Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study By

47 Superintendent’s Annual Report for 2000, 9-10; Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc. and John Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural Landscape Report (2007), 32. The Superintendent’s Annual Report for 2001 (8) reported that a final total of 800 trees had to be removed in Portsmouth Village.

48 Jones, “George Dixon House, Portsmouth, Cape Lookout National Seashore: Historic Structure Report.”) and Tommy Jones, Washington Roberts House, Portsmouth: Historic Structure Report [Partial Draft], October 2003, 23.

49 Superintendent’s Annual Report for 2003, 1. The coal shed was not a historic structure, but rather a modern reconstruction of the original 1939 building.

50 Superintendent’s Annual Report for 2004, 1, 2, 5; Superintendent’s Annual Report for 2005, 3. The latter report (3-9) presents a detailed list of 58 Isabel-related projects undertaken.

51 Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc. and John Milner Associates, Inc., Portsmouth Village Cultural Landscape Report (2007), 1, 22, 30-31; Superintendent’s Annual Report for 2005, 9.

52 Hudgins, Tropical Cyclones Affecting North Carolina, 60.

53 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. David Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 1584-1958 (The University of North Carolina Press, 1958), 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 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 on p. 9.

54 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 12.

55 Letter from Arthur Dobbs to the Board of Trade of Great Britain, 19 May 1755. Colonial Records of North Carolina, V, 344-347 (online version: http://docsouth.unc.edu/csr/index.html/document/csr05-0106; accessed January 27, 2009).

56 John E. Ehrenhard, Cape Lookout National Seashore: Assessment of Archeological and Historical Resources (Tallahassee FL: Southeast Archeological Center, National Park Service, 1976), 26.

57 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, p. 14.

58 Olson discusses the evolution of the northern and southern channels in detail in ibid.,14-17.

59 Dunbar, Geographical History of the Carolina Banks: Technical Report No. 8, Part A, 68, 87.

60 William S. Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina (Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 614-615.

61 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, 1584-1958, 279, says the hurricane occurred on 7 September 1846, but we have not seen confirmation of this precise date elsewhere.

62 Dunbar, Geographical History of the Carolina Banks: Technical Report No. 8, Part A, 109-112.

63 Wilson Angley and David Stick , “Inlets,” in Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 614f.

1 Sarah Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study (1982), 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 (2007), p. 128, says 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 Maqazine, June 1906, 310-17. David Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 1584-1958 (The University of North Carolina Press, 1958), 78, the Portsmouth Village National Register Nomination (29 November 1978), and Beth Keane's “Salter Battle Hunting and Fishing Lodge: National Register of Historic Places Registration Form” (Wilmington NC, September 22, 2004), 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 is in a letter from Robert Williams to the North Carolina Council of Safety, 9 August 1776, vol. 10, 739; Colonial and State Records of North Carolina (online version; http://docsouth.unc.edu/csr/index.html/document/csr10-0327, accessed 25 February 2009).

2 Tucker Littleton, “Pumping and Grinding” in David Stick, An Outer Banks Reader (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 163-167; reprinted from The State, October 1980. See also Louis Torres, Cape Hatteras National Seashore Historic Resource Study (1985), p. 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 Jeremaih Walter Pelletier, it was located at Hatchall’s Point on the White Oak River about two miles upstream from Swansboro. After more than a hundred years, interest 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 must produce 12.5% of their output from renewable sources by 2021 were driving the companies to explore such sources. Bruce Henderson, “Carolina Breezes Eyed as Major Energy Source,” Charlotte Observer, 6 April 2009.

3 Minutes of the Upper House of the North Carolina General Assembly, January 01, 1771 - January 26, 1771, vol. 08 (3 January 1771), 349 (online version; http://docsouth.unc.edu/csr/index.html/document/csr08-0169; accessed 25 February 2009).

4 The somewhat longer-term, important 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.

5 Gary S. Dunbar, Geographical History of the Carolina Banks: Technical Report No. 8, Part A (Baton Rouge: Coastal Studies Institute, Louisiana State University, 1956), 2, 8, 38; Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 23; John E. Ehrenhard, Cape Lookout National Seashore: Assessment of Archeological and Historical Resources (Tallahassee: Southeast Archeological Center, National Park Service, 1976), 23.

