PEOPLE & 



PLACES 



the same time to put herself through 

 Appalachian State University. Working in 

 the university's oral history department, she 

 first acquired a taste for heritage work there. 

 She eventually returned home to marry and 

 now lives in a mainland house that's been in 

 her family more than six generations. She's 

 never left again. 



On Harkers Island, she was pulled into 

 preservation through her church, and her 

 stamina has carried her this far. She 

 describes herself as "hyper" and "aggres- 

 sive," and she knows that she drives people 

 to their limits. 



oral historian friend to teach the women 

 how to interview their families before she 

 dispatched them with tape recorders. 



Pregnant and sick to her stomach, she 

 ferried the cookbook to the printer as each 

 section on the island's history was pieced 

 together between the recipes. People would 

 show up at the church on Monday nights 

 just to see what was being collated that 

 week, and the effort brought the community 

 together, she says. 



"The night we put the first book 

 together we cried," she says, her voice 

 breaking. "It felt like us, and it was us. 



From her office in the museum, Amspacher works to preserve the island's past and shape its future. 



When the women in her church asked 

 her to organize a bazaar, she proposed they 

 meet weekly for craft classes to share skills 

 and creative talents. The first sale of their 

 goods pulled in $7,200; however, the 

 women flatly refused to have another 

 bazaar, she recalls. 



"I was crushed," she says. "They were 

 worn out. I had worked them too hard." 



She then turned her sights to helping 

 them compile a local cookbook. Again, she 

 turned that venture into more than an 

 exchange of recipes when she invited a local 



Being from Harkers Island had always been 

 something you had to kind of bear — 

 because we were a small community, and 

 we talked funny, and it was like being from 

 the wrong side of town. It was a different 

 culture." 



From the Island Born and Bred 

 cookbook, which she hawked driving up 

 and down the coast in her red Plymouth 

 Voyager — often with kids in tow — she 

 went on to edit a range of heritage publica- 

 tions. She is editor of The Mailboat, a 

 newsletter filled with history and reminis- 



cences of locals that comes out when she 

 has time, and the Core Sounder, the 

 newsletter for the carvers guild and the 

 waterfowl museum. She brought history and 

 environmental awareness to the Seafood 

 Festival in Morehead City so that people 

 could learn the traditions of the fishers 

 whose catch they enjoyed and the impor- 

 tance of the environment to the future. 



As head of the museum, she is in 

 charge of promoting the Core Sound Decoy 

 Festival, which attracted 10,000 people to 

 the island last year. She also won grants 

 from the North Carolina Arts Council to 

 document storytelling on the 

 island and to capture its fiddle 

 and gospel music. She went out 

 herself to do some of the 

 interviewing. 



Sitting in a cramped room 

 of the current museum, 

 Amspacher appears worn out. 

 She has attended the funerals of 

 several local residents that week 

 and written moving obituaries 

 for them, another of her 

 responsibilities. But when she 

 talks about Harkers Island 

 natives or the museum, her 

 enthusiasm wells up. 



"What goes on in that 

 kitchen is more than carving," 

 she says, referring to a group of 

 men in the room next door who 

 are cheerfully whittling away at 

 wood. "It's keeping a commu- 

 nity together and has brought 

 about a whole lot of pride in 

 being who we are and how we came to be." 



Still, somewhere in the back of her 

 mind, a nagging thought remains that she's 

 fighting a losing battle. She wants to build 

 the museum so that, 50 years from now, 

 people will know the area was more than a 

 place to buy a summer home. 



"(So they'll know) that there was a 

 community of people who were very 

 talented, very determined and very 

 conscious of where and who they were ... 

 and that they held on to it for as long as 

 they could." □ 



28 EARLY SUMMER 1998 



