Looking Back at Lukens 



^-^ By Julie Powers 



LUKv^I lb isn't on the maps. No signs 

 point the way. Someone looking for the little 

 town along the South River can't find it by car. 

 Nor by boat. Nor even on foot. 



The only way to visit the village now is 

 through the people who once lived there. 



Like other early coastal communities now 

 absent from the sandy landscape, memories and 

 gravestones are all that's left of Lukens. Settled 

 in the 1700s on a Carteret County peninsula, it 

 once was sizable for its time and place. More 

 than 120 people fished, farmed and logged for a 

 living in Lukens, on the eastern shore of the 

 South River, as late as the 1940s. 



But world and local events turned against 

 it. By 1948, nobody lived in Lukens anymore. 

 Its homes and gathering places — the church, 

 the store, the school — were moved across the 

 water, or fell to ruin on the lonely riverbank. 



Lukens is luckier than most forsaken 

 towns. Former residents and families gather at 

 the South River fire hall every May to remember 

 it, and many then ride a barge to where Lukens 

 used to be. 



For some, the mile-long passage is a 

 return to younger days and simpler times — 

 to when they learned their lessons in the one- 

 room school, the mail came by boat, and the 

 gardens, the groves, the woods and the river 

 provided almost everything they needed. 



"Something draws you back," says Sara 

 Jane Norman Hardy, whose family left Lukens 

 for Oriental in 1945, when she was 1 1 . "I feel 

 like it's a very special place." 



For months after the move, she says, she'd 

 stand by the Neuse River and look toward where 

 Lukens had been. "I'd want to go back there so 

 badly," she says. 



Other former residents also tell of a love 

 for Lukens that has lasted more than 50 years. 

 But it wasn't enough to save it from succumbing 

 to a series of setbacks and trends of the times. 



A Quick End 



Some say a frightful 1933 hurricane that 

 destroyed half of its 26 homes foreran Lukens' 

 demise, just as such storms doomed Diamond 

 City on Shackleford Banks. Global events also 

 conspired to lessen Lukens. Electricity and 

 highways on the mainland were changing 

 lifestyles. And World War D had called away 

 the town's young men at a critical time — the 

 loss of Lukens' longtime leader. 



Daily life had depended heavily on the 

 busy Henry Tillman Banks. He ran the store and 

 the post office. He was a magistrate, the poll 

 keeper and the clerk at the Free Will Baptist 

 Church. On the county board of education, he 

 saw to hiring the schoolteacher. 



"When he died, there was just nobody, 

 really, to take over and do the things that he did," 

 recalls Hardy, his granddaughter. 



Lukens did not expire slowly, contrary to 

 its ghost town counterparts such as Portsmouth 

 on Cape Lookout National Seashore. A few 

 stubborn citizens persisted at Portsmouth until 

 1971 , and some of its buildings still stand. But 

 just four years after Banks died in March of 

 1944, Lukens had vanished. 



When the store closed, mail service ended. 

 School convened with 1 8 pupils that fall, but no 

 teacher came the next term. Hardy had four 

 siblings. 



"My mother just said we had to go to 

 school," she recalls. Families departed en masse 

 for South River, Oriental and other nearby 

 towns. The schoolhouse was moved to South 

 River. Lumber from the church went to build a 

 South River house. By 1948, everybody and 

 almost everything in Lukens had been borne 

 away by boats and barges. The few structures 

 left eventually decayed or burned. 



Two smaller communities on the peninsula 

 — Brown's Creek and Tumagain Bay — had 

 disappeared decades before Lukens did. Details 

 Continued 



COASTWATCH 13 



