Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study By

Chapter 4: 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 rather corn grown on inland farms and gotten in exchange 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 plantation in 1621, but it was more than another century before one appeared in North Carolina. The General Assembly passed an act to give one-half acre of land to anyone who would build a windmill to grind wheat and corn. A 1748 deed locates one in Pasquotank County, and by 1786 the mill in Portsmouth was joined by another in Marshallberg. A decade later one was built in Beaufort, and there were eventually more than sixty-five in the county. [ILLUSTRATION: Nineteenth century windmills map Barfield Seasoned by Salt Map 4, p78. CAPTION: Fig. 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] They proliferated especially in the mid-nineteenth century, but declined in use toward the end of the century as central station power and steam-, kerosene-, gasoline- or diesel-driven engines or generators appeared.² [ILLUSTRATION: Fig. 4-2: Windmill on Harkers Island ca 1904 NCC Series P1 ref image fp1-16.4. CAPTION: Windmill on Harkers Island, ca. 1904. North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill]

The rise and decline of windmills on the southern Outer Banks – picturesque and widespread as they came to be – betokened what turned out to be a disappointing fact: the area has never been a site of major, organized, large-scale economic activity that sustained itself over a long period of time. It did not offer the large and stable parcels of land, the labor supply or the developable natural resources (soils, mineable mineral deposits or damable 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 sustainable supply 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

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 historical sequence of activities that have appeared and disappeared, each of them marshalling an essentially time-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.