to its 

maximum extent, the lives, work, and culture of 

shore-based whalers in the eighteenth century 

were about as different as they could be from 

those of menhaden crews in the twentieth century. 

Other change factors have also been persistently 

in evidence for at least that length of time. With 

the capricious opening and closing of inlets by 

storms and hurricanes, piloting and lightering 

became less–common occupations and many men 

took up fishing instead. Travel and trade patterns 

as well as means of livelihood altered as canals 

opened (and closed); the coming of roads, bridges, 

and ferries had similar effects. Even tourism, now 

pervasive on the Banks, arrived at different times, 

brought different clienteles in different places, 

produced different developmental patterns, and 

impacted whatever cultural distinctiveness existed 

at different locations in different ways, to different 

degrees, and at different rates.

Broad claims of cultural distinctiveness, stability, 

and durability also mute critically necessary 

attention to race and class, as we have argued 

in Chapter 5. Necessary attention to gender 

is also backgrounded or omitted. As GarrityBlake was careful to point out in her study of 

the menhaden industry, the lives of fishermen’s 

wives (and of women more generally, including 

those who worked in the processing factories) 

were impacted by the industry in ways quite 

different in some respects from those of their 

14 These characterizations follow graphs in Michael 

W. Street, Thomas R. Rickman, and Walter Godwin, 

History and Status of North Carolina’s Marine 

Fisheries (Raleigh: North Carolina Department 

of Conservation and Development, Division of 

Commercial and Sports Fisheries, 1971), which we 

reproduced in Chapter 4. On the menhaden fisheries, 

see Garrity-Blake, The Fish Factory, also extensively 

cited in Chapter 4.

husbands.15 Paradoxically, evidence of the ultimate 

insupportability of any claim to a unique, stable, 

tradition-based Outer Banks culture emerges most 

convincingly from careful study of its most often 

cited feature: “hoi toide” speech. 

Hoi (but Ebbing) Toide: A Close 

Look at the Brogue 

A Google search for “hoi toide” produces more 

than 3,000 references to scholarly and popular 

books and articles, journalistic accounts, National 

Educational Television’s nationally distributed 

The Carolina Brogue (1994), the Outer Banks 

Chamber of Commerce’s “Outer Banks Lexicon,” 

and the BBC’s characterization of Ocracoke as 

“the Galapagos of language.”16 No other single 

feature of Outer Banks life has received so much 

commentary or is so widely trusted as a marker 

of its character. Long denounced as substandard 

English, it has in recent years been rehabilitated as 

a valued cultural feature, perhaps partly because 

it sounds vaguely British (and hence culturally 

preferred).

In 1962, University of North Carolina linguist 

Robert Howren described some salient features 

of the Carolina brogue, as it is called, in Ocracoke 

village.17 As early as 1910, Howren noted, it was 

already viewed as endangered by the advent of 

daily mail boats, ending what he (incorrectly) 

believed to be the island’s century-long isolation. 

The brogue-eroding communication was increased 

by the completion of a road from Oregon Inlet to 

Ocracoke in 1957 and the inauguration of ferry 

service to Atlantic three years later.

Presaging what later investigators would also 

conclude about the brogue, Howren observed 

that its system of characteristically stressed vowels 

“differs structurally only in minor details from the 

systems of the other dialects of the Atlantic states.” 

15 Garrity-Blake, The Fish Factory, 32–34, 39–40, 84, 

99–102.

16 The lexicon may be found at http://www.

outerbankschamber.com/relocation/history/names.

cfm. BBC quotation from WUNC-TV announcement of 

the film (http://www.unctv.org/carolinabrogue/index.

html).

17 Robert Howren, “The Speech of Ocracoke, North 

Carolina,” American Speech 37, no. 3 (October 1962): 

163–175.
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Down East, Far West, and Hoi Toide: Thinking About Culture and the Outer Banks

Two of its “most immediately evident phonological 

features” were the postvocalic /r/ (“Cubar” instead 

of “Cuba”) and the oi diphthong in tide. Lexically 

(that is, with regard to vocabulary), mainland/

general coastal/Ocracoke overlap was high. Hence 

the degree of uniqueness was low. Many words 

were current in all areas, but there was a “sizeable” 

group of Ocracoke expressions encountered 

infrequently or not at all in the rest of the state 

(e.g., the New England term comforter for a padded 

bedcover, instead of comfort, the more frequently 

encountered southern term; hummock for a small 

tree-covered hill; and a few nautical terms, such 

as fatback for menhaden). Howren concluded 

tentatively that Outer Banks speech “differs 

markedly from the Southern dialect” with regard 

to a few phonological and lexical features, but 

that those differences “should not be permitted to 

obscure the numerous similarities between [it] and 

that of the upper South.”18

Several years after Howren, Hilda Jaffe completed 

her Michigan State University Ph.D. dissertation 

on the Carteret County version of the brogue.19

Jaffe based her study on data from a then-recent 

linguistic atlas and a dozen local informants, 

lamenting “the overwhelming reluctance of 

the people of these isolated communities to be 

interviewed.”20 Unfortunately, Jaffe (like Howren 

before her) did not question the “isolation” of 

the Outer Banks. From the eighteenth century 

onward, she said, Bankers “stayed where they had 

settled” and had been left “virtually undisturbed 

until . . . the early part of the twentieth century.” 

Only since the 1940s, she judged, “has the outside 

world begun to encroach on their isolation.” 

Their speech thus remained “surprisingly unlike 

the general speech of the rest of eastern North 

Carolina,” despite the influence of public schools 

and the media. Jaffe found that the brogue was still 

“distinctive enough to bewilder strangers” and 

that people’s “communal solidarity,” tightly linked 

families, and prior experiences with journalists 

18 Ibid., 164, 168, 171–174. Howren’s detailed 

phonological and lexical analysis need not be 

recounted at length here.

19 Hilda Jaffe, “The Speech of the Central Coast of North 

Carolina: The Carteret County Version of the Banks 

‘Brogue’ ” (Ph.D. Diss., Michigan State University, 

1965).

20 Ibid., 2. The atlas Jaffe worked from was Hans Kurath 

and Raven I. McDavid, eds., The Pronunciation of 

English in the Atlantic States (Ann Arbor: University 

of Michigan Press, 1961).

who stigmatized them made them reluctant to trust 

or mingle with strangers from outside.21

Clearly, Jaffe’s understanding of the area’s 

demographic and cultural history was quite 

rudimentary. The volume on state history she 

used dated from 1858, and the later sources she 

referenced were few and limited; her chapter 

on settlement history was three pages long.22

Her dozen informants, male and female, ranged 

from high-school age through their mid-fifties, 

with the majority in their twenties and thirties. 

A few were descended from what Jaffe called 

“original settlers,” but they had lived in the area 

for varying (sometimes fairly short) periods of 

time, some having been born (and/or having 

spent much of their young, or even adult, lives) 

elsewhere. At the time of the interviews, several 

were living in Morehead City, and others in 

Marshallberg, Harkers Island, Williston, and 

elsewhere in Carteret County.23 Clearly they were 

not a promising array for the study she undertook. 

Working out of a limited and skewed set of data, 

Jaffe argued that pronunciation (especially the 

diphthong of tide / toide) was the brogue’s most 

distinctive feature, rather than vocabulary or 

grammar, although she also examined a range of 

distinctive verb forms and a few other vocabulary 

features.24 Overall, her study turned out to be thin 

in every respect, and consequently of little use.

Fortunately, linguist Walt Wolfram took up the task 

anew several decades later, publishing a much more 

thorough study of the Carolina brogue.25 Besides 

being a superior linguist technically, Wolfram was 

a more sophisticated analyst of historical context 

and social/cultural change. His view of language 

was capacious enough to comprehend the dynamic 

processes through which the brogue emerged, 

changed, adapted, and distinguished itself (or did 

not) from other bordering or even distant language 

areas. Wolfram established at the outset of his 

21 Ibid., 2.

22 Ibid., 10–12. By the mid-1960s, reliable secondary 

sources on aspects of North Carolina history pertinent 

to Jaffe’s study were readily available.

23 Ibid., 13-17.

24 Ibid., 9, 18–25, 81ff.

25 Wolfram, Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks. With other 

colleagues, Wolfram also published a later book on 

the same topic, Kirk Hazen, Natalie Schilling-Estes, 

and Walt Wolfram, Dialect Change and Maintenance 

on the Outer Banks, Publication of the American 

Dialect Society 81 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama 

Press, 1999).
184 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Down East, Far West, and Hoi Toide: Thinking About Culture and the Outer Banks

study that early settlers on the Banks came from 

several contributing areas, England, tidewater 

Virginia, and Ireland salient among them. Early 

Ocracokers, he explained, spoke several varieties 

of Early Modern English (EME), themselves in 

evidence in many other places and characterized 

by considerable inner diversity. The Civil War 

resulted in other significant contributing streams 

from the northeastern United States, and both the 

Great Depression and the growth of tourism after 

World War II introduced other change elements.26

Wolfram struggled with—but proved unable to 

resolve—the question of cultural isolation. On 

the one hand, he argued that isolation was an 

important factor in local language development, 

and even posited that despite the presence of fairly 

large numbers of slaves, the brogue “does not seem 

to have been influenced” by African American 

speech. The area, he said, has been “well removed 

from the language evolution that occurred [on the 

mainland] from Elizabethan times to the present 

day.” On the other hand, Wolfram recognized that 

whatever part isolation played, it was episodic and 

conditional. “One key factor in the development of 

the unique Ocracoke brogue,” he said,

was the isolation of Ocracokers from the 

mainland, although in its earliest days 

Ocracoke Village was probably not as isolated 

as one might think. Rather, the village was a 

booming port town . . . . Thanks to all [the] 

ship traffic, early residents of Ocracoke would 

have come into frequent contact with travelers 

from throughout England, the colonies, and 

the world.

Hatteras Inlet began to close in the 1730s, Wolfram 

notes, routing traffic through Ocracoke, but a storm 

in 1846 reopened it, shifting traffic again. Canals 

and railroads introduced analogous dynamics, 

as did hard-surface highways and ferries in later 

years.27 Was it then isolated, or not, one must ask, 

and when, for how long, and how thoroughly? 

The historical record suggests fairly clearly (see 

especially Chapter 2 above on the Atlantic world) 

that it never was—certainly not very thoroughly, or 

for very long. 

26 Wolfram, Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks, 7–20.

27 Ibid., 2, 15–18. It is paradoxical that Wolfram credited 

isolation as a factor to the extent that he did, given 

his generally dynamic and processual conception of 

language development.

Whatever the truth about isolation, how did 

Wolfram describe the brogue? In his detailed 

linguistic analysis, Wolfram focused on the 

phonological, lexical, and structural features that 

had interested Howren and Jaffe before him. His 

fieldwork was far more extensive and careful 

than Jaffe’s, however, stretching over several 

years and involving large numbers of informants. 

With regard to the perennially fascinating matter 

of pronunciation, Wolfram observed that “To 

a large extent, the association of the Ocracoke 

brogue with British English comes from the classic 

pronunciation of the /i/ vowel in hoi toide.” The 

vowel was regularly seized upon by commentators, 

he said, because it contrasts so strongly both with 

standard /i/ and with the characteristic southern /

ah/. Unlike former commentators who cast the 

/i = oi/ as universal in the brogue, Wolfram was 

careful to note that how local speakers use it 

“depends upon age, social setting and even micro 

speech context or other words they are using at the 

moment.” High tide is always hoi toide, he said, but 

the same /i/ in tire or fire is rendered as a southern /

ah/, resulting in tar and far.

28

The postvocalic /r/ is similarly used, Wolfram 

found. Ocracoke is “an r-pronouncing dialect,” 

Wolfram argued: far instead of fah, cart instead of 

caht. At the time of early settlement, he observed, 

r-lessness was considered low and rustic; it 

achieved higher status only at the end of the 

eighteenth century. Such shifts reveal the essential 

fickleness of language, Wolfram cautioned, going 

further to insist that there is “nothing intrinsically 

‘better’ about certain pronunciations than others. 

. . . Social judgments about pronunciations 

can change as rapidly and arbitrarily as the 

pronunciations themselves.”29

Wolfram also examined both vocabulary and 

sentence structure, finding a long list of identifiable 

Ocracoke words and sentence patterns. Nonnatives 

are dingbatters, menhaden are fatback, to 

mommuck means to harass or bother, down Sound

is south of Ocracoke, and offshore can mean crazy 

or silly. Local sentence structure employs repeated 

negatives, a-prefixing (“I’m a-goin’ to . . . ), and 

completive dones (“I done forgot to get the mail”), as 

well as the socially stigmatized but etymologically 

grounded and useful pan-southern y’all and 

28 Ibid., 50–60.

29 Ibid., 64–72.
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Down East, Far West, and Hoi Toide: Thinking About Culture and the Outer Banks

ain’t.

30 Hence if one tries simply to describe the 

most characteristically recognizable features of the 

brogue, one easily comes up with a substantial list 

of items.

But what about the age-old claim that the brogue is 

unique, handed down in isolation from generation 

to generation, durably resistant to contamination, 

jealously guarded and cherished as a cornerstone 

of local identity, and often troublesomely 

unintelligible to outsiders? Wolfram’s conclusion 

is: a little bit yes, a lot more no, and it depends 

on the context within which one views it. And in 

any case, the system is far more complicated than 

most people (whether locals or outside journalists 

or even some scholars) argue that it is. Many of 

its features, Wolfram says, “are not unique to this 

island specifically or even to the Outer Banks 

in general, but are found in other regions of the 

United States as well.” Not all of those features 

are used by all Ocracokers, especially younger and 

middle-aged speakers, and some who use them 

don’t use them all the time. Wolfram’s “overall 

impression” of Ocracoke English, he said, is that it 

“is distinctive not because of the many structures 

found only in this dialect, but because of the way in 

which . . . patterns have been joined together in the 

formation of this particular variety.” 31 What makes 

the Ocracoke dialect unique, to the extent that it 

is, he says, is “the particular way in which [these] 

features are combined . . . [like] a new recipe that 

has been created by mixing some well-known 

ingredients with a few lesser-known [ones] in an 

imaginative way.” 32

The brogue, that is to say, is a continuously 

evolving product of the same processes of change 

that affect all language, all the time, everywhere. 

Our foregoing chapters have chronicled many of 

those change processes: early settlement; later 

in and out-migration; the opening and closing 

of inlets and the consequent modifications 

in shipping; the dramatic and destructive 

interventions of hurricanes; the advent of maritime 

slavery with its particular patterns; the disruptions 

of war; the coming (and going) of government 

programs, institutions, and personnel; the 

30 Ibid., 74–94.

31 Ibid., 70.

32 Ibid., 27.

development of tourism; and the designation of 

vast swaths of the Banks as national seashores.33

In sum, it appears that Wolfram characterizes 

the Carolina brogue as a distinctive assemblage 

of elements deriving in the earliest period from 

several dialects of Early Middle English and Irish 

brought by early settlers, adapted over the years 

through the creative admixture of northeastern and 

southern elements, with all components of which 

it shares recognizable features of pronunciation, 

vocabulary, and structure. Those explanations we 

find easily demonstrable and unarguable. But we 

are aware of no historical evidence to substantiate 

any claim of isolation as a significant contextual 

factor, and much evidence to the contrary.

Down East and Far West: 

Bankers’ Linguistic Cousins in the 

Mountains 

Wolfram’s aim was not only to describe and 

analyze the way Ocracokers talk, but also to 

understand the relationship of their language 

system to those of other areas, wherever situated: 

other Outer Banks communities, the lowland 

South, and the non-South (from New England 

to the Midwest). He quickly concluded that the 

Ocracoke system was closely related in some 

respects to near-shore inland North Carolina, 

to non-Southern systems, to general “Southern” 

speech, and to some northeastern speech areas. 

With regard to vocabulary, he observed that “The 

bulk of the current Ocracoke vocabulary has a 

decidedly southern flavor to it, seasoned with some 

special Outer Banks terms and spiced up with a few 

words found only on the island.”34 Once one passes 

beyond the near-shore area, however, the next area 

of linguistic congruence, Wolfram argued, was 

not the adjacent piedmont, as one might expect, 

but rather the mountainous western counties. 

“One of the regions whose dialect most resembles 

the brogue,” he wrote, “is Appalachia.” In many 

respects, it turned out that the speech of Ocracoke 

“is more like speech in the mountains of western 

North Carolina than that of the intervening 

lowland areas.”35

33 Ibid., 22–28. The impact of television, studies show, 

has been less than is commonly supposed.

34 Ibid., 104–105.

35 Ibid., 27, 114–115.
186 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Down East, Far West, and Hoi Toide: Thinking About Culture and the Outer Banks

This rather surprising turn in Wolfram’s argument 

appears to have arisen for several reasons. The 

most obvious was that as a linguist intimately 

familiar with American dialects, he simply noticed 

some similarities in pronunciation, vocabulary, and 

sentence structure between the Carolina brogue 

of the Outer Banks and the speech of the western 

North Carolina mountains. He had after all been 

studying speech variations in the Appalachian 

region for about twenty years (with some two 

hundred informants, he reported) before he turned 

to the Outer Banks and was especially familiar 

with the data those investigations had produced.36

Indeed the many similarities in pronunciation, 

vocabulary, and sentence structure he cited were 

striking: a-prefixing of verb forms (a-fishin’), the 

completive done (She done went), double modals 

(might could), possessive pronouns ending in 

–n (hisn), and others. The vowel pronunciation 

bar instead of bear he said was “so strong in the 

Appalachian dialect that it even surfaces in songs 

about the mountains” such as “The Ballad of Davy 

Crockett”—an unfortunate choice of example, 

since the song actually derived from a Walt Disney 

movie of the 1950s.37

36 Wolfram seems to have begun his Appalachian 

work as principal investigator on a National 

Institute of Education study, Sociolinguistic Variables 

in Appalachian Dialects and Their Effect Upon 

Evaluation of Children’s Reading, around 1974. 

With Donna Christian, he published Sociolinguistic 

Variables in Appalachian Dialects (final report of 

National Institute of Education Grant No. G-74-0026; 

1975) and Appalachian Speech (Washington, DC: 

Center for Applied Linguistics, 1976). Several articles 

on Appalachian language appeared in Appalachian 

Journal in the 1970s and 1980s (4:224–35, 5:92–102, 

11:215–226). Shortly before he began his Outer Banks 

work, he published with Donna Christian Variation 

and Change in Geographically Isolated Communities: 

Appalachian English and Ozark English (Tuscaloosa: 

University of Alabama Press, 1988). These and 

other data on Wolfram’s work come from his North 

Carolina State University curriculum vitae (http://

www.ncsu.edu/linguistics/wolfram.php#cv).

37 Wolfram, Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks, 99, 109. The 

song was introduced in Walt Disney’s Davy Crocket, 

King of the Wild Frontier in December 1954. It was 

first recorded by Bill Hayes the following February, 

and then by Tennessee Ernie Ford on March 19, 1955. 

As a key item in the ensuing Davy Crockett craze, it 

eventually sold 10 million copies. Joel Whitburn, The 

Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits, 5th ed. (New York: 

Billboard Books, 1992), 178, 214, 518. More useful 

and reliable data on Appalachian dialect usage in 

traditional and commercial song was available to 

Wolfram in the vast field and commercial country 

music holdings in the Southern Historical Collection at 

the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which 

were by 1990 the second or third largest in the world.

Another reason for Wolfram’s having concentrated 

on the Appalachian comparison appears to have 

been that he understood (misunderstood, as it 

turned out) the region to be (and to have been for 

a very long time) “isolate[ed] from other American 

dialect areas,” and in that sense analogous to 

the “isolated” Outer Banks, and consequently 

useful for comparative purposes.38 “Many parts of 

Appalachia,” he observed, “far distant from regular 

transportation and communication routes because 

of the difficult mountainous terrain, existed in 

a kind of isolation similar to that created by the 

stretch of water that separates the Outer Banks 

from the mainland.”39

The Outer Banks and Appalachia, it turns out, 

share more than the specific dialect ties Wolfram 

asserted. For more than two centuries, both 

areas have been viewed as remote, isolated, and 

“different.” Appalachia has been widely (but 

wrongly) understood as a home to old-stock 

whites descended from noble English forbears. 

Hence early settlers and the generations that 

came after them spoke, as many a commentator 

fancied, “Elizabethan” English. Steering clear of 

modernity it all its forms, they (it was thought) 

cherished the old ballads and folkways, told quaint 

folk tales, played haunting modal tunes on ancient 

instruments (the “Appalachian” dulcimer being 

favored), cooked in the old ways and used the 

old cures, and hewed to old-time religion in their 

little country churches. Such notions combined 

to cast Appalachia in popular understanding and 

popular media as exceptionalist—a region outside 

(or exceptional to) mainstream history, experience, 

38 Wolfram, Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks, 109. Wolfram 

mentions isolation as a factor several times (e.g., 11, 

78, 114)

39 Ibid., 27.
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Down East, Far West, and Hoi Toide: Thinking About Culture and the Outer Banks

and norms.40 It was a myth (and an analytical 

trap) that Wolfram fell headlong into. Many 

pronunciation features of Appalachian English, 

he said, are analogous to those that have been 

preserved “mainly in regions that historically have 

not had much contact with speakers of mainstream 

English.”41

This misstep is particularly surprising in view 

of the fact that Wolfram conducted much of his 

Appalachian research in two West Virginia counties 

(Mercer and Monroe), the first of which had (as he 

himself pointed out) experienced the dramatic rise 

of industrial coal mining, with its attendant social, 

economic, cultural, and political dislocations, after 

the turn of the twentieth century.42 Coal mining 

linked Mercer County tightly not only to national 

but also, given the structure of the coal industry, 

to international markets. Many Mercer County 

40 Scholarly literature documenting the origins, 

forms, and social and political uses of these 

mostly groundless but widely cherished notions is 

vast. On popular understanding of the region as 

exceptionalist, see Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our 

Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers 

in the American Consciousness, 1970–1920 (Chapel 

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); W. 

K. McNeil, Appalachian Images in Folk and Popular 

Culture, 2nd ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee 

Press, 1995); and David Hsiung, Two Worlds in the 

Tennessee Mountains: Exploring the Origins of 

Appalachian Stereotypes (Lexington: University 

Press of Kentucky, 1997). On early twentieth-century 

deployment of such notions in cultural institutions 

and by commercial merchandizers, see Whisnant, All 

That Is Native and Fine, and Jane S. Becker, Selling 

Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an 

American Folk, 1930–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of 

North Carolina Press, 1998). 

The noble “Elizabethan” image had a negative 

counterpart in the image of the hillbilly. See Altina 

Waller, Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change 

in Appalachia, 1860–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of 

North Carolina Press, 1988), Williamson, Hillbillyland, 

and Harkins, Hillbilly. The notion of a geographically 

or culturally definable “Appalachia” itself is 

problematic; we cannot engage those problems here. 

Suffice it to say that the region has at various times 

and for various purposes been mapped to include 

anywhere from fewer than 200 to more than 400 

counties in from six to thirteen states. Maps are 

widely available online.

41 Wolfram, Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks, 11.

42 Despite the crucial differences between the 

two counties themselves, and the even stronger 

differences between Mercer County and any 

random county outside the coalfields of Central 

Appalachia, Wolfram and Christian maintained in 

Appalachian Speech, 5–6, that the two counties were 

“representative of central/southern Appalachia.”

miners, like others throughout the coalfields, lived 

not on rural farms but in turbulent mining towns.43

Since the late 1960s, however, many scholars have 

reconsidered, redocumented, and rewritten the 

history of the region. Their work has led inexorably 

to the consensus, already strongly emergent by the 

mid-1970s when Wolfram began his Appalachian 

work, that that history cannot be adequately 

understood from an exceptionalist perspective 

congruent with any notion of “isolation.” Scholars 

have documented again and again that all parts 

of the region were thoroughly connected to the 

“outside” from the eighteenth century onward, 

first by drovers’ roads and market paths; later by 

turnpikes, highways, and railroads; and through 

a succession of periods by print journalism and 

advertising, mail order merchandising, film and 

recorded music, and radio and television.

It has in fact been relatively easy to document that 

the region has not developed outside mainstream 

norms and processes, is not and has never been 

all white (or even all English-speaking), has 

not remained stubbornly and pervasively rural 

and agricultural, and therefore has not escaped 

the turmoil and dislocation associated with 

industrialization and modernization. 44 Hence the 

current meticulously documented perspective on 

the Appalachian region (however it is mapped) 

is anti-exceptionalist. In all of these respects, the 

western mountains are very like the Outer Banks.

43 See Wolfram and Christian, Appalachian Speech, 

Figures 1 and 2 at 7, 9. Wolfram and Christian used 

data from the same two counties in their later (1982–

1984) National Science Foundation report Variation 

and Change in Geographically Isolated Communities. 

For the statewide context of such dramatic 

transformations in many West Virginia counties, see 

John Williams, West Virginia and the Captains of 

Industry (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 

2003). The rapid and socially disruptive urbanization 

and industrialization of the region has been a major 

preoccupation of Appalachian scholars since the early 

1960s and was already by the early 1960s convincingly 

(if not yet fully) documented.

44 See for example Whisnant, Modernizing the 

Mountaineer; Ronald Eller, Miners, Millhands, and 

Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian 

South, 1880–1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee 

Press, 1982); Pudup, Billings, and Waller, Appalachia 

in the Making; and John C. Inscoe, Appalachians 

and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to 

Segregation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 

2001).
188 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Down East, Far West, and Hoi Toide: Thinking About Culture and the Outer Banks

Whether Wolfram was sufficiently grounded in his 

understanding of Appalachian history and culture 

is not in itself overwhelmingly important for our 

purposes, but neither is it irrelevant. The important 

issues here are two: (1) Wolfram’s meticulous 

and irrefutable demonstration that the Carolina 

brogue is not a linguistically unique product of its 

own isolation, but rather a special mix of linguistic 

elements drawn from diverse sources and sharing 

most (but not all) of its defining features with 

other language systems, and (2) the implications 

of the nearly universal belief that the Outer Banks 

were always “isolated” and that hoi toide thus 

survived both as product of the isolation and as 

a useful index to the exceptionalism of “Outer 

Banks culture.” It is past time, we suggest, for 

this romantic notion about the Outer Banks to be 

subjected to the sort of scrutiny recently brought to 

bear upon its dialect-linked sister area to the west.

Why did that scrutiny arise with regard to the 

mountains, and of what use might it be with regard 

to the Outer Banks?45 It arose primarily because 

in the early 1960s a number of disturbing social 

and economic issues (poverty, poor schools, black 

lung disease among coal miners, stripmining, 

and others) claimed the attention of both the 

general public and of younger scholars already 

energized by and engaged with broader issues of 

the period (e.g., school desegregation and civil 

rights, the Vietnam War, environmentalism). 

