THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 31, 1994 TAG: 9407290225
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY LORRAINE EATON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MANTEO LENGTH: Long : 222 lines
THERE ARE no cobwebs here, no dusty shelves. No mice, no mold.
And it's cool.
Still, this is an attic. The $750,000, florescent-lighted, climate-controlled, burglar-alarmed building called the Outer Banks History Center is, in a sense, Dare County's attic.
But instead of old love letters and trunks, its stackroom contains rare maps, oral history recordings, books, pamphlets, photographs, personal papers, negatives, prints and paintings that range from very valuable to just plain interesting.
For instance, down one spotless aisle, black-and-white photographs titled ``Wrecks, automobile,'' show razor-finned cars mangled in head-on collisions, smashed into gas pumps and plunged into buildings.
Down another are colorful watercolors of fish by Frank Stick, father of local historian David Stick. The younger Stick donated the backbone of the History Center collection. In a slender drawer, covered in tissue, lies a Currier & Ives engraving of the Civil War Battle of Roanoke Island.
Like any well-stocked attic, it can captivate and enchant for hours. But since it is a serious research library, rummaging is discouraged.
Still, the stuff is interesting. So we sorted through some stacks, riffled through some files and quizzed curator Wynne C. Dough. Here are some glimpses of Outer Banks history unearthed in the county's climate-controlled attic.
THE OASIS
The Outer Banks restaurant business started when the grand old hotels - The First Colony Inn, the Carolinian and the Croatan Inn - opened dining rooms featuring down-home fare during the 1930s.
Yaupon tea, for example, was served at the Carolinian for years. But as more outsiders arrived, tastes changed and menus expanded. Today, Dare County's 172 restaurants serve everything from fried fish to fondue.
Other aspects of restauranting have changed. Consider an ad in the 1964 guide ``Dining on the Outer Banks:''
``In addition to attractive location, good food and atmosphere, the Oasis employs only COLLEGE COEDS as waitresses, working their way through school, who serve in Bermuda shorts and Bare feet.''
In the current era of bikini contests, Bermuda shorts wouldn't raise an eyebrow. And waitresses with bare feet? The health department wouldn't hear of it.
MAN VS. NATURE, A CENTURIES-OLD STORY
Nature has always triumphed as the most powerful presence on the Outer Banks, but man refuses to give up the fight. In one of the stackroom's slender map drawers is a 174-year-old blueprint for one of these battles - a plan to dike the Roanoke and Albemarle sounds and reopen a shoaled-up inlet in Nags Head.
Roanoke Inlet, located in the vicinity of the present Outer Banks Mall, was once the most important area gateway to Atlantic Ocean shipping lanes (Oregon Inlet had not yet been formed). But around 1790, Roanoke Inlet was nearly impassable. The shoaling resulted in a battle with nature that lasted more than a century.
In 1787, the first official steps were taken when the state formed a company that would unsuccessfully attempt to dig out an inlet. In subsequent years, the state or federal government continued to be interested in the closed cut.
At different times, eight engineers surveyed the cut and submitted plans to reopen it. State and federal funds were used to dredge it. And in 1820, engineer Hamilton Fulton was getting paid more than the governor to devise this plan to open the waterway.
Fulton proposed dredging the inlet, building stone jetties to protect it and diking the sounds so that the flow of water from the Albemarle Sound would be forced through Roanoke Inlet. At a cost of $2.3 million, it was never tried.
``If it had been adopted, it would have consumed multiple millions of dollars of the state budget for years,'' Dough said.
Twenty years later, man still hadn't given up. In the 1850s, Congress anted up $50,000 to dredge the inlet in yet another unsuccessful attempt. By 1870, officials conceded that continuing the fight would be a waste of public money.
Several factors contributed to the defeat, Dough said. By the mid-1800s, railroads, canals and roads offered alternatives to ocean shipping lanes. In 1846, a storm cut a new route south of Nags Head, Oregon Inlet.
In addition, Currituck Sound was a new haven for wealthy northern hunters who flocked to the freshwater area for its legendary waterfowl. ``Reopening the inlet would raise the salinity and make it less valuable,'' Dough said.
By 1923, local residents were still urging that an inlet be opened in the vicinity of Roanoke Inlet, but according to David Stick's book, ``The Outer Banks of North Carolina,'' the battle ended when when the Beach Road was built in 1931.
A LUCKY FIND
One aisle of the attic resembles a gallery lined with framed artwork and important-looking documents. One, however, stands out - a framed book with decaying edges. Through the glass, the title reads ``Acts of the Assembly of the State of North Carolina - 1777.''
Dough tells this story: David Stick, on his quest for North Carolina lore, stopped at a shop where he spotted a framed copy of the acts of the second N.C. General Assembly session, a somewhat rare find. The owner wanted $50 for it. Stick talked him down to $15.
Then, Stick had a hunch. He removed the back of the frame. Behind the second acts are the first acts of the state of North Carolina. The volume is only one of only six known copies.
PROGRESS, AND THE DECLINE OF GOSSIP
In the summer of 1954, progress arrived in Dare County in the form of black dial telephones that replaced the 1938 crank models.
The History Center collection includes something that gives us a deeper glimpse into the county's history: the slimmer-than-slim 1954 phone book.
