The New York Times Comes to Harkers Island: 1924

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 the last whale had been caught. Life-saving and Coast Guard stations had come and gone, as had war-time population surges. A planned tourist development on Shackleford Banks had never materialized. The mostly post-Civil 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 found in 1900. And Core Banks was littered with the rusting hulks of automobiles converted to fishing buggies by rising numbers of sports 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 at best ambivalent picture of 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 County ferry operator Josiah W. Bailey described Cape Lookout as “isolated, wave washed, and windswept . . . unfamiliar to present generations.” By-passed 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 of the claim.

Another frequently invoked basis for popular characterizations of Outer Banks culture is the existence of putatively stable, multi-generational maritime occupations (frequently family-based) including fishermen, lighthouse keepers, and Life-Saving Service and Coast Guard crews – 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, 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.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 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.

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, 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. As we pointed out in a previous chapter, 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.

As we explained in an earlier chapter, 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, to less than one-half peak production levels by the 1970s. Similarly with commercial shad fishing: 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 nineties, peaked early (around 1900), and by the mid-30s was on a steadily 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 – much larger vessels and consequently larger crews, 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, an even cursory analysis of that generically totalized industry leads quickly to an awareness of change and diversity of types that have profound social and cultural effects. To expand the time frame to its maximum extent, the lives and work and culture of shore-based whalers in the eighteenth century were about as different as they could be from those of the menhaden crews more than 250 years later.

Other change factors have also been persistently in evidence for at least that length of time. With the rather capricious opening and closing of inlets from storms and hurricanes, piloting and lightering became less frequent 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 a prior chapter. Necessary attention to gender is also backgrounded or omitted. As Garrity-Blake 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 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.