Finding the then-meager existing literature on 

the region to depend on a romantic narrative 

that could not be squared with the fairly easily 

available historical record, those scholars set out 

to rewrite the region’s history. Though initially 

occupied with producing a revisionist but still to 

some degree exceptionalist narrative, they moved 

slowly but inexorably toward an anti-exceptionalist 

analysis. That move consistently highlighted the 

analytical uselessness of the old narrative, which 

reinforced exceptionalism in what was clearly not 

an exceptional region. That old perspective had 

obscured whole areas of the region’s historical 

experience: industrialization and urbanization, 

45 By this line of inquiry we do not mean at all to 

suggest that there has as yet been no analogous 

analysis of the Outer Banks. Examples come easily 

to mind. Stick’s popular but carefully researched The 

Outer Banks of North Carolina, though written in the 

1950s, is still useful. Cecelski’s Along Freedom Road 

and The Waterman’s Song both examine the crucially 

linked elements of race and culture, as does GarrityBlake’s The Fish Factory. 

race and race relations, labor history and class 

structure, women’s experience, trade and cultural 

exchange, intraregional diversity.46

We suggest that an analogous misconception has 

prevented a long-overdue reexamination of Outer 

Banks history and culture. A useful first step might 

be to ask why a historically unsupportable narrative 

of an isolated, culturally unique, universally hoi 

toiding Outer Banks came from, and why it has 

survived for so long. As we pointed out earlier, 

early readings of the thinly-scattered population 

were rather negative, from William Byrd’s culturally 

lapsed Adamites to media outlets’ heartless 

scavengers of shipwrecks. Those depraved images 

seem to have waned in the early and middle 

decades of the nineteenth century and thus were 

not picked up and developed by popular media, as 

were those of depraved mountaineers. Moreover, 

as these negative images of mountaineers were 

spreading in the media, the Life-Saving Service and 

the Coast Guard supplied publicly attractive images 

of courage and heroism linked to Outer Banks 

families, the Midgetts perhaps preeminent among 

them.

It also happened that the textile mills and tobacco 

factories of the piedmont did not extend to the 

coastal counties and the Outer Banks, and thus 

did not produce the very visible class and racial 

tensions that attended such development—

the “linthead” stereotype, for example. What 

industry there was in the region at various periods 

was located inland rather than on the Banks 

themselves: turpentine and naval stores from the 

late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century; 

rice and tobacco culture in the antebellum period; 

logging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth 

centuries; phosphate mining mostly later, first 

in the Castle Hayne area north of Wilmington 

around 1900 and then in the vast Pungo River 

Formation of Beaufort County from the late 1950s 

onward. Further, especially after World War II, the 

Outer Banks / coastal counties tourism industry 

organized itself to flood the media with positive 

images of Outer Banks folk and their maritime 

46 For a detailed discussion of this analytical shift, see 

Dwight B. Billings, Mary Beth Pudup, and Altina 

Waller, “Taking Exception with Exceptionalism: The 

Emergence and Transformation of Historical Studies 

of Appalachia,” in Pudup, Billings, and Waller, 

Appalachia in the Making, 1–24.
National Park Service 189

Down East, Far West, and Hoi Toide: Thinking About Culture and the Outer Banks

environment (a topic to which we will return at 

length in the following chapter). 

All of these factors combined to allow and even 

support the dissemination of a positive, romantic 

image of Outer Banks history and culture seriously 

at odds with important aspects of its actual history. 

That story of isolation and miraculous cultural 

survivals has proven widely attractive in some 

respects, but the much richer (anti-exceptionalist) 

story could be far more attractive, even to the 

tourists so assiduously courted by the little coastal 

towns and the chambers of commerce. 

Cultural Survival and Revival: An 

Endangered Dialect 

Wolfram’s analysis of the Carolina brogue brought 

him at length to a contradiction. “For two and 

a half centuries,” he insisted near the end of his 

book, “Ocracoke was isolated geographically, 

economically, and socially.” But now, oddly 

enough, it was suddenly an “endangered dialect,” 

beset by social and cultural changes on every hand. 

How could this be? Had these change factors been 

belatedly and suddenly introduced?

Wolfram had linked the Outer Banks to Appalachia 

partly through what he took to be their shared 

isolation and exceptionalism. But his own 

examination of language in West Virginia’s Mercer 

County had revealed that notion to be groundless. 

More careful attention to coastal North Carolina 

history would have shown it to be equally so for 

the Outer Banks. Whether framing his study of the 

brogue within the broader history of the changeinfused social, economic, cultural, and political 

systems of which the Banks were perennially a part 

would have led to a substantially different linguistic 

analysis cannot be known. But it would at least 

have made the brogue’s endangered status in the 

1990s less paradoxical.

To his credit, Wolfram responded to the fact of that 

change and endangerment in a socially sensitive 

and imaginative way by engaging the complex 

issues of the survival and revival of endangered 

language in other settings (Hebrew in Israel and 

Irish in Ireland, for example) and by working 

with local teachers and students to examine and 

engage issues of language change, survival, and 

revival. Not overlooking the difficulties of such 

revival, Wolfram and his colleagues for several 

years taught weeklong courses on the dialect in 

schools as part of the social studies curriculum 

and also produced a short video on the brogue. 

In his concluding discussion, Wolfram explored 

the complicated examples of Ocracokers who 

migrated out, experienced a variety of changes 

through education, travel, and employment, and 

then returned to the Banks, some becoming “more 

. . . islander than ever” and stronger users of the 

brogue.47

Wolfram’s hopes were modest, however. He 

admitted that if the brogue were to be revived, the 

impetus for that revival had to arise from within 

the community; that it could in any case hardly be 

expected to recover its former vitality, since most 

young people were not embracing it; and that 

what linguists themselves could do to encourage 

revival was limited.48 “It may be ebb tide for the hoi 

toide dialect,” Wolfram cautioned, “but its legacy 

deserves to be indelibly preserved.”49

In what appropriate and effective ways Cape 

Lookout National Seashore might involve itself in 

this discourse deserves thoughtful and extended 

consideration. At the very least, it should be careful 

that its interpretation of life and culture on the 

Banks does not reinforce or legitimize further the 

analytical confusions of the past.

47 Wolfram, Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks, 126–133.

48 Other examples come to mind: Cajun French in 

Louisiana, various American Indian languages 

including Cherokee in western North Carolina, and 

Welsh.

49 Wolfram, Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks, 136.
190 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study
191

Outer Banks Tourism and the 

Coming of Cape Lookout 

National Seashore

People who accept the expense and physical 

challenges of travel are motivated by widely varied 

factors: the spiritual significance of revered sites; 

the restorative power of baths and springs and 

mountain air; the rarity and beauty of creatures 

to be found in distant habitats; the magnificence 

of monumental landscapes, structures, or great 

art; or the contact with history to be found on 

the hallowed ground of heroic battles. Travelers 

who have come to the Banks for pleasure and 

recreation (in evidence as early as the 1790s but in 

growing numbers since World War II) have been 

attracted by the spectacular maritime environment 

and by what they understand to be the uniquely 

compelling features of local culture. From such 

places, travelers seek spiritual enlightenment 

or redemption, treasured objects, historical 

understanding, physical or emotional healing, 

sensual satisfaction, enhanced social standing, 

or behind-the-scenes views of authentic cultural 

practices.1

1 These and related issues are explored by Dean 

MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure 

Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 

and by numerous other scholars of tourism.

Language used to describe such sought-after 

sites and their boons tends to be essentializing, 

romanticizing, and extravagant in its promises, 

promises that may be only loosely (if at all) related 

to fact. At one level that is not a problem, since the 

main task of the language is to locate human needs 

and desires and to promise to satisfy them through 

some particular experience. But language deployed 

in this way inevitably contributes to the (frequently 

unverified) core of popular discourse about “the 

South,” Appalachia, the Catskills, the Alps, the 

Rhine valley, or the Pampas. Or the Outer Banks. 

Areas that have attracted tourists over long periods 

of time have distinctive life histories. North 

Carolina’s two most developed and visited areas—

the Outer Banks and coast to the east and the 

mountains to the west—have both been attractive 

tourist destinations since the late eighteenth 

century. But travelers to the mountains and the 

coast have sought very different experiences, 

Figure 9-1. Sherrill’s Inn, 1834. Hickory Nut Gap, NC. 

Sherrill’s Inn Collection, D. H. Ramsey Library Special 

Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville.

Figure 9-2. Mountain sanatarium for pulmonary diseases, 

1870s. Asheville, NC. Documenting the American South. 

University Library, The University of North Carolina at 

Chapel Hill. 
192 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

distributed themselves very differently, and shifted 

their preferences over time in distinctive ways.2

Early nineteenth-century western North 

Carolina travelers and tourists clambered out of 

stagecoaches into tiny inns, but their numbers 

grew with the opening of the Buncombe Turnpike 

in 1828, and accommodations improved.3 Wealthy 

lowland families came every summer, many 

believing that hot springs, sulphur springs, and 

mountain air had curative properties, and some 

built lavish summer houses.4 Small inns and hotels 

proliferated in the antebellum period: Buncombe 

County’s Sherrill’s Inn opened in 1834 and 

Walker’s Inn in Andrews in the 1840s; Flat Rock’s 

Woodfield Inn followed a decade later, Haywood 

County’s Battle House before 1850, and Blowing 

Rock’s Watauga Inn in 1888. Later hotels were 

grander. The sumptuous White Sulphur Springs 

Hotel in Waynesville (1878, 1893), the Green Park 

Hotel in Blowing Rock (1891), the Eseeola Inn in 

Linville (1892), Asheville’s massive stone Grove 

Park Inn (1913), and Blowing Rock’s Mayview 

Manor (1922) drew thousands year after year.5 The 

railroad punched through the Swannanoa Tunnel 

into Asheville in 1880, and electric trolleys arrived 

in 1889.6 From then until the Depression, the city 

witnessed boom development, much of it linked to 

2 For an exploration of the patterns in another region, 

see Brown, Inventing New England.

3 The 75-mile Buncombe Turnpike (begun in 1824) led 

from the North Carolina/South Carolina line through 

Flat Rock and Asheville and then along the French 

Broad River to Warm Springs.

4 See for example Philip Noblitt’s account of Piedmont 

textile magnate Moses Cone’s mountain estate 

(1899 ff.) in A Mansion in the Mountains: The Story 

of Moses and Bertha Cone and Their Blowing Rock 

Manor (Boone, NC: Parkway Publishers, 1996). 

George Vanderbilt’s lavish 255-room Biltmore House, 

situated on 125,000 acres of mountain land adjacent 

to Asheville, was completed in 1895. On early tourist 

hotels in Waynesville and Madison County, see Duane 

Oliver, Mountain Gables: A History of Haywood 

County Architecture (Waynesville, NC: Oliver 

Scriptorium, 2001), 55–74.

5 Michael R. Hill, Guide to North Carolina Highway 

Historical Markers, 10th ed. (Raleigh, NC: Office 

of Archives and History, Department of Cultural 

Resources, 2007), 25–27. Michael T. Southern, Jennifer 

F. Martin, and Catherine Bishir, A Guide to the Historic 

Architecture of Western North Carolina (Chapel 

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), offer 

detailed data on these and many other hostelries. See 

also Whisnant, Super-Scenic Motorway, 271–275.

6 Hill, Highway Historical Markers, 27.

tourism, some to its growing reputation as a health 

center for tubercular patients.7

 Asheville experienced more of such growth than 

anywhere else in the North Carolina mountains, 

but other areas became tourist magnets as well, 

especially those along the Blue Ridge Parkway 

that linked the new Great Smoky Mountains and 

Shenandoah National Parks in the late 1930s.8 After 

World War II strings of new motels sprang up in 

places like Maggie Valley, followed by ski resorts 

(Cataloochee was first in 1961) and posh gated 

communities such as Hound Ears and Invershiel, 

some of them developed by multinational 

corporations. 

Four hundred miles to the east, on the Outer 

Banks, distinctive geography, climate, and other 

factors configured tourism very differently. Visitors 

were drawn to the bathing beaches of Ocracoke 

as early as the 1750s and to Nags Head by the 

1830s. By1853, wealthy yacht owners had already 

formed an exclusive club.9 During the last half of 

the century, tourist accommodations sprang up 

from Currituck to Calabash. In the mid-1870s, Dr. 

G. K. Bagby bought and renovated Brunswick’s 

Atlantic Hotel and beguiled guests with promises 

of “A BAND OF MUSIC, FAST SAILING BOATS, 

BATH HOUSES, SURF BATHING, TEN PINS,” 

and a dining table supplied “with all the luxuries 

from land and water.” The closing years of the 

century witnessed the proliferation of hunting 

lodges on the sounds. Around Wilmington and 

Wrightsville Beach, trolley and railroad lines were 

soon carrying throngs to brightly lit music and 

dance pavilions and elegant hotels. From the 1920s 

onward, highways, bridges and ferries brought 

ever-larger streams of tourists, and hard-surfaced 

roads relieved the challenge of driving in the sand.

7 See for example Edwin A. Gatchell, Western North 

Carolina: Its Resources, Climate, Scenery and Salubrity

(New York: A.L. Chatterton Publishing Co., 1885). 

Physician William Gleitsmann (1840–1914) helped to 

put Asheville on the map for pulmonary treatment 

when he established the Mountain Sanitarium for 

Pulmonary Diseases in the 1870s.

8 Whisnant, Super-Scenic Motorway, chronicles the 

development of the Parkway, especially its links to 

the tourism industry and to the tourist sector of 

Asheville’s business community.

9 Ray McAllister, Wrightsville Beach: The Luminous 

Island (Winston-Salem: John F. Blair Publisher, 2007), 

27.
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Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

After the Depression and World War II, boom 

times returned. Beach resorts for people of modest 

means multiplied up and down the coast, and 

vacation homes and cabins stretched row on row 

behind (and sometimes on) the dunes. Legendary 

Outer Banks photographer Aycock Brown began 

his publicity blitz in 1952, and Cape Hatteras and 

Cape Lookout national seashores were established 

in 1958 and 1966.10 Within a few years, subdivisions 

for beach homes stretched north toward the 

Virginia border, matched by gated inland golf 

communities. Sport fishermen began competing for 

water and fish with commercial fishermen. Taking 

advantage of new technologies, kite boarders now 

maneuver across the waves and hang gliders soar 

over the dunes. 

Thus, despite the fact that tourism appeared at 

about the same time on both ends of the state 

and has developed steadily in both locales since, 

it was configured in each place by particularities 

of terrain, climate, flora and fauna, public policy, 

and entrepreneurial and corporate activity. In 

this chapter, we explore the eastern sector of this 

history, one of the most important contexts for 

the establishment, development, and operation of 

CALO.

10 See Brown and Stick, Aycock Brown’s Outer Banks.

The Nags Head and Ocracoke 

Nodes: Eighteenth and Early 

Nineteenth-Century Tourism 

The earliest inn-like establishment along the 

Banks that we have seen reference to was the Eagle 

Tavern, owned by Charles Jordan. Situated at 

Hertford on one of the long fingers of Currituck 

Sound, the Eagle was accepting guests as early 

as 1762. Opened initially in the owner’s home, 

it grew to twenty-five rooms spread across six 

lots. George Washington reportedly stayed there 

while surveying the Great Dismal Swamp.11

Charles Jordan’s tavern in Hertford did not spark 

a tourism boom on Currituck Sound, however. 

Early beachgoers preferred Ocracoke or Nags 

Head. “This healthy place,” Jonathan Price wrote 

of Ocracoke in 1795 in his publicity brochure 

promoting Shell Castle, “is in autumn the resort 

of many of the inhabitants of the main.”12 In the 

early years of the nineteenth century, Washington, 

North Carolina, businessman and entrepreneur 

John Gray Blount took his extended family on 

summer vacations to Ocracoke, where they were 

entertained by John Wallace, Blount’s partner in 

the development of Shell Castle.13

Even tiny Portsmouth, which did not attract a 

significant number of tourists until the boom in 

sport hunting toward the end of the nineteenth 

century, had become a vacation haven for some 

families by the 1840s and 1850s. Among them 

was the Havens-Bonner family from Washington, 

NC, members of which frequently made monthlong trips to Portsmouth for health reasons, 

during which they enjoyed the delights of seaside 

life. “Dear Husband,” Mary Havens wrote from 

Portsmouth on September 15, 1857,

Fryday [sic] evening we went to the beach 

. . . on horseback . . . . We went up past the 

habitable part of the Island then across to the 

beach riding all the way down . . . . The sun 

had just sunk to rest, when we got there. There 

were 25 [of us] in all . . . . It was the wildest 

sight I ever looked upon, the children were in 

the surf while the older ones were handing out 

supper . . . . It was a delicious repast, though 

11 Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 616–617.

12 Price, A Description of Occacock [Ocracoke] Inlet, 1. 

13 Keith, “Three North Carolina Blount Brothers in 

Business and Politics,” 29–30.

Figure 9-3. Advertisement for Brunswick’s Atlantic Hotel, 

July 1877. Kell, North Carolina’s Coastal Carteret County 

During the Civil War, 16.
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Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

ordinary food. Then with one accord all threw 

themselves on the bosom of old Ocean. Such 

delightful enjoyment was never mine before 

(in that way). All were happy. I suppose we 

remained an hour, the moon rising, but still 

greater enchantment when we turned our faces 

homeward, where we arrived all safely and 

were soon wrapt in the arms of Morpheus.14

Nags Head received early interest from Perquimans 

County planter Francis Nixon, who bought 200 

acres there and built a summer house. He later sold 

lots to others, but within a few years shifting sands 

were threatening summerhouses built on the lots 

he had sold. Nevertheless, by 1838, the area had its 

first hotel, and by 1841, the Ocean Retreat was also 

being advertised as a “new hotel.” 

By 1850, it was clear that the difficulty of reaching 

Nags Head was a major problem. Soon a steamer 

began to ferry guests down the Blackwater 

River from Norfolk into the Chowan and across 

Albemarle and Roanoke sounds to Nags Head. A 

new half-mile railroad carried tourists back and 

forth between the beach and the hotel. The strategy 

14 Havens and Bonner Family Papers, 1829–1890, 

collection 5140, Southern Historical Collection, 

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

worked; other steamers increased the frequency 

of trips, and hotel rooms were filled by satisfied 

visitors (including newspaper editors from Norfolk 

who wrote glowing reports of the growing resort).15

George Henry Throop, who visited Nags Head in 

the late 1840s, lamented the passing of what one 

could already describe as old Nags Head, when 

15 Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 96–104. 

Stick’s narrative does not distinguish clearly between 

the Ocean Retreat and Nags Head Hotel. Which one 

he is referring to here is not clear.

Figure 9-5. Ad for Ocean Retreat Hotel, 1841. Old North 

State and Nags Head Advocate (Elizabeth City), May 

25, 1841. Reproduced from Bishir, “The ‘Unpainted 

Aristocracy’: The Beach Cottages of Old Nags Head,” 7.

Figure 9-6. Nag’s Head Hotel advertisement in North 

State Whig (Washington), June 11, 1851. Reproduced 

from Bishir, “The ‘Unpainted Aristocracy’: The Beach 

Cottages of Old Nags Head.” 
National Park Service 195

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

only three families had houses there, no roads 

had been cut or hotels built, and the “restraints of 

fashionable life” had not yet appeared.16 He was 

nevertheless charmed to see “the contrast between 

the white sand-hills and the dark, beautiful green 

of its clusters of oak . . . the neat white cottages 

among the trees, the smoke curling lazily from the 

low chimneys, the fishing-boats and other small 

craft darting to and fro . . . .” Throop reported that 

Planters, merchants, and professional men 

usually have a snug cottage at Nag’s Head, 

to which they remove their families, with 

the plainer and more common articles of 

household furniture, one or more horses, a 

cow, and such vehicles as are fitted for use 

on sandy roads. . . . [S]ometimes half a dozen 

16 George Higby Throop, George Higby Throop, 

1818–1896. Nag’s Head: or, Two Months Among “The 

Bankers.” A Story of Sea-shore Life and Manners.

(Philadelphia, PA: A. Hart, Late Cary & Hart, 1850), 

96–97 (online version at http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/

throop/throop.html). Subsequent quotations from 

this source unless otherwise noted. As Richard Walser 

explained in “The Mysterious Case of George Higby 

Throop (1818–1896),” North Carolina Historical 

Review 33, no. 1 (January 1956): 12–44, Throop was a 

rather mysterious character. Designated as a “novel,” 

Throop’s narrative was actually a journal of his twomonth stay at Nags Head, part of his perhaps seven 

months in North Carolina in 1849. The narrator is 

a tutor to the children of a wealthy North Carolina 

planter, a situation possibly based on Throop’s stay 

in Bertie County with the wealthy Capehart family, 

who owned a summerhouse at Nags Head. The 

facts of Throop’s life are not well known, as Walser 

discovered. He was a New Yorker and achieved note 

as a schoolmaster, poet, composer, and musician. 

Unfortunately, he had a drinking problem (perhaps 

part of the cause of a failed marriage that produced 

a son he never knew until late in his life). During 

drinking bouts, he wandered erratically. Throop 

seems to have taught intermittently in other southern 

states, perhaps longest in Hampshire County, West 

Virginia, where he died in 1896.

servants accompany the family. . . . It costs but 

little, if any more, to keep them here than it 

would to leave them at home. 

To supply the needs of the visitors and their 

retinues, three or four packets ran weekly 

from Elizabeth City, Hertford, and Edenton. 

Amusements were abundant: fox hunting, fishing, 

bowling, taking local excursions, strolling on the 

beach, and swimming in the surf. 

But the main attraction was the hotel, thronged, 

Throop said, by “[s]cores of children and youth, 

whole regiments of young ladies and young 

gentlemen . . . , until the worthy innkeeper stood 

aghast.” He added that,

A siesta after the late dinner leaves you time 

for a short stroll about sunset; and after tea, 

dressing is the universal occupation. At length 

. . . the musician makes his appearance. The . . . 

sets are formed, and the long-drawn “Balance, 

all!” gives the glow of pleasure to every face.

About local people, Throop appeared puzzled and 

divided. “Where, who, and what are the bankers?” 

he asked.

To say the truth, I have seen but little of them. 

. . . I know that they are the landholders along 

the ridge[s] . . . I have seen them mending 

their nets, I have chatted with them, and yet I 

know but little of their character and habits. 

My friend Dr. A-- tells me that many of them 

are miserably poor . . . . Altogether, they seem 

to be a peculiar people. They are isolated from 

the social intercourse, which, in the more 

densely-peopled communities of the mainland, 

refines and elevates the individual. They look 

very jealously, I am told, upon strangers; but 

are clannish, and therefore honest and social 

among themselves. 

Throop’s uncertainty about what to think with 

regard to the bankers foreshadowed themes that 

would become nearly ubiquitous in the years 

ahead. What was already clear to him, however, 

was that trying to build a durable resort in such an 

unstable environment was fraught with difficulty. 

All around him, he saw 

Figure 9-7. The beach at Nags Head, 1860. Harper’s New 

Monthly Magazine, May 1860, 729.
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Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

the gradual entombing of whole acres of 

live-oaks and pines by the gradual drifting of 

the restless sands from the beach. Not a more 

melancholy sight in the world. In a morning’s 

walk, you may pass hundreds of enormous 

oaks, the topmost branches barely visible 

above the surface, while their roots may be 

scores of feet beneath the surface, strangled by 

the merciless sands.

The summer cottage and hotel culture of Nags 

Head proved long-lived. A visitor from Norfolk in 

1851 found a settled community already twenty 

years old. Its members were accustomed to pass 

the weeks, he said,

in refined social intercourse, surrounded by 

the health reviving breezes of old Ocean, the 

season of the year that would expose them to 

sickness on their plantations. [The cottages 

were] of considerable size . . . built in the 

fashion of regular homesteads with spacious 

porches and balconies and convenient out 

houses as if for permanent occupancy. 

They are generally situated on high hills 

with beautiful wooded sides commanding a 

magnificent prospect of the ocean and sound 

. . . . 17

The hotel housed federal troops during the 

Civil War, but the cottagers returned as numerously 

as ever at war’s end, and a new hotel and new 

cottages were soon erected.18 Twenty years later, 

memories of elegant social life were undimmed. 

“At the house,” recalled a Raleigh student, 

we find the usual throng of summer boarders 

. . . lounging or promenading on the piazzas: 

here a party starting for a drive, there a crowd 

of excursionists landing from a sloop . . . . We 

wander over . . . one of the [hotel’s] upper 

verandas. . . . [A] familiar, longed-for voice

calls to us, and . . we are soon on our way to 

the ocean. Along the beach extends a row of 

houses grown old and gray under the suns and 

rains of many summers . . . . 19

Storms, fires, and wars interrupted the idyll at 

times. A fire in 1903 destroyed the hotel, by then 

17 Bishir, The “Unpainted Aristocracy,” 8.

18 Ibid., 9–11.

19 Ibid., 16.

a 150-room structure.20 The steamers continued 

to arrive nevertheless, and in the mid-1920s, Nags 

Head thrived, as it has continued to do since. 

The Closing Years of the Century: 

Hunting Clubs

“Hunting,” says Stuart Marks in his insightful 

study of that enterprise in the South, “is not a 

timeless pursuit within a cultural void. Its means 

and practices [evolve] in keeping with the political, 

economic, social and cultural tempos of the 

time.”21 There is a whole “ecology of meanings” 

associated with hunting, Marks argues: 

For many men, hunting is the quintessential 

masculine activity, for it links their youth, 

when they were just learning about becoming 

men, with their [present]. . . . It recalls that 

early learning, often under the tutelage of 

20 Ibid., 18.

21 Stuart Marks, Southern Hunting in Black and White: 

Nature, History, and Ritual in a Carolina Community

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 

53–54. Subsequent quotations are from this source 

unless otherwise noted.

Figure 9-8. Advertisement for Nags Head featuring 

steamers to Elizabeth City. Elizabeth City Independent, 

July 2, 1926. Reproduced from Bishir, “The ‘Unpainted 

Aristocracy’: The Beach Cottages of Old Nags Head,” 14.
National Park Service 197

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

their fathers, the close associations of men 

engaged in a common pursuit, the triumphs 

over subjects capable of evasion, the mastery 

over technology and dogs, and the pleasures 

associated with the land. . . . Hunting is also 

a way by which some men reaffirm their 

masculine identities. . . . . [It is]a timeless 

activity, for when the game is killed, butchered, 

and served, men still command the homeside 

turf as providers . . . . Hunting is part of a man’s 

. . . obligations to family, church, work, and 

friends. . . . . As a seasonal recreation and as a 

bastion of masculinity, hunting in many rural 

Southern communities persists as a product 

of history and of its associations with regional 

myths and values. 

Much of the tourism that occurred on the Outer 

Banks during the final third of the nineteenth 

century revolved around hunting lodges, many of 

them located on the sounds, that attracted hunters, 

some from far-flung locations and many who had 

both the means to afford such endeavors and the 

elevated social and cultural sense of themselves 

that the endeavor reinforced. “A person socialized 

in hunting,” Marks observes, “reads its symbols 

for their formal, explicit signs as well as for their 

implicit meanings of rank and power, of wealth 

and status, of the boundaries between ‘us’ and 

‘them’ that participants declare by the tone of their 

voice and by their actions, by the style of their 

clothes and by their dispositions, and through 

their use of space and time.” On the Outer Banks, 

the waterfowl sport-hunting enterprise (for such 

it mostly was) marked the intersection of the 

maritime environment, the local culture of hunting 

guides, the social and cultural intervention of 

wealthy northern hunter-vacationers, the dynamics 

of class and race, and the slow evolution of the 

local economy.22

Class differences had long been at the core of 

the hunting enterprise in Europe, and associated 

norms and practices had come to the New World. 

