Our Coast’s history: The early days of Bogue Banks / Part 1 of 3
Excerpts from an article by David Cecelski, reprinted with permission

Map of the western end of Bogue Banks and Bogue Sound around 1900. From Kay Holt Robert Stephens 1984 work, “Judgment Land: The Story of Salter Path,” vol. 1.”

An H2O Captain excursion is an experience. We get to see the Atlantic Ocean, the wild horses of Shackleford Banks, discover great shelling on Sand Dollar Island or on Shack, or on The Cape. See a lighthouse and the Beaufort and Morehead City waterfronts, USCG Station Ft. Macon, not to mention the Rachel Carson Preserve.

If that already wasn’t a WOW, if you go on our exclusive excursion, “Lunch in Swansboro and the ICW (Intracoastal Waterway),” we will travel approximately 25 miles one way, the complete length of Bogue Banks along the ICW.

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I found this group of photographs at the State Archives of North Carolina in Raleigh. They were taken in Salter Path, a fishing village on the North Carolina coast, probably in 1938 or 1939.

Salter Path is located on Bogue Banks, a 21-mile-long barrier island best known for being the site of Fort Macon State Park, the North Carolina Aquarium, and some of the state’s most popular beach resort communities, including Atlantic Beach, Pine Knoll Shores, and Emerald Isle.

I want to look at the history of Salter Path before the first hotels and condominiums were built there. When Charles A. Farrell took these photographs, Salter Path was the only settlement of any kind on the western two-thirds of the island.

At that time, no paved road yet led to Salter Path. People came and went largely in boats. Lights were few and far between. On a clear night, you felt as if you could see every star in the heavens.

Farrell’s photographs give us a glimpse of Salter Path just before the hotels and beach resorts showed up, the first paved road was built and all the rest.

I have paired Farrell’s photographs today with brief excerpts from a book called “Judgment Land: The Story of Salter Path,” which was written by an island visitor and sometimes resident named Kay Holt Roberts Stephens back in 1984.

Long out of print, Kay Stephens’ book lets us hear the voices of some of the village’s oldest residents at that time. Several of those island people recalled when Salter Path was first settled in the 1890s.

The oldest of those islanders even remembered other settlements that were located on the western half of Bogue Banks in the late 1800s — Yellow Hill, Rice Path, Bell’s Cove and others. Those communities faded away in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Some of their people moved to Broad Creek and other communities on the mainland, but others helped to build the new village of Salter Path.

With the help of those people’s memories and Farrell’s photographs, we can learn at least a bit about what Salter Path and the whole western part of Bogue Banks was like in those long-ago days.

Salter Path 1935-40. A mother or grandmother and a little girl stand on the dune line that helped to shelter the village from wind and waves. We can glimpse Bogue Sound in the distance. Photo: Charles A. Farrell, courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina

Approximately a mile west of where Salter Path is now, in a section of the island that was nestled down among live oak glades and sand dunes, there used to be a little village called Rice Path.

In “Judgment Land,” Kay Stephens described how Rice Path got its name:
“Sometime between 1865 and 1880, a ship loaded with rice wrecked on the beach. The families living on the banks … went aboard the ship, filled their bags with rice, and carried it across the sand dunes through the low growing shrubs, through the closely-knit live oak trees, and then on to the shores of Bogue Sound. There they loaded the rice on their skiffs and took it home. From then on the path and the settlement that grew up in the vicinity was referred to as Rice Path.”

According to the old islanders who visited with Kay Stephens, the move of the people in Rice Path and the other little settlements on the western part of Bogue Banks to Salter Path was prompted partly by a changing economy and partly by a changing landscape.

“By 1896, some of the settlers on the western end of Bogue Banks were becoming dissatisfied with their homesites. Each year it became more difficult to raise a garden due to the encroaching sand and … salt spray. The families living … between Hopey Ann Hill and Yellow Hill were especially affected as portions of the banks were eroding rapidly. Also, the settlers felt a need to be closer to Beaufort and Morehead City, the towns they turned to for trade. Therefore in March of 1896 the first permanent settlers moved to the area, which would be called the village of Salter Path.”

Two girls on the main path into Salter Path 1935-40. Photo: Charles A. Farrell, courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina

One of Kay Stephens’ best sources is an unpublished memoir written by an island woman named Alice Guthrie Smith. Ms. Smith was born at the Rice Path in 1892, and she apparently wrote her recollections of her early life on the island sometime in the 1950s.

I have never seen her recollections, but fortunately Stephens quotes from them liberally.
Like quite a few other families, Alice Guthrie Smith’s family came to Bogue Banks from Shackleford Banks, the barrier island just to the east. Her grandparents, John Wallace and Hopey Ann Guthrie, left Shackleford Banks after he had a severe fall at the Cape Lookout Lighthouse and was left crippled.

Hopey Ann Guthrie apparently thought that life might be a little easier on Bogue Banks than at Shackleford. I am not sure why, though I suspect that she wanted a new home closer to the mainland and a bit more protected from the hurricanes that had been so hard on the villages at Shackleford.

John Wallace died two or three years after the family’s arrival at the Rice Path. Hopey Ann raised their large family on her own, living largely off the sea. The site of their home came to be known as Hopey Ann Hill.

In her memoir, Alice Guthrie Smith remembered when her family left the Rice Path and moved to Salter Path.  Kay Stephens quotes her in “Judgment Land”:
“Well, we lived to that house … until March 1896. (Our neighbors) Rumley Willis, Henry Willis, Alonza Guthrie, and Damon Guthrie all decided they would move to the Salter Path. So, here we go. Well, the day came for everybody to go down to the Salter Path and clear up their place, burn the pine straw and leaves and get their place ready to take their house down. So, Rumley put his house on a hill near the sound on the east side of the Salter Path that runs from the ocean to the sound. There were large oak trees all around his house. It was a beautiful place to build… There were only four families at first, but it wasn’t long before most of the people that lived to Rice Path, Yellow Hill, Bill’s Point, and Belco moved to Salter Path and Broad Creek.”

Reprinted with permission from www.CoastalReview.org,