"A
place shaped by her people. A people shaped by their home."
T.
Edward Nickens, from the 2000 Yearbook - Core Sound Waterfowl
Museum
Photos
by Scott Taylor
It
is not an easy place to get to, Core Sound. The region begins
where most folks' geographic knowledge of North Carolina ends:
beyond Morehead City, beyond Beaufort, to the far side of the
North River. There, a fat finger of marsh and tangled forest juts
north into Pamlico Sound, bounded on the east by the blue-gray
sweep of Core Sound's shallow waters.
Look
carefully, far across the sound, and you will glimpse sandy banks
flecked with marsh and maritime forest. These are the Core Banks,
49 miles of blissfully desolate beach, a checkmark-shaped 
crest
of barrier islands that comprise Cape Lookout National Seashore.
It is wild country over there on the Banks. Not a soul lives there.
It was not always so.
And
of that, there is much to be told.
For
35 miles U.S. Highway 70 and State Route 12 skirt Core Sound's
mainland shore, passing through prodigious marshes and a dozen
tiny communities. Fish houses crowd the highway; crab shacks edge
the water. Dry land and the highway end abruptly at Cedar Island,
from which a two-and-a-half hour ferry steams for Ocracoke. These
are the two ways to get here: Driving north from Morehead City
and Bogue Banks and Beaufort, or south from Cape Hatteras and
Ocracoke.
Either
way, it's a trip through time and space, into the heart of North
Carolina's true Down East. This is a place fashioned by the sea
and sand and wind, and the people who call it home. Here, history
is a patchwork quilt of ancient whaling stories and round-stern
workboats, crabpots and clam rakes, and waters where fishermen
and hunters navigate their boats by the church steeples rising
over the mainland. And waterfowl, always waterfowl. Core Sound's
waterfowl heritage is the thread that binds it all together.
Core
Sound's heritage of waterfowling culture is unlike any on the
North Carolina coast. Ducks and decoys fashion a lens through
which you can see, and understand, Core Sound's environment and
natural history, her folk art and her unforgettable folks. There
is no other place like Core Sound. There are no other stories
like these.
Human
history dawns early on Core Sound. The Coree Indians, from which
Core Sound derives its name, lived on the Core Sound mainland
and fished and hunted on Cape Lookout and the Core Banks. In 1585,
Captain John White named Lookout's ferocious shoals "Promontorium
Tremendum," or Horrible Headland. It wasn't't until 1713, when
Enoch Ward and John Shackleford bought 7,000 acres of the Banks,
that permanent white settlement began. A dozen years later, the
first New England whalers arrived, introducing a fishery that
would provide Core Banks with one of its most colorful chapters
of history. For the next century-and-a-half, Core Banks was dotted
with tiny settlements. Mullet were pulled from the sea, salted
in barrels, and shipped to distant ports. Whales were harpooned
by boats launched from the beach. By 1764, maps showed a cluster
of whaler's huts just west of the lighthouse. By 1890, a community
of fishing families engulfed half of Shackleford Banks. Its name
was Diamond City.
On
the northern tip of Core Banks, on the south side of Ocracoke
Inlet, the village of Portsmouth grew, by 1770, to be the largest
settlement on the entire Outer Banks. You can wander through its
sandy streets today. It is a ghost town, of sorts, where the historic
homes of shopkeepers and boat captains keep silent vigil.
Nothing
of the sort can be found of the other Core Banks communities.
In 1899, a massive hurricane roared across the islands, flooding
homes and gardens, sweeping away cattle, killing orchards, and
breaking the Bankers' will to remain. They sailed their cottages
across the sound, board by board or in large pieces lashed to
skiffs. Within a few years, Core and Shackleford Banks were deserted.
The
Bankers settled from Salter Path to the Promised Land district
of Morehead City, and north to Cedar Island. Most, however, made
landfall on Harkers Island and all along the sound's western shore.
Their descendants live there still, in a necklace of working communities
with one foot in the water and the other on land.
Core
Sound is a place, but it is made up of many places. There is Bettie
and Otway, Smyrna, Marshallberg, Gloucester, and Harkers Island,
the southern anchor of Down East. Cross Smyrna Creek and the beautiful
Jarrett Bay to Davis Shore, the historic home of waterfowl hunting
that drew the likes of Babe Ruth and the adventure novelist E.G.
Marshall. Here was the jumping-off point to the Core Banks Rod
& Gun Club. Here was a center of commerce - shad factories,
logging operations, and the interstate trade of products carried
on the Alphonsa, one of the finest examples of a Core Sound sharpie.
Cross
Oyster Creek and Brett Bay and look to the east and you will see
Piney Point, home of the beloved decoy carver Mitchell Fulcher.