In North Carolina as throughout the colonies, the 

“conflict of two legacies” was in evidence from the 

beginning. There was the English legacy, which 

“restricted the taking of wild animals to those of 

privileged social standing.” But there was also a 

“countervailing tradition of revolting against such 

prerogatives,” and both crossed the Atlantic with 

early settlers. 

In the American South, pre-Civil War structures 

of inequality, Marks explains, played out in the 

culture of hunting as “men of property” tried 

to enforce class differences through game laws 

and regulations. But in general, their ploy was 

unsuccessful, since the courts tended to favor “the 

opening lands for public access and allowing the 

free taking of wildlife as an economic asset.” The 

abundance of wildlife and frontier conditions also 

22 Commercial waterfowl hunting (“market gunning”) 

was discussed in a previous chapter.

Figure 9-9. Principal railroad lines in North Carolina, 1890. Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 939. Map by Mark 

Anderson Moore. North Carolina Office of Archives and History.
198 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

weighed against restrictions on hunting, so the few 

statutes spoke only to encouraging the destruction 

of predators and vermin, regulating the harvest 

of valuable species to preserve breeding stocks, 

restricting the hunting privileges of certain groups 

(such as slaves), and regulating trespass.

The military defeat of the Old South and the 

emancipation of slaves changed the relationship 

of elite planters to their land and to other social 

groups, and that in turn changed their motives 

and methods of taking game. On the whole, elite 

southerners switched from mammals to birds as 

prey and became concerned with distinguishing 

themselves, through their styles of hunting, from 

farmers, factory workers, and commercial hunters. 

At the same time, the closing of hunting lands, long 

considered a sort of commons, for agricultural 

purposes trapped blacks as laborers and forced 

poor whites into a market economy. 

At the close of the Civil War, Marks argues, the 

general public was rather indifferent to the whole 

issue of wildlife, but that indifference “changed 

into a melee of crusades for the wildlife that 

remained” after 1870. Consensus swung away 

from viewing wildlife as an exclusively economic 

resource, “toward a more elitist tradition of sport 

for amusement and of species preservation.” 

Three interrelated factors spurred the rise of 

sport waterfowl hunting on the Outer Banks (as 

in many other locales) after 1870: the coming 

of railroads, improvements in firearms, and the 

rise of sportsmen’s associations. In 1850, Marks 

notes, North Carolina had about 250 miles of 

railroad track, but by 1890 it had more than 3,000. 

As important as the additional miles of track, 

however, was the fact that many of those miles 

linked non-plantation areas to markets. In the 

1880s, small shortline railroads were consolidated 

and tracks were changed to a standard gauge. The 

huge Southern Railway was officially brought 

into being in 1894 by combining many small 

predecessors. One of its two long north-south 

routes extended from Washington, DC, through 

Figure 9-10. Map of Southern Railway system in 1895, with 

branch line from Greensboro to Goldsboro. Leffingwell, The 

Happy Hunting Grounds, 1895.

Figure 9-11. Cover of brochure published by Southern 

Railway to entice hunters to the South, 1895. North 

Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library.
National Park Service 199

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

Charlotte to Jacksonville, Florida; a branch track 

ran from Greensboro east to Goldsboro, where 

it connected with shorter regional lines that 

reached to Wilmington, Morehead City, New Bern, 

Washington, Edenton, and Elizabeth City.23 New 

cold-storage technology allowed railroad cars to 

be filled with perishable items, including waterfowl 

killed by hunters (48). 

In fairly short order, “The second Northern 

invasion of the South came,” Marks observes, “by 

way of refrigerated, Pullman, and private [railroad] 

cars.” The railroads published pamphlets and 

advertisements in journals and newspapers urging 

northerners to “visit the South and hunt game 

where it is more plentiful than in any other section 

of the United States.”24 Such brochures provided 

the names of guides, hotels, and boardinghouses, 

as well as summaries of state and local game laws, 

which varied bewilderingly. “[W]e invite you to 

come South and visit her hospitable people,” the 

Southern Railway brochure said, “promising you 

shooting and fishing such as you never enjoyed 

before.”25

The guns those outsiders carried also soon 

underwent changes that made them safer, faster, 

and more accurate than the older muzzleloading black-powder guns that preceded them. 

Hammerless, breech-loading guns and center-fire 

cartridges had appeared in Europe as early as the 

23 See map in Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina,

940.

24 A representative example is William Leffingwell, The 

Happy Hunting Grounds, also Fishing, of the South: 

A Book Descriptive of the Best Resorts in the South 

(Chicago, IL: Donohue & Henneberry, 1895).

25 Ibid., Introduction [no p.].

1850s but were not adopted in the United States 

until the 1880s. But when they became available, 

hunters bought them enthusiastically. 

An additional piece of the sport-hunting complex 

that fell into place in the 1870s was the rise of 

game reserves and sportsmen’s associations. The 

first large-scale preserve (12,500 acres) was the 

Blooming Grove Park Association in northeastern 

Pennsylvania. Only four and a half hours from 

New York City by train, it opened in 1871 and 

quickly became a model. Soon sportsmen’s interest 

turned southward. “The recently subdued South,” 

Marks says, “offered potential as preserve land to 

wealthy, well-organized Northern entrepreneurs . 

. . [who were] attracted to the idea of the Southern 

plantation as a haven from winter weather and as a 

hunting preserve.” 

Most of the Outer Banks counties bordering 

the sounds experienced the influx of hunters, 

and Carteret County got at least its share. The 

“golden era” of the clubs extended from the 1870s 

to the 1950s. Clubs appeared with considerable 

frequency but are not well documented, partly 

because they were bought and sold, and their 

names (and sometimes locations) changed.26

During the early years, private homes were 

converted into small lodgings for hunters, but 

soon clubs began to buy land and construct their 

26 Jack Dudley’s Carteret Waterfowl Heritage

(Burtonsville, MD: Decoy Magazine, 1993) offers the 

best discussion available. Our account draws heavily 

from Dudley.

Figure 9-12. Advertisement for breech-loading shotgun, 

from Southern Railway promotional brochure for 

hunters. Leffingwell, The Happy Hunting Grounds (1895). 

North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina 

Library. 

Figure 9-13. Carteret County waterfowl hunters in an 

elevated shooting platform. Dudley, Carteret Waterfowl 

Heritage, 74.
200 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

own buildings.27 The Harbor Island Club, whose 

members were mainly from New York, bought 

land on Core Banks as early as 1887. The Harbor 

Island Shooting Club was incorporated in 1896. Its 

(apparent) successor, the Harbor Island Hunting 

Lodge, had wealthy Union Carbide Corporation 

inventor and industrialist (and University of North 

Carolina benefactor) John Motley Morehead Jr. 

(1870–1965) among its two dozen shareholders. 

The building was badly damaged by storms in the 

1930s and was last used by a hunting party in the 

mid-1940s.28

The Pilentary [Gun] Club, which dates from 

the turn of the century, had its heyday between 

1905 and 1920. Members of the wealthy Mott 

family from New York were major members, for 

whom the local Mason family worked for years 

as caretakers, assisted by an ex-slave cook.29 The 

27 The largest and most splendid of the huntingoriented buildings, the lavish 21,000-square-foot 

Whalehead Club (http://www.whaleheadclub.org) on 

the shores of Currituck Sound near Corolla was built 

(and primarily used) as a private residence in the early 

1920s by Philadelphia industrialist Edward Collings 

Knight, Jr., as a setting to pursue his passion for 

waterfowl hunting.

28 Dudley, Carteret Waterfowl Heritage, 26–31. 

Though buildings came and went, some of the clubs 

themselves survived for many decades. The current 

list of donors for the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum 

at Harkers Island includes the Carteret Gun and 

Rod Club, Harbor Island Shooting Club, Davis Island 

Hunting Club, Hog Island Hunting Club, Pilentary 

Hunting Club, and Nine Island Lodge as major donors 

(http://www.coresound.com/s-capitalcampaign.

htm#huntclub).

29 This may be the same “clubhouse cook” (Joe Abbot) 

referred to in Holland, Survey History, 12. Holland 

says circumstantial evidence suggests that Abbot 

worked for the Pilentary Club, but he does not say 

specifically that he was black. Abbot lived for a time 

(perhaps as late as 1939) in the Washington Roberts 

House, the oldest surviving house in Portsmouth.

club’s building, sold to a Charlotte textile executive 

in 1920, was destroyed by a hurricane in 1933. 

Roughly contemporary with the Pilentary Club 

was the Carteret Gun and Rod Club, founded 

about 1902 and located east of Davis on the Banks. 

All of its members but one were from New York; 

membership was around sixty in 1915. It was 

renamed Cedar Banks Club in 1933, the year of a 

huge hurricane, after which most members left. In 

1947, the club was bought by a corporation made 

up of about thirty sport hunters and renamed Core 

Banks Rod and Gun Club; its original clubhouse 

burned in 1970.The Hog Island Hunting Club 

was a late addition to the roster of clubs, dating 

Figure 9-14. Pilentary Gun Club on Core Banks, December 

1915. Cape Lookout National Seashore archive photo.

Figure 9-15. Interpretive sign for Styron and Bragg 

House, Portsmouth.
National Park Service 201

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

from the late 1940s and apparently including some 

remaining members of the Harbor Island Gun 

Club. Its clubhouse was built from World War II 

surplus materials.30

Marks’s observations about the class dimensions 

of hunting were well borne out in the social and 

business relationships that developed around the 

hunting clubs. Many local men, and some women, 

worked for wealthy hunters as guides, caretakers, 

and cooks. A number of Portsmouth men worked 

for the clubs. Henry Pigott worked as a cook in the 

1960s for hunters who used the abandoned Coast 

Guard building as a clubhouse. John Wallace Salter 

(1873–1950) and his sons, also from Portsmouth, 

worked as guides. Tom Bragg and Jodie Styron 

called the house where they lived together with 

Tom’s sister (Jodie’s wife) Annie, the Bragg-Styron 

Hunting Lodge. Tom (who also worked as a market 

gunner) and Jodie worked as guides, and Annie 

as a cook. The nearby town of Davis supplied 

numerous guides, especially from the extended 

Murphy family, including Albert (1880–1957), 

Francis (1883–1974), Henry (1898–1955), and his 

brother Willie Gray (1882–1953), who had worked 

as a market gunner before becoming a guide for 

the Carteret Rod and Gun Club, and John Wesley 

Paul (b. 1903). Albert Mason came from Stacy 

(1892–1970).31

The hunting clubs were already in decline by the 

end of World War I, partly as a result of increasing 

state regulation of hunting laws. Those laws had 

long lacked uniformity from state to state, or even 

from county to county within states. The North 

Carolina General Assembly had long had power 

over wild game, but enforcement had been left to 

the individual counties. The result, Marks says, 

was a “baffling array of county-specific game 

laws” regarding the length and timing of seasons, 

bag limits, trespass regulations, and the like.32 For 

a half-century after 1890, game laws in North 

Carolina underwent continual change, and public 

disagreement over the changes revealed schisms 

within various constituencies situated in the coastal 

30 Dudley, Carteret Waterfowl Heritage, 13–19, 33–35, 

37–45.

31 Ibid., 52–65. Dudley supplies numerous brief 

biographical sketches of these and other guides.

32 Marks, Southern Hunting in Black and White, 51–53. 

A 1926 statewide game law established the State 

Game Commission. It was followed in 1947 by the 

Wildllife Resources Commission, which controlled all 

functions of game conservation in the state.

counties. Those counties’ residents had welcomed 

the jobs and income that accompanied the coming 

of the hunting clubs, for example, but at the same 

time, some came to resent the hordes of touristhunters, who decimated local wildlife.33

By any measure, the threat to wildlife was severe. 

Sport hunters and their commercial hunting 

predecessors had depleted many species, and 

coastal birds were among the hardest hit. To 

stem the destruction, the so-called Audubon law 

established the Audubon Society in 1903. Taking 

the protection of game and birds as a main task, 

the Society encountered substantial opposition 

in eastern counties. Local game wardens arrested 

violators but could rarely get local juries to convict 

them. The Audubon law was actually repealed in 

fifty-two counties; forty-four counties retained 

it until a state game commission was established 

in 1927.34 Certainly by the end of the 1920s, the 

legal frameworks and other factors that had given 

rise to and sustained sport/tourist hunting in 

North Carolina’s coastal counties had changed 

definitively, ending the heyday of the hunting clubs. 

Some few survived the changes, however, and a few 

new ones continued to be created for some years 

thereafter.

One such entity, the Salter-Battle Hunting and 

Fishing Lodge, dating from 1945, still stands 

on Sheep Island as part of CALO’s historic 

landscape.35 The Salter family came to the island 

with the earliest settlers and remained associated 

with it (and particularly with Portsmouth) for the 

better part of two centuries. Though some of the 

Salters moved inland in the 1920s so their children 

could get better schooling, they returned to 

Portsmouth seasonally to fish and hunt, and their 

house/lodge on Sheep Island eventually became 

known as the Salter Gun Club. It was moved to 

Atlantic after a hurricane in 1938, but in 1945 the 

Salters dismantled another building in Atlantic and 

moved it to Sheep Island as a new lodge. Three 

years later, they sold the building and a small plot 

to a group of men who made up the Portsmouth 

33 Ibid., 49.

34 Ross, “Conservation and Economy” 21–27.

35 The discussion that follows is taken from Keane, 

Salter-Battle Hunting and Fishing Lodge: National 

Register of Historic Places Registration. 
202 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

Hunting and Fishing Club, for whom some of the 

Salters continued to serve as guides.36

Throughout the post-Civil War history of sport 

hunting, racial divides were fully as important as 

class differences, as Scott Giltner’s recent Hunting 

and Fishing in the New South makes clear.37 Since 

the early colonial period, Giltner observes,

For both blacks and whites, exploitation of the 

sporting field became a key marker of racial 

and class status. For well-to-do whites, the 

ability to hunt and fish freely, to use certain 

methods and equipment, and to employ black 

laborers to attend their excursions became 

ways to publicly display their wealth and social 

standing. . . . For blacks themselves, hunting 

and fishing were vivid symbols of an economic 

cultural, and spatial separation from whites 

that reflected the struggle for control over their 

own lives and labors. 

For whites, that is to say, sport hunting and fishing 

were importantly about marking social status and 

class privilege. For slaves, especially, the ability 

to feed themselves, pride in providing for their 

families, and the intervals of quasi-independence 

afforded by hunting and fishing were more 

important than any other consideration. 

36 In 1980, the Battle family, who had come to own the 

property, entered into a 25-year lease agreement 

with Cape Lookout National Seashore. Ibid.

37 Scott E. Giltner, Hunting and Fishing in the New 

South: Black Labor and White Leisure After the Civil 

War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 

2008), 1–10. The following brief discussion is based on 

Giltner’s work, from which all quotations are taken.

Since maintaining the white-defined culture 

of sport hunting and fishing required the labor 

(and acquiescence) of blacks, however, blacks’ 

assertion of their right to hunt and fish freely by 

and for themselves after emancipation was viewed 

by whites as a form of usurpation. Viewed as a 

challenge “to white sportsmen’s monopoly over 

Southern hunting and fishing,” such an assertion 

was bound to lead to conflict. Much of that conflict 

took the form of race-based rhetoric, efforts to 

restrict black access to wildlife (and to convince 

lower-class whites to accept those restrictions as a 

means of controlling blacks), the prejudicial hiring 

of blacks in menial positions to complete the “old 

plantation South” picture of hunting and fishing 

projected by upper-class whites, and the exclusion 

of blacks from what became a lucrative industry 

toward the end of the nineteenth century.38

Early Twentieth-Century Tourism

As the sport-hunting era faded, the beaches 

became the major scene of vacation activity—

swimmers and sunbathers in the daytime and 

boardwalk strollers and dancers in the evenings. 

One vacationer recalled turn-of-the-century Nags 

Head evenings at an early dance pavilion lighted 

by lanterns. On slow evenings, music came from 

scratchy records played on an old windup Victrola, 

but the dancing picked up when someone banged 

out tunes on a piano or accordion. Better yet, 

Howard Weaver sometimes brought his threepiece dance band.

38 Giltner, Hunting and Fishing in the New South, 1–9. 

Giltner skillfully explores all of these dimensions in 

illuminating detail.

Figure 9-17. Lumina, Best Dancing Pavilion on the South 

Atlantic Coast, ca. 1917. Durwood Barbour Collection 

of North Carolina Postcards, North Carolina Collection, 

University of North Carolina Library.

Figure 9-18. Interior of Lumina dancing pavilion at night, 

ca. 1912. Durwood Barbour Collection of North Carolina 

Postcards, North Carolina Collection, University of North 

Carolina Library.
National Park Service 203

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

The possibilities of the beach pavilion were 

developed to their full potential many miles to the 

south, however, at Wrightsville Beach, which began 

to develop as a pleasure ground after the Island 

Beach Hotel opened in 1888 and the short-line Sea 

View Railroad reached the area from Wilmington 

in 1889. Local promoters were soon touting the 

area as “The Playground of the South.”39 The first 

extravagant beach holiday party took place on July 

4, 1889, with a regatta, fireworks, and dancing in 

the pavilions. 

By the end of the 1890s, growth was explosive. 

The three-story, 150-room Seashore Hotel 

showplace opened in 1897, and two years later 

the town of Wrightsville Beach was incorporated. 

The area rebuilt quickly after the monster San 

Ciriaco hurricane of 1899. By 1902, families 

from Wilmington could take an electric trolley 

to the beach in 45 minutes; beach cottages were 

multiplying rapidly; and Consolidated Railways, 

Light and Power Company had built a 400-seat 

vaudeville theater. A widely celebrated central 

feature of Wrightsville Beach during the first third 

of the twentieth century was the gigantic, lavish, 

and brightly lit Lumina Pavilion, opened on the 

south end of the beach in June 1905.

Excursion trains brought thousands from 

Wilmington and as far away as Atlanta to “The 

Fun Spot of the South.” Hundreds crowded into 

its 6,000-square-foot ballroom to dance to the 

39 Our account here is drawn from McAllister, 

Wrightsville Beach, 19–145.

music of the biggest bands of the day—Sammy 

Kay, Tommy Dorsey, and Kay Kyser. There was 

something for everyone: a bowling alley, a shooting 

gallery, slot machines, food, movies (shown 

on a large screen in the surf after 1914), a huge 

promenade, and major athletic and aquatic events. 

By the 1920s, other pavilions, hotels, and beach 

houses were spreading in every direction, and 

fill was dumped to provide more building room. 

The state built the Wilmington-Wrightsville 

Beach causeway in 1926, and the first automobiles 

arrived in 1935. The coming of World War II 

troops, military bases, and shipbuilding doubled 

the population of New Hanover County, 

and Wrightsville Beach became a year-round 

community. Threats from German submarines 

forced the dousing of the Lumina’s lights, but 

they came back on in 1943 and the big bands 

returned, drawing countless service personnel. 

The big bands played on into the 1950s, but with 

increasing competition from the new jukeboxes. 

In 1954, hurricane Hazel blew down the huge 

lighted LUMINA sign on the roof, and the crowds 

dropped off. Much of the building was closed in 

the 1960s, and it was torn down in 1973.

As was the case everywhere at the time, the 

dancers, swimmers, and boardwalk strollers at 

Wrightsville Beach were all white, but McCallister’s 

engaging history of Wrightsville Beach provides 

an interesting capsule history of a brief effort to 

establish a black resort on the then-separate Shell 

Island. Since the late nineteenth century, blacks 

had had a small pavilion at Ocean View Beach, 

but in 1923 plans developed for a larger “National 

Negro Playground” that would draw both local 

blacks and those from surrounding states. After a 

Figure 9-19. Movies “over the waves” at Lumina. 

Postmarked July 22, 1926. Postcard’s caption says “A 

novel feature of the Lumina entertainment is ‘Movies 

over the waves,’ music and dancing in the background, 

the ever changing sea and starry sky excelling in 

grandeur painted decorations, and with balmy ocean 

breezes instead of artificial ventilation.” E.C. Kropp Co., 

Milwaukee, WI. Durwood Barbour Collection of North 

Carolina Postcards. North Carolina Collection, University 

of North Carolina Library.

Figure 9-20. Map of Wrightsville Beach showing former 

site of Lumina Pavilion and railroad/trolley lines that 

served it, Shell Island Resort, and several large clubs and 

hotels. Map by Roy Wilhelm. McAllister, Wrightsville 

Beach: The Luminous Island, xii. 
204 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

series of fires “of undetermined origin” destroyed 

some buildings, the plan was abandoned in 1926. 

In the 1960s, the inlet separating Shell Island 

closed, merging it with Wrightsville Beach.40

Cape Lookout Village and the 

Cape Lookout Development 

Company

Between the resort developments at Nags Head 

and Beaufort and areas further south, the only 

substantial node of development after the 

obliteration of Diamond City in the hurricane of 

1899 was at the south end of Core Banks near the 

lighthouse. This small aggregation of structures, 

which at some indeterminate point came to be 

referred to as Cape Lookout Village, was only 

partly and belatedly related to what would usually 

be thought of as tourism, but it eventually was used 

by local people for recreational purposes.41

An 1853 U.S. Coast Guard survey of Shackleford 

Banks shows a small settlement called Lookout 

Woods located about a mile west of the lighthouse 

40 Ibid., 67–72.

41 Extensive detailed information on Cape Lookout 

Village is available in John Milner Associates, Inc., and 

Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., Cape Lookout 

Village Cultural Landscape Report; in Cape Lookout 

Village Historic District National Register Nomination 

(included as Appendix B of the Cultural Landscape 

Report), which includes in Sect. 7, 5–18, a structureby-structure list of properties in the district; and in 

historic structure reports for individual contributing 

structures. The extraordinarily thorough and detailed 

Cultural Landscape Report includes a vast number 

of useful maps (see our Appendix A for several 

examples), photographs, and other illustrations. Our 

brief précis here is drawn mostly from these existing 

reports; it is in no way a substitute for them.

on Shackleford Banks. After the devastating 1899 

hurricane, a few Diamond City fishing families 

relocated between the Life-Saving Station and 

the lighthouse, and by 1910 as many as eighty 

people were living there. For a little more than a 

year (April 1910–June 1911), they had the services 

of a post office, but it was discontinued because 

newly motorized boats placed both Harkers Island 

and Beaufort in easy reach.42 Around 1915, local 

schoolteacher Clem Gaskill built what later came 

to be called the Gaskill-Guthrie house there.43 By 

1920 there were about thirty houses in the area.44

In some quarters, however, there were high hopes 

for the development potential of Cape Lookout. 

Around 1913, Beafort entrepreneur C. K. Howe 

and some associates formed Cape Lookout 

Development Company, with plans to establish 

both a resort and a commercial port.45 They began 

to buy land, and an ambitious plat showed many 

streets and hundreds of lots awaiting eager buyers. 

A large clubhouse and hotel completed the scene. 

Contemporaneously with these developments, 

the Corps of Engineers began in 1915 to construct 

a jetty in Cape Lookout Bight to create a coaling 

station and “harbor of refuge.” Cape Lookout 

Development Company principals apparently 

viewed this move as promising not only resort, but 

also commercial, potential for the area.46

Many were apparently convinced. “Cape 

Lookout to Be a Great Port,” a Beaufort News

headline proclaimed a decade later.47 “It seems 

probable,” the article said, “that the long deferred 

development of Cape Lookout is now about to 

take on a new life and that it may yet realize the 

42 John Milner Associates, Inc., and Wiss, Janney, Elstner 

Associates, Inc., Cape Lookout Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 2-7–2-12.

43 See Jones, Gaskill-Guthrie House, 23. Gaskill was 

related to William H. Gaskill, superintendent of the 

Cape Lookout Life-Saving Station, 1887–1912, and 

he himself worked for the Life-Saving Service from 

1917–1919. Jones, Lewis Davis House.

44 Cape Lookout Village Historic District National 

Register Nomination, Sec. 7, 2.

45 A major proponent of the plan was District 1 

(Beaufort) Representative John H. Small. Cheney, 

North Carolina Government, 707–714. Cape Lookout 

Development Company may have been a successor to 

a previous entity called Cape Lookout Land Company. 

See Jones, Lewis Davis House,, 28

46 John Milner Associates, Inc., and Wiss, Janney, Elstner 

Associates, Inc., Cape Lookout Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 2-12–2-14.

47 “Cape Lookout to Be a Great Port,” Beaufort News, 

August 4, 1924, unpaged clipping.

Figure 9-21. Gaskill-Guthrie House, 1939. Jones, GaskillGuthrie House, 24.
National Park Service 205

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

hopes of those who have desired to see a seaport 

and resort city established there.” Cape Lookout 

Development Company officials had already 

obtained a charter and were advertising and selling 

property. “Quite a number” of lots had been sold, 

the article reported somewhat vaguely, a “good 

many houses” were expected by the following 

summer, and a clubhouse and “possibly a large 

hotel” were planned. To increase public awareness, 

company officials had recently hired a boat and 

taken fifty or so newspaper reporters out to look 

at “the magnificent harbor,” which many of them 

saw as “North Carolina’s best chance to build up a 

seaport of the first grade.” Pennsylvania Governor 

Gifford Pinchot, who thirty years earlier had 

pioneered scientific forest management on the 

Vanderbilt estate in western North Carolina, came 

to look and was “greatly impressed.” 

The Cape Lookout developers hoped to interest 

the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad in building 

a line to the Cape but were prepared to build their 

own trolley line like the one from Wilmington 

that had helped spur development at Wrightsville 

Beach. “There are many persons who believe,” the 

Beaufort News reported,

that important as the possibilities of converting 

Cape Lookout into a big Summer resort [are,] . 

. . its commercial possibilities are even greater. 

The naturally fine harbor there has been 

greatly improved by the breakwater which the 

Federal Government started there some years 

ago . . . . When the railroad is finished, the 

harbor can be used for a coaling station. A fuel 

oil station may also be established there and it 

is possible that a cotton export business may 

be built up there some day. 

The plans were both grand and vague, but in the 

next year, the article concluded, the developers 

“hope to have some big results to show for their 

hopes and activities.” 

The signs were not encouraging, however. In 

early 1922, the company sold Coast Guardsman 

Odell Guthrie a lot for $100; the sale included 

Clem Gaskill’s small ten-year-old house, which 

the company had bought from Gaskill after he 

moved to Harkers Island.48 A half-dozen years 

later, Charles A. Seifert, owner of the Coca-Cola 

franchise in New Bern, bought two lots and built 

a house (popularly known as the Coca-Cola 

House), one of the first vacation houses built at 

Cape Lookout by someone who was not native to 

Carteret County.49

Two or three houses do not a development make, 

however. Demand for the commercial harbor 

never developed, the railroad (or trolley) was never 

built, only a few lots were sold, and sand eventually 

buried the only partially completed breakwater. 

The date of Charles Seifert’s purchase of land for 

the Coca-Cola house (1927) shows that the Cape 

Lookout Development Company continued to 

push the project at least until that date, but it was 

48 Jones, Gaskill-Guthrie House, 24.

49 For full details on this house, see Jones, Coca-Cola 

House. The house is also referenced in the literature 

as the Seifert-Davis house. Seifert sold it to Harry T. 

Davis in 1953 (Jones, Coca-Cola House, 32).

Figure 9-22. Cape Lookout Development Company plat, 1915. Jones, Lewis-Davis House, 13.
206 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

not to be. Three interrelated factors seem to have 

doomed the development: the failure to build the 

railroad or trolley line, the federal government’s 

abandonment of the jetty construction, and the 

coming of the Depression two years later. Their 

relative importance is not clear.

