by Jim Morekis
MAY RIVER OYSTERS
The legendary freshness and taste of May River oysters are available right off the docks in the South Carolina Lowcountry at the Bluffton Oyster Company or in area seafood restaurants.
LOWCOUNTRY SIGNATURES
The Lowcountry’s two signature dishes, shrimp & grits and she crab soup, are both available in delicious abundance in the Charleston area. Try Poogan’s Porch for shrimp & grits and Hyman’s Seafood north of town for she crab soup.
CALABASH SEAFOOD
The seaside North Carolina town of Calabash, just north of the state line with South Carolina, has given its name to an entire genre of seafood. Enjoy these fried delectables at one of about a dozen Calabash restaurants in the town itself, including Calabash Seafood Hut and Dockside Seafood, or in Myrlte Beach, Original Benjamin’s.
FRIED HERRING
If the idea of fried herring sounds a bit weird, head straight to the Cypress Grill in Jamesville, North Carolina, east of Williamston in the Albemarle or Inner Banks region (Feb.-Apr.), and see how it’s done. You can eat every part of the fish except for the backbone, and it’s all crispy and delicious.
African American Heritage
The life and contribution of the coastal Carolinas’ African American population is a testament to resilience, resourcefulness, and authentic culture. Here are the key sights in the region: You can see them all in a five- or six-day road trip with stays in Wilmington, Charleston, and Beaufort, South Carolina, or combine them with other sights when you’re headed to just one area.
WILMINGTON
• Bellamy Mansion: This historic mansion features extensive interpretive programming on African American history, as well as one of the few intact slave quarters in the United States.
• Louise Wells Cameron Art Museum: At this nationally renowned museum, you’ll find artwork of notable regional African American artists.
GEORGETOWN
• Rice Museum: This museum has several exhibits on the contributions of African Americans in building the rice culture of the Lowcountry and the way they lived.
CHARLESTON
• Old Slave Mart Museum: This structure that once held an indoor slave market today re-creates what happened during those actions and traces the history of the slave trade.
the Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston, South Carolina
• Old City Market: On land donated to the city with the stipulation that no slaves were ever to be sold here, the City Market was once and still is a place for African American vendors to ply their wares.
• Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture: Those of an academic bent can visit this research center at the College of Charleston and view exhibits that sample from its permanent archives. While on this gorgeous campus, don’t miss a visit to the Cistern area in front of historic Randolph Hall, where Barack Obama spoke before a large crowd during the 2008 presidential campaign.
• Philip Simmons Garden: View the wrought-iron art of Charleston’s most beloved artisan in the garden of St. John’s Reformed Episcopal Church.
• Drayton Hall Plantation: At this authentically preserved plantation building in West Ashley, you can take a tour and visit the old African American cemetery on the grounds.
• Boone Hall Plantation: Visit this former cotton plantation and still-active agriculture facility to see the excellent restored slave quarters and the well-done interpretive exhibits. While on Mount Pleasant don’t miss the sweetgrass basket-maker stands all along Highway 17.
BEAUFORT, SOUTH CAROLINA
• Robert Smalls House: View the home of the African American Civil War hero Robert Smalls, who later served in Congress.
• Tabernacle Baptist Church: Robert Smalls attended this church, which today hosts a memorial sculpture of him on the grounds.
• Beaufort National Cemetery: This burial ground contains a memorial to African American Civil War troops.
THE LOWCOUNTRY
• Penn Center: Located on St. Helena Island, this is a key research and cultural site in the study of the Gullah culture and people.
• Daufuskie Island: The Historic District here is where Pat Conroy taught African American children at the still-standing Mary Field School.
• Tuskegee Airmen Memorial: Located inland in Walterboro, this monument is dedicated to the African American fighter pilots who trained here during World War II.
• Union Cemetery: This small but evocative cemetery on Hilton Head Island serves as the final resting ground of several soldiers of the Civil War Colored Infantry.
Carolina Lighthouses
Often treacherous for sailors due to its geography and susceptibility to storms, the Carolina coast is chock-a-block with historic lighthouses. Generally speaking, most have public visiting hours, including “climbing” availability, from late spring to early fall. Sometimes the grounds remain open when the lighthouses are closed to the public. It’s always a good idea to call ahead.