This is the Stacy community, where it is said there were more
decoy carvers than anywhere else on Core Sound. Here was Davis
Shore, whose carvers supplied guides and gun clubs.
The
road through Down East heads nearly north now, through Masontown
and Sea Level, where the U.S. Merchant Marine has a retirement
community full of white-haired old men who will tell you of being
shipwrecked and sunk by German U-boats, and of raucous nights
in far-off ports. Dawdle at Atlantic, which a few old-timers still
call "Hunting Quarters," then hold on for the ride across 10,000
acres of open black needle rush marsh, the largest remaining on
the Atlantic seaboard. The marsh sweeps to the west for a mile
or more, hemmed in by far trees that form a thin green horizon.
To the east, duck blinds punctuate Core Sound. Shaped like a giant
wishbone, with 18 miles of uninhabited sound front beach jutting
into Pamlico Sound, Cedar Island is the region's most isolated
community.
That's
it. That's the road to Core Sound and the real Down East. But
having your bearings straight isn't the same as knowing where
you are.
Knowing
where you are Down East means knowing that the beam from the Cape
Lookout lighthouse flashes every 15 seconds, pulsing like a heartbeat
over Cape Point and Shackleford Banks. To those at sea, it means
danger. To the sons and daughters of the Bankers, it means home.
Knowing
where you are Down East means knowing how to make a meal out of
an old red drum and Irish potatoes. Or make a celebration out
of loon, stewed long and low with fatmeat and rutabagas. It means
knowing what it feels like to pile all the family and fishing
gear and camp fixin's for a week-or a month-at your weathered
shack, tethered to some piece of sand out there on the edge of
Core and Shackleford Banks.
It
means knowing where you were-or where Mama and Daddy were-in the
Storm of '33. It means knowing how to tell when a blue crab is
about to shed its shell, and when the speckled trout move into
the marshes, and when the flounder move into the flats.
Knowing
where you are Down East is knowing that the Cape Village old-timers
used to square dance out there at the Hook, in the big moonlit
house they called "Casablanca," and their laughter would echo
across the marsh and the wide bight and then die away somewhere
over the dark water. Except there is laughter still in their memories.
It
means knowing that it takes 30 to 40 sapling stakes to set out
a pound net, and that sweetgum trees make the best net stakes.
In Core Sound, knowing where you are means knowing that there
is no way of drawing a line between who you are and the world
of marsh and beach and tangled piney woods that you call home.
And it means knowing about the waterfowl. The ducks and geese
came in feathered storms, tumbling from the skies. Redheads and
canvasbacks, blackheads and black ducks, mallards and pintail.
And Canada geese, filling the air with their primordial cackling.
They came from the northern prairies of the American Dakotas,
the boreal forests of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the riverside
marshes of the St. Lawrence River.
Settling
on the water in vast flocks, like low, dark islands in a dawn
light, the ducks and geese of Core Sound supported one of the
most individualistic waterfowling cultures of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. All skills necessary to wrest a
living from the marshes, sound, and sea were brought to bear through
decoy carving, waterfowl hunting, and guiding. The boatwright's
deft touch with a drawknife. The netter's skill with line and
knot. The sailor's love of canvas. The fishermen's intimate understanding
of wind and tide. Who knows how many thousands of decoys were
carved in a Core Sound work shed? To those old-timers, each wooden
bird was little more than a tool. But today, we see these works
of folk art as a prism, through which we can view a life lived
close to the land and sea.
The
ducks still come, though their numbers are diminished. And the
carvers are still there, up and down Core Sound. Barns and garages
are still carpeted with juniper shavings. Men-and women-still
work the wood by hand, a community of contemporary carvers with
an international reputation. For the most part, their birds are
meant for the mantle, not the marsh. But theirs is a heritage
born on the winds that ruffle Core Sound's shallow waters, bend
the marsh grass low over the Banks, and set the mind stirring
on wings of memory, of the past, and of promise.
Hurricane,
nor'easter, mullet blow, gale. Winds such as these have shaped
the islands, the trees, the shoreline, the people of Core Sound.
At the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum, you'll let the salt breeze
of Down East fill the sails of your imagination. You'll hear canvas
ruffling over a Core Sound skiff trailing net for mullet. You'll
hear breezes roaring through the dunes and rising to hurricane
strength, driving a century's worth of settlers off the vulnerable
barrier islands and onto the nearest mainland shore. You'll feel
the wind of a winter dawn burn your cheeks, the winds that bring
the ducks-redheads and canvasbacks and geese cackling like children
at play-and the duck hunters and decoy makers out of the past
and into your hands.
For
the winds of the past have calmed. But history and lore cling
to this sliver of coastal North Carolina like barnacles to a skiff
bottom. Once you are here, you will know why: Core Sound is not
an easy place to get to.
But
you will learn: It is an even harder place to leave.