What did happen, however, was that existing 

residential houses at Cape Lookout were slowly 

converted to vacation use, eventually resulting in 

a small resort community. The O’Boyle-Bryant 

house, built about 1939, was used by military 

personnel during World War II and bought by N. 

C. State forestry professor Ralph Bryant in 1961. 

It was later used by his daughter and her husband 

and incorporated into Cape Lookout National 

Seashore in 1976.50 The Guthrie-Ogilvie house was 

similarly repurposed for vacation use. The CocaCola house was bought by long-time state geologist 

Harry T. Davis, who used it as a base for his bird 

studies and as a retreat for the North Carolina 

Shell Club.51 Around 1930, a Mr. Baker built a large 

summer cottage in the area (Casablanca). At about 

the same time, the Bryant house was built, and 

Carrie Arendell Davis built a house and a dance 

hall and snack bar (a mini-Lumina?) that was 

the scene of popular weekend parties.52 Around 

50 Tommy Jones, O’Boyle-Bryant House, Cape Lookout 

National Seashore: Historic Structure Report (Atlanta, 

GA: Southeast Regional Office, National Park Service, 

2003), 1–2, says that the house was built “in the 

spring of 1939 by Earl O’Boyle, who was stationed 

at Cape Lookout from 1938 to 1942 as one of the 

personnel manning the Navy’s . . . radio compass 

station at the Coast Guard Station. . . . [T]he house 

was occupied by O’Boyle and his family until the fall 

of 1942 . . . . [It was] occupied by military personnel 

for the remainder of World War II . . . .”

51 John Milner Associates, Inc., and Wiss, Janney, Elstner 

Associates, Inc., Cape Lookout Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 2-17.

52 Cape Lookout Village Historic District National 

Register Nomination, Sec. 7, 3.

1940, George Allen Holderness and several other 

Tarboro families purchased a home with a partinterest arrangement and shared its use for many 

years. 

The Cape Lookout Village area underwent 

considerable expansion during World War II, 

but buildings associated with the expansion 

were removed at the end of the war. Les and 

Sally Moore, who owned a store at the Cape, 

constructed several rental cabins from the 1950s 

until around 1970. The second lighthouse keeper’s 

quarters was sold as surplus property in 1958 

to Dr. and Mrs. Graham Barden, who moved it 

south and used it for many years as a vacation 

cottage. Several other buildings (including two jetty 

workers’ houses) were also sold at this time and 

converted to occasional use.53 Fishing Cottage #2, 

possibly built by a Coast Guardsman for his family, 

also dates from the 1950s.54

The Era of Roads and Bridges

It is paradoxical that some part of the failure of the 

Cape Lookout Development Company’s grand 

design owed to their failure to build some form 

of railroad or trolley to the Cape, because their 

hopes emerged on the cusp of what turned out to 

be a period of sustained construction of roads and 

bridges onto (and on) the Outer Banks.

These local developments occurred in the context 

of two major developments: the often-chronicled 

Good Roads Movement, spearheaded in North 

Carolina by the indomitable Harriet Berry but 

53 Ibid., Section 7.

54 See Tommy Jones, Fishing Cottage #2. On the 

simultaneous buying up of the surviving residences 

at Portsmouth for vacation use, see Dunbar, 

Geographical History of the Carolina Banks, 130.

Figure 9-23. O’Boyle-Bryant house as it looked in 1939. 

Jones, O’Boyle-Bryant House, 28. Figure 9-24. Cape Lookout Village as it looked in 1942. 

Jones, Gaskill Guthrie House, 21.
National Park Service 207

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

part of the larger national movement for good 

roads (1880–1916), initially led partly by bicyclists, 

oddly enough, but more closely tied afterwards to 

a push for better farm-to-market roads, and the 

state’s 1921 Highway Act, which provided new tax 

funds to construct hard-surface roads connecting 

county seats and principal towns.55 As the 

highways lengthened (to 7,551 total miles in 1928) 

and became better, the number of automobiles 

multiplied. Between 1920 and 1928, the number 

of registered automobiles in the state grew 

from 127,405 to 418,864, a better than threefold 

increase.56

All up and down the Outer Banks, there were 

efforts to build bridges and improve roads. In the 

early 1920s, Dare County moved toward bridging 

Roanoke Sound. The bridge was finished by 

1928, but did not go much of anywhere. On the 

Roanoke Island end, it connected with the only 

hard-surfaced road in the area (built by the state in 

1924 between Manteo and Wanchese), but on the 

beach side it connected only to sand tracks. Such 

lacks were pervasive in the coastal counties; a 1924 

map shows virtually no hard-surfaced highways 

55 For a discussion of the 1921 Act’s provisions, see 

Walter Turner, Paving Tobacco Road: A Century 

of Progress by the North Carolina Department of 

Transportation (Raleigh: North Carolina Department 

of Cultural Resources, Office of Archives and History, 

2003), 12–13. On the Good Roads movement, see also 

Whisnant, Super-Scenic Motorway, 17–21. 

56 Cecil Kenneth Brown, The State Highway System 

of North Carolina: Its Evolution and Present Status

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1931), 

190, 210.

east of Wilmington, New Bern, Washington, and 

Edenton except for a north-south segment from 

Wilmington to Jacksonville (perhaps constructed 

during World War I).Indeed there were not a lot of 

roads anywhere in the state.57

Other bridges followed. The 1925 state legislature 

authorized funds for a bridge on old N.C. 342 (now 

U.S. 17) across Albemarle Sound, and another 

spectacular three-mile bridge was built on U.S. 32 

in 1938.58 To the south, Carteret County residents 

watched as the 8,200-foot causeway linking 

Morehead City and Beaufort across Bogue Sound 

was completed in late 1926.59 By 1930, the 3-milelong Wright Memorial Bridge stretched across 

Currituck Sound, and the next year a state highway 

was completed through the Kitty Hawk and Nags 

Head beaches, making it possible to drive on 

modern roads from Currituck to Manteo.60 Several 

decades passed before other new bridges were 

built, but the 2-mile Oregon Inlet (later Herbert 

C. Bonner) Bridge opened in 1963.61 And virtually 

everywhere the new bridges and roads went, 

tourist development followed, bringing new motels 

and tourist housing.

The new roads and bridges were part of a 

transportation system that also included—

57 Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 566.

58 Turner, Paving Tobacco Road, 21, 41.

59 “Linking Up Morehead City and Beaufort with 

Concrete Bridge Over 8,000 Feet Long,” Raleigh News 

and Observer, November 7, 1926, unpaged clipping.

60 Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 243–246.

61 Turner, Paving Tobacco Road, 69.

Figure 9-25. North Carolina highways as of 1924. Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 566. Map by Mark Anderson 

Moore. North Carolina Office of Archives and History.
208 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

importantly for the Outer Banks—a new, 

state-operated ferry system as well. Private ferries 

had operated throughout the state since colonial 

times, but by the 1920s few of them remained. In 

1934, however, the Highway Commission began 

subsidizing one private ferry at Oregon Inlet; the 

state bought the ferry in 1950. Another acquisition 

and a new state-run ferry across the Alligator 

River in the late 1940s led to the organization of 

a state ferry service by the mid-1950s. In time, 

the state came to operate twenty-four ferries on 

seven routes, the second-largest ferry system in the 

country, and each of them critical to the tourism 

industry.62

Post-World War II Private Tourism 

Development

The end of World War II brought a dramatic 

increase in travel and tourism virtually everywhere. 

Reunited families, the arrival of small children, 

the availability of new automobiles, the growth 

of roadside motels, the building of new highways 

and bridges, the opening of theme parks and other 

attractions, and (especially in Florida) the use of 

DDT to control mosquitoes and air conditioning 

to make the heat bearable were some of the most 

important factors spurring tourism.63 On the North 

Carolina coast, four developments were central to 

the expansion of tourism after the war: publicist 

Aycock Brown’s efforts in Dare County (and those 

of towns and counties that quickly copied his 

model), sport hunting and fishing, and the coming 

of two national seashores at Cape Hatteras and 

Cape Lookout. 

There is nearly complete consensus that Aycock 

Brown was a publicity wizard who virtually 

singlehandedly generated a tourist boom in Dare 

County. The northern Banks were in a state of 

crisis at the close of the war.64 Commercial hunting 

had decreased, shad production was down, 

military bases had closed, and even the Coast 

Guard was boarding up its stations. Returning 

servicemen looked for work in vain. Tourism 

seemed like a promising direction for development, 

62 Ibid., 115–118.

63 On the post-war Florida experience with tourism, see 

Mormino, Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams.

64 David Stick, Graveyard of the Atlantic: Shipwrecks of 

the North Carolina Coast (Chapel Hill: University of 

North Carolina Press, 1952), 200–202. 

but long-established resort areas to the south 

offered stiff competition. 

Brown turned out to be more than equal to the 

challenge. He had done public relations work 

for the old Pamlico Inn and worked as a reporter 

for the Beaufort News. He had even had an 

unsuccessful term as a police reporter for the 

Durham Herald. His duty station on the coast 

during the World War II had broadened his 

knowledge of the Outer Banks. After the war, he 

had worked in publicity for the outdoor drama The 

Lost Colony and was freelancing for the Sanitary 

Fish Market and even a dog track at Moyock. Then, 

in 1952, he began a 26-year stint as director of the 

Dare County Tourist Bureau, a position from which 

Figure 9-26. Aycock Brown photograph of a bathing 

beauty and Cape Hatteras lighthouse. Brown and Stick, 

Aycock Brown’s Outer Banks, 41.
National Park Service 209

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

he planned, pushed, cajoled, beguiled, and finagled 

the county’s explosive tourism growth into being.65

Many Outer Banks counties and towns were 

forming chambers of commerce at the time 

Brown came to Dare County, but most of these 

organizations amounted to little more than a post 

office box, and they were accomplishing little. 

But the garrulous and indefatigable Brown knew 

how to get the job done. Neither a swimmer nor a 

fisherman himself, he took countless photographs 

of (preferably female) swimmers, fishermen, 

and anything else he thought he could place 

somewhere, anywhere. Lawrence Madry of the 

Virginian Pilot recalled that Brown

will get a story printed in your newspaper or 

magazine—the New York Times or the National 

Geographic, it doesn’t matter—by inundating 

you with his own stories or photographs, or 

completely knocking you off guard with the 

depth of his kindness, or spilling you into 

some deep well of laughter, pushed by the 

overwhelming force of his zany personality.

Jim Mays, an editor for Norfolk’s WTAR, said 

Brown knew

how to conjure up via long-distance telephone 

a compelling conviction in the minds of 

faraway journalists that a dead whale washed 

up on the beach at Rodanthe is a story of major 

international significance.66

Whatever Brown’s strategies and tactics, tourism 

quickly became, and has remained, Dare County’s 

main industry. The new Southern Shores 

development opened in 1947, and Dare County‘s 

Atlantic Township (including Kill Devil Hills, Kitty 

Hawk, and Southern Shores), which in 1926 had 

had a tax value of slightly over $100,000, increased 

in value to more than $6 million in 1957.67

65 Our brief characterization of Brown’s work on behalf 

of tourism in Dare County is drawn from Vera Evans, 

“Ad Man, Con Man, Photographer, and Legend,” in 

David Stick, An Outer Banks Reader, 200–202, and 

Brown and Stick, Aycock Brown’s Outer Banks, 8–16, 

38. The latter source contains a large selection of 

Brown’s Outer Banks photographs, a major archival 

collection of which is at the Outer Banks History 

Center, which also houses Stick’s papers.

66 Brown and Stick, Aycock Brown’s Outer Banks, 14, 38.

67 Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 252, 260.

Fortuitously, Brown’s assertive and imaginative 

promotional activities came on the very eve of 

major state and federal involvement in tourism 

development on the Outer Banks.

Public Tourism Development: Two 

National Seashores

“When we look up and down the ocean fronts of 

America,” Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes 

observed with alarm in 1938, 

we find that everywhere they are passing 

behind the fences of private ownership. The 

people can no longer get to the ocean. When 

we have reached the point that a nation of 

125 million people cannot set foot upon the 

thousands of miles of beaches that border 

the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, except by 

permission of those who monopolize the 

ocean front, then I say it is the prerogative and 

the duty of the Federal and State Governments 

to step in and acquire, not a swimming beach 

here and there, but solid blocks of ocean front 

hundreds of miles in length. Call this ocean 

front a national park, or a national seashore, or 

a state park or anything you please—I say that 

the people have a right to a fair share of it.68

Clearly, however, if citizens were to be shown the 

delights of unspoiled nature on North Carolina’s 

barrier islands, that nature would have to be not 

only protected by public ownership and prudent 

regulations, but also recovered and rebuilt. That 

certainly became abundantly clear with the 

68 Quoted in Binkley, Cape Hatteras National Seashore 

Administrative History, v. See esp. the chapter on 

“The New Deal and ‘National Ocean Beaches,’” 9–15.

Figure 9-27. National Park Service group embarking 

at Oregon Inlet for tour of the Outer Banks as 

potential national seashore site, 1934. National Park 

Service photograph courtesy of Harpers Ferry Center; 

reproduced in Binkley, Cape Hatteras National Seashore: 

Administrative History, 14
210 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

formation of the first of the national seashores on 

the Outer Banks, at Cape Hatteras. 

As early as the 1930s there were plans for a state 

park in the area.69 In 1934, the National Park 

Service sent a reconnaissance team to examine 

the site, and they returned very enthusiastic. The 

creation of Cape Hatteras National Seashore 

was authorized by Congress in 1937. Key North 

Carolina Congressmen Lindsay C. Warren and 

Herbert C. Bonner, along with North Carolina 

illustrator, outdoorsman, conservationist, and 

real estate man Frank Stick, promoted the 

project skillfully and unremittingly.70 The project 

received a key boost when the Phipps family, 

having established hunting clubs at Buxton and 

Kennekeet, found themselves with other land they 

couldn’t sell during the Depression and didn’t 

want to continue paying taxes on. Stick helped 

them to arrange to convey it to the state for use as 

a park (along with adjoining land of his own) as 

the first land in the nascent preserve. It remained 

unclear for years whether the area would be a 

state park, a national park, or a national seashore. 

After years of indecision (both state and federal), 

conflict, negotiation, and planning, Cape Hatteras 

National Seashore was finally established in 1953 

and formally dedicated in 1958. 

Significantly with regard to tourism, the legislation 

directed the NPS to develop “extensive facilities” 

for recreational beachgoers and to allow the 

Seashore’s use by commercial and sport fishermen 

and hunters. To satisfy that requirement while 

continuing and extending the conservation 

efforts that had been integral to the Seashore’s 

establishment would prove a daunting task, as 

69 “Hatteras Park Almost Certain,” Raleigh News and 

Observer, July 28, 1935; unpaged clipping.

70 Binkley, Cape Hatteras National Seashore: 

Administrative History, 1ff. Binkley has an excellent 

précis of the relevant precursor legislation, 1–4, and 

of Stick’s work with the Park Service to establish Cape 

Hatteras National Seashore, 22–26. Unless otherwise 

indicated, our brief account of the founding of Cape 

Lookout National Seashore is drawn from Binkley. 

Stick published an early article advocating for such a 

park, “A Coastal Park for North Carolina,” Elizabeth 

City Independent, July 21, 1933. See Stick, The Outer 

Banks of North Carolina, 247–248, and Binkley, Cape 

Hatteras National Seashore: Administrative History, 

6–7.

indeed it had been in virtually all national parks 

throughout the entire history of the Park Service.71

This charge was rendered especially difficult by 

the presence of already-established residential 

and commercial areas on the part of the Banks 

occupied by the seashore, such as Rodanthe, 

Salvo, Avon, Buxton, Frisco, and Ocracoke. Rising 

populations and increased building in those 

locations put pressure on the Seashore, whose 

annual visitorship between 1955 and 2002 rose 

from about 260,000 to almost 3 million.72 In 2008, 

the Seashore had approximately 71 visitors per 

acre of land, four times as many as Great Smoky 

Mountains National Park (17/acre/year), and fifty 

times as many as Yellowstone National Park (1.4/

acre/year).73

For better or worse, then, North Carolina’s first 

national seashore shared a boundary at numerous 

points along its length with areas intensively 

developed (and developing) for tourism. The best 

that could be hoped for was a mostly positive 

synergy between the two systems. That hope would 

be tested again on the new National Seashore 

created between Ocracoke and Beaufort Inlets a 

few years later.

The history of Cape Lookout National Seashore 

has always (indeed, even before it was founded 

and officially opened) been inseparable from the 

history of tourism and related recreational use 

on Core and Shackleford Banks, partly because 

early planning got underway in the late 1950s, 

when tourism was viewed as the next quick fix 

for economic development. In 1959, the state of 

North Carolina passed legislation to establish an 

Outer Banks state park south of Cape Hatteras 

National Seashore, and land acquisition began. 

Three years later, the North Carolina Seashore 

Park Commission urged transferring state-owned 

Outer Banks property to the NPS for Cape 

Lookout National Seashore. Between 1963 and 

1966, various bills were introduced in Congress 

to establish the Seashore.74 By mid-1964, both the 

71 Binkley examines the entire protracted process in all 

of its legislative, legal, political, social, and cultural 

dimensions in Cape Hatteras National Seashore: 

Administrative History, 43–159.

72 Ibid., Appendix G, 259.

73 Visitors/acre/year calculated from data provided 

by National Park Service Public Use Statistics Office 

(http://www.nature.nps.gov/stats/).

74 Beal and Prioli, Life at the Edge of the Sea, 125–127.
National Park Service 211

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

Secretary of the Interior and the President had 

signed on to the plan. Congressional approval 

followed in early 1966.75

Earliest detailed planning for the new National 

Seashore assumed that fairly dense facilities 

for tourists, and for moving them from place to 

place, would be central. As early as 1963, an NPS 

development map showed a possible “highway 

causeway bridge” and a ferry crossing North River 

Channel and Shackleford Slue to Shackleford 

Banks. It also showed a motor road leading all the 

way up Shackleford Banks almost to Barden Inlet, 

with picnic and parking areas, docks, a “marine 

supplies” store, beaches with dressing rooms and 

shelters, a ranger station, and a visitor center along 

the way. It was, in a word, a plan premised on 

intensive tourist facilities development consistent 

75 Roy Parker, Jr., “National Seashore Endorsed by 

[Interior Secretary Stewart] Udall,” Raleigh News 

and Observer, May 1, 1964; Roy Parker, Jr., “White 

House Approves Cape Lookout National Seashore,” 

Raleigh News and Observer, June 20, 1964; “National 

Seashore Gets Congressional Approval,” Raleigh

News and Observer, February 27, 1966; “Lookout 

Approved,” Raleigh News and Observer, March 1, 

1966. 

with the Park Service’s Mission 66 program, which 

was drawing to a conclusion in 1966.76

The new Seashore was located, said a 

Congressional report two years later, within 

250 miles of 5 million people, large numbers of 

whom could be expected to visit.77 Local boosters 

76 General Development Plan Map (1963), National Park 

Service, Denver Service Center. We have discovered no 

comparable map for Core Banks. On Mission 66, see 

Ethan Carr, Mission 66: Modernism and the National 

Park Dilemma (Amherst: University of Massachusetts 

Press, 2007), and Conrad Wirth, Parks, Politics and the 

People (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980).

77 Report from Senate Committee on Interior and 

Insular Affairs on S. 251, 89h Congress, 1st Session, July 

23, 1965, 2.

Figure 9-28. 1963 General Development Plan map, Cape Lookout and Shackleford Banks. National Park Service, 

Denver Service Center.

Figure 9-29. Landing strip next to Portsmouth LifeSaving Station, March 2008. Photo by David E. Whisnant.
212 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

were quick to take up the theme. Raleigh News 

and Observer reporter Roy Parker, Jr., wrote in 

midsummer of 1965 that “Cape Lookout Expects 

to Attract Million in Five Years,” and a few months 

later his fellow writer Roy Hardee reported that 

local officials were predicting “a bright future for 

the economic and tourist development of Carteret 

County” with the opening of the Seashore.78

Besides the causeway or ferry, Hardee reported, 

the sound side of the Banks was to be dredged to 

create a boat channel “running the entire length of 

the new Seashore area” and the dredging spoil used 

to build a 50-foot protective berm on the ocean 

side.79

The expected gains from tourism were welcomed, 

but a few worries surfaced early on about a 

78 Roy Hardee, “National Seashore Tourist Gains Seen,” 

Raleigh News and Observer, April 7, 1966.

79 Even as late as 1971, the possibility of bridging Core 

Sound with some sort of mass transit system was still 

being considered. A master plan of that year referred 

to “a system bridging Core Sound and arriving on the 

island. This mass transit system could then connect 

with or become a part of the island transport system. 

. . . Such a mass transit system is to be considered 

superior to an alternate desire to construct a motor 

vehicle bridge over the sound.” Cape Lookout 

National Seashore, Master Plan, 1971, 90.

possible down side. Entrances to the Seashore 

must be carefully protected, Hardee wrote, so that 

no “honky-tonks and shacks” would be allowed, 

and highways crossing the Banks (between ocean 

and sound, presumably) had to be avoided.80

As it turned out, tourist facilities for the new 

National Seashore were scaled back, and tourism 

gains proved much smaller than anticipated. No 

causeway or ferry was installed; no Shackleford 

Banks facilities of any kind were built. And many 

fewer than the anticipated number of tourists 

came; even by the mid-1980s, annual visitation was 

still only about 100,000. 

Initially, however, the major problem was not 

how much tourist development the National 

Park Service was to do, of what kind(s), and 

where to put it, but how to finish acquiring the 

final few necessary parcels of land. They were 

in the hands of powerful people, who were well 

aware of the quick rise in land values following 

the announcement that the new Seashore was 

to be built, and committed to private models of 

development. 

80 Roy Hardee, “Cape Lookout Development Aired,” 

Raleigh News and Observer, July 1, 1967.

Figure 9-30. Charles M. Reeves, Jr., Master Plan, Proposed Cape Lookout Development, 1964. Rader and 

Associates, Miami, FL. National Park Service, Denver Service Center.
National Park Service 213

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

From the 1920s through the late 1960s, latter-day 

sport hunters organized and established hunting 

clubs and lodges, although these were generally 

less grand than their predecessors from the late 

nineteenth century. Several such groups used 

buildings in Portsmouth into the 1950s and 1960s. 

The small, two-room Ed Styron House was leased 

for that purpose until 1989. In the early 1950s, the 

former Portsmouth Life-Saving Station (built in 

1894 and decommissioned in 1937) was sold to a 

private hunting club. The club built a landing strip 

adjacent to it, obliterating the old Marine Hospital 

site. The recently established Salter Gun Club 

also began in 1965 to use the Dixon-Salter House, 

which dated to 1900.81 And in 1930, the Raleigh 

News and Observer reported that “a big club 

owned by northern interests” was being planned 

for Salvo and that the wealthy Phipps family, 

owners of “private shooting estates” in several 

counties, had bought 800 acres near Buxton on 

which to develop “a great shooting property.”82 The 

Core Sound Gun Club bought what would turn out 

to be a key 900+-acre parcel.

Simultaneously, private developers with visions of 

major tourist enclaves bought large parcels on the 

Outer Banks. Powerful Sanford industrialist (and 

member of the state Banking Commission) Charles 

M. Reeves, Jr., owned 230 acres near the lighthouse 

and 500 acres at Drum Inlet.83 On the smaller 

parcel, he planned to lay out roadways and more 

than 700 residential building lots. Other space was 

reserved for motels, and Cape Point itself looked 

to Reeves like a prime site for a hotel. Reeves was 

willing to sell his property, providing he could get 

what he thought it was worth. In the late 1960s, he 

sold his 500 acres at Drum Inlet for only $46 an 

acre, but the 230 acres near the lighthouse brought 

81 Jones, Ed Styron House,1; Wiss, Janney, Elstner 

Associates, Inc., and John Milner Associates, Inc., 

Portsmouth Village Cultural Landscape Report, 

31, 70, 121, 126; Keane, Salter-Battle Hunting and 

Fishing Lodge: National Register of Historic Places 

Registration.

82 D. V. Meekins, “Cape Hatteras Getting on Map,” 

Raleigh News and Observer, March 23, 1930; unpaged 

clipping.

83 Apparently Reeves had acquired some part of his 

property by purchasing the tauranization rights of 

the Cape Lookout development company. See Cape 

Lookout Village Historic District National Register 

Nomination, Sec. 8, 29.

him $1.5 million ($6500 an acre) when he sold it in 

1974.84

Negotiations over the Core Banks Gun Club 

land dragged on for more than nine years, nearly 

derailing plans for the entire park at the outset. 

Expected difficulty in acquiring the Club’s land led 

to its being excluded from the original legislation in 

1963. A half-dozen years later it had still not been 

acquired. Condemnation proceedings were halted 

when the state Supreme Court ruled that the state 

lacked authority to condemn it. Meanwhile, even 

the 1.5 acres owned by the much less powerful 

Salter Gun Club had to be obtained through what 

a state official called a “painstaking, cat-and-mouse 

process.”85

To get the Gun Club’s land, the Supreme Court 

said, special legislation would be required. It was 

introduced and passed quickly in mid-1969.86 As 

late as 1974, legislation to establish the park still 

excluded the land.87 Meanwhile, more and more 

titles were turning out to be complicated and 

obscure, and the estimate for acquiring all the 

necessary land had risen from $265,000 to $13 

84 Beal and Prioli, Life at the Edge of the Sea, 135; Jack 

Childs, “State to Acquire Core Banks Tract,” Raleigh

News and Observer, December 10, 1970.

85 Russell Clay, “Cape Lookout Seashore: It’s Coming, 

but When?,” Raleigh News and Observer, October 26, 

1969. The state paid $16,000 for the Salter Gun Club’s 

land and a two-story house, and only $150/acre for 

1,000 acres south of the Core Banks Gun Club’s land. 

Russell Clay, “State Acquires Seashore Tract,” Raleigh

News and Observer, October 30, 1969.

86 Jim Lewis “Law Needed to Take Gun Club Land,” 

Raleigh News and Observer, May 20, 1969; follow-up 

articles also appeared on June 7 and 12.

87 Steve Berg, “Park Land Bill Is Introduced,” Raleigh

News and Observer, June 17, 1974.

Figure 9-31. Model A Ford modified for fishermen’s use, 

ca. 1975. Cape Lookout National Seashore archive photo.
214 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

million. The Gun Club’s land was finally bought for 

$3,000 per acre at the end of 1974. The Club was 

given a 25- ear lease on part of the property. The 

lease expired in late 1999, and eighteen months 

later, Governor Holshouser presented deeds for 

16,600 acres to the National Park Service. 88

The Reeves and Gun Club purchases could have 

marked a full and decisive shift from private to 

public ownership and development, from private 

clubs and subdivisions on the southern Banks to a 

national seashore that would fully realize Secretary 

Ickes’s vision of nearly forty years earlier, but they 

did not quite swing the balance. Another round 

remained to be fought with another group of 

private interests. 

88 “Aid Sought to Acquire Land at Cape Lookout,” 

Raleigh News and Observer, July 3, 1974; “N.C. to 

Acquire Key Section of Land on Cape Lookout,” 

Raleigh News and Observer, December 4, 1974; Bean 

and Prioli, Life at the Edge of the Sea, 135; Durham

Morning Herald, June 7, 1976.

