National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior Cape Hatteras National Seashore Manteo, North Carolina Final Technical Report - Volume One: Ethnohistorical Description of the Eight Villages Adjoining Cape Hatteras National Seashore and Interpretive Themes of History and Heritage Cultural Resources Southeast Region Final Technical Report – Volume One: Ethnohistorical Description of the Eight Villages adjoining Cape Hatteras National Seashore and Interpretive Themes of History and Heritage November 2005 prepared for prepared by Cape Hatteras National Seashore Impact Assessment, Inc. 1401 National Park Drive 2166 Avenida de la Playa, Suite F Manteo, NC 27954 La Jolla, California 92037 in fulfillment of NPS Contract C-5038010616 About the cover: New Year’s Eve 2003 was exceptionally warm and sunny over the Mid-Atlantic states. This image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on the Aqua satellite shows the Atlantic coast stretching from the Chesapeake Bay of Virginia to Winyah Bay of South Carolina. Albemarle and Pamlico sounds separate the long, thin islands of the Outer Banks from mainland North Carolina. Image courtesy of NASA’s Visible Earth, a catalog of NASA images and animations of our home planet found on the internet at http://visiblearth.nasa.gov. 1. Acknowledgements We thank the staff at the Cape Hatteras National Seashore headquarters in Manteo for their helpful suggestions and support of this project, most notably Doug Stover, Steve Harrison, Toni Dufficy, Steve Ryan, and Mary Doll. The following staff of the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries shared maps, statistics, and illustrations: Scott Chappell, Rodney Guajardo, Trish Murphy, Don Hesselman, Dee Lupton, Alan Bianchi, and Richard Davis. Assistants in the field provided quality interviews and valuable insights into village life – Susan West, Jennifer Miller, and Julie Burke. Special thanks also go to Susan West for providing meals and lodging in support of this project. Stephanie Bodine, Carol Filby, Sandra Kellum, and LaVern Reels transcribed our interviews. The staff at the History Center in Manteo, the Hatteras village library, and the Ocracoke Preservation Society offered enthusiastic help. Outer Banks historian David Stick was kind enough to proof-read the historical section of this work despite his struggles with glaucoma. Danny Couch of Buxton was willing to make time in his busy schedule to share his wealth of knowledge about village history. Karen Duggan with the Cape Lookout National Seashore headquarters, Pam Morris with the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center, and Sally Anger all helped scan photographs and maps. Conversations with the Cedar Island – Ocracoke ferry staff were insightful and fun, as the ferry workers tend to be former fishermen and island residents. Most importantly, we thank the many Hatteras and Ocracoke Island villagers who took the time to share their stories, thoughts, and suggestions; without their unflagging spirit of hospitality and helpfulness this project would not have been possible. This report, however, owes a special debt to the efforts of the National Park Service Applied Ethnography Program, particularly Dr. J. Anthony Paredes, Regional Ethnographer and Chief of the Ethnography and Indian Affairs Branch, Southeast Regional Office, for its design, structure, and content - the value and utility of the report to future staff, residents, and visitors to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore is due in large part to his support and initiative. Thanks must also be given to Dee Smith-Wilson, our Contracting Officer, to Dan Scheidt, the Division Chief of Cultural Resources, and Kirk Cordell, his predecessor, to Paul Hartwig, the Associated Regional Director for Cultural Resources, to Regional Director Patricia Hooks, and to the Southeast Regional Cultural Resources Council for recommending the project for funding and for their persistent support of the program. Finally, the principal investigator, John S. Petterson, must acknowledge the efforts of Barbara Garrity-Blake, the lead ethnographer and lead author of the report, for devoting years of her time to making this project such a success. The quality of the study is primarily a result of her work, and the devotion of Laura Stanley to the numerous editorial revisions. i 2. Executive Summary This document results from a three-year long research project funded by the National Park Service beginning in 2002 to conduct an ethnohistorical and ethnographic study of eight communities adjacent to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore (CAHA). This study grew out of the National Park Service’s recognition of the importance of understanding the social, cultural, and economic histories of communities affected by its policies and actions; its purpose was to “support the Park in the interpretation of its cultural resources, stewardship of ethnographic sources within the Park, and in community relations with these Park neighbors.” Research methods included participant-observation in Hatteras and Ocracoke villages, social mapping, genealogical interviews, and extended, tape-recorded interviews of community elders and leaders. We also built upon interviews of residents who born before or near the turn of the century that were recorded in the 1970s and 1980s by National Park Service staff as part of the University of North Carolina’s Southern Oral History Project. In some cases we were able to interview the children of those interviewed in earlier decades, now deceased. These interviews helped us formulate a diachronic description of social and cultural change in Outer Bank villages, particularly relating to the interpretive themes of Cape Hatteras National Seashore: seashore living and fishing economy. The final document is divided into three main components: • A description of contemporary life on the Outer Banks, including demographic changes, challenges and issues faced by traditional banker communities, and a discussion of the role of the National Park Service in villager life (Chapter 6). This section includes a discussion of management issues and recommendations. • An ethnohistorical description of the eight villages adjoining Cape Hatteras National Seashore: Rodanthe, Waves, Salvo, Avon, Buxton, Frisco, Hatteras, and Ocracoke. This is the main body of the text, and includes an overall history of Hatteras and ii Ocracoke Islands (Chapter 5), as well as specific ethnohistories of the six other villages (Chapter 7), and is based primarily on recorded interviews. • Interpretive themes of history and heritage. This section offers information pertaining to ten interpretive themes identified by National Park Service staff. The purpose of this section is to provide a reference guide for Park interpreters who are developing programs about the cultural meanings of artifacts, places, or events in Banker history. We have included as much primary source information for each of these themes as possible, and included secondary source references as well. In addition to the main document described above, we have compiled the oral histories recorded and transcribed for this project in a separate document. These interviews will be made available to National Park personnel as well as the public. They should be studied in conjunction with the interviews from the 1970s and 1980s conducted by National Park staff and Southern Oral History Project researchers. These interviews are file at the History Center in Manteo, and at the Cape Hatteras National Seashore headquarters in Manteo. Also useful to any research of Outer Banks culture and history is an annotated bibliography of coastal research compiled by Betty Duggan (2001), which was undertaken as a precursor to this project. iii 3.0 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Acknowledgements……….......................................................................... i 2. Executive Summary ................................................................................... ii 3. Table of Contents....................................................................................... iv List of Appendices ................................................................................... xii List of Tables ........................................................................................... xii List of Figures.......................................................................................... xiii List of Maps ...............................................................................................xv 4. Introduction ................................................................................................1 4.1. Background.........................................................................................2 4.2. Goals and Objectives .........................................................................3 4.3. Methods...............................................................................................4 4.4. Organization of Ethnohistories and Interpretive Themes ...................6 5. History of Hatteras and Ocracoke Islands...............................................8 5.1. The Colonial Period: Stockmen Beginnings .......................................8 5.2. The Federal Period (1780s to 1865): Shipwrecks and War...............13 5.3. Modernization: Post Civil War to Post World War II........................18 6. The Outer Banks Today...........................................................................25 6.1. Regional Overview..............................................................................25