6 Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 82, 84.

7 Godfrey, Paul J. and Godfrey, Melinda M., Barrier Island Ecology of Cape Lookout National Seashore and Vicinity, North Carolina (1976), Chapter 4; online version, http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/science/9/index.htm (accessed 28 January 2009).

8 Edmund Ruffin, Agricultural, Geological, and Descriptive Sketches of Lower North Carolina, and the Similar Adjacent Lands (Raleigh: Printed at the Institution for the Deaf & Dumb & Blind, 1861), 130-133; online edition, http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/ruffin/ruffin.html (accessed 28 January 2009).

9 Olson, Portsmouth Village Historic Resource Study, 62-63.

10 Ruffin, Agricultural, Geological, and Descriptive Sketches of Lower North Carolina, and the Similar Adjacent Lands, 126. An excerpt from Ruffin’s comments on the horses may be found in Stick, An Outer Banks Reader, 150-153.

11 OuterBanksGuidebook.com (http://www.outerbanksguidebook.com/horses.htm; accessed January 28, 2009).

12 Bonnie Lou Hendricks and Anthony A. Dent appear to greatly overstate the case when they argue 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.

14 Ibid., 1-2. Our account of whaling draws substantially upon this prize-winning study. The Simpsons point out (p. 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: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

15 Marcus B. Simpson and Sallie W. Simpson, Whaling on the North Carolina Coast, 4. The Simpsons note (4) that the open-sea New England whalers that 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 the Simpsons (49) place it much later in 1916.

17 Marcus B. Simpson and Sallie W. Simpson, Whaling on the North Carolina Coast, p. 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. .

19 Marcus B. Simpson and Sallie W. Simpson, Whaling on the North Carolina Coast, 7-11. As an example of early conflict for the scarce resource, they sketch the 1694 court case between whalers Charles Thomas and Mathias Towler.

20 Ibid., 11-15.

21 Ibid., 15-17. On all of these topics, the Simpsons present considerably more detail than we have space for her.

22 Ibid., 21-23. Between the end of the Revolution and the War of 1812, the Simpsons conclude, American whaling regained much of the dominance it had recently lost.

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 18 August 1878 (ibid., 5).

24 Ibid., 34.

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 on 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).

26Emily Jateff, Archeological Reconnaissance Survey for Shore Whaling Camps Associated with Diamond City, Cape Lookout National Seashore: Final Report (2007), 10, says that the area was “populated by European transplants from at least the late seventeenth century,” but we have seen 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).

27

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 the Simpsons) we have been able to find.

30 Marcus B. Simpson and Sallie W. 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 agree generally that by at least 1903 they were all gone.

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, 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 D.C.: 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; we confine ourselves to those around which a substantial species-focused industry has arisen at some juncture.

33 Ezekiel 16:10 has a reference to porpoise-hide sandals.

34 Unless otherwise indicated, our brief account here is drawn from David S Cecelski, A Historian's Coast: Adventures into the Tidewater Past (Winston-Salem, N.C: J.F. Blair, 2000), 81-86; Simpson and Simpson, Whaling on the North Carolina Coast, 23-26, 36-37; and Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, p. 230. A rare film produced in 1936 tells of Canada’s Mi'kmaq and Maliseet peoples’ involvement in the 19th-century commercial porpoise hunting industry (see McCord Museum site: http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/info/pressreleases/119z13.html; accessed 6 January 2010).

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 (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 D.C.: Bureau of Fisheries, 1917), p. 5.

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 (Washington, D.C.: 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; ibid., 128. Mr. Grey seems to have been the superintendent of the factory.

41 Garrity-Blake, The Fish Factory, 16.

42 Greer, The Menhaden Industry of the Atlantic Coast, 6.

43 Garrity-Blake, The Fish Factory, 11.

44 Raleigh News and Observer, 3 December 1937, 7 January 1945 and 28 December 1947; unpaged clippings.

45 Aycock Brown, “Menhaden Catches Declining,” Raleigh News and Observer, 1 December 1949; unpaged clipping.

46 Norwood Young, “Fish! Fish!,” Raleigh News and Observer, 10 December 1961; unpaged clipping.

47 ‘Washington Hears of Problems,” Raleigh News and Observer, 4 March 1961; unpaged clipping.

