More than a dozen ships a day carried cargo and crew along Outer Banks waterways by the dawn of the 19th century. Schooners, sloops, sailboats, and new steamers all journeyed around the sounds and across the oceans, often dangerously close to the coast, in search of the ever- shifting and shoaling inlets.

At that time, waterways were the country's primary highways, and North Carolina's barrier islands were part of most eastern routes. Hurricanes and nor'easters took many boats by surprise, ending their voyages and hundreds of lives. Alexander Hamilton dubbed the ocean off the barrier islands "the Graveyard of the Atlantic" because its shoals became the burying grounds for so many ships. In an attempt to help seamen navigate the treacherous shoals, the federal government authorized the Banks's first lighthouses in 1794: one at Cape Hatteras in the fishing village of Buxton and the other in Ocracoke's harbor, on a half- mile-long, 60-mile-wide pile of oyster shells dubbed Shell Castle Island. Shell Castle Lighthouse first illuminated the Atlantic in 1798. The Cape Hatteras beacon was finally erected in 1802. Two subsequent structures have sat on the same Buxton spot, but the Shell Castle beacon has long since succumbed to the sea.

Ship captains complained that the early lighthouses were unreliable and too dim. Vessels continued to smash into the shoals. So in 1823 the federal government financed a 65-foot-high lighthouse on Ocracoke Island. Whitewashed with a glass tower set slightly askew on its top, it is the oldest lighthouse still standing in North Carolina.

Officials raised the Cape Hatteras tower to 150 feet in 1854. Five years later, two new Outer Banks beacons were built, at Cape Lookout and on Bodie Island, both of which were improved and rebuilt in later years.

On December 16, 1870, the third lighthouse at Cape Hatteras was illuminated. Standing 208 feet tall and using a multifaceted lens to refract its beam across miles of sea, this spiral-striped structure is the tallest brick lighthouse in the world (see our Natural Wonders and Attractions chapters for more information on the Hatteras Lighthouse).

Currituck Beach's red-brick beacon was the last major lighthouse to be built on the barrier island beaches. The 150foot tower was completed in 1875. It watches over the Whalehead Club, near the western shores of Corolla. It is the only unpainted lighthouse on the Outer Banks.

In September 2004, a reproduction of the original Roanoke Marshes light was completed. It sits at the southern end of Queen Elizabeth Street in Manteo at the end of a 600-foot pier. The original light sat in Shallowbag Bay and was one of more than a dozen screw-pile lighthouses in North Carolina. These lights were designed like a common house, not a tower. The screw-pile lights were so named because screws were dug into the sand at the bottom of pilings supporting the home. A lighthouse keeper and his family lived in the house overlooking the water. The original Roanoke Marshes light (constructed in 1857) was lost when a barge moving the light capsized. None of the original North Carolina screw-pile lighthouses exist in their original locations.

In the early 1800s malaria was a common affliction among mainland farmers and wealthy families along Carolina's coast. This feverous condition was thought to be caused by poisonous vapors escaping from the swamps on hot, humid afternoons. Physicians recommended escaping to the seaside for brisk breezes and salt air.

Nags Head was established as a resort destination when a Perquimans County planter bought 200 acres of ocean-tosound land for 50 cents an acre in the early 1830s. Eight years later the Outer Banks's first hotel was built near what is now Jockey's Ridge State Park. Guests arrived at the 200-room Nags Head Hotel from across the sounds on steamships and spent weeks enjoying the beaches and the hotel's formal dining room, ballroom, tavern, bowling alleys, and casino.

In 1851 workers enlarged the hotel and added a mile-long track of rails so mule- pulled carts could ease vacationers' journeys to the ocean. The hotel burned down and was rebuilt; later, it was buried by sand. Jockey's Ridge, the East Coast's tallest dune, swallowed the two-story structure bit by bit. Hotel clerks offered discounts during the final years for those who didn't mind digging their way into their rooms.

Wealthier visitors who wanted to stay the whole summer built their own vacation cottages on the barrier islands' central plains and eventually on oceanfront property. Some farmers carried their entire households-- cows, pigs, sheep, and all-- across the sounds on small sailing sloops to summer at Nags Head. By 1849 a local visitor remarked that between 500 and 600 visitors bathed daily at the barrier island beach.

