Time and Tide: The Vanishing Culture of the North Carolina Coast

By Tim Hatcher

• Beautiful book with over 100 color photos of NC coast 
• Booksellers and gift retail are enthusiastic about this book, which has no close competition for general audiences
• Written in accessible, colloquial style ideal for general audiences 
• In addition to points of interest, the author spends considerable time on the region’s environmental and social concerns 
• Examines the effects of climate change on the region 
• Includes diverse experiences of coastal life often omitted from other books on this region
  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blair
• Release date: Apr 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781958888049

Book preview

Preface

As soon as oyster season rolls around and it gets close to my birthday, I head to Mill Creek, in Newport, North Carolina—an out-of-the-way, rural place that hugs the Newport River, where Tommy Haynes and generations of his family have harvested world-famous oysters and crabs. For many years, if I was lucky, during my visit I’d get to talk with Lloyd Culpepper, the patriarch of the family. The two of us leaning against his golf cart, I would listen as he talked about living and working on the water since he was a kid. I’d hang on his every word. But because he was still working well into his eighties, he always wanted to cut our talk short and get back to his chores.

I truly love Mill Creek. It’s one of the few places near the North Carolina coast that development has been slow to change. Out there, the homesteads where people live and work the water look pretty much the same way they have for decades. Most places, like Tommy’s, are right on the water, with old, weathered docks filled with crab pots piled high and old workboats (some working, others not). The roads wind perilously around the river’s edge, and being so close to the water, they flood in places. There is something special about turning that last curve, driving slowly up the gravel driveway, and pulling up next to the big cooler that’s usually full of bulky gray bushels of oysters in late October. It makes me feel good to see that at least one family is still making a go at commercial fishing.

The last time I was there, in the fall of 2021, Mr. Culpepper drove up on his golf cart, and we had a chance to talk briefly. He agreed that as soon as the season wound down, he would spend time with me telling about his many decades of working the water. I was thrilled since he knew more about oystering and crabbing than anyone I had ever met—he was one of the last, true North Carolina watermen. We agreed to meet again right after the holidays.

Mill Creek Oyster Festival, 1979. UNC Sea Grant College Program, via Wikimedia Commons

I had planned to visit him sometime in February. Around that time, I was at the local Tractor Supply getting pet food when I ran into the guy who had first turned me on to Tommy’s oyster business. Of course, as we talked, oysters came up. He asked if I had been to Tommy’s. I replied that I gotten my usual October oysters and was planning another visit soon. He asked if I had heard that Mr. Culpepper had passed away. I couldn’t believe it. I was overcome with sadness. When I’d last seen him, just a few months back, he had looked to me to be in good health. I wouldn’t have dreamed that I’d never have the chance to hear his stories and memories of growing up on and working the water for over half a century. Sadly, another noble waterman, another living legacy, was gone.

Being raised in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains gave me the opportunity, from the time I was just a youngster, to explore and find isolated, hard-to-get-to places. I’ve walked many miles on paths next to crystal-clear, ice-cold mountain streams, seldom seeing anyone all day. But from the first time I left the little cottage on stilts I’d rented from the Midgett family in the late fall of 1968 and walked the Hatteras Island shoreline all day with zero human contact, I was hooked. I knew my life would never be the same. I had been to beaches in Florida as a child and to Myrtle Beach as a young teenager, but those experiences were limited by the constraints of being with family and just being young and naive.

After that first visit to the Outer Banks, I promised myself that I would spend as much time as I could on the North Carolina coast. For the next three decades, as I moved from place to place, I sought to spend my vacations and any spare time I could muster somewhere on the coast. For many years—what turned out to be a big part of my adult life—I learned about, thought about, and reflected upon what I encountered as I spent time on the coast. The more time I spent there, the more I began to take notice of things that were changing, sadly, because I was coming to understand and appreciate the uniqueness of the people who lived on and worked the water. I learned by listening to and observing the people I met and got to know: who they were, how they spoke, and how they felt about the place where they lived and worked. I eventually realized that they possessed a culture unlike any I had ever known.

The events, people, and encounters that triggered the development, growth, and transformation of the coastal culture, what I began to call influencers—from the discovery of the coast by Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524 until now—are important because they have had such a profound effect on the people who call the North Carolina coast home. I wandered through the lore and real history of the so-called Golden Age of Piracy along the North Carolina coast, and discovered the repugnant history of the flipper factory of the late eighteenth century, the ongoing mystery of the Lost Colony of Roanoke, and the way local Bankers befriended and assisted the Wright brothers as they made history. In researching the natural wonder of the Atlantic Ocean, the blue waters of the Gulf Stream, and the Intracoastal Waterway, I realized what a key role these waters have played in people’s lives and how the many violent, destructive, deadly storms that bombard the coast have helped to create and toughen the unique coastal culture.

