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, 

USCG Station Ft. Macon

On an H2O Captain excursion, you are most likely to see and go past USCG Station Fort Macon. Captain Mark will point it out to you. A bit of history would disclose Date of Conveyance: 1903, Station Built: 1904, Fate: Discontinued in 1963 and reestablished as a Coast Guard Group office.

In 1904, the Treasury Department received permission from the War Department to build a lifesaving station on the Fort Macon Military Reservation. The Lifesaving Service, an organization later combined with the Lighthouse Service to form the Coast Guard as it is known today, started here in Atlantic Beach, NC with one main building, two small shortage sheds, and water supply facilities. When the War Department gave up this installation in 1924, by Act of Congress, the Treasury Department received 22.6 acres of land for the lifesaving station, and the remainder was given to the State of North Carolina (the area now known as the Fort Macon State Park, with Fort and beachfront area). Please know that Captain Mark is a Lifetime Member of the Friends of Fort Macon!

In 1938, many improvements were made to the station, with the construction of a larger main building with a watchtower, a boathouse with an attached marine railway, an equipment building, and other associated utilities. Of these, the boathouse (less railway) and the equipment building (Fort Macon Aids to Navigation Team Building) are still in service.

The dock area was built by the Army in 1941 after the start of World War II but was then turned over to the Coast Guard after the war in January 1946. These docks were improved in 1946/47, with the engineering building being constructed in 1948 and the actual designation of this unit as a Coast Guard Base following shortly afterward. In 1963, a concrete dock was constructed for the Cutter Chilula at the end of the Base grounds. The construction was completed in l965.

Finally, the Lifesaving Station and the Base were combined organizationally into a Station in 1963, then changed back to a Base in 1965, and finally, the formation of a Group Office was attached to the Base to coordinate other local North Carolina units. The old station house and the main building were replaced by the current 7O man barracks in 1965 and these structures were removed.

COAST GUARD BASE FORT MACON TODAY
Base Fort Macon still occupies the same area of land it started on in 1904, with many of the older buildings still finding use today. The Base serves as a host for 6 other commands which are colocated within its fence. While each has its own Commanding Officer, the Base and ANT Ft. Macon (Aids to Navigation Team) are attached to the Group Office. Its responsibilities extend from Hobucken, NC to the north, to the NC/SC border to the south.

Base and Group Fort Macon has many missions it is required to perform, from maintaining a constant ready status to aid the mariner in distress to keeping the various navigational markers in working order. With these comes the responsibility to enforce Federal Laws covering boating safety to drug interdiction. Many hours of training and work go into these areas so as to be ready when the need arises.

Some of these same missions are also shared with the various boats moored at the Base. We have a buoy tender, and some FRCs (Fast Response Cutters), plus other assets. A tour of the assets of the base may be possible. Please ask Captain Mark as he serves as the Immediate Past Flotilla Commander of the USCG Auxiliary.
Source: USCG

Photos by Captain Mark:  (middle) USCG Cutter Maple taken from the Bridge; (bottom) Sonder with Lt. Commander/Executive Officer Lesniak USCG on the FRC Richard Snyder

The first item needed to visit the WILD HORSES and discover great shelling on Shackleford Banks, or see the CAPE LOOKOUT LIGHTHOUSE is to have a boat.

Thinking of purchasing your own boat?

A seller of a boat has only two basic requirements: getting paid the amount they have agreed to receive and meet the due dates of the contract. The fewer contingencies your contract includes, the better your chances are for success. Presenting your offer with banking and insurance ready, as well as the survey dates scheduled, shows that you are organized and removes doubt from the seller. Sellers appreciate a buyer who has taken the initiative to line things up in advance.

Most purchase agreements include an accept or reject the date. To move forward and accept, the buyer commits to complete the sale. At that point, the deposit becomes non-refundable. As a buyer, you can’t accept the boat until the bank and/or insurer approves the survey. It is critical to make sure your lender can do so on or before the closing date.

With these assurances, you can accept the vessel and transition to the banking transfers and paperwork signatures.

It is important that someone on your team (a documentation service or lender) obtains a current USCG abstract of title to determine whether there are any recorded liens on the vessel. The abstract should be ordered once the purchase agreement is signed.

There is a lot to accomplish in a limited window, but try to keep your ultimate vision in mind: sparkling waters, friends and family, en route to paradise.

If this is not for you, please reserve your wild horses, great shelling, and/or lighthouse adventure experience today with H2O Captain Eco-Tour Private Boat Excursions at https://h2ocaptain.com.

If it IS for you will need to hire a captain to take you around our waterways to investigate our "skinny" water and know where to navigate.

Looking forward to welcoming you aboard!

We Have Changed People's Lives!

We believe in the power of bringing water and people together, which is why our excursions create compelling memories, that deliver life-changing experiences!

Greetings to all who have an interest in our environment, nature, animals, dolphins, water, eco-tours, wild horses, oceans, bays, discovering great shelling, charter boats, the sport of powerboating, walking, smelling the fresh saltwater air, and of course, our National Park, the Cape Lookout National Seashore.

This corner of the website will contain our weekly blog, released generally on Tuesdays.  The purpose of this educational blog is to provide content on the above-named subjects that answers our prospective passengers' questions and helps us all learn about our flora & fauna along the paradisical Crystal Coast in the Southern Outer Banks.  This is our opening effort. 

Should there be a topic of interest you would like Captain Mark to have a discussion about, please contact him and let him know.

As H2O Captain introduced 3 Exclusive Excursions in 2021, please look for 2 additional introductions for 2022!!

In the interim, a (re)introduction to our company may be needed.  Please click to view our video.

Help us spread the news about our new Blog for all that have an interest in the Crystal Coast, Shackleford Banks, the Cape Lookout Lighthouse, Atlantic Beach, Beaufort, Emerald Isle, and all it has to offer.