Meanwhile, locals lived in small wooden houses within the woods, selling fresh fish and vegetables to the new tourists, thereby earning extra income each summer.

Outer Banks inlets again proved important military targets during the Civil War. Union and Confederate troops stationed armed ships at Hatteras and Ocracoke Inlets and set up early encampments. North Carolina crews captured Union boats filled with fruit, mahogany, salt, molasses, and coffee along the enigmatic inlets. Forts, too, were built along the barrier islands, although erosion and storms have long since erased all traces of such structures. Fort Oregon was constructed on the south side of Oregon Inlet; Fort Ocracoke on Beacon Island, inside Ocracoke Inlet. Fort Hatteras and Fort Clark were across from each other at Hatteras Inlet, by then the primary passageway between the ocean and sounds.

By the fall of 1861, however, Union forces overtook Hatteras Inlet and controlled most of the Outer Banks and lower sounds. Confederate troops still ruled Roanoke Island and the upper sounds. They built three small fortresses on the north end of their stronghold, reinforcing their position and to block all access through Croatan Sound.

Union troops also were massing. In January 1862 Gen. Ambrose Burnside led an 80-boat flotilla from Newport News to the Outer Banks. Water was so scarce on this trip that some soldiers resorted to drinking vinegar out of sheer thirst. Others died of typhoid before the battle even began. Nevertheless, on February 7 more than 11,500 members of the federal army amassed for a Roanoke Island attack (an overlook at Northwest Point on the northern end of the island commemorates this site today). At least 7,500 men raided the shores at Ashby's Harbor that night, near Roanoke Island's present-day Skyco. About 1,050 Confederate soldiers fought to maintain their foothold.

After hours of battle around what is now the Nags Head-Manteo Causeway, Confederate troops finally were forced to surrender. Union troops captured an estimated 2,675 of these Southerners. Federal forces held Roanoke Island, and most of the Outer Banks, for the rest of the Civil War.

After Roanoke Island fell to the Union, Union leaders had to decide what to do with the slaves from the former Confederate camp. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler at Fortress Monroe set a precedent by declaring slaves as contraband. Word spread of this action, and black women and children began flocking to Union camps where they were allowed to settle peacefully. Once word reached the underground network of servants, abolitionists, and free blacks, the number of freedom- seeking individuals migrating to Dare and Currituck Counties increased. At the outbreak of the Civil War, only a few hundred slaves lived along the Outer Banks. But two months after falling to Union troops, Roanoke Island was filled with more than 1,000 runaway and recently freed slaves. Inhabitants of the colony worked as porters for Union officers and soldiers, and as cooks, teamsters, and woodcutters. The federal government offered men $8.00 per month plus rations and clothing to build a fort, Fort Burnside, on Roanoke Island's north end. Women and children, who made up three-fourths of the population of blacks on the island at that time, collected $4.00 a month, including clothing and ration benefits.

By June 1863, officials had established an official Freedmen's Colony on Roanoke Island, west of where the Elizabethan Inn now stands. The government granted all unclaimed lands to the former slaves and outfitted them with a steam mill, sawmill, grist mill, circular saws, and other necessary tools. About 3,000 freed slaves lived here in a village with more than 600 houses, a school, store, small church, and hospital.

Union forces began accepting black troops soon after they established the settlement. By the end of July, more than 100 members of the Freedmen's Colony had formed the nation's first African-American army regiment. The new colony would have survived were it not for the government's decision to return all lands to the original landowners after the war was over. When the Freedmen's Colony was abandoned in 1866, federal officials quickly transported many of the former slaves off the Outer Banks. Others remained on Roanoke Island to work the waters and the land.

After the war, commerce began again along the ocean, increasing quickly with steamers now outnumbering sailboats and onetime warships joining private shipping companies. Storms, too, continued to wrack the shores and seamen, even sinking iron battleships into oblivion along this rough coast.

