Our Coast’s history: The early days of Bogue Banks / Part 2 of 3
Excerpts from an article by David Cecelski, reprinted with permission
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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A solitary gentleman in his collard patch next to Bogue Sound, Salter Path, 1935-40. In the distance, you can see that he’s put up a pen made of old fishing nets to protect his chickens from predators. You couldn’t find a scene more typical of the North Carolina coast in the 1930s. Photo: Charles A. Farrell, courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina
The early settlers at Salter Path did not hold deeds to the property that they occupied but saw the land being unused and made their homes there, a very old practice on the banks.
For that reason, the squatters, as they became known, later ran into legal entanglements, including a formal complaint from the land’s actual owner, a New Yorker named Alice Hoffman, who was Eleanor Roosevelt’s aunt. The legal issues were resolved in the 1920s and the Salter Pathers were allowed to stay on the land, though with restrictions that limited the village’s growth.
Methodist church, Salter Path 1935-40. This was not the building described by Alice Guthrie Smith. That church was a smaller frame building that had been moved from the Rice Path in the 1890s and was used as a church and schoolhouse. Photo: Charles A. Farrell, courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina
Community life at Salter Path revolved around a solitary church, a tiny graded school and, for the men at least, the general store. In her memoir, Alice Guthrie Smith recalled that first church in Salter Path: “That was the place where all the churches in Carteret County would meet and have their summer picnics. Oh, wasn’t that a happy time for everybody present! Everybody was in love and harmony with each other, and we looked forward to that day. Everybody took their baskets full of good things to eat and after everybody got through eating and drinking lemonade…, we would have preaching and singing or somebody would make a speech. Now, that was the good old days!”
My mother was born and raised in Harlowe, a little community 12 miles from Salter Path on the mainland of Carteret County. I still remember her telling me about a Sunday school picnic on Bogue Banks. It may have been the only time that she visited the island as a child, which was around the time of these photographs. She said it was quite an adventure. They made the journey by boat and at that age, she had rarely if ever traveled so far from home.
Mullet fishing camp and striker boat, probably Harkers Island built, on the ocean beach, Salter Path, 1935-40. Photo: Charles A. Farrell, courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina
One of the state’s oldest and largest fisheries, the salt mullet fishery was a big part of life on Bogue Banks in the 1930s.
This is one of my favorite images from “Judgment Land”:
“In the summer when the mullet would run in big black schools out in the ocean, some of the settlers would come to the beach near Riley (Salter)’s home. They would encircle the mullet with the long nets which had … been knit by their women. Hundreds of pounds of mullet would be brought to shore. All day long the women would sit with their `sitting up babies’ between their legs and split and gut the fish. Their long cotton dresses and even their sunbonnets were slick where they had wiped their hands ….”
Mullet fishing is still important in Salter Path today, though perhaps it means more now to the fishermen’s hearts than it does to their pantries or pocketbooks. The beach seine fishery for mullet has come and gone elsewhere on the North Carolina coast, but a solitary crew of the village’s men still persist in fishing in much the same way as their ancestors did for many generations before them.
Young boy and a haul of striped “jumping” mullet, Salter Path, 1935-40. Photo: Charles A. Farrell, courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina
In “Judgment Land,” Kay Stephens also quotes Alice Guthrie Smith’s memoir about the way that the islanders traded their salt mullet for other things that they needed in life.
“They would wash and clean them so they could salt them down, head them up, and leave those barrels of fish on the beach until sometime later. In the fall, October or November, a large boat from Down East (the eastern part of Carteret County) would come up to Salter Path loaded with sweet potatoes and corn. They would trade the corn and potatoes for the fish that the people had salted.
“The way they got the fish from the beach to the sound was to tie a rope around the barrel and two men would get a long pole and put it through the rope, take the poles on their shoulders, and carry the barrels down the Salter Path to the sound. There they put them in skiffs, took them out to the deep water where the large boat was, and put them aboard the boat after they took the corn and potatoes out.”
According to legend, the coming and going of those mullet fishermen wore a sandy path from the ocean beach across the dunes and swales to the shores of Bogue Sound. The path ran by the home of Riley Salter and his family, which led people to call it Salter Path and gave the village its name.
Women at work, Salter Path, 1935-40. Photo: Charles A. Farrell, courtesy State Archives of North Carolina
When Kay Stephens was researching “Judgment Land,” she spent a great deal of time with Lillian Golden, a local woman who was born on the island in 1901.
I love Lillian Golden’s descriptions of island life because they are so granular: in Ms. Golden’s words, you can really hear and understand the practicalities of how the Bogue Bankers fashioned a life there on the edge of the sea.
In this excerpt from “Judgment Land,” Stephens recounts how Lillian Golden described how the islanders made their mattresses.
“The villagers made their ticking out of flat homespun. The mattress that was placed on top of the slats was stuffed with seaweed. A feather mattress was placed on top of the seaweed mattress. The seaweed used in the mattresses was gathered along the shore and spread on bushes. It was left there through several showers of rain so the saltwater and other material could wash out. The sun would then bleach the seaweeds.”
Well into the 20th century, the villagers made feather mattresses. Stephens talked with another local woman, for instance, whose mother had a mattress stuffed with robin feathers.
In the 1800s and into the 1900s, the islanders often caught robins and other songbirds in fishing nets spread among the wax myrtle and yaupon bushes around their homes. They valued the birds for their feathers but also sought them out in order to feed their families.
A young man, probably a fisherman on his way back from the mulleting beach, Salter Path, 1935-40. Photo: Charles A. Farrell, courtesy State Archives of North Carolina
Reprinted with permission from www.CoastalReview.org,