After World War II, sport fishing had become 

a major business on the Outer Banks. A major 

impetus at the southern end had come unbidden 

in 1933, when a hurricane opened Barden’s Inlet, 

separating Core Banks from Shackleford Banks.89

“It was almost as if, when the water rushed out, 

the twentieth century rushed in,” islander Irvin 

Guthrie reported. Anthropologists Barbara 

Garrity-Blake and James Sabella note that the new 

inlet provided easy access to the ocean for sport 

fishermen, transformed Harkers Island into a 

“jumping off place” for tourists, and led to tourismrelated development. Mrs. Harkers Lodge, located 

at Shell Point, became the island’s first motel and 

an attractive lodging for fishermen. Between 1930 

and 1950, Harkers Island population grew almost 

50 percent (from 854 to 1244).90By the mid-1950s, 

a National Park Service survey counted thirty to 

forty fishing cottages on Core Banks.91

Sport fishing in coastal North Carolina would 

eventually grow into a $1 billion a year industry. 

In 1991, a million individual anglers, more than 

a quarter million recreational boats, nearly 200 

charter and “head” boat operators (nearly a third 

of them out of Carteret County) were pulling 

nearly 14 million pounds of fish of more than 200 

species out of the water every year. Suppliers of 

boats and motors, fishing gear and clothing, and 

other services added to the industry’s importance. 

Shore fishermen were responsible for roughly half 

the harvest in any year.92

The obliteration of the Marine Hospital site was 

by no means the only damage that decades of 

tourism and recreational used had wrought on the 

Outer Banks. By the 1950s, when the formation 

of Cape Lookout National Seashore first began 

to be contemplated, it was already clear that 

89 John Milner Associates, Inc., and Wiss, Janney, Elstner 

Associates, Inc., Cape Lookout Village Cultural 

Landscape Report, 4-11.

90 Garrity-Blake and Sabella, Ethnohistorical Overview 

and Assessment Study, 6.5.21 and Table 6.5.1: 

Population of Harkers Island Township: 1970–2000 

[sic; figures are actually given for 1930–2000].

91 National Park Service, A Report on the Seashore 

Recreation Area Survey of the Atlantic and Gulf 

Coasts (Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1955), 

“Undeveloped Seashore Areas in North Carolina.”

92 Detailed data from North Carolina Division of Marine 

Fisheries, Description of North Carolina’s Coastal 

Fishery Resources, 1972–1991 (Morehead City, NC: 

Division of Marine Fisheries, 1993), 1–3, 47–52, and 

Appendix 2. Shore-fishing percentage taken from 

Figure 17.

Figure 9-32. Removing junk cars from Cape Lookout 

National Seashore with lighthouse in background. Car on 

bottom appears to be a ca. 1962 Chrysler; one in middle 

probably a Ford, ca. 1962–1963; one on top likely a 1955 

Chevrolet. Note fishing rod receptacles on front bumper 

of middle car. Since the cars would presumably not have 

been abandoned when new, the 1960s models were 

probably abandoned after the National Seashore was 

created. Southeast Regional Office archive, National Park 

Service. 
National Park Service 215

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

repairing those damages would have to be an 

early order of business. As early as 1968, F. Ross 

Holland reported that fishermen and other users 

had left their imprint upon the banks. “Clusters of 

fishermen’s shanties,” he said

dot the landscape; for the most part they are 

tarpaper shacks that would be a disgrace in 

the worst city slum. Worn out and broken 

down dune vehicles in all their unsightliness 

are much in evidence. These rusting cars or 

small trucks with snow tires or extra wide 

tires on the drive wheels are collected together 

in various spots in what appear to be Core 

Banks junkyards. Many individual buggies 

dot the Banks, abandoned by their owners 

where they broke down. All the vehicles are 

gradually being covered by the drifting sand, 

and one wonders how many sand dunes with 

their crowns of sea oats hide earlier versions of 

dune buggies.

Eight years later, the Raleigh News and Observer

reported, a “rusty fleet of more than 2,500 

abandoned vehicles”—automobiles, pickup trucks, 

vans, and even Model A Fords—lay on the beaches, 

waiting to be crushed on site, buried, or hauled off 

in a barge.93

Nearly ten years after the new National Seashore 

was authorized, but before it actually opened, 

Durham Sun writer Bill Noblitt lamented both 

the rusty automobiles and the shacks and old 

trailers (250 or more of them) that littered the 

landscape around five fishing camps frequented 

by doctors, insurance men, and workingmen 

“serious [enough] about fishing” to build the flimsy 

structures and haul them out to the Banks.94 “Don’t 

call them sportsmen,” News and Observer writer 

Bob Simpson cautioned a year later in an article 

on the “squatter boom” on the Banks. Simpson 

explained that “squatters” (“upstate greedies”) 

were “claiming the right to the land” by throwing 

up shacks on it “when the rightful owners were in 

good faith selling it to the state.”95

93 Holland, Survey History, 3; Raleigh News and 

Observer, April 30, 1976, unpaged clipping.

94 Bill Noblitt, “People Mess Up Core Bank,” Durham

Sun, December 4, 1975, unpaged clipping.

95 Bob Simpson, “Core Banks Squatters: ‘Don’t Call Them 

Sportsmen,’” Raleigh News and Observer, December 

7, 1975, unpaged clipping.

Obviously there was room to maneuver with regard 

to the terminology concerning the fishing-related 

structures that dotted Cape Lookout National 

Seashore’s acres, but there was no denying that 

scores of them were out there. A map of existing 

development prepared by the NPS in 1977 

showed 51 such structures on Shackleford Banks. 

Nearly 275 were on Core Banks, scattered from 

just below Shingle Point to around Swash Inlet.96

Unsightliness was only part of the problem. In 

his 1976 study of barrier island ecology, Paul J. 

Godfrey took a broader approach. Unfortunately, 

he said, 

a good many people have shown no respect for 

the Outer Banks environment and have spoiled 

a great deal of it . . . . There are a great many 

[surf fishing] camps on the island where the 

fishermen stay; clusters of them are sometimes 

surrounded by rings of abandoned cars towed 

there in an effort to protect the buildings from 

the sea. Fishermen bring to the island an old 

car which they drive up and down the beach 

until it wears out or gets hopelessly stuck. This 

in itself does no real harm unless the car is 

driven over dune grass or through bird nesting 

grounds, but the car is eventually left to rust 

on the beach . . . . There are probably over a 

thousand such hulks on Core Banks.

As for the camps themselves, Godfrey observed, 

some are made up of “neat, decent little buildings,” 

but many “are unsightly, vermin-infested hovels 

surrounded by rubbish.”97

A challenge even more legally, politically, and 

(especially) culturally complicated than that on 

96 Map supplied by Denver Service Center, National Park 

Service [623-20018 – Scanned images – 151768.pdf]

97 Godfrey and Godfrey, Barrier Island Ecology of 

Cape Lookout National Seashore See especially 

Figures 115–118. As early as 1933, future Cape 

Hatteras National Seashore partisan Frank Stick 

wrote of the destruction of the Banks by erosion, 

overgrazing, and deforestation. See Binkley, Cape 

Hatteras National Seashore: Administrative History, 

7. The action of winds, tides, and storms over the 

decades since the national seashore was established 

sometimes uncovers more cars long buried by those 

same processes. The policy of CALO management 

is to remove newly uncovered cars if they still have 

enough structural integrity to permit it, especially 

if several are discovered near to each other, as 

happened as a result of Hurricane Isabel in 2003 

(telephone conversation with Barry Munyan, Chief 

Ranger, December 18, 2009).
216 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

Core Banks awaited the Park Service when it 

began in 1978 to acquire land on Shackleford 

Banks. Considered broadly, the land the state and 

federal governments had to deal with on Core and 

Shackleford Banks might be thought of as falling 

into a handful of categories: 

(1) Historically “settled” land, such as Portsmouth, 

Diamond City (before it was blown away), and 

other small early fishing villages on Shackleford 

Banks (e.g., Lookout Woods); 

(2) Historically public or “commons” land, such 

as beaches, to which the public’s increasingly 

restricted access so troubled Harold Ickes in 

1938; 

(3) State institutional lands, such as those 

appropriated at various times (and for varying 

lengths of time) for lighthouses, lifesaving 

stations, military installations, or the Coast 

Guard; 

(4) Privately held speculative lands, bought as 

investments or for speculative development; 

and 

(5) What one might call legacy lands, bought 

(or not) and occupied long enough to have 

acquired deep and complex cultural and social 

meanings. 

The difficulty of acquiring land for the new 

National Seashore depended to some extent upon 

the category to which it belonged. Shell Castle 

Island had been abandoned for a century and a 

half, and Portsmouth had been almost completely 

depopulated for decades. In those areas, remaining 

property owners were fairly easy to deal with. 

Access to public beaches was not under threat, as 

it would soon be further north and south, where 

private tourism development was burgeoning. State 

institutional lands could fairly easily be conveyed 

and repurposed as governmental needs and 

priorities changed. Acquiring private speculative 

lands (such as those of Charles Reeves, Jr.) could 

be legally challenging and expensive, but they 

could ultimately be obtained. 

Legacy lands could be a much more complicated 

matter, as they proved to be on Core and 

Shackleford Banks. The Core Banks buildings were 

mostly clustered on lands between the lighthouse 

and the Coast Guard station. Some had been 

purchased when they were decommissioned by 

the Coast Guard; others had been built in the area. 

Years of regular use had formed a tight-knit and 

supportive community. Families who owned and 

used the houses were loath to see their community 

come to an end. 

A Coastwatch article in 2003 evoked the ties 

individuals and families had formed to the area and 

their relationships with other families who used 

the cottages regularly year after year. Some houses 

had been updated with generators, but most had 

changed little. June Long’s father had started 

coming in the 1920s and continued visiting until 

his death in 1972. “This place means everything 

to me,” said Wilson Davis of the Coca-Cola house 

his family had been returning to every year since 

the 1950s. “It is my family’s history.” Some of the 

owners were given 25-year leases when the land 

was transferred to the National Park Service in 

1976, but negotiations and lawsuits continued for 

years.98

As Beal and Prioli have outlined it, the more 

contentious Shackleford Banks challenge was 

focused around two groups: seasonal surf 

fishermen and local people who had long 

maintained cottages for seasonal and occasional 

use. The surf fishermen were disturbed by planning 

for the park that proposed a wilderness designation 

for Shackleford Banks. That designation would ban 

all structures and private motor vehicles, including 

those taken to the Banks by the fishermen for 

more than twenty-five years—many of them 

ingeniously designed and built with great care.

99 The fishermen, most of whom were not from 

Carteret County, fearing the elimination of their 

sport, responded immediately and negatively. They 

finally agreed to the Shackleford Banks wilderness 

designation, but asked to retain their customary 

practices on Core Banks and Portsmouth Island. 

For the most part, state officials and agencies 

98 “Core Banks Cottages Rich in History, Tradition,” 

Coastwatch, Winter 2003.

99 Beal and Prioli, Life at the Edge of the Sea, 135–143.
National Park Service 217

Outer Banks Tourism and the Coming of Cape Lookout National Seashore

agreed, rejecting the position of conservationist 

groups, which sought to ban surf fishing 

throughout the National Seashore. 

Having reached an agreement with surf fishermen, 

the state turned to acquiring Shackleford Banks 

land. In that effort, they faced the full array of 

issues attaching to legacy lands. The many beach 

cottages and houses on Shackleford in some 

respects resembled buildings used by tourists 

and seasonal visitors, but those who had built 

them were by no reasonable definition “tourists.” 

Certainly they were not squatters like those 

further north on Core Banks, though in fact only 

a very few of them actually owned the property 

on which the more than fifty cottages stood. 

They were mostly local people who had built the 

structures and occupied them for years, and who 

practiced what Beal and Prioli called “gentle land 

use,” contrasting sharply with the Core Banks 

squatters’ practices. For generations these owners 

had considered the land commons or communal 

property. The buildings, Prioli notes, were not just 

weekend retreats, but rather “extensions of their 

primary homes” that “connected them spiritually 

with a past that was increasingly threatened by 

the tourism and commercialism that were rapidly 

overrunning their mainland environments.” 

So distressed were these cottage-owners that 

their houses were going to be destroyed that they 

burned them one night in December 1985. For 

good measure, outraged owners also torched 

the only two houses that had qualified for 25-

year leases. Unknown parties also burned the 

Cape Lookout National Seashore visitor center 

on Harkers Island, destroying data on important 

wildlife research. Despite an FBI investigation, no 

one was ever charged with the arson.100 Conflicted 

feelings lingered between local people and Park 

Service personnel for years.

100 Ibid., 143. The Beal and Priori version of this history 

is not the only one that might be (or has been) told. 

Other versions contend that the Park Service itself 

burned the structures and that local people stood on 

the shore of Harkers Island and cried as they watched 

the flames. It is beyond the scope of this present 

study to present, evaluate, or judge among the 

various versions. To do so would require a separate 

study.

The history of tourism on the southern end of the 

Outer Banks bequeathed a complicated social, 

cultural, political, and economic dynamic to 

the developers and managers of Cape Lookout 

National Seashore, one within which the constant 

challenge of mediating between private rights 

and the public good, cold legalities and intense 

sentiment could not be avoided.
218 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study
219

Management, Interpretive, and 

Research Recommendations

The Scope of Work (SOW) for this study notes that 

an HRS “supplies data for resource management 

and interpretation [and . . . identifies any need 

for special history studies, cultural landscape 

reports, or other detailed studies and may make 

recommendations for resource management 

and interpretation as appropriate.” Given the 

extensive work already done in nominating CALO 

structures for the National Register, the SOW 

specifies that “National Register amendments 

or new documentation [are not included in this 

scope of work; however, the researchers will 

make recommendations for the same” as needed. 

This chapter responds to the Scope of Work’s 

requirements in the following ways:

•	 Discussing briefly the especially problematic 

relationship between historic resources at 

CALO and meaningful historical interpretation

at this park;

•	 Suggesting how reframing and enlarging the 

analytical and interpretive contexts, themes, 

and perspectives for CALO to bring them up 

to date with current historical scholarship 

could correct, enhance, and deepen historical 

and cultural interpretation across the park as 

a whole and at particular locations, especially 

through the creative use of new technologies; 

and

•	 Making recommendations for further research 

that could help round out understanding of 

specific aspects of CALO history as reflected in 

previous studies, National Register documents, 

and the List of Classified Structures.

Especially in light of the park’s intention to 

write a new general management plan and a 

comprehensive interpretive plan in the near 

term, we hope these recommendations will help 

connect the contexts and perspectives we have 

developed here to the elaboration of themes and 

programming of specific activities that those 

planning processes will entail.

“Historic Resources” and 

Interpretation

Because of the imperatives imposed by historic 

preservation legislation and the National Register, 

the idea of “historic resources” in the National 

Parks dictates a focus on extant physical resources, 

especially historic buildings, structures, and, to 

some extent, landscapes (including vegetation 

and circulation networks). At CALO, which was 

designated as a park largely due to its natural and 

recreational value and whose physical cultural 

resources are predominantly fragile, impermanent, 

and somewhat scattered in terms of thematic or 

narrative unity, tying history-telling too tightly to 

existing physical resources invites presentation of 

a narrative that is fragmented and less connected 

to the large, important, and interesting stories that 

have unfolded on and around Core Banks for more 

than three hundred years. 

As we suggest in Chapter 1, the National Register 

process has been especially problematic as a 

guide for interpretation at the park. By dictating 

rigid periods of “significance,” it has identified a 

fairly short contextual timeframe for the histories 

of areas within the park (approximately 1857 to 

1957) that may fit the time for which there is some 

physical integrity, but that is out of phase with the 

much longer time period that needs to be looked 

at to understand the historical importance of this 

region.1

1 For an incisive critique of the National Register, see 

Thomas F. King, Thinking About Cultural Resource 

Management: Essays from the Edge (Walnut Creek, 

CA: AltaMira Press, 2002), especially 19–25.
220 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Management, Interpretive, and Research Recommendations

Particularly in the case of Portsmouth, where as 

many as half of the identified “historic resources” 

of the park are clustered, the on-the-ground 

remnants of the past (dating largely from 1900 on) 

do not represent the period of the site’s greatest 

importance (1753 to approximately 1860). Creative 

uncoupling of interpretive materials from physical 

resources could enhance the interpretation of 

this site and help better explain why a community 

developed there and achieved importance in 

the first place. In this regard, we concur with 

recommendations contained in the recent cultural 

landscape report for Portsmouth Village.2

Similarly, with regard to other social and cultural 

elements that are crucial to represent at the site—

including race, gender, class, and culture—new 

interpretations need to take a larger view, which 

2 Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John Milner 

Associates, Inc. Portsmouth Village Cultural Landscape 

Report, 2007.

may help to pull together apparently fragmentary 

remains into narratives that draw out these 

neglected elements of how life was lived on and 

around Core Banks.

In the spirit of loosening the overly tight linkage 

between “historic resources” (extant physical 

structures) and “history” (a narrative of what 

happened on and around this land in the past), we 

suggest below some ways to broaden the context 

in which the history of Core Banks is understood. 

Narratives that flow from that broadening will 

encompass many of the resources still found on the 

site, but will not be completely dictated by them. 

See Appendix D for an indication of how we have 

moved from thinking about historic resources 

in a National Register context to defining major 

“locations of activity” that encompass but are not 

defined by historic resources.

Figure 10-1. Survey of Roanoke Inlet and Sound, 1829. Map by James D. Graham, United States Corps of Engineers. 

Courtesy of Outer Banks History Center, State Archives of North Carolina.
National Park Service 221

Management, Interpretive, and Research Recommendations

In an age when new technologies are vastly 

expanding our ability to visualize the pasts of 

places that are no longer physically present, the 

opportune moment to widen the frame at CALO 

seems at hand. In this connection, we suggest that 

CALO staff study carefully the North Carolina 

digital mapping website recently developed by the 

University of North Carolina library.3 The aim of 

this project is to digitize all known North Carolina 

maps produced before 1923, nearly 120 of them 

supplied by the Outer Banks History Center. 

Offering particularly promising possibilities is the 

interactive Historic Overlay Maps subsection of 

the site, which includes two sample georeferenced 

Carteret County overlay maps, one of them 

centered on Beaufort Inlet. All of the maps can 

be overlayed on Google Earth. These new digital 

technologies offer CALO significantly expanded 

possibilities for historical documentation, resource 

management, and interpretation.

Widening and Updating the 

Historical Frame

More than identifying previously untouched topics 

or newly discovered information (not unimportant 

tasks, certainly), our recommendations suggest that 

what the park most needs is to take advantage of 

the new perspectives on history that have developed 

as a result of the flowering of historical scholarship 

that has taken place since the park’s founding. 

The park needs to begin thinking differently about 

what history is, what domains and topics are 

appropriate for historical analysis, how historical 

information can be organized and narrated, and 

how the fragmented remains of what we know 

about the past can be brought together and made 

coherent to visitors. These new perspectives 

will allow the park and the public to understand 

CALO’s resources in a fresh light and offer new 

ways to invite visitors to understand the fluidity 

of the past, the way power relations of all kinds 

3 Available at http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/ncmaps. As a 

part of its large “Documenting the American South” 

collection (http://docsouth.unc.edu/), UNC-Chapel Hill 

is developing numerous digitization projects (already 

funded and under way) that involve georeferenced 

historical materials, including “Going to the Show,” 

which uses the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps for North 

Carolina, and “Driving through Time: The Digital Blue 

Ridge Parkway,” which includes historical Parkway 

land maps and for which Anne Whisnant is the 

scholarly adviser.

have shaped lives and landscapes, the challenge of 

understanding histories only partially visible, and 

the perpetual layering of our physical settings as 

the new overwrites the old. 

Connectedness Instead of 

Isolation

Our primary recommendation is that, for 

interpretive uses, CALO should reconceptualize 

the park area’s history in a much broader frame, 

which should include not just the Outer Banks 

themselves but also the coastal counties and 

communities that border the sounds, the rest of 

North Carolina, and the wider Atlantic world. 

This frame should, most importantly, emphasize 

the park area’s essential but ever-changing 

connectedness both to mainland North Carolina 

and to the larger maritime worlds to which it has 

always been joined by the sea. 

The domain of analysis in the already existing 

historical and cultural studies (HRSs, HSRs, 

CLRs) and in current park interpretation is 

too often limited to the Outer Banks, which 

themselves, following an established discourse 

perhaps more appropriate to natural history, are 

conceived of principally as “barrier islands.” As 

we have explained at numerous points, however, 

such a conception has the effect of bracketing 

off the history of the Outer Banks from larger 

histories with which it has had demonstrably close, 

persistent, and important connections for several 

centuries. 

Although the entire park would benefit from such a 

reconceptualization, Portsmouth Village offers the 

greatest unrealized possibilities in this regard. At 

present, the interpretive materials for Portsmouth 

give little hint of how significant this site was for 

North Carolina commerce after the mid-eighteenth 

century, how connected its fortunes were to other 

parts of the colony/state and world, how shaped its 

early social development was by slavery and race, 

or why it became much more isolated in recent 

times than it originally was. In most currently 

available interpretative materials, the story—a 

fascinating episode integral with many of the most 

important themes in early American history—is 

buried in bland, too-small narratives that are at best 

misleading and at worst incorrect. 
222 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Management, Interpretive, and Research Recommendations

Take, for example, the interpretive wayside that 

greets visitors arriving at Portsmouth by ferry at 

Haulover Point. The sign says that after its charter 

in 1753, Portsmouth became a “bustling seaport” 

and “one of the most important lightering ports on 

the eastern seaboard.” It explains that “goods from 

Europe” were loaded onto smaller ships here “for 

the last leg of their journey to the mainland” and 

notes that “the Civil War and the opening of other 

inlets on the Carolina coast reduced Portsmouth’s 

importance.”4 However, it makes no mention of 

early North Carolina’s colossal transportation 

problems or Ocracoke Inlet’s singular (but 

increasingly problematic) role as the main outlet 

to the sea for much the colony and state’s early 

coastal trade. Additionally, it neglects to mention 

export trade and wrongly characterizes most of 

the imports coming through the inlet as being 

from Europe, when in fact very little transatlantic 

shipping was handled at Portsmouth. (Most of the 

trade through Ocracoke Inlet went to and from 

either other American ports or the Carribbean, as 

we have shown in Chapter 2). 

A 2007 brochure, Historic Portsmouth Village, 

currently posted on the CALO website, does a 

4 Interpretive wayside, Portsmouth Village, near 

Haulover Point dock, Cape Lookout National 

Seashore, March 15, 2008.

better job of explaining that Ocracoke Inlet is 

key to the story of Portsmouth, but also contains 

other information that is either misleading or 

erroneous. It repeats the dubious claim (based on 

the Congressional report supporting establishment 

of a marine hospital at Portsmouth) that in 1842 

“two-thirds of the exports of the state passed 

through Ocracoke Inlet.” This statement would 

not be possible within a broader framing that sets 

the history of Portsmouth in relation to the larger 

changes in trade and transportation in the rest of 

North Carolina, including the growth of the port of 

Wilmington, which had already eclipsed all other 

state ports in importance decades before the 1840s, 

when the brochure notes that “changes were on the 

horizon for Portsmouth.”5

As we argue in Chapter 2 on the Atlantic world, 

Portsmouth needs to be situated and interpreted 

with reference to Ocracoke inlet, Shell Castle, 

and Ocracoke village. John Gray Blount and 

his entrepreneurial enterprises need to be 

comprehended and taken account of for visitors. 

5 Watson, Wilmington: Port of North Carolina, 45. 

Historic Portsmouth Village brochure is available at 

http://www.nps.gov/calo/planyourvisit/brochures.htm.

Figure 10-2. Historic Period Plan, Portsmouth Village, ca. 1760–1866. John Milner and Associates, Portsmouth 

Village Cultural Landscape Report, 35.
National Park Service 223

Management, Interpretive, and Research Recommendations

Yet neither the wayside nor the brochure says 

anything about how shipping magnate John Gray 

Blount’s Shell Castle enterprise shaped the site, nor 

in fact even mentions Shell Castle at all. 

With the availability, especially, of Phillip 

McGuinn’s extensive and well-researched thesis 

on Shell Castle and of new technological tools, 

some steps should be taken to help visitors to 

visualize what was there during Portsmouth’s and 

Shell Castle’s zenith. Would it be possible, for 

example, to design an onsite map that represents 

the relationships among Ocracoke village, 

Portsmouth, Shell Castle, and eastern North 

Carolina, including the historically relevant (and 

changing) configurations of the channels and 

inlets and the Blount trading networks? The recent 

Portsmouth Village Cultural Landscape Report, in 

fact, includes such a map. Additionally, could a 

ferry route allow visitors to pass by the remnants 

of Shell Castle on their way to Portsmouth from 

Ocracoke? 

As McGuinn notes, despite shifting sands, 

Ocracoke Inlet is configured today much as it was 

in 1713, allowing for the use of new technologies 

to provide useful interpretive tools.6 Could 

a virtual exhibit georeference and layer the 

numerous available historical maps onto a presentday Google satellite image, so the viewer might 

envision how what is there now looks both similar 

to and different from what was there in 1800, 

1850, or 1900? Such a project might be carried out 

in collaboration with the North Carolina Maps 

project. 

Better representing the wider context of 

Portsmouth and Shell Castle in this and other 

ways could help visitors better appreciate the 

significance of even the small and otherwise 

easily overlooked “sea captains’ graves” site at 

Portsmouth. While a sign here presently notes 

that the families of the deceased “shipped the 

stones here from the New England area,” we see 

from one of the headstones that the sailor who 

died at Portsmouth in 1810 was from Providence, 

Rhode Island (one of the major ports in the United 

States at that time). These small facts take on new 

meaning when one understands the graves as a 

small but significant physical representation of 

the period when Shell Castle and Ocracoke Inlet 

6 McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” 13.

served as a hub of North Carolina’s coastwise (not 

transatlantic) trade with northern American ports.

Race 

We have not attempted to evaluate specifically all of 

the current interpretive infrastructure with regard 

to race generally and African American history 

specifically, but our general impression is that it is 

far from adequate. Certainly the written historical 

studies are insufficient in this regard, although 

some of them contain scattered information about 

African American history; even this information 

remains at a purely demographic level and thus 

does not take account of race as a factor shaping 

power relationships between different groups. 

Again, with regard to interpretive materials at 

Portsmouth, both the 2007 Portsmouth brochure 

and the Haulover dock wayside elide the history 

of race and slavery. The wayside is silent about the 

hundreds of enslaved workers who helped give the 

town its “bustle” and who handled much of the 

heavy work that lightering entailed. And through 

liberal use of the passive voice, the brochure masks 

slaves’ work: Ships “were forced to transfer their 

Figure 10-3. Gravestone of Capt. Thomas W. Greene (d. 

January 17, 1810), from Providence, RI. Photo by David E. 

Whisnant.
224 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Management, Interpretive, and Research Recommendations

cargo” to lighters. “At Portsmouth were built the 

warehouses and docks” that lightering required. 

With all due respect to the memory of Henry Pigott 

and the black Pea Island lifesavers, the romantic 

images of Pigott dutifully rowing the mail boat to 

Portsmouth or of the lifesavers’ heroism does not 

even begin to engage race as a central constitutive 

part of the history of CALO or its broader 

historical context. 