Seven U.S. lifesaving stations were established on the Outer Banks in 1874 in an attempt to help save sailors' lives, if not salvage some of the ships. The stations were located at Jones Hill near the Currituck Beach Lighthouse; Caffey's Inlet north of Duck; Kitty Hawk Beach south of the present pier; Nags Head within current town boundaries; Bodie Island south of Oregon Inlet; Chicamacomico, which is still open to visitors in Rodanthe and conducts simulated rescue drills each summer; and Little Kinnakeet, on the west side of North Carolina Highway 12 in Avon.

The stations were operated mostly by native Outer Bankers. Good swimmers and sea captains who knew the wild waters, these men risked their lives (and many perished) trying to pull others from the ocean. In March of 1876 the entire Jones Hill station crew was lost during an attempt to rescue seven sailors aboard the Italian ship Nuova Ottavia.

Many complained that the lifesaving service had two major flaws: They were only open for four months of the year, and the seven stations were too far apart, up to 15 miles in some cases, for the surf- men to adequately patrol the beaches on foot. In 1877 and 1878, two major shipwrecks that resulted in the loss of 188 lives provoked the government to build more stations. The wreck of the USS Huron in Nags Head occurred in November 1877 when the Nags Head station was closed for the season. The wreck of the Metropolis in January 1878, 4.5 miles south of the Jones Hill Station, was a fiasco of a rescue operation, with 85 lives lost because it took more than five hours for the lifesaving station to respond. By 1879, 11 new stations were in operation on the Outer Banks at Deal's Island (later Wash Woods), Old Currituck Inlet (later Penny's Hill), Poyners Hill, Paul Gamiels Hill, Kill Devil Hills, Tommy's Hummock (north of Oregon Inlet and later named Bodie Island), Pea Island, Cedar Hummock, Big Kinnakeet, Creeds Hill, and Hatteras (later named Durants). The schedule was switched to eight months of the year at that time and later became year-round. The Pea Island Station was the only all-black lifesaving station in the nation.

Rescue techniques advanced with new equipment and the surfmen's experience in ocean survival. Before motorized rescue craft were available, lifesaving teams had to row deep-hulled wooden boats, often through overhead waves. If they made it through raging seas to shipwrecks, they sometimes couldn't carry all of the sailors back to shore in one trip. As a result, they devised a pulley system to haul men off the sinking vessels. Dubbed a Britches Buoy, the device consisted of a pair of short pants sewn around a life preserver ring and hung on a thick rope by wide suspenders; the rope was wound around a handle crank mounted to a wooden cart on shore. Shipwreck victims struggled into the britches, usually with the assistance of surfmen in the rescue boat, and gave an "all-clear" tug on the rope. With the buoy sewn into the seams around their waists, these sailors didn't sink. Even in the highest seas, they could keep their heads above water while lifesaving crews back on shore reeled them safely onto the sand.

Surfmen at Outer Banks lifesaving stations saved thousands of lives during hurricanes and hellacious northeast blows. In 1915 the Lifesaving Service became part of the U.S. Coast Guard. Coast Guardsmen continue to aid barrier-island boaters with a variety of state-of-the-art rescue craft stationed at modern Oregon Inlet and Hatteras Island stations. The old lifesaving stations are still scattered around the Outer Banks today. Some were moved and transformed into private homes. The Wash Woods station is a rental house north of Corolla. A store in Corolla, Outer Banks Style, occupies the old Kill Devil Hills Lifesaving Station, which was moved north. To see a restored lifesaving station and learn about the history of the service and the surfmen, visit Chicamacomico Lifesaving Station in Rodanthe (see our Attractions chapter).

The government provided increasing numbers of jobs for lifesavers, lighthouse keepers, and postmasters at the dawn of the 20th century. Other locals continued to profit from summer tourists. But most Outer Bankers remained poor fishermen, farmers, stockmen, store clerks, hunters, and hunting guides. Currituck Sound was known as the premier hunting spot on the East Coast, and many hunt clubs were established along the northern Outer Banks. Market hunting was a huge business for the locals on the northern Outer Banks in the late 1800s and early 1900s. During this time it was legal for hunters to kill as many ducks and waterfowl as they could and sell them on the market, to be shipped through the mainland to Norfolk and on to bigger cities.