48 Charles Craven, “Fishing for Menhaden,” Raleigh News and Observer, 3 January 1965, III-1; Garrity-Blake, The Fish Factory, 24.

49 Jim Polson, “Menhaden in Middle of Fishing Dispute Along State’s Coast,” Wilmington Morning Star, 16 August 1985; unpaged clipping; Garrity-Blake, The Fish Factory, 22.

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, N.C: McFarland, 1998), 170. Much of our account of the mullet fishing industry here is drawn from Mallison, 170-172.

51 F. Ross, Jr. Holland, Survey History of Cape Lookout National Seashore (Raleigh NC: Division of History, Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation, 1968), 20-21.

52 Tommy Jones, Fishing Cottage #2, Cape Lookout National Seashore: Historic Structure Report (2003), 11.

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.

54 Stick details a sample arrangement, ibid., 218.

55 Hugh Smith, The Fishes of North Carolina (2 vols., Raleigh: E.M. Uzzell, 1907), II, 408-409.

56 Ibid., II, 409.

57 Holland, Survey History of Cape Lookout National Seashore, p. 21.

58 The American Farmer, and Spirit of the Agricultural Journals of the Day (May 13, 1840); Southern Planter (1841-1866); Feb 1842; 2, 2, American Periodicals Series Online, 48; The Atlanta Constitution (1881-2001), November 19, 1882, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Atlanta Constitution (1868 - 1942)

pg. 4 (online access ,4 February 2009).

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 D.C.: U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, 1899), 104-105, 115-116, 121, 123, 155, 161-162.

61 John Cobb, Investigations Relative to the Shad Fisheries of North Carolina (Raleigh: E.M. Uzzell & Co. , 1906), 10, 17.

62 “Committee Hears Shad Fishermen,” Raleigh News and Observer, 18 December 1936; unpaged clipping.

63 R. L. Carson, “Industry That Once Gave Employment to 25,000 Now Near Extinction,” Raleigh News and Observer, 28 February 1937; unpaged clipping.

64 Cecelski, A Historian's Coast, 87-92. This account is drawn principally from Cecelski.

65 “Planning Vast Future for Tar Heel Oysters,” Raleigh News and Observer, 5 December 1929; unpaged clipping.

66 “The Oyster Now Moves South,” Raleigh News and Observer, 28 December 1924; “Making the Oyster Safe,” Raleigh News and Observer, 13 November 1925; Robert E. Coker, “State Potentially Rich in the Oyster Industry” and “Why state Ranks Low in Farming of Oysters,” Raleigh New and Observer, 16 and 23 March 1930; unpaged clippings.

67 Wade Lucas, “State’s Oyster Industry Hard Hit by Two Hurricanes,” Raleigh News and Observer [undated clipping, possibly 18 March 1955].

68 “Oyster Probe Being Waged,” Raleigh News and Observer, 19 October 1961;”Scarcity of Tar Heel Oysters Discussed,” Raleigh News and Observer 10 February 1963; “Oyster Industry Hit By Polluted Waters,” Raleigh News and Observer, 17 July 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, 15 October 1972; unpaged clippings.

70 Brunswick Star-News, August 13, 1989; unpaged clipping.

71 “N.C. Seeks to Revive Oyster Crop,” Raleigh News and Observer, 12 July 1970; “Shellfish Supply Keeps Dwindling,” Raleigh News and Observer, 4 June 1973; Richard Whittle, “N.C. Oystering on the Decline,” Raleigh News and Observer, 3 September 1977; unpaged clippings.

72 “Oysters Now Making Comeback in State,” Fayetteville Observer-Times, 29 April 1979; Charlotte Observer, 19 November 1989; unpaged clippinigs.

73 “State’s Crab Industry May Be Expanded Soon,” Raleigh News and Observer, 29 August 1941; unpaged clipping.

74 “A Neglected Tar Heel Resource,” Raleigh News and Observer, 11 July 1943, unpaged clipping;. and “The Crab Crop,” Raleigh News and Observer, 12 August 1944, unpaged clipping.

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