V \ilson and Barbara 

 Snowden are keepers 

 of Currituck history. 

 She is a school teacher and 

 Currituck County historian, 

 and he is a businessman, 

 farmer, longtime volunteer 

 fire department chief and 

 boat restorer. Wilson 

 Snowden helped raise and 

 restore the battery blind 

 owned by the Currituck 

 Wildlife Guild, the only one 

 he knows of in the county. 



Wilson Snowden heads out to set decoys on Currituck Sound. 



International Migratory Game Bird Treaty. 

 In 1918, Congress voted its provisions into 

 law. 



The nation's remaining game markets 

 pulled all birds from their public stalls. The 

 era of market hunting for waterfowl was 

 over for all but poachers and unscrupulous 

 dealers. Any ducks sold in the United States 

 had to be raised on waterfowl farms and 

 harvested by means other than shooting, 

 under permit from the U.S. Department of 

 Agriculture. 



L 



I ^ate one afternoon, the day after 

 I meet Saunders in Chesapeake, I drive 

 through the village of Currituck on the 

 western shore of the sound, past the Knotts 

 Island ferry, crowded with school buses, and 

 park in front of the tiny brick Currituck 

 County jail, built around 1820. Across the 

 street, warm golden light streams through 

 the windows of the W.H. Snowden store. 



Wilson Snowden closed the store in 

 1986, 97 years after it opened in the vibrant 

 county seat. The original headboard 

 counters remain, as do ornately bracketed 



wooden shelves, now chockablock with old 

 wooden decoys, miscellaneous tools and a 

 few dusty store ledgers that date back to the 

 first years of the century. 



Wilson and Barbara Snowden are 

 keepers of Currituck history. She is a 

 schoolteacher and Currituck County 

 historian, and he is a businessman, farmer, 

 longtime volunteer fire department chief 

 and boat restorer. As twilight fades, we 

 ferret through the store's ledgers, searching 

 for references to the old market hunting 

 trade. We find notations of shot and powder 

 bought and sold, but nothing that we can 

 point to as tactile evidence of Currituck's 

 defining era. In a back room, Barbara 

 Snowden shows me a large black stain on a 

 wall, where for decades you could see 

 where some old storekeeper had written the 

 price paid for ducks and geese. A few years 

 ago, a can of grapefruit juice leaked over the 

 figures, obscuring the numbers. Barbara 

 Snowden' s heart sank. 



Not much remains of those days. 

 Saunders still has his daddy's 12-gauge 

 shotgun and his granddaddy's old 10-gauge 

 gun, with its Damascus steel barrels. The 

 hand-cut checkering on the stock is nearly 



worn smooth. There are a few old battery 

 weights and iron decoys around, but of all 

 the gunning batteries used in Currituck 

 Sound, only a few are known to exist. 

 "They just let 'em go to pieces," Wilson 

 Snowden explains, "somewhere out there 

 in the marsh, like you would an old boat." 



Gone, too, are many of the old 

 landings and wharves where generations of 

 Currituckians labored, shipping out fish 

 and fowl and farm harvests. In Poplar 

 Branch, the rotted and ramshackle wharves 

 were burned April 23, 1969, by the Lower 

 Currituck Fire Department at the request of 

 the N.C Wildlife Resources Commission. 

 A public boat ramp was installed as locals 

 lamented the loss of another piece of the 

 past. "This is the date of the end of the 

 'Good Old Days in Currituck County,'" 

 resident Seward Parker wrote to a local 

 newspaper. 



Now it takes great effort to uncover 

 even the tiniest remnant of Currituck's 

 market hunting era. "People just can't 

 imagine how it was back in those days," 

 Saunders says, and for the briefest moment 

 he holds his hands very still. "The average 

 person just don't know." □ 



COASTWATCH 13 