NORTH CAROLINA
• Currituck Beach Lighthouse: Still active, open to the public for climbing Easter-November.
the spiral staircase of Currituck Beach Lighthouse
• Bodie Island Lighthouse: Still active, closed to the public. Keeper’s building is open to the public.
Bodie Island Lighthouse
• Cape Hatteras Lighthouse: Still active, open to the public for climbing the third Friday in April until Columbus Day. Gorgeous view.
Cape Hatteras Lighthouse
• Ocracoke Lighthouse: Still active, closed to the public. Grounds are open to the public.
• Cape Lookout Lighthouse: Still active, closed to the public. Keeper’s quarters and grounds are open to the public.
• Bald Head Island Lighthouse: Inactive, open to the public year-round. State’s oldest light.
Bald Head Island Lighthouse
SOUTH CAROLINA
• Georgetown Lighthouse: Still active, closed to the public.
• Morris Island Lighthouse: Inactive, closed to the public. You can get a great view of it from the north end of Folly Island.
• Hunting Island Lighthouse: Inactive, open to the public year-round for climbing. It’s located within a popular state park and offers a stunning view.
• Harbour Town Lighthouse: Technically not a real lighthouse at all, but a tourist attraction within Sea Pines Plantation. Open to the public year-round for climbing.
Adventures in Nature
You could devote a lifetime to experiencing the diverse and evocative ecosystems of the Carolina coast. Here’s a week-long trip covering the highlights.
Day 1
Begin up in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, where you’ll spend the morning kayaking amid this anything-but-dismal ecosystem. Then head down to Nags Head on the Outer Banks, where you can stay in a beachfront motel for the night. If you have a four-wheel drive, on the way, you can drive onto the beach near Corolla and see the fabled herd of wild horses there.
Day 2
Spend the morning hang-gliding off the huge sand dune of Jockey’s Ridge State Park, or head down to Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge on Hatteras Island for some bird-watching. This afternoon on your way down to Beaufort, North Carolina, stop at Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge for some more bird-watching on this important flyway.
Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge
Day 3
Today in Beaufort you begin with a ferry ride to Harkers Island and a tour of Cape Lookout National Seashore, courtesy of Coastal Ecology Tours, where you’ll enjoy the protected scenery and habitat. This afternoon visit the North Carolina Aquarium in back in Beaufort, where you’ll spend one more night.
Day 4
Today you get up bright and early to head down the South Carolina coast to the blackwater Edisto River, where you’ll take a waterborne tour with Carolina Heritage Outfitters, based northeast of Beaufort, South Carolina, and spend the night in a tree house upriver.
Day 5
This morning you paddle back down the Edisto River to your vehicle.
wild horses in Corolla
The Outer Banks
HIGHLIGHTS
PLANNING YOUR TIME
INFORMATION AND SERVICES
Nags Head and Vicinity
SIGHTS
ENTERTAINMENT AND EVENTS
SPORTS AND RECREATION
ACCOMMODATIONS
FOOD
TRANSPORTATION
Roanoke Island
S FORT RALEIGH NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE
OTHER SIGHTS
SPORTS AND RECREATION
TOURS
ENTERTAINMENT AND EVENTS
SHOPPING
ACCOMMODATIONS
FOOD
TRANSPORTATION
Cape Hatteras National Seashore
BODIE ISLAND
HATTERAS ISLAND
S OCRACOKE ISLAND
TRANSPORTATION
Albemarle Sound
S THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP
GATESVILLE
ELIZABETH CITY
HERTFORD
EDENTON
WINDSOR
WILLIAMSTON AND VICINITY
EAST ON U.S. 64
TRANSPORTATION
Pamlico Sound
WASHINGTON, BATH, AND BELHAVEN
S MATTAMUSKEET NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE
TRANSPORTATION
hang gliding at Jockey’s Ridge State Park.
Highlights
Look for S to find recommended sights, activities, dining, and lodging.
S Wright Brothers National Memorial: This American treasure provides a fun, educational, and ultimately stirring chronicle of one of the greatest achievements in history: powered flight (click here).