Our chapters on the Atlantic world and on slavery 

and class offer some starting points for a more 

adequate consideration: slavery in Portsmouth 

and on Shell Castle (including the importance of 

black pilots, the lives of slave watermen, and their 

role in attempted escapes), African Americans’ 

abandonment of Portsmouth after the Civil War, 

the legacy of slavery in the coastal counties and 

towns, race relations in the many and varied 

embodiments of the fishing industry (as outlined, 

for the menhaden industry, in Garrity-Blake’s 

The Fish Factory), or the work of black women 

in the fish packing houses, to take a few of many 

examples. A first task would be to pull together 

scattered information about race and African 

American history and to update or augment the 

waysides at Portsmouth with (at the very least) 

a chart showing the waxing and waning of the 

African American population, the shifting of 

occupations, and the changing proportions of 

blacks and whites.

Class 

The essentially reductionist and romantic public 

discourse that has long dominated encounters 

with the Outer Banks (discussed in our chapter 

on Outer Banks culture) slights and misconstrues 

a number of key features of Outer Banks history 

and life. Central among them is the issue of 

class. The cozy narratives of life in Portsmouth 

or Cape Lookout Village or Harkers Island 

notwithstanding, it is relatively easy to demonstrate 

that the history of the Outer Banks and of the 

counties and towns from Wilmington north—like 

the history of any place, at any time—is inseparable 

from issues of race and class.7

Our Chapter 2 on the Atlantic world pays 

considerable attention to John Gray Blount and 

his protégé John Wallace, one of whom was an 

established and determinedly powerful member of 

the upper class and the other of whom had major 

class aspirations. In Chapter 5 on slavery, race, 

and class, we explore the interrelationships among 

those categories, especially during Reconstruction 

and the Fusionist period, paying particular 

attention to class position and relationships as 

tools used by the elite to maintain established racial 

mores, usages, and boundaries. From a much later 

period, as Chapter 9 on tourism explains briefly, 

many owners and users of the much-contested 

beach cottages on Core and Shackleford Banks 

had considerably higher class positions than 

did working class residents of Harkers Island or 

surrounding communities. And the class dynamics 

of sport hunting are impossible to ignore, as the 

National Register nomination for the SalterBattle Hunting and Fishing Lodge as well as our 

discussion in the chapter on economic activities 

make clear. 

Thinking about class as a relevant category might 

aid development of interesting interpretive 

materials incorporating the Salter-Battle site or 

Cape Lookout Village, where tourism development 

plans emerged in the early twentieth century, 

where recreational use flourished, and where 

conflicts between homeowners and the National 

Park Service persisted into the present century. 

Gender 

The existing historical narrative about CALO 

is largely a narrative of men’s lives: the houses 

7 To make this observation is in no way to belittle 

or dismiss the actual existence of small pockets of 

racial harmony and cooperation, as chronicled, 

for example, in Cecelski’s portrait of “The Last 

Daughter of Davis Ridge” in A Historian’s Coast, 

63–69. Noeleen McIlvenna’s A Very Mutinous People 

presents a succinct but detailed and dramatic account 

of the Albemarle area in the late seventeenth 

and early eighteenth century, when refugees 

from the developing plantation system in Virginia 

and ideological and religious opponents of the 

Restoration in England established an insistently (and 

even militantly) egalitarian political and social system 

in the Albemarle/Dismal Swamp region.
National Park Service 225

Management, Interpretive, and Research Recommendations

they built, the organizations they worked for, the 

buildings they worked in, the dangers and rigors of 

the work they did. With few exceptions, existing 

studies and interpretive infrastructure neither 

take explicit note that they are describing a malecentered narrative nor pay any systematic attention 

to women—their status, their lives, or their work—

except as they appear in conventionally supporting 

roles as wives, cooks, postmistresses, storekeepers, 

and the like. To urge the reexamination of the 

lives of women in our focal area, moreover, is not 

merely to “add women in.” Recent analyses of 

women and their lives invariably conclude that 

their roles, social and political involvements, range 

of activity, and impact upon historical processes 

was far greater than established narratives have 

admitted. And perhaps more significantly, the study 

of women invariably calls us to understand better 

how ideas about gender have shaped the lives 

of both men and women. A serious and detailed 

reexamination of the lives of women in the CALO 

region, therefore, could be expected to open a new 

window on the entire way of thinking about how 

life has been structured on Core Banks. 

There are a few images of women on wayside 

panels in Portsmouth, but not much more than 

that. Women who are referred to in existing studies 

are generally classed generically as “wives.” The 

HSR on the Lighthouse Keeper’s Dwelling, for 

example, mentions two wives, about whom we 

learn only that Amy Clifton served as postmistress. 

The HSR on the Portsmouth Life-Saving Station 

mentions women hardly at all, in any role; the 1982 

Portsmouth Village HRS (in many respects an 

excellent study) contains only two minor mentions 

of women.8

Portsmouth Village interpretive signs tell or show 

us that Jodie Bragg’s wife, Annie, cooked for 

hunters, and that Annie Salter was postmistress 

and storekeeper, but nothing more about them. We 

learn that Jessie Lee Babb and Mildred Robertson 

played guitar; that Walker Styron met his wife, 

Sarah, on a boat ride from Portsmouth to Okracoke 

and they lived in Portsmouth for 23 years; that 

Cecil and Leona Gilgo built their house in 1936; 

that there were almost as many girls as boys in the 

8 Jones, Portsmouth Life-Saving Station, 23,40, 174, 

mentions the Women’s National Relief Association 

briefly twice and makes note of two wives who 

died, one of them that of substitute surfman George 

Dixon.

Figure 10-4. Portsmouth postmistress Annie Salter, ca. 

1935. Cape Lookout National Seashore archive photo.

Figure 10-5. Children (thirteen boys and twelve girls) of 

Portsmouth School, 1916. Cape Lookout National Seashore 

archive photo.

Portsmouth school in 1916 and that Mary Snead 

was their teacher; that Patsy Dixon was also a 

storekeeper (Were all the storekeepers women, one 

wonders, and if so, what status or economic import 

attached to their position?); that Washington 

Roberts had a sister named Jonsie; that Ed Dixon 

lived with his sisters, Elma and Nora; and that 

Henry Pigott’s sister Lizzie was the barber. Leah 

Pigott’s and Rose Pickett’s gravestones remain, but 

we know little or nothing about what their lives 

were like. A half-century into the current phase of 
226 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Management, Interpretive, and Research Recommendations

feminism, women’s history, and women’s studies, 

such an interpretive lapse should not continue. 

Culture 

A careful new look needs to be taken at the 

interpretive requirements and possibilities of 

culture on and proximate to the Outer Banks 

(not some kind of unique “Outer Banks culture,” 

a phrase rooted in numerous problematic 

assumptions). Virtually the entire current literature 

on culture and cultural studies has rejected longheld essentializing notions of cultural isolation and 

uniqueness in favor of analyses that emphasize 

cultural borrowings and sharings, dynamic 

processes, cultural syncretism, and broadly 

contextualized change. 

While current interpretive materials for CALO, 

to the park’s credit, do not fall into the trap of 

projecting a singular, unique culture on Core 

Banks, there are opportunities to engage cultural 

topics more fully at several places. Portsmouth’s 

eighteenth and nineteenth-century position as a 

key point in North Carolina’s trading networks, 

for instance, undoubtedly brought many avenues 

of cross-cultural encounter and exchange as 

ships passed in and out through Ocracoke Inlet, 

and people and goods from around the Atlantic 

world intermingled. Cecelski’s discussion of slave 

watermen repeatedly emphasizes the multicultural 

experience and perspectives of many of the black 

watermen. McGuinn’s analysis of the inventory 

of goods owned by John Wallace uses possessions 

to assess Wallace’s cultural position and social 

aspirations. And as Garrity-Blake demonstrates, 

changes in the occupational demographics of Core 

Banks spurred the development of discrete workbased subcultures and hierarchies within certain 

occupations. (Her analysis focuses on the cultures 

and subcultures around menhaden fishing, but 

similar conversations could be had about workers 

in lifesaving, other government employment, sport 

hunting, and other pursuits).9 As recreational use 

flowered in the twentieth century, what cultural 

distinctions (e.g. regarding land use, conservation, 

or other matters) emerged, one might usefully ask, 

between those who made their living in and around 

Core Banks and those who used it as a playground? 

9 McGuinn, “Shell Castle,” Chapter 5; Cecelski, The 

Waterman’s Song; Garrity-Blake, The Fish Factory.

Figure 10-6. Sadie [? and Nora Dixon, ca. 1917. Cape 

Lookout National Seashore archive photo.

Figure 10-7. Gravestone of Rose Pickett (1836–1909) in 

Portsmouth cemetery. Photo by David E. Whisnant.
National Park Service 227

Management, Interpretive, and Research Recommendations

The National Seashore Itself: Land 

Use, Conservation, and the Future 

A final area of interpretive possibility for the park 

is to bring these perspectives on interconnection, 

race, class, gender, and culture and the region’s 

history before the park into seamless conversation 

with the dialogues about land use and conservation 

that ultimately led to the creation of Cape Lookout 

National Seashore and that have shaped the park 

for the past forty years. Rather than approaching 

the history of the site as if it ceased when the 

National Seashore came into being, highlighting 

the connections between the pre-park past and 

the park-dominated present could help the 

public appreciate the park’s current management 

challenges and understand continuities that shape 

the environment in which the park operates. 

A first step would be to supplement the recently 

completed interpretive film with something far 

less romantic. The “unspoiled nature” interpretive 

theme that this film carries should be modulated by 

reference to the prior destruction and reclamation 

of the Banks.10 As it is, the film does not prepare 

visitors for the human history in (or of) the park. 

It offers next to no historical context and hardly 

any information at all on the centuries of human 

habitation and enterprise on the islands. And it 

provides no framework within which visitors might 

be assisted to think about how the park came 

to be, paths not taken (e.g., to develop the area 

commercially), challenges that the Park Service 

faced in returning the land to a more “natural” state 

(e.g., picking up all the junk cars), and the multiple 

and not easily harmonizable agendas (e.g. between 

the NPS and former cottage owners, recreational 

and commercial fishermen, local citizens with a 

stake in the area’s history, concessions operators, 

etc.) that must govern the preservation and use 

of the resource as it stands. It is, unfortunately, 

a romantic, visually seductive, “feel good” film 

that severs the park from its history and does not 

provide visitors with the necessary historical, 

social, political, or cultural frame to understand 

and appreciate the park or evaluate its probable 

future needs.

10 See for example Binkley’s discussion of Frank Stick 

in Cape Hatteras National Seashore: Administrative 

History, 6–7, and Godfrey and Godfrey, Barrier Island 

Ecology of Cape Lookout National Seashore.

Research Needs 

Topical Research

The new interpretive directions outlined above 

suggest additional research and/or studies on the 

following specific topics:

•	 African American history on Core Banks and 

adjacent mainland areas. This would include 

bringing together scattered details on black 

history from the earlier studies on Portsmouth, 

especially, and extending them into later 

periods and into other areas through both 

primary research and targeted use of recent 

secondary scholarly materials. Scholars David 

Cecelski and Barbara Garrity-Blake have done 

groundbreaking work in this area that suggests 

many other possibilities for documentation 

and analysis. Our Chapter 5 suggests many 

points of entry.

•	 Women’s history on Core Banks. Similarly, 

developing the story of women on the Banks 

would involve bringing together scattered 

pieces (augmented by additional primary 

research) into a narrative about women’s lives 

in, around, and on the Banks and broadening 

and extending that narrative with reference to 

the socially and culturally shaping influence 

of gender on both women and men. Within 

existing CALO studies, consideration of this 

area has been even more deficient than has 

been the limited attention to race.

•	 Cape Lookout National Seashore administrative 

history. A competent administrative history 

linking the NPS site’s development to its 

pre-park history would be very helpful in 

developing interpretive materials pertaining 

directly to social, cultural, and environmental 

issues that have engaged park managers 

and citizens since the 1960s. Such a history 

ought in particular to explore in detail the 

complex relationship that CALO has had to its 

surrounding communities. 

•	 Class as a constitutive factor in the history of the 

Outer Banks. Dominant popular narratives and 

discourses (elements of which are by no means 

absent in existing CALO interpretive materials) 

for the most part fail to engage the whole 

matter of class, even when class differences 

inhere in the materials under discussion (e.g., 

slavery, sport hunting, tourism, the fishing 
228 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Management, Interpretive, and Research Recommendations

industry, trade and shipping) and are engaged 

seriously by recent historical studies.

Updating Existing Documents 

and Completing Draft or Partial 

Studies 

Two existing studies need to be updated and/or 

completed:

(1) Tommy Jones, Historic Resource Study of 

Washington Roberts House: partial draft 

completed 2003.

(2) Barbara Garrity-Blake and James Sabella, 

Ethnohistorical Overview and Assessment Study 

of Cape Lookout National Seashore Including 

a Case Study of Harkers Island: Draft report of 

Phase I (Harkers Island) completed December 

2007. If the other projected portion (Wades 

Shore/West Shackleford Banks) has been 

completed, it has not come to our attention.

Updating or Adding National 

Register Nominations

While we do not anticipate major new National 

Register work lying ahead, we do have some 

modest recommendations: 

(1) Setzer-Dawsey House: On May 1, 2007, 

Tommy Jones reported in a memo that “On 

25 April 2007, Mike McGee, CALO chief of 

maintenance, escorted me to Cape Lookout 

village to re-evaluate the architectural integrity 

of the Setzer-Dawsey House. When the 

Cape Lookout Village historic district was 

listed in the National Register in 2000, the 

house and two adjacent outbuildings were 

judged non-contributing. At the request of 

the NC SHPO the house was re-evaluated as 

were the two adjacent outbuildings. Based 

upon this evaluation, the house and one 

of the outbuildings should be considered 

contributing buildings in the district.” Jones’s 

fairly detailed memo, illustrated with eight 

photographs, provides an excellent beginning 

for an amendment to the Cape Lookout Village 

Historic District National Register nomination.

(2) Cape Lookout Light Station: This National 

Register nomination was prepared in 1972. 

Its four pages were intended to cover the 

lighthouse, the keeper’s dwelling, the generator 

house, the coal and woodshed, and the oil 

house. Areas of significance indicated omit 

architecture and engineering. The technical 

description is very scant for the lighthouse and 

keeper’s dwelling, consisting of two paragraphs 

for the former and one for the latter; no 

technical description at all is offered for any 

of the other structures. Comment on the site 

of the first lighthouse is conjectural only. Since 

Jones’s HSR on the Keeper’s Dwelling (2003) 

and Opperman’s on the lighthouse (2008) are 

now available, a much more thorough National 

Register nomination could be prepared. 

Slightly more detailed information on these 

structures is available in the Cape Lookout 

Village Historic District nomination. 

(3) Portsmouth Village: As this is arguably 

the most significant historic site within 

CALO’s boundaries, we concur with the 

recommendations in the recent Portsmouth 

Village Cultural Landscape Report that 

the Portsmouth Village National Register 

nomination be updated to expand and define 

the period of significance to encompass 

1753–1971; to elaborate significance under 

Criteria A, C, and D in the additional areas of 

community and maritime history, vernacular 

architecture, and archaeological potential; and 

to expand the boundary to include the Middle 

Community and Sheep Island, possibly based 

on archaeological investigations. 

Additionally, we suggest that the park 

consult with Philip Horne McGuinn at East 

Carolina University to determine whether 

the archaeological findings he uncovered at 

Shell Castle might merit expansion of the 

Portsmouth Historic District’s boundaries 

to include the remains of Shell Castle as 

well. Despite the fact that Shell Castle is 

outside the park boundaries, its importance 

to understanding the history of Portsmouth 

cannot be overstated. Even if the site does not 

merit National Historic Landmark status, it 

might qualify to be raised to national rather 

than statewide significance, possibly making 

the structures eligible for grant support to aid 

in stabilization and preservation.

(4) Cape Lookout Village: We concur with the 

recommendations in the Cape Lookout 

Village Cultural Landscape Report (2005), 4-1 

through 4-8, that the Cape Lookout Village 
National Park Service 229

Management, Interpretive, and Research Recommendations

National Register nomination could use 

revision to include other themes of significance 

(e.g., military history for the World War II 

period) and to extend the historical period 

of significance (4-2 through 4-5).11 The CLR 

urged consideration of 1812 as a beginning 

date for the period of significance, rather than 

1857 (4-6). The CLR also urged archeological 

investigation (4-5), which seems justified. All 

of these recommendations are congruent with 

our treatment of the Outer Banks as a complex 

and dynamic region interacting from at least 

the late seventeenth century onward with an 

Atlantic world, rather than as an isolated set of 

“barrier islands.” 

We do not agree with the CLR’s observation, 

however, that “recreational activities” should 

not be included as “a significant theme in the 

history of Cape Lookout Village” (4-6) because 

year-round residence was not normal since 

World War II and recreational activity was “less 

connected to the aspecific geographic features 

that made Cape Lookout an important locus 

for maritime safety and commercial fishing.” 

We think this final assertion, in particular, 

warrants more careful analysis.

Additional Studies Needed

We concur with the recommendation in the 

Portsmouth Village Cultural Landscape Report that 

HSRs be prepared for historic buildings in the 

village; that a systematic archeological investigation 

(to encompass McGuinn’s findings at Shell Castle 

as well, if possible) be undertaken; and that oral 

history interviews be done with descendents and 

longtime residents of the area.

11 See also Cape Lookout Village National Register 

nomination, 4.
230 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study
231

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Communities: Appalachian English and Ozark 

English. Washington, DC: National Science 

Foundation, 1984.

Wright, David, and David Zoby. “Ignoring Jim 

Crow: The Turbulent Appointment of Richard 

Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers.” The 

Journal of Negro History 80, no. 2 (Spring 

1995): 66–80. 

York, Wick. “The Architecture of the U.S. LifeSaving Stations.” Log of Mystic Seaport 34, no. 

1 (1982): 3–20. 

Government Documents, Studies, 

and Reports

Cultural Landscape Reports

John Milner Associates, Inc., and Wiss, Janney, 

Elstner Associates, Inc. Cape Lookout Village 

Cultural Landscape Report, Cape Lookout 

National Seashore [Final Submission]. Atlanta, 

GA: Southeast Regional Office, National Park 

Service, 2005.

Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc. and John 

Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village 

Cultural Landscape Report, 2007. Atlanta, 

GA: Southeast Region Office, National Park 

Service. http://www.nps.gov/calo/parkmgmt/

upload/CALO%20Portsmouth%20

Village%20CLR.zip

Historic Resource Studies

Olson, Sarah. Portsmouth Village Historic Resource 

Study. Harkers Island, NC: Cape Lookout 

National Seashore, 1982.

Olszewski, George. Historic Resource Study for 

History of Portsmouth Village. Harkers Island, 

NC: Cape Lookout National Seashore, 1970.

Torres, Louis. Cape Hatteras National Seashore 

Historic Resource Study. Manteo, NC: Cape 

Hatteras National Seashore, ca 1985. 

Historic Structure Reports 

Cape Lookout National Seashore. Coast Guard 

Station: Historic Structure Assessment Report, 

U.S. (Building Number 501 A). Harkers Island, 

NC, 1993.

Jones, Tommy. Coast Guard Station Boat House, 

Cape Lookout National Seashore: Historic 

Structure Report. Atlanta, GA: Southeast 

Regional Office, National Park Service, 2004.

Jones, Tommy. Coca-Cola House, Cape Lookout 

Village: Historic Structure Report. Atlanta, 

GA: Southeast Regional Office, National Park 

Service, 2004.

Jones, Tommy. Ed Styron House, Portsmouth, Cape 

Lookout National Seashore: Historic Structure 

Report. Atlanta, GA: Southeast Regional 

Office, National Park Service, 2004.

Jones, Tommy. Fishing Cottage #2, Cape Lookout 

National Seashore: Historic Structure Report. 

Atlanta, GA: Southeast Regional Office, 

National Park Service, 2004).

Jones, Tommy. Gaskill-Guthrie House, Cape 

Lookout National Seashore: Historic Structure 

Report. Atlanta, GA: Southeast Regional 

Office, National Park Service, 2004. 

Jones, Tommy. George Dixon House, Portsmouth, 

Cape Lookout National Seashore: Historic 

Structure Report. Atlanta, GA: Southeast 

Regional Office, National Park Service, 2004.

Jones, Tommy. Guthrie-Ogilvie House, Cape 

Lookout National Seashore: Historic Structure 

Report. Atlanta, GA: Southeast Regional 

Office, National Park Service, 2003.

Jones, Tommy. Lewis Davis House, Cape Lookout 

National Seashore: Historic Structure Report. 

Atlanta, GA: Southeast Regional Office, 

National Park Service, 2003. 

Jones, Tommy. Life-Saving Station Boat House, 

Cape Lookout: Historic Structure Report. 

Atlanta, GA: Southeast Regional Office, 

National Park Service, 2003.

Jones, Tommy. Life-Saving Station, Cape Lookout: 

Historic Structure Report. Atlanta, GA: 

Southeast Regional Office, National Park 

Service, 2004.
National Park Service 241

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Service, 2004.

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Lookout National Seashore: Historic Structure 

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Report. Atlanta, GA: Southeast Regional 

Office, National Park Service, 2006.

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Draft], October 2003.

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National Register Nominations

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Register of Historic Places Nomination. 

September 3, 1988. http://pdfhost.focus.nps.

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Village Historic District: National Register 

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Village: National Register of Historic Places 

Nomination. November 29, 1978.

Keane, Beth. Salter Battle Hunting and Fishing 

Lodge: National Register of Historic Places 

Registration. September 22, 2004.

Resource Management and Master Plans

Cape Lookout National Seashore. Master Plan, 

Cape Lookout National Seashore, 1971.

Harkers Island, NC: Cape Lookout National 

Seashore.

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Management Plan, Cape Lookout National 

Seashore, 1990. Harkers Island, NC: Cape 

Lookout National Seashore.

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Seashore, 1997. Harkers Island, NC: Cape 

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Assessment, 1983. Harkers Island, NC: Cape 

Lookout National Seashore.

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through 6, Master Plan Report, Cape Lookout 

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National Seashore.

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242 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

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Annual Report, Fiscal Year 2003. Harkers 

Island, NC: Cape Lookout National Seashore, 

2003.

Theses and Dissertations

 Jaffe, Hilda. “The Speech of the Central Coast of 

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Blount Brothers in Business and Politics, 

1783–1812.” Ph.D. diss., Chapel Hill: 

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 

1941. 

 Logan, Byron. “An Historical Geographic Study of 

North Carolina Ports.” Ph.D. diss., University 

of North Carolina, 1956. 

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Carolina Entrepot, 1789–1820: An Historical 

and Archaeological Investigation.” M.A. 

thesis, East Carolina University, 2000. 

 Rutz-Robbins, Kristi A. “Colonial Commerce: 

Race, Class and Gender in a Local Economy, 

Albemarle, North Carolina, 1663–1729.” 

Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 2003. 

Other

1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission. 1898 

Wilmington Race Riot Report. Raleigh, NC: 

North Carolina Department of Archives and 

History, 2006. http://www.history.ncdcr.

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Binkley, Cameron. Cape Hatteras National 

Seashore: Administrative History. Atlanta, 

GA: Southeast Regional Office, National Park 

Service, 2007.

Cass, Lewis, John Bragg, Charles Goadsby Ferris, 

Bomford, Geo., Alexander J. Swift, and 

Department of War, et al. Annual Report of 

the Secretary of War, Showing the Condition of 

That Department in 1835. November 30, 1835. 

Washington, DC: Department of War.

Colonial and State Records of North Carolina. 26 

vols. Chapel Hill: University Library, UNCChapel Hill, 2008. http://docsouth.unc.edu/

csr/index.html/document/csr.

 Ehrenhard, John E. Cape Lookout National 

Seashore: Assessment of Archeological 

and Historical Resources. Tallahassee, FL: 

Southeast Archeological Center, National 

Park Service, 1976.

Faber, Sabrina, and Paul E. Fontenoy. A Guide to 

Naval and Maritime History Resources in 

the East Carolina Manuscript Collection. 

Greenville, NC: East Carolina Manuscript 

Collection, J.Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina 

University, 1996. 

Garrity-Blake, Barbara J., and James Sabella. 

Ethnohistorical Overview and Assessment 

Study of Cape Lookout National Seashore 

Including a Case Study of Harkers Island: Draft 

Report of Phase I. Harkers Island, NC: Cape 

Lookout National Seashore, 2007.

Goode, George Brown. The Fisheries and Fishery 

Industries of the United States. Washington, 

DC: Government Printing Office, 1887.

Gray, Betty. Washington / Beaufort County Cultural 

Heritage Tourism Initiative Final Report. 

Washington, N.C.: Washington Tourism 

Development Authority, 2001. 

Greer, Rob Leon. The Menhaden Industry of the 

Atlantic Coast: Appendix III to the Report of 

the US Commissioner of Fisheries for 1914. 

Washington, DC: Bureau of Fisheries, 1917. 

Hill, Edward E., and Renee M. Jaussaud. Inventory 

of the Records of the National Park Service 

Record Group 79. 2007. http://www.nps.

gov/history/history/online_books/RG79/

NPSrg79_inventory.pdf.

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Lookout National Seashore. Raleigh, NC: 

Division of History, Office of Archeology and 

Historic Preservation, 1968.
National Park Service 243

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Carolina Since 1586: An Historical Perspective.

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VA: National Weather Service, 2000. http://

www.erh.noaa.gov/er/hq/ssd/erps/tm/tm92.

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Impact Assessment, Inc. Ethnohistorical Description 

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v2.pdf.

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for Shore Whaling Camps Associated with 

Diamond City, Cape Lookout National 

Seashore: Final Report. Harkers Island, NC: 

Cape Lookout National Seashore, 2007.

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1879. Raleigh, NC: The Observer, State 

Printer and Binder, 1879.

McGehee, Lucius Polk, Harry W. Stubbs, Atwell 

Campbell McIntosh, and Harry Browne 

Skillman. Consolidated Statutes of North 

Carolina, Prepared Under Public Laws 1917. 

Raleigh, NC: Commercial Printing Co., State 

Printers, 1920. 

National Park Service. NPS Policy 28: Cultural 

Resource Management. 1998. http://www.

nps.gov/history/history/online_books/

nps28/28contents.htm

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Recreation Area Survey of the Atlantic and 

Gulf Coasts. Washington, DC: National Park 

Service, 1955. 

North Carolina Secretary of State, The Legislative 

Manual and Political Register of the State of 

North Carolina. Raleigh, NC: Josiah Turner, 

Jr., State Printer and Binder, 1874.

Peeling, Ruth. “Captain Otway Burns, Firebrand of 

1812: Historical Drama in Three Acts.” 1968. 

University of North Carolina Library.

“Portsmouth Island’s History and Development.” 

n.d . CALO archive.

Public Laws and Resolutions of the State of North 

Carolina Passed by the General Assembly. 

Raleigh, NC: Howards & Broughton, 1899.

Rankin, W. S., ed. Annual Report of the North 

Carolina State Board of Health. Raleigh, NC, 

1919. “Ribbon of Sand,” Cape Lookout 

National Seashore Orientation Film. 2008.