I discovered that controversies can spring up almost anywhere. Even building much-needed structures like the new Basnight Bridge (replacing the old, unsafe Bonner Bridge), the new Mid-Currituck Bridge, and the now-defunct Southport megaport project were rife with political intrigue, legal battles, and personal animosities.

The more hours I spent on North Carolina–built boats, including my own, the more fascinated I became with the long and celebrated tradition of boatbuilding, including how the famous Carolina flare hull design came to be, and how the industry transformed from a simple cottage industry into a billion-dollar business. As I spent time on the water, I saw how the long-held right of access to the state’s coastal waters is being challenged. I waded through hundreds of documents to learn about the long, confusing, and often contentious story of the development of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. I traced the history, importance, and decline of commercial fishing, and learned how politics, cheap imported seafood, and pressure from powerful, well-heeled organizations throw up roadblocks that negatively impact commercial fishing. My historical research revealed the reasons for the loss of several commercial fisheries, including how the menhaden fishery grew and succeeded and how and why it was destroyed.

I witnessed firsthand how the National Park Service, with legal pressure from distant officials and wealthy outside environmental organizations, actually closed miles of the beaches around Cape Point on Hatteras Island in an effort to protect a little piping plover bird—causing bad feelings and disagreements, and causing local businesses dependent on visitors and anglers for their livelihoods to either close their doors or lose a big chunk of their seasonal income.

I found that books I read about the coastal culture of North Carolina, with a few exceptions, did a less-than-adequate job of reflecting on the many contributions of African Americans, including the hard work of African American menhaden fishermen; on historical accounts of the massacre of Black citizens during the bloody 1898 Wilmington insurrection; and on how a few Black businessmen attempted to counter the racism of the Jim Crow era by developing all-Black beach resorts. The resorts, dance halls, and juke joints of Seabreeze and Freeman Beach, it turns out, were part of the Chitlin’ Circuit where soul and beach music were actually born.

After I moved to the coast, I saw firsthand continuing pressures on African American culture through examples of modern racist segregation still visible in a few coastal towns, and I was appalled by the distressing story of a recent land grab and the eight-year incarceration and ongoing legal battles of two African American brothers for trying to protect their ancestral lands just north of Beaufort.

I unearthed several really bad ideas—like the insanity of the U.S. government in the late 1940s seriously considering using the Outer Banks and Topsail Island for nuclear bomb testing, and the irrationality and waste around the annual multimillion-dollar tax-funded beach nourishment projects happening now up and down the entire North Carolina coast.

After many years of experiencing the coast and its people, I felt compelled to write. More and more, I found myself disturbed, even angry, that the coastal culture was being either ignored or treated as if it didn’t really exist or was unworthy of anything but disdain. I was also frustrated about what had been written about the coast. With few exceptions, most of what I read was obsolete, distorted, or misleading—and frankly dispassionate or just so much fluff. I became determined to shed a new light on the coastal culture—on the not-so-well-known things that had helped create it and the influences on the coastal culture coming in the not-so-distant future. And I wrote passionately (I hope), especially because I wanted to capture as much as I could the authenticity and heart I experienced and then lost when we lost Mr. Culpepper.

As I learned some uncomfortable and obscured truths about a people desperately struggling to protect their culture but clearly vulnerable to unwanted changes, I recognized that I had strong biases about the coast and its residents. As I began to write, I forced myself to unearth and consider both sides of the conflicts and controversies I learned about. My research revealed to me many of the root causes of the changes impacting the coastal culture and the fragile environment that people depend on and that is so susceptible to harmful human intervention.

As time and tides came and went, I noticed many things began to change: the old beat-up pickup trucks with rusty booms hanging out the back were gone, replaced by expensive, shiny, customized trucks. Fewer and fewer whitewashed handmade workboats piloted by weather-beaten people were fishing the sounds. Instead, high-dollar, sleek sport fishing boats driven by young, wealthy anglers were running full blast through the inlets. And even the distinctive way that people speak, the unique brogue spoken up and down the coast for generations, especially Down East and on the Outer Banks, was harder and harder to hear. Even getting to the beach, and certainly finding easy and free access to coastal waters, was becoming harder to do.

After almost six decades of spending time, learning, writing about, and now living on the coast, I am as passionate and concerned about the North Carolina coast as ever. There is no doubt that the coast and its people will endure many changes and face many challenges—some good, some bad, and some somewhere in between. But there is also no doubt that the people will remain fiercely independent, persevering, hard-working, skilled, clever, clannish, reverent, tough, and strong. More than ever, they and their culture deserve to be valued and preserved.