S Jockey’s Ridge State Park: The largest sand dune in the eastern United States is a great place to romp, relax, enjoy the view, or fly a kite (click here).
S Fort Raleigh National Historic Site: Here at the site of the Lost Colony, the mysterious first chapter of English settlement in the New World unfolded in the 1580s (click here).
S Ocracoke Island: On this remote island, you’ll find a historic village that is the home of one of America’s most unique local communities, as well as some serious water sports and walking opportunities (click here).
S The Great Dismal Swamp: This natural wonder straddling the Virginia-Carolina line is an amazing place for canoeing or kayaking, bird-watching, or sightseeing (click here).
S Somerset Place Historic Site: The graceful architecture and exotic setting of this early plantation contrast with the tragic history of its slavery days (click here).
S Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge: The landmark lodge on Lake Mattamuskeet towers over a dramatic waterscape that attracts migratory birds by the tens of thousands (click here).
The Outer Banks are like a great seine net set along the northeastern corner of North Carolina, holding the Sounds and inner coast apart from the open ocean, yet shimmying obligingly with the forces of water and wind.
The Outer Banks can be—and on many occasions have been—profoundly transformed by a single storm. A powerful hurricane can fill in a centuries-old inlet in one night, and open a new channel wherever it pleases. As recently as 2003, Hatteras Island was cut in half—by Hurricane Isabel—though the channel has since been artificially filled. This evanescent landscape poses challenges to the life that it supports, and creates adaptable and hardy plants, animals, and people.
The Sounds are often overlooked by travelers, but they are an enormously important part of the state and the region. Collectively known as the Albemarle-Pamlico Estuary, North Carolina’s Sounds—Albemarle, Pamlico, Core, Croatan, Roanoke, and Currituck—form the second-largest estuarine system in the country after Chesapeake Bay. They cover nearly 3,000 square miles and drain more than 30,000. The diverse marine and terrestrial environments shelter crucial plant and animal communities as well as estuarine systems that are essential to the environmental health of the whole region and to the Atlantic Ocean.
Sheltered from the Atlantic, the Inner Banks are much more accommodating, ecologically speaking, than the Outer Banks. Wetlands along the Sounds invite migratory birds by the hundreds of thousands to shelter and rest, while pocosins (a special kind of bog found in the region) and maritime forests have nurtured a great variety of life for eons. Here is where North Carolina’s oldest towns—Bath, New Bern, and Edenton—set down roots, from which the rest of the state grew and bloomed. In Washington County, 4,000-year-old canoes pulled out of Lake Phelps testify to the region’s unplumbed depths of history.
You may hear folks in North Carolina refer to any point on the coast, be it Wilmington or Nags Head, as “Down East.” In the most authentic, local usage of the term, Down East really refers to northeastern Carteret County, to the islands and marsh towns in a confined region along the banks of Core Sound, north of Beaufort.
PLANNING YOUR TIME
The standard beach-season rules apply to the coastal areas covered in this chapter. Lodging prices go up dramatically between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and though you might score a rock-bottom price if you visit on a mild weekend off-season, you might also find that some of the destinations you’d like to visit are closed.
Coastal North Carolina is beautiful four seasons of the year, and for many people fall and winter are favorite times to visit, wonderful times for canoeing and kayaking on eastern North Carolina’s rivers, creeks, and swamps. The weather is often more than mild enough for comfort, and the landscape and wildlife are not so obscured by tropical verdancy as they are in the spring and summer.
Late summer and early autumn are hurricane season all through the Southeast. Hurricane paths are unpredictable, so if you’re planning a week on the beach and know that a hurricane is hovering over Cuba, it won’t necessarily hit North Carolina, although the central Carolina coast is always an odds-on favorite for landfall.