 Street, Michael W., Thomas R. Rickman, and 

Walter Godwin. History and Status of North 

Carolina’s Marine Fisheries. Raleigh: North 

Carolina Department of Conservation and 

Development, Division of Commercial and 

Sports Fisheries, 1971. 

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Schedules of the Census of the United States, 

1870. Washington DC: National Archives 

and Records Service, General Services 

Administration, 1960–. 

United States Fish Commission. Report of the 

Commissioner [of Fish and Fisheries] for 

the Year Ending June 30, 1903, Part XXIX. 

Washington, DC: US Commission of Fish and 

Fisheries, 1905.

Watters, Christina F. “A Review of the Rangewide 

Regulations Pertaining to Diamondback 

Terrapins (Malaclemys terrapin).” Stone 

Harbor, NJ: Wetlands Institute, 2004.
244 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study
245

Repositories and Collections Consulted

Archival and print research methodology has 

changed greatly, and for the better, in recent 

years as the result of the digitization of vast 

troves of historical records: primary documents, 

photographs and maps, serials, newspapers, and 

published books. We have made extensive use 

of those resources, as well as of non-digitized 

materials. Repositories and databases consulted for 

this study have included:

African-American Newspapers: The Nineteenth 

Century [online digital resource]: Cultural 

life and history during the 1800s. First-hand 

reports of major events and issues.

America’s Historical Newspapers [online digital 

resource]: Early American Newspaper Series, 

1690-1900

America History and Life: Digitized index for 

North American history consisting of journal 

articles, books, book chapters, dissertations 

and book reviews. Full-text searchable.

Cape Lookout National Seashore Archives: Print 

and computerized records 

Documenting the American South (http://

docsouth.unc.edu/ ): Fully searchable internet 

access to texts, images, and audio files related 

to southern history, literature, and culture: 

books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral 

history interviews, and songs, including the 

26-volume Colonial and State Records of North 

Carolina (1886-1907).

Havens and Bonner family papers, 1829-1890. 

Southern Historical Collection, University of 

North Carolina Library.

H-Atlantic: International online discussion list for 

scholars who study British North America 

and the United States, Europe, West Africa, 

the Caribbean, and South America in a 

transatlantic context. Component unit of 

Humanities and Social Sciences Online 

(H-Net), housed at the Center for Humane 

Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online, 

Michigan State University. 

JSTOR: Online digital full-text scholarly journals in 

a variety of fields

LexisNexis Congressional: [online digital resource] 

Index and abstracts for congressional 

committee documents, prints, reports and 

published hearings, legislative histories, bill 

texts

Library of the University of North Carolina at 

Chapel Hill: 

Davis Library: Print, archival and microform 

resources

North Carolina Collection: Published, microform, 

and photographic materials on all aspects of 

North Carolina history including extensive 

newspaper clipping files.

Making of America (Cornell University Library): 

Digital library of primary sources in American 

social history from the antebellum period 

through reconstruction. Especially rich in 

nineteenth century periodicals.

National Park Service Denver Service Center 

(ETIC): Extensive digital collection of CALO 

maps, reports, planning documents, and 

drawings.

National Park Service Southeast Regional Office: 

Digitized photographic materials 

New York Times Historical Newspaper [online 

resource]: Full-text and full-image articles 

covering the entire publishing history of the 

newspaper (1851-2001).

North Carolina Maps (http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/

ncmaps/): Comprehensive, online collection 

of more than 3,000 historic maps of the state 

from the North Carolina State Archives, the 

North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel 

Hill, and the Outer Banks History Center.

North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office: 

Extensive holdings on all aspects of historic 

preservation, including National Register 

nominations
246 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Outer Banks History Center, Manteo NC: Regional 

archives and research library administered by 

the North Carolina State Archives. 

ProQuest: Full text online database of Ph.D. 

dissertations
247

Appendices

Appendix A: National Register Nominations

Note: All of the National Register documentation for CALO’s National Register nominations (except 

Salter-Battle Hunting Lodge) is now available online, with PDFs of nomination documents, including 

photographs, at the National Register of Historic Places website (http://www.nps.gov/nr/). 

Year 

Listed Entity

Contributing 

Resources 

(in original 

nomination)

Period of 

Significance

Contexts

of Significance

Level of 

Significance

1972 Cape Lookout 

Light Station 5

19th century 

(1857–1859; 

1873)

Communications; transportation. 

Prototype of Outer Banks 

lighthouses. Part of system of 

Atlantic navigation aids.

State

1978

Portsmouth 

Village Historic 

District

48 1800–1900; 

1900–

Commerce; social/humanitarian. 

“Only existing village on Core 

Banks south of Ocracoke Inlet”; 

Shell Castle; role as “major 

shipping and trading center”; 

sea-related commerce; “zenith” in 

1850s; lifesaving.

State

1989

Cape Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Station Historic 

District

7 1900– 

(1916–1945)

Commerce; military; 

transportation. History of 

lifesaving; maritime heritage of 

NC; one of rescue stations in 

NC when built in 1917; marine 

search and rescue along deadly 

Cape Lookout shoals area in 

critical transit route; connection 

to families in region, as many had 

a relative work there.

State

2000

Cape Lookout 

Village Historic 

District

27 

(10 previously 

listed in 1972 

and 1989)

1857–ca.1950 

Social history; maritime history; 

architecture. “Unique Outer 

Banks community”; “relatively 

intact” with history in navigation, 

lifesaving, fishing, and resort uses. 

Connection between architecture 

and natural environment. 

Home of “hardy Banker fishing 

families.”

State

(Criteria A, C)

2005

Salter-Battle 

Hunting & 

Fishing Lodge

4 1945–1957

Recreational hunting and fishing 

along Core Banks. Larger history 

of area as prime location for 

waterfowl hunting from 1870 

to 1950s. Local peoples’ role in 

supporting northern hunters.

State

(Criteria A)
248 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Appendix B: Calendar of Hurricanes

Note: For tracking maps of all Atlantic hurricanes since 1851, including Saffir-Simpson categories and 

individual storm details and tracking information, see Atlantic Tropical Storm Tracking by Year (http://

weather.unisys.com/hurricane/atlantic/).

Date 

(year, 

month, 

day(s) [if 

known])

Name CAT Max. 

Wind

Main Impact 

Points Property Damage (NC) NC Deaths

1750 08 “Great 

Storm” Cut several new inlets

1761 New inlet near Bald 

Head Island

1769 Devastated New Bern

1803 New Bern area

1804 09 07–08

NE course from GA 

to MD; unknown NC 

impact

1806 09 06

Wrecked large 

number of ships at 

Okracoke Inlet

1813 08 27–28

Hit Charleston; 

probably passed over 

inland NC

1815 09 03–04 New Bern and 

Elizabeth City

1820 09 10–11

Turned to sea near 

Cape Hatteras; gales, 

heavy rains

1821 09 02–03 New Bern, Morehead 

City

1825 06 03–04 New Bern, Okracoke

20 vessels ashore at Okracoke, 

coastal plantations inundated, 

crops and livestock lost

1827 08 24–25 

Broke Diamond Shoals lightship 

from anchors at Hatteras, 

driven aground at Portsmouth; 

widespread damage

1830 08 15–17 Wilmington, New 

Bern

All vessels blown from moorings 

in New Bern; many damaged at 

Wilmington

1837 08 18–20 Wilmington Bridges washed out; high tides

1837 10 09 “Racer’s 

Storm”

Ocracoke, Core 

Banks, Bodie Island

Steamer Home sank (90 deaths), 

Cumberland, Enterprise lost

1839

Washed away sheep 

and cattle, some 

houses, at Portsmouth 

(Olson 1982, 63)
National Park Service 249

Date 

(year, 

month, 

day(s) [if 

known])

Name CAT Max. 

Wind

Main Impact 

Points Property Damage (NC) NC Deaths

1839 08 28–30

Cape Hatteras, 

Elizabeth City, 

Washington

Bridges

1842 07 12–15

Severe damage 

from Portsmouth 

northward

Perhaps one of the most 

destructive ever; many ships 

believed lost; many drownings; 

houses wrecked/washed away; 

livestock

1842 08 24 Okracoke, Hatteras 3 ships (Kilgore, Pioneer, Congress) 

lost 8

1846 09 07–08

Opened Hatteras 

(7th) and Oregon 

(8th) inlets

Mary Anna lost off Hatteras

1853 09 07 Passed off Cape 

Hatteras Unnamed brig lost on 7th

1856 09 4–5

Wilmington, 

Wrightsville Beach, 

Wrightsville

Severely reduced width of 

Wrightsville Beach and swept off 

all oaks

1857 09 9–12

Cape Hatteras, 

Wilmington, coast 

generally

Several ships lost; high tides at 

New Bern

1861 11 01–? Cape Hatteras 75-vessel Union fleet scattered, 2 

ships lost 7

1874 09 28 75 Wilmington, Cape 

Hatteras

Houses, buildings in Wilmington; 

high water; Spanish ship Arrina

1876 09 17 73 Wilmington, Cape 

Hatteras, Wrightsville

British ship Excelsior; New River 

military camp; unprecedented 

high water

1877 10 3–4 Albemarle Sound Swept away all bridges, wharves

1878 09 12 75 Cape Lookout

1878 10 23

Wilmington, 

Morehead City, Cape 

Lookout

Steamer City of Houston lost off 

Frying Pan Shoals; many others 

lost/damages

1879 08 18 4 168

Morehead City, 

Beaufort, Diamond 

City

Atlantic and Ocean View hotels 

destroyed; all wharves washed 

away; heavy destruction at 

Diamond City

40+

1881 09 09 90+ Wrightsville, 

Wilmington

Buildings, trees; vessels driven 

ashore; most severe storm since 

1822, 1838

1882 09 21–23 Cape Lookout, 

Wilmington

Wilmington and Weldon Railroad 

damaged

1883 09 11 3 100+ Wilmington, Hatteras Vessels wrecked, driven ashore 53

1885 08 25 approx. 

125

Wilmington, 

Morehead City, 

Hatteras

1887 08 20 82 Hatteras, Pamlico 

Sound, Kitty Hawk Vessels lost

Appendix B
250 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Date 

(year, 

month, 

day(s) [if 

known])

Name CAT Max. 

Wind

Main Impact 

Points Property Damage (NC) NC Deaths

1887 10 31 70 Kitty Hawk Telegraph poles down

1899 08 16 “San 

Ciriaco” 4 140 Diamond City Wiped out Diamond City; Shackleford Banks residents left 20–25

1889 09 9–12 Nags Head

1899 10 30–31 72

Wrightsville Beach, 

Wilmington, Kitty 

Hawk

1

1893 08 27–29 “Great” 72 Wilmington, Kitty 

Hawk

Several vessels lost at sea, some 

washed on shore at Wilmington

1904 11 13 3 68 Hatteras

Destroyed Life-Saving station 

at New Inlet, drowning 4 men; 

several schooners wrecked

1908 07 30 1 58 Beaufort, Morehead 

City, New Bern Heavy flooding

1913 09 02–03 1 74

Core Banks, Pamlico 

Sound, Portsmouth, 

Washington, New 

Bern

Railroad bridges at Washington, 

New Bern, Methodist and 

Primitive Baptist churches at 

Portsmouth; $3 million

5 

1933 09 15–16 3 125

Beaufort, Pamlico 

Sound, Core 

Banks, New Bern, 

Portsmouth

$3 million; washed over Core 

Banks; opened Drum Inlet; almost 

all Cedar Island homes destroyed; 

flooded Portsmouth, destroyed 

houses

21

1936 09 18 2 80 Hatteras

1944 08 01 1 80

Oak Island, 

Wilmington, Carolina 

Beach, Wrightsville 

Beach; Brunswick, 

New Hanover, 

Pender, Onslow 

counties

Major crop damage; $2 milliion

1944 09 14 “Great 

Atlantic” 3 110

Portsmouth, Avon, 

Nags Head, Elizabeth 

City

Portsmouth devastated; most 

residents left; catastrophic 

flooding at Avon; two Coast 

Guard cutters capsized; $1.5 

million

1

1953 08 13 Barbara 1 90 Morehead City, 

Okracoke, Nags Head Crop damage; $1 million 1

1954 08 30 Carol 2 90+ Cape Hatteras Crops; $250,000

1954 10 15 Hazel 4 150 SC line to Cape Fear, 

Cape Lookout

Dunes, practically all buildings, 

trees; record rainfall; $100 million 19

1955 08 12 Connie 3 <80 Southport to Nags 

Head Flooding

1955 08 17 Diane 2 74 Wilmington Beach erosion, flooding; 

farmlands

1955 09 19 Ione 3 107 Salter Path

Unprecedented rain; major 

damage to dunes, Cape Lookout 

to Drum Inlet; Drum Inlet choked 

by sand; $88 million

7

Appendix B
National Park Service 251

Appendix B

Date 

(year, 

month, 

day(s) [if 

known])

Name CAT Max. 

Wind

Main Impact 

Points Property Damage (NC) NC Deaths

1958 09 27 Helene 3 85

Wilmington to 

Hatteras; Pamlico 

Sound

Beach erosion; crops; $11 million

1960 09 11 Donna 3 100+ Wilmington to Nags 

Head $25 million 8

1968 10 19–20 Gladys 1 90 Wilmington, Cape 

Lookout

1971 09 30 to 

10 01 Ginger 1 92 Pamlico Sound; Cape Hatteras

High water levels, rainfall; crops; 

$10 million

1984 Diana 3 115 Counties south of 

Carteret $85 million 3

1985 09 26–27 Gloria 3 100+ Wilmington, New 

Bern $8 million 1

1989 09 21–22 Hugo 3 100 Brunswick County

Beach houses; beach erosion; 

dunes; costliest ever to hit U.S. 

mainland; $70 million 

1

1991 08 18–19 Bob 3 98 Cape Hatteras $4 million 1

1993 08 30–31 Emily 3 111 Pamlico Sound, 

Hatteras Island Homes; $35 million 0

1996 07 12 Bertha 2 115

Wrightsville 

Beach, Topsail 

Island, Belhaven, 

Washington, New 

Bern

Storm surge; 5,000 homes 

damaged; $270 million 2

1996 09 05 Fran 3 120

Brunswick to Carteret 

counties; Wrightsville 

Beach, Emerald Isle, 

Topsail Beach

Storm surge; beach erosion; river 

flooding; $2 billion 21

1999 08 Dennis 110 $100 million 0

1999 09 Floyd 2 110 $6 billion 52

Source: Jay Barnes, North Carolina’s Hurricane History, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); 

James E. Hudgins, Tropical Cyclones Affecting North Carolina Since 1586: An Historical Perspective, NOAA Technical 

Memorandum (Bohemia, NY: National Weather Service, 2000), 8–59.
252 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Appendix C: Maps

Map 1: Historic Inlets Map.

Source: Gary S. Dunbar, Geographical History of the Carolina Banks: Technical Report No. 8 Part A (Baton 

Rouge: Coastal Studies Institute, Louisiana State University, 1956), 218. 
National Park Service 253

Map 2: Shackleford Banks, N.C. (1850-1890). Simpson and Simpson, Whaling on the 

North Carolina Coast.

Source: Marcus B. Simpson and Sallie W. Simpson, Whaling on the North Carolina Coast (Raleigh: North 

Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1990), 33. 

Appendix C
254 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Appendix C

Map 3: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Base Map.

Source: National Park Service, Denver Service Center.
National Park Service 255

Appendix C

Map 4: Cape Lookout Bight Historical Base Map.

Source: National Park Service, Denver Service Center.
256 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Map 5: 1963 Development Plan Map with Causeway Bridge to Shackleford Banks.

Source: General Development Plan: Cape Lookout and Shackleford Banks, 1963; National Park Service, 

Denver Service Center.

Appendix C
National Park Service 257

Map 6: Proposed Boundary, Cape Lookout National Seashore, April 1964.

Source: National Park Service, Denver Service Center.

Map 7: Plat of Property on Core Banks and Cape Lookout, 1970.

Source: National Park Service, Denver Service Center.

Appendix C
258 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Map 8: Contributing Features, Portsmouth Village.

Source: Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., and John Milner Associates, Inc. Portsmouth Village Cultural Landscape 

Report (2007).

Appendix C
National Park Service 259

Appendix D: Coastal County and State Election Results

Elections of 1896-1908

20100701 CALO HRS Final

Appendices

9

Appendix  D  

Coastal  County  and  State  Election  Results

Elections  of  1896-­‐1908 David Whisnant 6/23/14 1:19 PM

Comment [8]: File name in accompanyin

files: Coastal county and state election result

table.doc
260 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Appendix E: Historic Resources and Their Contexts: 

A Quick Reference Guide 

Part I: Historic Resources, the National Register, and Other Relevant Studies

Structure Information, 

Current National Register 

Status, and Other Relevant 

Studies

Cape Lookout 

Lighthouse 

HS-100-A 18 Cape Lookout 

Light Station 

1972; also 

ref in Cape 

Lookout 

Village 2000

1972 A & C State 19th c. Prototype of 

all lighthouses 

to be erected 

on the Outer 

Banks of North 

Carolina. 

CLV CLR, 

2005 HSR, 

2008

CLV 3-45, 3-63, 

3-64, 3-69

Cape Lookout 

Light Station 

Oil House 

HS-100-B 91821 Cape Lookout 

Light Station 

1972; also 

ref in Cape 

Lookout 

Village 2000

1972 A & C State 19th c. Prototype 

of all light 

stations to 

be erected 

on the Outer 

Banks of North 

Carolina. 

CLV CLR, 

2005

CLV 3-65

Cape Lookout 

Light Station 

Keeper’s 

Quarters 

HS-100-C 91766 Cape Lookout 

Light Station 

1972; also 

ref in Cape 

Lookout 

Village 2000

1972 A & C State 19th c. Prototype 

of all light 

stations to 

be erected 

on the Outer 

Banks of North 

Carolina. 

CLV CLR, 

2005

CLV 3-66, 

3-127, 5-29; 

Photo Pair 

6 (2)

Cape Lookout 

Light Station 

Coal and 

Wood Shed 

(destroyed in 

a hurricane 

since listing)

Cape Lookout 

Light Station 

1972

1972 State CLV CLR, 

2005

CLV 3-68

Cape Lookout 

Light Station 

Generator 

House

Cape Lookout 

Light Station 

1972

1972 State CLV CLR, 

2005

Portsmouth 

Life-Saving 

Station (aka 

Coast Guard 

Station)

HS-501-A 12512 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 State 19th c.; 20th c. Association 

with the U.S. 

Life-Saving 

Service on the 

Outer Banks 

and for its role 

in the history 

of Portsmouth 

Village. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007 

LSS HSR, 

2003

PV Figs. 63, 

76, 109 (well 

house), 108 

(pump house), 

157B, 158B, 

160B, 161B, 

162B

Portsmouth 

Life-Saving 

Station 

Kitchen (aka 

Sugar Shack?)

HS-501-B 91745 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 State 19th c.; 20th c. Association 

with the U.S. 

Life-Saving 

Service on the 

Outer Banks 

and for its role 

in the history 

of PV. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007 

LSS HSR, 

2003

PV Figs. 63, 77

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Relevant NR 

Nominations

Year Listed 

on NR

NR Criteria 

Identified

NR 

Signficance 

Level 

Identified

NR Period of 

Significance

Nat Register 

Contexts/

Significance 

Statement 

(Edited, from 

LCS)

Other 

Relevant 

Studies 

Providing 

Specific 

Detail on 

Structures

Recent 

Photographs 

in Cultural 

Landscape 

Reports: 

CLV (2005) 

and PV 

(2007) figure 

numbers

Those with no structure # were enumerated in 

NR Noms but were not on Fall 2009 LCS.
National Park Service 261

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Relevant NR 

Nominations

Year Listed 

on NR

NR Criteria 

Identified

NR 

Signficance 

Level 

Identified

NR Period of 

Significance

Nat Register 

Contexts/

Significance 

Statement 

(Edited, from 

LCS)

Other 

Relevant 

Studies 

Providing 

Specific 

Detail on 

Structures

Recent 

Photographs 

in Cultural 

Landscape 

Reports: 

CLV (2005) 

and PV 

(2007) figure 

numbers

Portsmouth 

Life-Saving 

Station Stable 

HS-501-C 12534 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 State 19th c.; 20th c. Association 

with the U.S. 

Life-Saving 

Service on the 

Outer Banks 

and for its role 

in the history 

of PV. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007 

LSS HSR, 

2003

PV Fig. 78, 

159B, 163B, 

164B

Robinson, Roy, 

House (aka 

Lionel Gilgo 

House?)

HS-502 12513 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Fig. 79

Mason, 

Dennis, House 

(aka Dave 

Willis House?)

HS-503-A 12514 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Figs. 80, 

124, 189B

Babb, Jesse, 

House (aka 

Marion Gray 

Babb House?)

HS-504-A 12515 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Figs. 62, 

81, 101 (water 

box), 171B, 

172B

Babb Kitchen 

(was included 

with Marion 

Gray Babb 

House in 1978 

NR Nom)

HS-504-B 91752 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

Babb Garage 

(was included 

with Marion 

Gray Babb 

House in 1978 

NR Nom)

HS-504-C 91746 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

Babb 

Generator 

House (was 

included with 

Marion Gray 

Babb House 

in 1978 NR 

Nom)

HS-504-D 91753 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

Appendix E
262 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Relevant NR 

Nominations

Year Listed 

on NR

NR Criteria 

Identified

NR 

Signficance 

Level 

Identified

NR Period of 

Significance

Nat Register 

Contexts/

Significance 

Statement 

(Edited, from 

LCS)

Other 

Relevant 

Studies 

Providing 

Specific 

Detail on 

Structures

Recent 

Photographs 

in Cultural 

Landscape 

Reports: 

CLV (2005) 

and PV 

(2007) figure 

numbers

Babb Privy 

(was included 

with Marion 

Gray Babb 

House in 1978 

NR Nom)

HS-504-E 91754 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A &C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Fig. 125 

(septic tank)

Babb Barn 

(was included 

with Marion 

Gray Babb 

House in 1978 

NR Nom; later 

destroyed in 

hurricane)

HS-504-F 91764 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

Styron, Ed, 

House 

HS-505 12516 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007 

HSR, 2002

PV Fig. 83

Dixon/Babb 

Cemetery 

Headstones 

(Batch) 

HS-506 12517 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

McWilliamsDixon House 

(aka Elma 

Dixon House 

in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-507-A 91779 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Figs. 72, 82, 

118, 148

McWilliamsDixon Cool 

House 

(included with 

Elma Dixon 

House in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-507-B 91780 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

McWilliamsDixon Shed 

(included with 

Elma Dixon 

House in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-507-C 91781 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

Appendix E
National Park Service 263

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Relevant NR 

Nominations

Year Listed 

on NR

NR Criteria 

Identified

NR 

Signficance 

Level 

Identified

NR Period of 

Significance

Nat Register 

Contexts/

Significance 

Statement 

(Edited, from 

LCS)

Other 

Relevant 

Studies 

Providing 

Specific 

Detail on 

Structures

Recent 

Photographs 

in Cultural 

Landscape 

Reports: 

CLV (2005) 

and PV 

(2007) figure 

numbers

McWilliamsDixon Privy 

(included with 

Elma Dixon 

House in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-507-D 91782 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

Portsmouth 

Church 

HS-508 12518 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Figs. 49, 

84, 112, 165B, 

166B, 167B, 

196B

Washington 

Roberts House 

HS-509 91783 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007 

HSR, 2003

PV Figs. 85, 

177B

Dixon, 

George, 

House 

HS-510-A 12519 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007 

HSR, 2003

PV Figs. 86, 

121, 186B

Pigott, Henry, 

House 

HS-511-A 12520 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Figs. 88, 

119, 126 

(septic tank), 

181B, 182B, 

183B

Pigott 

Summer 

Kitchen 

(included with 

Henry Pigott 

House in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-511-B 91747 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

Pigott Cool 

House 

(included with 

Henry Pigott 

House in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-511-C 91748 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

Appendix E
264 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Relevant NR 

Nominations

Year Listed 

on NR

NR Criteria 

Identified

NR 

Signficance 

Level 

Identified

NR Period of 

Significance

Nat Register 

Contexts/

Significance 

Statement 

(Edited, from 

LCS)

Other 

Relevant 

Studies 

Providing 

Specific 

Detail on 

Structures

Recent 

Photographs 

in Cultural 

Landscape 

Reports: 

CLV (2005) 

and PV 

(2007) figure 

numbers

Pigott Shed #2 

(included with 

Henry Pigott 

House in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-511-E 91750 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

Pigott Privy 

(included with 

Henry Pigott 

House in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-511-F 91751 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

Gilgo, Tom, 

House 

HS-512 12521 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Figs. 58, 89

Wallace, 

Robert, House 

HS-513 12522 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Figs. 69, 90, 

178B, 179B, 

180B

Grace 

Cemetery 

Headstones 

HS-514 12523 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

Gilgo, Cecil, 

House (aka 

Ben Salter 

House in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-515 91784 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Fig. 94

Schoolhouse HS-516-A 12524 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Figs. 45, 95, 

168B

Appendix E
National Park Service 265

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Relevant NR 

Nominations

Year Listed 

on NR

NR Criteria 

Identified

NR 

Signficance 

Level 

Identified

NR Period of 

Significance

Nat Register 

Contexts/

Significance 

Statement 

(Edited, from 

LCS)

Other 

Relevant 

Studies 

Providing 

Specific 

Detail on 

Structures

Recent 

Photographs 

in Cultural 

Landscape 

Reports: 

CLV (2005) 

and PV 

(2007) figure 

numbers

Schoolhouse 

Shed 

(included with 

Schoolhouse 

in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-516-B 91755 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Fig. 169B

Schoolhouse 

Cistern 

(included with 

Schoolhouse 

in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-516-C 91756 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Figs. 98, 

170B

Community 

Cemetery 

Headstones 

HS-517 12525 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Figs. 129, 

130, 131, 

199B, 200B

Post Office 

and General 

Store 

HS-518 12526 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Figs. 60, 68, 

71, 87, 187B, 

188B

Dixon-Salter 

House (aka 

Theo Salter 

House/

Salter Gun 

Club in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-519-A 12527 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Figs. 59, 93, 

190B, 191B

DixonSalter Cool 

House (not 

mentioned 

in 1978 NR 

Nom)

HS-519-B 91757 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

DixonSalter Shed 

(included with 

Theo Salter 

House in 1978 

NR Nom)

HS-519-C 91758 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

Appendix E
266 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Dixon-Salter 

Privy (included 

with Theo 

Salter House 

in 1978 NR 

Nom)

HS-519-D 91759 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

Dixon, Carl, 

House 

HS-521-A 12528 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Fig. 91, 127 

(septic tank), 

193B

Dixon, Carl, 

Summer 

Kitchen 

(included with 

Carl Dixon 

House in 1978 

NR Nom)

HS-521-B 91760 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV 192B [?]

Gaskill, Frank, 

House (1978 

NR Nom also 

included 

several 

outbuildings 

not 

mentioned 

here)

HS-522-A 12529 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Figs. 92, 

184B

Styron-Bragg 

House 

HS-523-A 12530 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Figs. 31. 