The last of the whalers, Stacy Guthrie, Harkers Island, 1965. Photo by Bruce Roberts

Introduction

At first blush, North Carolina’s coastal areas don’t seem much different from other coastlines. Beaches, inlets, shoals, jetties, islands, rivers and creeks, sounds, swashes, pocosins, swamps, bridges, and ferries dot the global coast-scape from Gloucester, Massachusetts, to Majorca, Spain, and from England’s Cumbrian coast back to Portsmouth Island, North Carolina. The smell of salt water and fish, the grittiness of sand, and the flush of a sunrise over coastal waters are similar just about anywhere the land meets the sea. But the importance of these places is not so much about their similarity. It’s about the uniqueness of each place and how that uniqueness has shaped the cultures of the people who call these special places home. To them, geography matters.

Coastal environments, especially North Carolina’s Outer Banks, look very rugged, but they are, in fact, quite fragile. They are susceptible to human impact and interference and have a harder time recovering when damaged than other less fragile and more stable ecosystems like deciduous forests. While the aquatic biome (including fresh and salt water) is considered the largest and most stable ecosystem on earth, ecosystems like those of the Outer Banks, and to a lesser extent those of the Crystal Coast or what is sometimes known as the Southern Outer Banks, are indeed fragile and always respond adversely to overuse and lack of protections. The impact that people have on nature is not the only influence on a culture. The reverse is also true: nature impacts people as well. What is clear-cut and undeniable is that people are shaped by their natural physical environment—the places where they live, work, and unwind.

People are influenced by place in many ways. There is no doubt that the well-known phrase Home is where the heart is is more than just a platitude. The more special a place, the more impact it has on its occupants. Fact is, the more you love a place, the more it impacts you. Loving a place means being drawn by it, dreaming of it, and having a strong desire to make it home. Thus, it becomes an important part of who we are.

I have stood on and appreciated many coasts—including Astoria Beach, Oregon; the North Shore of Oahu; and Black Sand Beach, Northern Ireland—but none has given me the feeling I get when I stand on a North Carolina beach. For me, it’s a feeling of my own mortality, that life is in fact fleeting. It’s the idea that I am alive and where I need to be.

The history that people share, including their traditions and customs, is part of the uniqueness of the North Carolina coast. The relationship that people have with their environment shapes their culture more than just about anything that they can create themselves. What we produce from our own power is very different from the power of nature. Geography matters to us and to who we are. Midwest farmers, West Coast surfers, Gloucester’s fishermen, and North Carolina’s Bankers, who live on the Outer Banks—these communities came to be not so much by what people created or brought with them, but through the ways they learned to live with, endure, and deal with nature—the land, the sea, the mountains, the plains, and of course the weather. For inhabitants of the coast of North Carolina, geography and weather matter.

As humans, we may not be an obvious product of nature, but there is no doubt that we are a part of it. Other than our own psyches, our beliefs, and a few critical social contacts like friends and family, nature has the power to influence us more than almost anything else. Whether we realize it or not, there is a direct and strong relationship between experiencing nature and the way we feel and how we act. Spending time in and around the ocean can wash away that unnatural frame of mind we get when we are cooped up in an office 40 or more hours a week or live in a big city where the only vegetation that we experience is a puny-looking houseplant.

Communities and families who have deep roots in distinctive and out-of-the-way places like the Outer Banks and the Crystal Coast of North Carolina have a specific, strong-willed, and unusually tough and protective culture. The folks in both of these areas might consider their geographic and cultural identity to be Down East. Down East is a term not easily defined. For some, it broadly describes anywhere along the North Carolina coast, including the sounds. But for others, it means the rural waterfront communities east of Beaufort that begin roughly at the Highway 70 East and Highway 1332 (Harkers Island Road) intersection. It includes Otway, Smyrna, Williston, Harkers Island, Marshallberg, Straits, Davis, Stacy, Sealevel, Gloucester, and Atlantic. Some argue that Beaufort is Down East, but that’s not how most true Down Easterners would describe it.

Hatteras native fisherman. Photo by Bruce Roberts

However they label themselves, the people along the North Carolina coast are fiercely independent, family oriented to the point of being clannish, hard working, religious, and strongly community minded. They are often ready to lend a hand to a needy neighbor and willingly place themselves in danger for a friend or fellow worker—whether a commercial fisherman or a gift shop owner. They can be gruff, ill tempered, impatient, and downright nasty, especially when it comes to any kind of interference with their livelihoods, their family, or community. As a testament to this Down East attitude, they have for decades referred to themselves as Bankers and to visitors and basically anybody who is not from around here as dingbatters, and they still do.