Locals also made a living as hunting guides. According to the record book of the Pine Island Club, from 1888 to 1910 its members killed a total of 72,124 waterfowl, including geese, swans, snipes, black ducks, mallards, widgeon, gadwall geese, and Canada geese. The record kill for a day's hunt, according to David Stick in The Outer Banks of North Carolina, was 892 ruddy ducks by Russell and Van Griggs. This reckless killing decimated the numbers of waterfowl on the Currituck Sound, and market hunting was outlawed in 1918 by an act that made the selling of migratory waterfowl illegal. Much later, in the 1930s, game laws were passed shortening the season and lowering the bag limit. Sport hunting continues along the Outer Banks today, but on a much smaller scale.

In 1902 the barrier islands recorded another first when Thomas Edison's former chief chemist began experimenting with wireless telegraphy. Radio pioneer Reginald Fessenden transmitted the first musical notes received by signal from near Buxton on Hatteras Island to Roanoke Island. He wrote to his patent attorney that the resulting sounds were "very loud and plain, i.e., as loud as in an ordinary telephone."

In 1900 Ohio bicycle shop owners Wilbur and Orville Wright arrived by boat at Kitty Hawk, drawn by accounts of prevailing winds, isolation, and soft landing spots. They spent some time in Kitty Hawk and received mail there, but the Wright Brothers camped and flew their glider on Kill Devil Hill. They brought with them a 17-foot glider, but when they flew it the wings generated less lift than they expected. Wilbur kept it aloft for only 10 seconds. In 1901 they returned with another glider which also failed to fly as

World War II came closer to home than many Americans know. German U-boats prowled the Atlantic coast off the Outer Banks. The first U-boat sunk by Americans lies in a shallow grave off the coast of Bodie Island. Residents of these islands witnessed many attacks at sea and faced the debris brought in by the tide. they had hoped. In 1902 the persistent Wright brothers tried another machine that flew over 1,000 glides. In 1903 the Wrights returned to Kill Devil Hills with a new 40-foot, 605-pound Flyer. When they tested it on December 14, 1903, the Flyer was damaged and required repair. On December 17, 1903, the Wrights made a second attempt despite the 27 mph wind. Orville positioned himself in the flyer and at 10:35 A.M. left the ground, keeping the Flyer aloft for 120 feet, with Wilbur running alongside. The brothers took turns flying three more times that day, increasing their flight distance each time. The fourth and last flight of the day, Wilbur's second, was the best: 852 feet in 59 seconds. The site is now marked with a stone monument in a National Park set along the original runway. Replicas of the historic airplane, hangar, and brothers' shack are on display at the Wright Brothers National Memorial (see our Attractions chapter).

Modern Influences

In the 1930s, bridges linking the Outer Banks to the mainland brought thousands more tourists forever changing the islands. Visitors could drive to popular summer resorts at Nags Head rather than rely on steamships. Hotels, rental cottages, and restaurants appeared to accommodate the influx.

During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) set up six camps along the barrier islands. Throughout the '30s, CCC workers performed millions of dollars' worth of dune construction and shoreline stabilization. The dunes you see along the east side of NC 12 did not develop naturally. CCC workers planted much of the grass and shrubbery to help stave off erosion along the ocean.

Although it was mostly waged on other continents, World War II did come to the Outer Banks's doorstep. German U- boats lurked in near-shore shipping lanes, exacting heavy damage on Allied vessels. At least 60 boats fell victim to the submarines, though the Germans experienced losses of their own: The first U-boat sunk by Americans lies in an Atlantic grave off the coast of Bodie Island. Outer Banks residents of that era recount having to pull their shades and extinguish all lights each night during the war so ships and submarines could not easily discern the shoreline.

Talk of the country's first national seashore began in the 1930s. By 1953, when the Cape Hatteras National Seashore finally was established under the auspices of the National Park Service, it stretched from Nags Head through Ocracoke Island.

Today, the Outer Banks is home to some of the most popular yet pristine beach resorts on the Atlantic coast. About 34,000 people make the barrier islands their permanent home. Please see our Area Overview chapter for a modern portrait of the Outer Banks communities.