96, 115, 144, 

173B, 174B, 

175B, 176B

StyronBragg Shed 

(included 

with Styron 

House in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-523-B 91761 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

Styron-Bragg 

Cool House 

(was this the 

privy or the 

boat house 

from the 1978 

NR Nom?)

HS-523-C 91762 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Relevant NR 

Nominations

Year Listed 

on NR

NR Criteria 

Identified

NR 

Signficance 

Level 

Identified

NR Period of 

Significance

Nat Register 

Contexts/

Significance 

Statement 

(Edited, from 

LCS)

Other 

Relevant 

Studies 

Providing 

Specific 

Detail on 

Structures

Recent 

Photographs 

in Cultural 

Landscape 

Reports: 

CLV (2005) 

and PV 

(2007) figure 

numbers

Appendix E
National Park Service 267

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Relevant NR 

Nominations

Year Listed 

on NR

NR Criteria 

Identified

NR 

Signficance 

Level 

Identified

NR Period of 

Significance

Nat Register 

Contexts/

Significance 

Statement 

(Edited, from 

LCS)

Other 

Relevant 

Studies 

Providing 

Specific 

Detail on 

Structures

Recent 

Photographs 

in Cultural 

Landscape 

Reports: 

CLV (2005) 

and PV 

(2007) figure 

numbers

Potter, T. T., 

House (aka 

Armfield 

House in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom; 

shed and 

boat house 

mentioned in 

1978)

HS-524-A 12531 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of PV 

HD; however, 

property may 

be less than 

50 years old. 

If historic 

structure 

does exist, 

it has been 

heavily altered 

and has no 

architectural 

integrity. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

PV Figs. 54, 61. 

97, 123 (septic 

tank), 146, 

185B

Roads in 

Portsmouth 

Village (Batch) 

(mentioned 

in 1978 NR 

Nom, but 

not included 

explicitly 

in list of 

resources)

HS-550-A 12532 Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. Contrib. 

feature of the 

PV HD, only 

existing village 

on the Core 

Banks south 

of Ocracoke 

Inlet. 

PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

George 

Willis House 

(collapsed 

ruins only in 

1978)

Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

Portsmouth 

Boathouse 

(501D in NR 

Nom)

Portsmouth 

Village 1978

1978 A & C State 19th c.; 20th c. PV HRS, 

1982 PV 

CLR, 2007

Cape Lookout 

Coast 

Guard Sta. 

Equipment 

Building 

HS-100-C 91771 Cape Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Station 1988; 

also ref in 

Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

1989 A State 1916-1945 Prominent 

role in the 

maritime 

heritage of NC. 

CLV CLR, 

2005

Cape Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Station 

HS-200-A 91769 Cape Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Station 1988; 

also ref in 

Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

1989 A State 1916-1945 Prominent 

role in the 

maritime 

heritage of NC. 

CLV CLR, 

2005

CLV 3-17, 3-23. 

3-97, 3-100, 

3-135, Photo 

Pairs 12 -16, 

18-21 (2)

Cape Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Station Galley 

HS-200-B 91770 Cape Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Station 1988; 

also ref in 

Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

1989 A State 1916-1945 Prominent 

role in the 

maritime 

heritage of NC. 

CLV CLR, 

2005

CLV 3-98, 

3-130, 3-137

Cape Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Station Cistern 

HS-200-D 91772 Cape Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Station 1988; 

also ref in 

Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

1989 A State 1916-1945 Prominent 

role in the 

maritime 

heritage of NC. 

CLV CLR, 

2005

Appendix E
268 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Relevant NR 

Nominations

Year Listed 

on NR

NR Criteria 

Identified

NR 

Signficance 

Level 

Identified

NR Period of 

Significance

Nat Register 

Contexts/

Significance 

Statement 

(Edited, from 

LCS)

Other 

Relevant 

Studies 

Providing 

Specific 

Detail on 

Structures

Recent 

Photographs 

in Cultural 

Landscape 

Reports: 

CLV (2005) 

and PV 

(2007) figure 

numbers

Cape Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Sta. Generator 

Bldg. Ruin 

HS-200-E 91773 Cape Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Station 1988; 

also ref in 

Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

1989 A State 1916-1945 Prominent 

role in the 

maritime 

heritage of NC. 

CLV CLR, 

2005

CLV 3-101

Cape Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Sta. Storage 

Bldg. Ruin 

HS-200-F 91774 Cape Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Station 1988; 

also ref in 

Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

1989 A State 1916-1945 Prominent 

role in the 

maritime 

heritage of NC. 

CLV CLR, 

2005

Cape Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Station Cistern 

#2 

HS-200-G 91775 Cape Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Station 1988; 

also ref in 

Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

1989 A State 1916-1945 Prominent 

role in the 

maritime 

heritage of NC. 

CLV CLR, 

2005

Lewis-Davis 

House, Cape 

Lookout 

Village (same 

as Carrie 

Arrendale 

Davis house, 

mentioned 

in CLV NR 

nomination?)

CLV-1 91828 Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 Contrib. 

building in the 

CLV HD. 

CLV CLR, 

2005 HSR, 

2003

CLV 3-95, 3-96

Guthrie 

Ogilvie House 

(aka Luther 

Guthrie 

House)

CLV-2 91829 Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 Contrib. 

building in the 

CLV HD. 

CLV CLR, 

2005 HSR, 

2003

CLV 3-90

GaskillGuthrie House CLV-5 91832 Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 Contrib. 

building in the 

CLV HD. 

CLV CLR, 

2005

CLV 3-93, 3-94

Fishing 

Cottage #2 

CLV-6 91833 Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 Contrib. 

building in the 

CLV HD. 

CLV CLR, 

2005 HSR, 

2003

Life Saving 

Station, Cape 

Lookout 

Village 

CLV-8 91835 Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 Contrib. 

building in the 

CLV HD. 

CLV CLR, 

2005 HSR, 

2003

CLV 3-36

Cape Lookout 

Light Station 

Kitchen (1906)

HS-100-D 91767 Cape Lookout 

Village 2000 

(listed as NC)

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 Prototype 

of all light 

stations to 

be erected 

on the Outer 

Banks of North 

Carolina. 

CLV CLR, 

2005

CLV 3-67

Cape Lookout 

Light Station 

Cisterns 

(Batch) 

HS-100-E 91768 Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 Prototype of 

all lighthouses 

to be erected 

on the Outer 

Banks of North 

Carolina. 

CLV CLR, 

2005

CLV 3-67

Coca-Cola 

House (aka 

Seifert-Davis 

House)

HS-3 91837 Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 Contrib. 

building in the 

CLV HD. 

CLV CLR, 

2005 HSR, 

2003

CLV 3-19, 3-77

Appendix E
National Park Service 269

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Relevant NR 

Nominations

Year Listed 

on NR

NR Criteria 

Identified

NR 

Signficance 

Level 

Identified

NR Period of 

Significance

Nat Register 

Contexts/

Significance 

Statement 

(Edited, from 

LCS)

Other 

Relevant 

Studies 

Providing 

Specific 

Detail on 

Structures

Recent 

Photographs 

in Cultural 

Landscape 

Reports: 

CLV (2005) 

and PV 

(2007) figure 

numbers

Keeper’s 

Dwelling 

(aka “Barden 

House” 1907)

HS-4 91838 Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 Contrib. 

resource in the 

CLV HD. 

CLV CLR, 

2005 HSR, 

2003

CLV 3-78, 3-79, 

3-80

BakerHolderness 

House 

(Casablanca) 

(ca. 1930)

Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 CLV CLR, 

2005

CLV 3-16, 3-59, 

3-104

BakerHolderness 

House 

(Casablanca) 

Outbuilding 

(ca. 1930)

Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 CLV CLR, 

2005

CLV 3-59, 

3-105, 3-106

Cape Lookout 

Village 

Circulation 

Network (19th 

c to present)

Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 CLV CLR, 

2005

Cape Lookout 

Village 

Landscape

Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 CLV CLR, 

2005

Carrie 

Arendell Davis 

House (ca. 

1930) (same 

as Lewis-Davis 

House or 

not?; spelling 

of name is 

“Arrendale” 

in Jones HSR)

Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 CLV CLR, 

2005

Former Coast 

Guard Dock 

(ca. 1950)

Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 CLV CLR, 

2005

Gordon Willis 

House (ca. 

1950)

Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 CLV CLR, 

2005

CLV 3-84

Jetty Worker’s 

House No. 1 

(ca. 1915)

Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 CLV CLR, 

2005

CLV 3-81

Jetty Worker’s 

House No. 2 

(ca. 1915)

Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 CLV CLR, 

2005

CLV 3-82

Life Saving 

Station Boat 

House (David 

Yeomans 

House) (ca. 

1887, moved 

1958)

Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 CLV CLR, 

2005 HSR, 

2003

CLV 3-90

O’BoyleBryant House 

(ca. 1928) 

(referred to 

in NR nom 

as “Bryant 

House”)

Cape Lookout 

Village 2000

2000 A & C State 1857-ca.1950 CLV CLR, 

2005 HSR 

2003

CLV 3-91, 3-92

Appendix E
270 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Salter-Battle 

Hunting and 

Fishing Lodge

Salter-Battle 

Hunting and 

Fishing Lodge 

2004

2005 A State 1945-1957

Salter-Battle 

Hunting and 

Fishing Lodge 

Cemetery

Salter-Battle 

Hunting and 

Fishing Lodge 

2004

2005 A State 1945-1957

Salter-Battle 

Hunting and 

Fishing Lodge 

Cistern

Salter-Battle 

Hunting and 

Fishing Lodge 

2004

2005 A State 1945-1957

Salter-Battle 

Hunting and 

Fishing Lodge 

Storage Shed

Salter-Battle 

Hunting and 

Fishing Lodge 

2004

2005 A State 1945-1957

House #3, 

Coast Guard 

Village 

CGV-3 91830 Draft National 

Register 

nomination 

for Coast 

Guard Village 

currently being 

completed. 

Eligibility of 

individual 

structures is 

unknown until 

nomination 

completed. 

Appendix E

Preferred 

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Relevant NR 

Nominations

Year Listed 

on NR

NR Criteria 

Identified

NR 

Signficance 

Level 

Identified

NR Period of 

Significance

Nat Register 

Contexts/

Significance 

Statement 

(Edited, from 

LCS)

Other 

Relevant 

Studies 

Providing 

Specific 

Detail on 

Structures

Recent 

Photographs 

in Cultural 

Landscape 

Reports: 

CLV (2005) 

and PV 

(2007) figure 

numbers
National Park Service 271

Appendix E

Cape 

Lookout 

Lighthouse 

HS-100-A 18 D D D D

Cape 

Lookout 

Light Station 

Oil House 

HS-100-B 91821 D

Cape 

Lookout 

Light Station 

Keeper’s 

Quarters 

HS-100-C 91766 D D D D

Cape 

Lookout 

Light Station 

Coal and 

Wood Shed 

(destroyed in 

a hurricane 

since listing)

Cape 

Lookout 

Light Station 

Generator 

House

D

Portsmouth 

Life-Saving 

Station (aka 

Coast Guard 

Station)

HS-501-A 12512 D D D

Portsmouth 

Life-Saving 

Station 

Kitchen 

(aka Sugar 

Shack?)

HS-501-B 91745 D

Portsmouth 

Life-Saving 

Station 

Stable 

HS-501-C 12534 D D

Robinson, 

Roy, House 

(aka Lionel 

Gilgo 

House?)

HS-502 12513 D

Mason, 

Dennis, 

House (aka 

Dave Willis 

House?)

HS-503-A 12514

Babb, Jesse, 

House (aka 

Marion Gray 

Babb House?)

HS-504-A 12515 D D D

Part II: Historic Resources and HRS Contexts

Those with no structure # were enumerated in NR 

Noms but were not on Fall 2009 LCS.

Where Primarily Discussed in CALO HRS 

Contextual Chapters “D” Indicates Structure 

Specifically Discussed

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Context: 

Atlantic 

World 

(Chap. 2)

Context: 

Hurricanes 

and 

Changing 

Physical 

Environment 

(Chap. 3)

Context: 

Maritime 

Economy 

(Chap. 4)

Context: 

Slavery, 

Race, and 

Class (Chap. 

5)

Context: 

Government 

Activity 

(Chap. 6)

Context: 

Wars 

(Chap. 7)

Context: 

Outer 

Banks 

Culture 

(Chap. 8)

Context: 

Tourism 

and 

Coming 

of CALO 

(Chap. 9)
272 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Babb Kitchen 

(was included 

with Marion 

Gray Babb 

House in 

1978 NR 

Nom)

HS-504-B 91752 D D D

Babb Garage 

(was included 

with Marion 

Gray Babb 

House in 

1978 NR 

Nom)

HS-504-C 91746 D D D

Babb 

Generator 

House (was 

included with 

Marion Gray 

Babb House 

in 1978 NR 

Nom)

HS-504-D 91753 D D D

Babb Privy 

(was included 

with Marion 

Gray Babb 

House in 

1978 NR 

Nom)

HS-504-E 91754 D D D

Babb Barn 

(was included 

with Marion 

Gray Babb 

House in 

1978 NR 

Nom; later 

destroyed in 

hurricane)

HS-504-F 91764 D

Styron, Ed, 

House 

HS-505 12516 D

Dixon/Babb 

Cemetery 

Headstones 

(Batch) 

HS-506 12517 D

McWilliamsDixon House 

(aka Elma 

Dixon House 

in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-507-A 91779 D D

McWilliamsDixon Cool 

House 

(included 

with Elma 

Dixon House 

in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-507-B 91780 D D

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Context: 

Atlantic 

World 

(Chap. 2)

Context: 

Hurricanes 

and 

Changing 

Physical 

Environment 

(Chap. 3)

Context: 

Maritime 

Economy 

(Chap. 4)

Context: 

Slavery, 

Race, and 

Class (Chap. 

5)

Context: 

Government 

Activity 

(Chap. 6)

Context: 

Wars 

(Chap. 7)

Context: 

Outer 

Banks 

Culture 

(Chap. 8)

Context: 

Tourism 

and 

Coming 

of CALO 

(Chap. 9)

Appendix E
National Park Service 273

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Context: 

Atlantic 

World 

(Chap. 2)

Context: 

Hurricanes 

and 

Changing 

Physical 

Environment 

(Chap. 3)

Context: 

Maritime 

Economy 

(Chap. 4)

Context: 

Slavery, 

Race, and 

Class (Chap. 

5)

Context: 

Government 

Activity 

(Chap. 6)

Context: 

Wars 

(Chap. 7)

Context: 

Outer 

Banks 

Culture 

(Chap. 8)

Context: 

Tourism 

and 

Coming 

of CALO 

(Chap. 9)

McWilliamsDixon Shed 

(included 

with Elma 

Dixon House 

in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-507-C 91781 D D

McWilliamsDixon Privy 

(included 

with Elma 

Dixon House 

in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-507-D 91782 D D

Portsmouth 

Church 

HS-508 12518 D D

Washington 

Roberts 

House 

HS-509 91783 D D D

Dixon, 

George, 

House 

HS-510-A 12519 D

Pigott, Henry, 

House 

HS-511-A 12520 D D D D

Pigott 

Summer 

Kitchen 

(included 

with Henry 

Pigott House 

in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-511-B 91747 D D

Pigott Cool 

House 

(included 

with Henry 

Pigott House 

in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-511-C 91748 D D

Pigott Shed 

#2 (included 

with Henry 

Pigott House 

in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-511-E 91750 D D

Pigott Privy 

(included 

with Henry 

Pigott House 

in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-511-F 91751 D D

Gilgo, Tom, 

House 

HS-512 12521

Wallace, 

Robert, 

House 

HS-513 12522

Appendix E
274 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Grace 

Cemetery 

Headstones 

HS-514 12523

Gilgo, Cecil, 

House (aka 

Ben Salter 

House 

in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-515 91784

Schoolhouse HS-516-A 12524 D

Schoolhouse 

Shed 

(included 

with 

Schoolhouse 

in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-516-B 91755 D

Schoolhouse 

Cistern 

(included 

with 

Schoolhouse 

in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-516-C 91756 D

Community 

Cemetery 

Headstones 

HS-517 12525

Post Office 

and General 

Store 

HS-518 12526 D D

Dixon-Salter 

House (aka 

Theo Salter 

House/

Salter Gun 

Club in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-519-A 12527 D D

DixonSalter Cool 

House (not 

mentioned 

in 1978 NR 

Nom)

HS-519-B 91757 D D

DixonSalter Shed 

(included 

with Theo 

Salter House 

in 1978 NR 

Nom)

HS-519-C 91758 D D

DixonSalter Privy 

(included 

with Theo 

Salter House 

in 1978 NR 

Nom)

HS-519-D 91759 D D

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Context: 

Atlantic 

World 

(Chap. 2)

Context: 

Hurricanes 

and 

Changing 

Physical 

Environment 

(Chap. 3)

Context: 

Maritime 

Economy 

(Chap. 4)

Context: 

Slavery, 

Race, and 

Class (Chap. 

5)

Context: 

Government 

Activity 

(Chap. 6)

Context: 

Wars 

(Chap. 7)

Context: 

Outer 

Banks 

Culture 

(Chap. 8)

Context: 

Tourism 

and 

Coming 

of CALO 

(Chap. 9)

Appendix E
National Park Service 275

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Context: 

Atlantic 

World 

(Chap. 2)

Context: 

Hurricanes 

and 

Changing 

Physical 

Environment 

(Chap. 3)

Context: 

Maritime 

Economy 

(Chap. 4)

Context: 

Slavery, 

Race, and 

Class (Chap. 

5)

Context: 

Government 

Activity 

(Chap. 6)

Context: 

Wars 

(Chap. 7)

Context: 

Outer 

Banks 

Culture 

(Chap. 8)

Context: 

Tourism 

and 

Coming 

of CALO 

(Chap. 9)

Dixon, Carl, 

House 

HS-521-A 12528

Dixon, Carl, 

Summer 

Kitchen 

(included 

with Carl 

Dixon House 

in 1978 NR 

Nom)

HS-521-B 91760

Gaskill, 

Frank, House 

(1978 NR 

Nom also 

included 

several 

outbuildings 

not 

mentioned 

here)

HS-522-A 12529

Styron-Bragg 

House 

HS-523-A 12530 D D

StyronBragg Shed 

(included 

with Styron 

House 

in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom)

HS-523-B 91761 D D

Styron-Bragg 

Cool House 

(was this 

the privy 

or the boat 

house from 

the 1978 NR 

Nom?)

HS-523-C 91762 D D

Potter, T. T., 

House (aka 

Armfield 

House 

in 1978 

Portsmouth 

NR Nom; 

shed and 

boat house 

mentioned in 

1978)

HS-524-A 12531

Roads in 

Portsmouth 

Village 

(Batch) 

(mentioned 

in 1978 NR 

Nom, but 

not included 

explicitly 

in list of 

resources)

HS-550-A 12532 D

Appendix E
276 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

George 

Willis House 

(collapsed 

ruins only in 

1978)

Portsmouth 

Boathouse 

(501D in NR 

Nom)

Cape 

Lookout 

Coast 

Guard Sta. 

Equipment 

Building 

HS-100-C 91771 D

Cape 

Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Station 

HS-200-A 91769 D D D

Cape 

Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Station 

Galley 

HS-200-B 91770 D

Cape 

Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Station 

Cistern 

HS-200-D 91772 D

Cape 

Lookout 

Coast 

Guard Sta. 

Generator 

Bldg. Ruin 

HS-200-E 91773 D

Cape 

Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Sta. Storage 

Bldg. Ruin 

HS-200-F 91774 D

Cape 

Lookout 

Coast Guard 

Station 

Cistern #2 

HS-200-G 91775 D

Lewis-Davis 

House, Cape 

Lookout 

Village (same 

as Carrie 

Arrendale 

Davis house, 

mentioned 

in CLV NR 

nomination?)

CLV-1 91828 D D

Guthrie 

Ogilvie 

House (aka 

Luther 

Guthrie 

House)

CLV-2 91829 D

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Context: 

Atlantic 

World 

(Chap. 2)

Context: 

Hurricanes 

and 

Changing 

Physical 

Environment 

(Chap. 3)

Context: 

Maritime 

Economy 

(Chap. 4)

Context: 

Slavery, 

Race, and 

Class (Chap. 

5)

Context: 

Government 

Activity 

(Chap. 6)

Context: 

Wars 

(Chap. 7)

Context: 

Outer 

Banks 

Culture 

(Chap. 8)

Context: 

Tourism 

and 

Coming 

of CALO 

(Chap. 9)

Appendix E
National Park Service 277

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Context: 

Atlantic 

World 

(Chap. 2)

Context: 

Hurricanes 

and 

Changing 

Physical 

Environment 

(Chap. 3)

Context: 

Maritime 

Economy 

(Chap. 4)

Context: 

Slavery, 

Race, and 

Class (Chap. 

5)

Context: 

Government 

Activity 

(Chap. 6)

Context: 

Wars 

(Chap. 7)

Context: 

Outer 

Banks 

Culture 

(Chap. 8)

Context: 

Tourism 

and 

Coming 

of CALO 

(Chap. 9)

GaskillGuthrie 

House 

CLV-5 91832 D D

Fishing 

Cottage #2 

CLV-6 91833 D

Life Saving 

Station, Cape 

Lookout 

Village 

CLV-8 91835 D

Cape 

Lookout 

Light Station 

Kitchen 

(1906)

HS-100-D 91767 D

Cape 

Lookout 

Light Station 

Cisterns 

(Batch) 

HS-100-E 91768 D

Coca-Cola 

House (aka 

Seifert-Davis 

House)

HS-3 91837 D D

Keeper’s 

Dwelling 

(aka “Barden 

House” 1907)

HS-4 91838 D D D

BakerHolderness 

House 

(Casablanca) 

(ca. 1930)

D

BakerHolderness 

House 

(Casablanca) 

Outbuilding 

(ca. 1930)

D

Cape 

Lookout 

Village 

Circulation 

Network 

(19th c to 

present)

D D D D D

Cape 

Lookout 

Village 

Landscape

D D D D D D

Carrie 

Arendell 

Davis House 

(ca. 1930) 

(same as 

Lewis-Davis 

House or 

not?; spelling 

of name is 

“Arrendale” 

in Jones HSR)

D D

Appendix E
278 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Preferred 

Structure 

Name (from 

LCS or NR 

nomination)

LCS 

Structure 

Number

LCS ID Context: 

Atlantic 

World 

(Chap. 2)

Context: 

Hurricanes 

and 

Changing 

Physical 

Environment 

(Chap. 3)

Context: 

Maritime 

Economy 

(Chap. 4)

Context: 

Slavery, 

Race, and 

Class (Chap. 

5)

Context: 

Government 

Activity 

(Chap. 6)

Context: 

Wars 

(Chap. 7)

Context: 

Outer 

Banks 

Culture 

(Chap. 8)

Context: 

Tourism 

and 

Coming 

of CALO 

(Chap. 9)

Former Coast 

Guard Dock 

(ca. 1950)

D

Gordon Willis 

House (ca. 

1950)

Jetty 

Worker’s 

House No. 1 

(ca. 1915)

D

Jetty 

Worker’s 

House No. 2 

(ca. 1915)

D

Life Saving 

Station Boat 

House (David 

Yeomans 

House) (ca. 

1887, moved 

1958)

O’BoyleBryant House 

(ca. 1928) 

(referred to 

in NR nom 

as “Bryant 

House”)

D

Salter-Battle 

Hunting 

and Fishing 

Lodge

D D D

Salter-Battle 

Hunting 

and Fishing 

Lodge 

Cemetery

D D

Salter-Battle 

Hunting 

and Fishing 

Lodge Cistern

D D

Salter-Battle 

Hunting 

and Fishing 

Lodge 

Storage Shed

D D

House #3, 

Coast Guard 

Village 

CGV-3 91830 D

Appendix E
National Park Service 279

HRS Contexts (Chapters and Chapter Sections) Major CALO-Related Locations of Activity

Atlantic World (Chap. 2) Portsmouth and Ocracoke Inlet

Hurricanes and Changing Physical Environment (Chap. 3) “Portsmouth 

Cape Lookout 

Cape Lookout Light Station

Shackleford Banks

General Outer Banks, Inlets, and Coastal North Carolina”

Maritime Economy (Chap. 4) “Southern Outer Banks

Core Sound

Pamlico Sound”

Stock raising and agriculture Portsmouth 

Whaling “Shackleford Banks (Diamond City)

Cape Lookout “

Fishing

Dolphin “Portsmouth

Cape Lookout

Shackleford Banks”

Menhaden “Portsmouth

Cape Lookout

Harkers Island”

Mullet “Shackleford Banks

Core Banks

Portsmouth”

Shad Outer Banks

Oysters Outer Banks, Coastal North Carolina

Shellfish Outer Banks

Loggerhead Turtles and Diamondback Terrapins Outer Banks

Shipbuilding Portsmouth

Work boat building Shackleford Banks

Commercial hunting Portsmouth

Extra-legal maritime activities Portsmouth

Slavery, Race, and Class(Chap. 5) “Portsmouth

Shackleford Banks

Outer Banks, Coastal North Carolina”

Government Activity (Chap. 6)

Portsmouth Custom House, marine hospital, weather station Portsmouth

Cape Lookout Light Station and Lighthouse Service “Cape Lookout 

Cape Lookout Light Station”

U.S. Life-Saving Service “Portsmouth

Cape Lookout”

U.S. Coast Guard “Cape Lookout Coast Guard Station

Cape Lookout

Portsmouth”

Great Depression and New Deal Coastal North Carolina

Wars (Chap. 7)

Revolutionary War “Portsmouth/Ocracoke

Cape Lookout

Carteret County”

War of 1812 Portsmouth/Ocracoke

Civil War “Portsmouth/Ocracoke

Outer Banks

Coastal North Carolina”

Part III: HRS Contexts and Major CALO-Related Locations of Activity
280 Gateway to the Atlantic World: Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study

Spanish-American War Coastal North Carolina

World War I “Carteret County

Outer Banks”

World War II “Cape Lookout

Outer Banks”

Outer Banks Culture (Chap. 8) “Cape Lookout/Harkers Island

Portsmouth/Ocracoke

Outer Banks”

Tourism and Coming of CALO (Chap. 9)

Nags Head and Ocracoke Nodes (eighteenth and early 

nineteenth century)

“Portsmouth

Northern Outer Banks”

Hunting clubs (late nineteenth century) “Salter-Battle Hunting and Fishing Lodge

Portsmouth

Early twentieth century

Cape Lookout village and Cape Lookout Development 

Company

“Cape Lookout

Shackleford Banks”

Era of roads and bridges Outer Banks

Post-World War II private tourism Outer Banks

Public tourism development: Two National Seashores CALO and CAHA

Appendix E
As the nation’s principal conservation agency, the 

Department of the Interior has responsibility for most 

of our nationally owned public lands and natural 

resources. This includes fostering sound use of our 

land and water resources; protecting our fish, wildlife, 

and biological diversity; preserving the environmental 

and cultural values of our national parks and historical places; and providing for the enjoyment of life 

through outdoor recreation. The department assesses 

our energy and mineral resources and works to ensure 

that their development is in the best interests of all our 

people by encouraging stewardship and citizen participation in their care. The department also has a major 

responsibility for American Indian reservation communities and for people who live in island territories under 

U.S. administration. 

NPS CALO 623/128134

National Park Service 

U.S. Department of the Interior 

Cape Lookout National Seashore

131 Charles Street

Harkers Island, North Carolina 28531

www.nps.gov/calo

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