Gary, one of my longtime fishing buddies, liked to point out that you should always try to make friends with Down Easterners and Bankers; you should never make an enemy! He often told a story of a guy he knew from Raleigh, who, when he fished the shallow waters around Ocracoke, was prone to borrowing crabs out of crab pots that were not his. Gary said that it was early one day in late June when the guy was on Ocracoke around Northern Pond, supposedly fishing but in fact borrowing. As he pulled the next crab pot up into his small skiff, he heard a loud voice coming from the shore, screaming: What the hell are you doin’? Them’s my pots! in the strongest Down East accent/brogue he’d ever heard. It was almost unintelligible. It sounded more like Whada hale you doine? Dems moi powts! Before the Raleigh man could say a word, the Banker crab pot owner came at him with a machete, yelling Awl cut yore gowd diam haid ouif. With a sly grin, Gary finished his story, saying that his friend the thief from Raleigh had no doubt about what he’d just heard. He quickly grabbed the boat’s steering wheel, jammed it into gear, and tore out of there as fast as he could while the grizzled wild man kept swinging his machete, still yelling at the top of his lungs. The protective side of the Banker culture was well represented here.

People who use crab pots and other available means to catch fresh seafood as their livelihood depend on the fresh, salty, and brackish waters that hug the extensive and distinctive coastlines of North Carolina. The sandy, swampy, and, in a few places, nutrient-rich landscapes that make up coastal North Carolina provide shelter, stability, and habitats where living things can grow and develop. This coast is where the special culture of its inhabitants was started, has evolved, and has declined.

Cape Hatteras Light and the coastline, 1999. Photo by Bruce Roberts

Chapter 1

The Goodliest Soil

It was in early 1584 when Sir Walter Raleigh ordered Phillip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe to scout out a place in the New World for a settlement in what eventually became North Carolina and Virginia. They found the green haven of Roanoke Island in a massive sound behind barrier islands, later known as the Outer Banks. They were amazed at the good fishing in the waters and the abundance of delectable grapes. In a letter written the following year, then Governor Ralph Lane praised the land of Roanoke Island: It is withal the Goodliest Soil Under the Cope of Heaven (Quinn, 1952).

North Carolina has approximately 5,000 miles of coastline and some 3,000 miles of inland water shores. If you were to travel 5,000 miles east from Raleigh, you could be in Vienna, Austria; going south, you’d be in Santiago, Chile. If you added the other 3,000 miles of inland shore around the sounds, you could almost make it to Hong Kong or Mumbai. Any way you look at it, North Carolina is blessed with an abundance of coastline.

Primarily for promotional reasons, the state’s coastline is described in different ways that include some overlap in definitions. The coastal areas are often defined as the Outer Banks (sometimes divided into Northern and Southern), from the southeast corner of Virginia Beach south to Cape Lookout and including Bodie Island, Pea Island, Hatteras Island, Ocracoke Island, Portsmouth Island, and sometimes the Core Banks as the Southern Outer Banks; the Inner Banks, between Interstate 95 to the west and the Outer Banks to the east, including the sounds, and extending from the Virginia border to the South Carolina border; and the Crystal Coast, typically defined as the 85-mile stretch of coastline from Cape Lookout National Seashore southwestward to the New River Inlet at the South Carolina border.

The Outer Banks have for over a century had a special appeal and are arguably the most visited of all North Carolina coasts based on tourism dollars spent. The abbreviation OBX, coined by a clever marketer in the 1990s, can be spotted on car bumper stickers nationwide. However, there are other well-known coastal regions like Core Banks and the Crystal Coast that are in many ways just as interesting and distinctive. While the Outer Banks’ 200 miles of coastline are well traveled, the other 7,000 or so miles of coastline, including twenty-three islands and the Inner Banks around the many sounds and rivers, offer a history, an appeal, and a mystery all their own.

The Outer Banks: Remote Ribbon of Sand

It is the seven islands of the Outer Banks that make the North Carolina coast truly memorable and unique. The Outer Banks are a thin, string-like grouping of barrier islands over 200 miles long, covering some 400 square miles of land (mostly sand). Nestled within miles of pristine beaches, there are several small towns and villages. Some of the more familiar towns, moving south from the North Carolina–Virginia border, are Currituck, Corolla, Sanderling, Duck, Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, Nags Head, and Whalebone. Next, taking U.S. Highway 64 West, there are Roanoke Island, Manteo, and Wanchese; and then back out to the barrier islands south of Oregon Inlet on Highway 12, there are Pea Island, Rodanthe, Salvo, Avon (originally called Kinnakeet), Buxton (with its unique woods), and Cape Hatteras. And finally, accessible only by water (ferry or private boat), there is Ocracoke Island, where Blackbeard’s flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, sank just offshore.