The four-page directory is a single sheet of heavy paper folded in half. It lists 201 entries - 103 residential, 92 business and six government lines. This was progress, but the new phones affected one of the Outer Banks' oldest pastimes - gossip.
Until 1954, up to 19 phones could be connected to one line. ``If people on the same line were curious enough, they would just pick up the phone to see what was going on,'' said William C. Meekins Jr., junior vice president of the old Norfolk & Carolina Telephone & Telegraph Co.
``And you could tell how many people were on the line because the more people you had listening, the less transmission. When the line got muffled, you knew everyone was listening.''
The new service cut party-line subscribers to a maximum of 10 per line. Gossip is still a favored pastime, but old-timers here say that the 1954 phones squelched a lot of it.
Today, the local phone book contains 707 pages with 19,110 entries.
THE BIG STILL
While many visitors see only the sand and the sea, the county also harbors acres and acres of dense woods. Quite a bit of illegal, tax-free income has come out of these woods.
In a photo shot by the late Aycock Brown (circa 1960), the late Manteo Police Chief Chester Mitchell, late Dare County Sheriff Frank Cahoon and Deputy Sheriff Clarence Hassell, proudly display the spoils of a raid in Kitty Hawk Woods. According to Dough, the still is one of scores that were operated in the thick forests of Dare.
North Carolina first outlawed moonshining after the start of the Civil War to conserve food sources for Confederate forces. The state was also one of two that voted against repealing Prohibition.
During Prohibition (1920-1933), bootlegging was big business in the remote stretches of the Outer Banks, Dough said. Even shipwreck reports contain veiled references to illegal cargoes.
``It was an ideal place for that sort of thing,'' Dough said. ``It took a local's knowledge to get in and out of those woods without mishap, and there was enough wood to start fires under hundreds of stills.''
East Lake, a community on the mainland just west of Manteo, was known as the bootlegging capital of the nation, according to Stick's book.
It wasn't corn whiskey, Dough noted. Instead, the East Lake distillers brought in rye. The product had a big following in Baltimore, where whiskey drinkers still prefer rye, even in their juleps.
Despite efforts by law enforcement officials, bootleggers still operate in North Carolina. In the 1950s, agents were busting about 50 stills a month. In 1991, officials posted a warning that moonshine coming out of Brunswick County in the western part of the state had dangerously high levels of lead. During a 12-month period in 1993 and 1994, officials destroyed 11,660 gallons of mash that could have produced 11,660 gallons of moonshine worth $26,595.
BEFORE THE JAMS
The choke of cars at the Wright Memorial Bridge each weekend has been called the largest traffic jam in the state. But a photo taken about 1950 shows the humble beginnings of the bridge and the tourist industry.
The original Wright Memorial Bridge was completed in 1930 by a group of Elizabeth City investors who saw the potential in the then-undeveloped Dare beaches. Two years earlier, the county had built a toll bridge that connected Roanoke Island to the beaches. It cost $1 to cross.
The construction of the Wright Memorial Bridge had a huge impact on Dare County: It convinced state officials that they needed to invest in the area. One year later, the 18-mile beach road was complete.
The original bridge was probably located just north of the present span, and some locals say you could see water between the slats when you crossed it. It was replaced in 1966.
OUTSMARTING THE GULLS
The business of the North Carolina Department of Transportation is roads and bridges. But in the early 1960s, engineers got to do a little art.
It was a period of exceptionally low tides in the sounds, said D.W. Patrick, a retired chief engineer with the Department of Transportation who now lives in Aulander. The sea gulls, taking advantage of the situation, gathered mussels from the flats and then dropped them on the road to free the meat.
``A mussel shell, it will just splinter into smithereens with the exception of the hinge,'' Patrick said. ``They are like dual razor blades. People were getting two flat tires at a time.''
The problem was most severe on Hatteras Island, and dump trucks with brooms were sweeping the area 24-hours a day. The DOT decided to try other measures.
Reasoning that the gulls would not drop shells on each other, the DOT painted white sea gull silhouettes on a 1-mile strip of N.C. 12 near Salvo ``and then sat back and observed on a daily basis,'' Patrick said.
The amount of shells decreased, but the problem wasn't solved. Later, the county board spent about $7,000 to pave an 800-foot-long strip between the highway and the sound that the gulls could call their own. Patrick figures that that had more to do with the decrease of shells on N.C. 12 than the silhouettes. ILLUSTRATION: Staff color photo illustration by DREW C. WILSON
On the Cover
Peeking into the Past
A Cornucopia of Outer Banks Lore
Photos courtesy of the Outer Banks History center
A bulletin circulated by the Dare County Tourist Bureau that
promotes the Outer Banks as a healthy, friendly and convenient
destination for vacationers is on display at the Outer Banks History
Center.
Dare County Sheriff Frank Cahoon, left, and his helpers show off a
still they busted in the '50s.
Pictures of seagulls were painted along N.C. Route 12 to discourage
the birds from dropping mussels on the roadway to break them open
and leaving shells to damage vhicle tires.
A rendering from a Civil War-era periodical depicts the Feb. 8,
1862, batle for Roanoke Island.1
KEYWORDS: OUTER BANKS HISTORY CENTER
NORTH CAROLINA HISTORY
by CNB