THE HOOK 



"When I was a boy, there wasn't no 

 trees whatsoever," he says, and explains 

 that from the early 18th century to the 

 mid 20th, grazing cattle, goats and sheep 

 kept the island's vegetation cropped. 



For years, in fact, Yeomans could 

 see out the back window clear to 

 Harkers Island, where he was postmas- 

 ter. Each afternoon he got off work at 

 4 p.m. and ran a 14-foot Barbour skiff 

 across Back Sound, through Lighthouse 

 Channel and Barden Inlet and into the 

 cape bight. His wife, Clara, "would keep 

 watch out to see me," he says, and when 

 he got to a certain point in the sound, 

 she knew it was time to put the dinner 

 rolls in the oven. 



Few people are aware that this wild 

 cape of the national seashore was once 

 quite heavily settled. To most visitors, 

 the Cape Lookout lighthouse, built in 

 1859, is the park's image. Visitors by 

 ferry arrive just a few hundred feet from 

 the base of the lighthouse, and the Park 

 Service visitors center is housed in the 

 adjacent two-story brick lighthouse 

 keeper's quarters. There, you can buy 

 Cape Lookout lighthouse bookmarks, 

 postcards and cross-stitch patterns, and 

 view posters emblazoned with light- 

 houses in Maine, Florida, Wisconsin 

 and Rhode Island. But you will learn 

 nothing of the cape's communities of 

 two generations ago and before. 



When Yeomans was a child, some 

 50 houses were scattered through the 

 dunes south of the light. They were the 

 homes of fishers and surfmen for the 

 Lifesaving Service mostly, but also of 

 shopkeepers, at least one bootlegger 

 and, later, of workers on the rock jetty 

 built in the mid-1910s to stabilize the 

 cape. Cape Village was one of several 

 island communities, a minor one at that. 

 Until a hurricane blew Barden Inlet 

 open in 1933, Shackleford and Core 

 banks were connected by a thread of 

 dunes cut by "the drain," a low area 

 where water trickled across at high tide. 

 Yeomans remembers walking across the 

 drain to Shackleford to visit the old 



cemeteries of a chain of abandoned, late 

 19th-century whaling towns — Diamond 

 City, Wade's Shore, Sam Winsor's Lump 

 and others that collectively accounted for 

 perhaps 500 to 800 residents. But in 

 1899, a massive hurricane roared across 

 the island, flooding homes and gardens, 

 sweeping away cattle, killing orchards 

 and breaking the bankers' will to remain. 

 They sailed their houses across the sound 

 board by board or in large pieces lashed 

 to multiple skiffs. Within a few years, 

 Shackleford Banks was deserted but for a 

 few squatters' cabins, and today not a 

 single structure remains there. But at the 

 cape, the U.S. Lifesaving Service, folded 

 into the Revenue Cutter Service in 1915 

 to form the U.S. Coast Guard, kept the 

 community alive. 



Yeomans pulls up to a low swale of 

 marsh, and we step out on the narrow 

 crescent beach of the cape bight. He 

 points out a third of the 16 structures still 

 standing in Cape Village. There are a few 

 scattered one-story cabins with tin roofs 

 and weathered walls, and the old 



Casablanca house, its screen porches 

 lending it a snaggletoothed appearance. 

 The most prominent structure is a two- 

 story building with cedar siding weathered 

 to gray, hovering close to the water with a 

 regal bearing. It had been the old light- 

 house keeper's quarters, built in 1907. In 

 the same year that Yeomans moved the 

 Lifesaving Service boathouse, Graham 

 Barden Jr., son of the longtime congress- 

 man for whom Barden Inlet was named, 

 bought the house with two friends and 

 moved it from the lighthouse to the bight. 

 "We basically bid what it would cost to 

 raze the house and haul away the debris, 

 which is what the Coast Guard planned to 

 do," Barden says. "They said flat out they 

 wanted a raked-clean lot." 



Now the National Park Service owns 

 the houses, and most are leased to their 

 former owners. In the early 1960s, the 

 federal government considered extending 

 the Cape Hatteras National Seashore south 

 to Shackleford Banks, and by the summer 

 of 1963, the state of North Carolina had 

 purchased 80 percent of the barrier island 



Fishing is an age-old livelihood on the cape. 



10 SPRING 1998 