INFORMATION AND SERVICES
The Aycock Brown Welcome Center (milepost 1.5, U.S. 158, 877/629-4386, www.outerbanks.org, Dec.-Feb. daily 9am-5pm, Mar.-May and Sept.-Nov. daily 9am-5:30pm, June-Aug. daily 9am-6pm) at Kitty Hawk, the Outer Banks Welcome Center (1 Visitors Center Circle, Manteo), and the Cape Hatteras National Seashore Visitors Center (Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, Memorial Day-Labor Day daily 9am-6pm, Labor Day-Memorial Day daily 9am-5pm) on Ocracoke are all clearinghouses for regional travel information. The Outer Banks Visitors Bureau (www.outerbanks.org) can be reached directly at 877/629-4386. Extensive travel information is also available from the Crystal Coast Tourism Authority (3409 Arendell St., 877/206-0929, www.crystalcoastnc.org).
North Carolina Sea Grant (919/515-2454, www.ncseagrant.org) provides wallet cards listing the seasons for different seafood caught and served in Carteret County. The cards can be ordered by mail or downloaded and printed from the website.
Major hospitals are located in Nags Head, Windsor, Washington, Edenton, Ahoskie, and Elizabeth City. On Ocracoke, only accessible by air or water, nonemergency medical needs can be addressed by Ocracoke Health Center (305 Back Rd., 252/928-1511, after-hours 252/928-7425). Note that 911 works on Ocracoke, like everywhere else.
Other hospitals in the area include Carteret General Hospital (3500 Arendell St., Morehead City, 252/808-6000, www.ccgh.org, where the author was born), Craven Regional Medical Center (2000 Neuse Blvd., New Bern, 252/633-8111, www.uhseast.com), Duplin General Hospital (401 N. Main St., Kenansville, 910/296-0941, www.uhseast.com), Lenoir Memorial Hospital (100 Airport Rd., Kinston, 252/522-7000, www.lenoirmemorial.org), and Wayne Memorial Hospital (2700 Wayne Memorial Dr., Goldsboro, 919/736-1110, www.waynehealth.org).
Nags Head and Vicinity
The Outer Banks are a long sandbar, constantly eroding and amassing, slip-sliding into new configurations with every storm. The wind is the invisible player in this process, the man behind the curtain giving orders to the water and the sand. The enormous dune known as Jockey’s Ridge was a landmark to early mariners, visible from
miles out to sea.
According to legend, Nags Head was a place of sinister peril to those seafarers. Islanders, it’s said, would walk a nag or mule, carrying a lantern around its neck, slowly back and forth along the beach, trying to lure ships into the shallows where they might founder or wreck, making their cargo easy pickings for the land pirates.
It was the relentless wind at Kill Devil Hill that attracted the Wright brothers to North Carolina. Today, it brings thousands of enthusiasts every year, hang gliders and parasailers, kite-boarders and kite flyers. Add to these pursuits sailing, surfing, kayaking, hiking, birding, and, of course, beach-going, and the northern Outer Banks are perhaps North Carolina’s most promising region for outdoor adventurers. Several nature reserves encompass large swaths of the unique ecological environments of the Banks, though increasingly the shifting sands are given over to human development.
SIGHTS
S Wright Brothers National Memorial
Although they are remembered for a 12-second flight on a December morning in 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright actually spent more than three years coming and going between their home in Dayton, Ohio, and Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. As they tested their gliders on Kill Devil Hill, the tallest sand dune on the Outer Banks, the Wright brothers were assisted by many Bankers. The locals fed and housed them, built hangars, and assisted with countless practicalities that helped make the brothers’ experiment a success. On the morning of December 17, 1903, several local people were present to help that famous first powered flight get off the ground. John Daniels, a lifesaver from a nearby station, took the iconic photograph of the airplane lifting off. It was the first and only photograph he ever made. He was later quoted in a newspaper as saying of the flight, “I didn’t think it amounted to much.” But it did, and that flight is honored at the Wright Brothers National Memorial (milepost 7.5, U.S. 158, Kill Devil Hills, 252/441-7430, www.nps.gov/wrbr, park year-round daily, visitors center June-Aug. daily 9am-6pm, Sept.-May daily 9am-5pm, free). At the visitors center, replica gliders are on display, along with artifacts from the original gliders and changing displays sponsored by NASA. You can also tour the reconstructed living quarters and flight hangar, and, of course, climb Kill Devil Hill to get a glimpse of what that first aviator saw.