Historically, but not surprisingly, the narrow spit of land that touches the Currituck, Albemarle, and Pamlico Sounds on the west side and the Atlantic Ocean on the east side has made an indelible mark on the people who call it their home. There are only a few geographies in the world that have shaped generations of inhabitants as much as the Outer Banks. For decades, experts, scientists, and other concerned, knowledgeable, and sometimes misinformed people have discussed, written about, and pondered the origins, movements, transformations, stability, and future of the geography and ecology of the Outer Banks.

It was not until the early 1960s, with the groundbreaking work of Dr. Robert Dolan, that the actual makeup of the Outer Banks was finally understood. Dolan was one of the founding professors of the University of Virginia’s Department of Environmental Sciences. His research explained why the barrier islands on the Atlantic coast are shifting rather than washing away as a result of waves and storms. For generations, the common belief was that the islands were actually anchored by hidden coral reefs and that movement was simply that of the surface sand. Dolan’s work showed that this was not the case. Part of his research included drilling some 140 holes from the inland Great Dismal Swamp area along the North Carolina/Virginia line all the way to Ocracoke to the south. Some holes were over 100 feet deep. He concluded that the Outer Banks were actually a ribbon of sand only about 30 feet deep and not fixed to anything, including nonexistent coral reefs. This confirmed that the entire Outer Banks, not just the sand, actually moves as a result of winds, currents, and storms.

Silver Lake on Ocracoke Island. Photo by Cheryl Roberts

Simply asking locals with several generations of relatives who lived on the islands about shifting sands would probably have saved scientists like Dolan a lot of time and energy. The fact that the original Kitty Hawk dune (actually located in Kill Devil Hills) where the Wright brothers took off (see chapter 8) has shifted over 20 feet a year was common knowledge among families in the area. To preserve the historically significant site, the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps along with local Bankers attempted to stabilize it by planting vegetation, bushes, and grasses; but no matter what scientifically supported or politically motivated efforts are carried out, the Outer Banks have significantly shifted and continue to shift to the southwest.

Dolan provided scientific advice to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regarding efforts to stabilize the shoreline at Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge, just southeast of Oregon Inlet. He also counseled state officials regarding North Carolina Highway 12, the well-known Outer Banks Highway, and provided useful data concerning Oregon Inlet. In building the high coastal dunes along the Outer Banks, Dolan wrote, man has created a new state in the beach system that may be detrimental to the long-range stability of the barriers and may become more difficult and costlier to manage than the original natural system (Dolan & Lins, 1986). The billions of dollars a year spent replenishing the coasts and keeping Highway 12 open is ongoing testimony that Dolan was onto something.

Today, visitors can still get a glimpse of how the Banks looked generations ago. The Jockey’s Ridge dune just south of the Wright Brothers National Memorial is a bare sand dune without any vegetation that stands some 100 to 150 feet tall, depending on the winds, rain, and other climate conditions. Unlike the famous Kitty Hawk dune (which no longer exists), it is not used as an airfield for powered flight. Instead, it’s used for hang gliding and for kids to tumble down. It is also—at least currently—the tallest sand dune system left on the East Coast. As visitors explore the areas around Jockey’s Ridge, the overall lack of vegetation becomes noticeable. But this does not mean that the Outer Banks have always been short of mature tree stands or even forest.

Jockey’s Ridge dune. Photo by John Wenzelburger

Kinnakeet Village, 45 miles south of Jockey’s Ridge, once had enormous stands of live oaks and cedars, which were valuable for boatbuilding. The early village flourished as a precolonial boatbuilding and repair depot for ships exploring the East Coast. It was the island’s most prosperous village until Hatteras Inlet was opened by a hurricane in 1846 and became a major access to the Banks. Because of the massive commercial harvest of Kinnakeet’s forests, eventually there were no trees left to build boats. This also killed most other remaining vegetation, resulting in a massive sand dune that traveled west at about 20 feet per month. This migration around Avon shrank the area at an incredible rate so that today, it is the smallest sliver of an island. In this same spot, the ocean continually tries to reclaim what land is left, and engineers attempt, at great expense and ultimately in vain, to curtail the loss.

South of Kinnakeet on Hatteras Island, plant variety