Our Coast’s history: The early days of Bogue Banks / Part 3 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.
**********
Now and then, the sea provided very different kinds of gifts. In her memoir, Alice Guthrie Smith recalled, for instance, how wind and waves knocked a load of lumber off a schooner during the great hurricane of 1885.
The lumber washed up on Bogue Banks and after the storm, she wrote, “everybody that needed lumber went over to the beach and pulled up all they wanted. Dad saved enough to start him a small house to the Rice Path.”
I am always surprised, when I visit the old homes on Salter Path or on Ocracoke or some other island village, how often people tell me that this room’s floor or this chest of drawers or this table came off a shipwreck years ago.
It always feels as if there is no limit to the way that the islanders were bound to and shaped by the ways of the sea.
A girl or a young woman sitting in the doorway of her family’s cabin on Bogue Sound, Salter Path, 1935-40. Photo: Charles A. Farrell, courtesy State Archives of North Carolina
Now and then, I get a glimpse in “Judgment Land” at something that I rarely hear talked about: the fear that the island’s women felt for their safety and the safety of their daughters when their husbands were away fishing and hunting or when their husbands had died and left them on their own.
Kay Stephens tells the story, for instance, of a night during the Civil War when three men from the mainland forced their way into the home of Francis and Horatio Frost and raped two of their daughters. At the time, Horatio and their only son were gigging flounder on Bogue Sound.
In another part of the book, Lillian Golden recalled the fear that she and her widowed mother felt at their home in Salter Path when she was a girl.
“The neighborhood wasn’t thickly settled, and you didn’t think of calling nobody … I was scared to go to sleep nights. We were in the woods. The other young’uns had a father with them, you see.
Like so many other young women of the time, Lillian did not wear make-up and rarely wore jewelry in the hope that she could avoid men’s attentions.
Young women visiting in the doorway of a cottage in Salter Path, 1935-40. Photo: Charles A. Farrell, courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina
I found Lillian Golden’s recollections of her widowed mother especially entrancing when I reread “Judgment Land” the other day.
Her mother, Mary Francis Smith, took her husband’s death very hard. He was scarcely 30 years old when he died after a long illness in 1901. Beset by grief, Laura Francis was visited by nightmares for years.
Lillian told Kay Stephens that, in order to comfort her mother, she slept with her, nuzzled against her back, from the time that she was a little girl until she was married in 1918.
Yet for all that, Mary Francis managed to provide for herself and her children.
”She clammed and caught soft-shell crabs in the spring and summer. She took in sewing, sometimes staying up late into the night to finish a dress that was wanted the next day. In the fall and winter, she and her children would cut wood and sell it by the cord …
“She would cut the leaves off the yaupon (bushes) and sell them to a factory on Harkers Island. (Harkers Island is 18 miles east of Salter Path.) There the leaves were cured and put into sacks and sold under the brand name `Carolina Tea.’
“In 1905 after her aunt Mahalia Ann Guthrie was no longer able to serve as the village midwife, Laura Francis began her long career delivering the babies not only in Salter Path but elsewhere on the banks.” She was a little bit of everything: fisherwoman, seamstress, woodcutter, herbalist, midwife, and mother, as well as, for a time, the village’s postmistress.
To get by, Mary Francis saved and reused every little thing, kept two big gardens and spun her own thread, and made her family’s clothes. Her neighbors shared and together they made do and got by.
My friend Karen Willis Amspacher is the director and guiding spirit at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island. Many of her ancestors came from Shackleford Banks, the island I mentioned earlier that is just to the east of Bogue Banks.
More than once, when we have been discussing how hard it was to survive on those islands back in the day, Karen has just shaken her head and told me, “Those were some tough folks, David. That’s all I can say. Those were some tough folks.”
A mother and her children on their front porch, Salter Path, 1935-40. Photo: Charles A. Farrell, courtesy, State Archives of North Carolina
Coastal Review is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture, and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries, and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe.
About David Cecelski
Historian David Cecelski shares his time between Durham and his family's homeplace in Carteret County. He has written several award-winning books and hundreds of articles about history, culture, and politics on the North Carolina coast. His writing focuses on telling stories from his little corner of the world that illuminate American history more broadly. Dr. Cecelski was recently the co-recipient of the N.C. Literary and Historical Association’s Crittenten Award for lifetime achievement.
Reprinted with permission from www.CoastalReview.org,
