Voyage Through Centuries

Early Settlement: Survival, Self-sufficiency, Rebellion, Disease

Less than a century after the first English families stepped ashore on Roanoke Island, steady streams of pioneers were betting on hope.

They were settling along the north shore of Albemarle Sound. They had little inkling of the adventure ahead (reports from explorers were always glowing) nor how self-reliant they would become, nor how hard it would be.

Hunters, fur trappers, Indian traders, the solos of civilization, had boldly explored before, reaping marginal rewards. They understood the reality of life in the New World.

England, heady with anticipation for its rewards, awaited big returns from her wilderness colonies founded on land she did not own.

Why Did People Come?

Some immigrants were leaving an intolerable life. Some wanted to get rich. Some wanted to worship freely. Some came to avoid being hanged.

If you couldn’t afford passage, or if you were offered the  choice of hanging or banishment, you came as an indentured servant, bound to a master for a certain number of years.

You might hope to learn  a trade and you might hope to receive freedom dues at the end of your tenure: money, clothes, seeds, a gun, or maybe even a piece of land.  Servitude could be a path to new beginnings, or it could be a dead end with overwork, early death, poverty, or continual re-indenturing to stay alive. 

Some had no choice. They came as slaves, chattel bound forever to planters, many from Barbados sugar cane plantations. 

Few came with the desire to enrich England’s coffers. 

But First They Had to Get Here

Albemarle Sound has no safe harbor. A barrier beach spells the lash of the Atlantic Ocean, but inlets are notoriously dangerous. So ships routinely sailed  into Chesapeake Bay to disembark along the James River.

From there, settlers who wanted to go south had their choice of travel on two rivers, the Elizabeth and the Nansemond, which, according to propaganda-of-the-day will convey you into Carolana, so that this (James) River is a Haven to both Colonies.

Well, maybe. To get to North Carolina from the James River would require another 80 miles or so of hard traveling. First an upstream row on one of the two rivers on a flatboat or other small craft.

Then miles of slogging on Indian trails, many along rises through the Great Dismal Swamp (greatly whittled down today). Alternatively, a traveller could head west over land toward the Blackwater River, then navigate the Chowan River downstream.

Quaker missionaries William Edmundson and George Fox were overwhelmed by the trip in 1670. Edmundson, whose guide got lost, was sorely foiled in swamps and rivers.  And Fox wrote that he was overwearied  by the time he got to Carolina, having travelled hard through the Woods and over many Bogs and Swamps.

Half a century later the land was still impassible. Surveyor William Byrd described it as a miserable morass where nothing can inhabit. (Except runaway slaves who forged clandestine communities in the tangle.) By 1796 there would be a canal through it,  initially proposed by George Washington, dug by slaves.

Survival

Surely the seeds of familiar grains, wheat, rye, oats and barley, would prosper here, since the climate and soil were so felicitous. They did not. Fortunately, there was corn.

Algonquians had adopted Three Sisters farming,  complementary planting of maize, beans and squash that sprang from the Iroquois creation myth. An Algonquian named Squanto shared the technique with Jamestown settlers.

Plantings were mounded for drainage and minimally tilled. Corn stalks supported bean vines. Squash hugged the ground, kept it moist, cool and weed-free. Herring or menhaden and maybe some ashes were buried for fertilizer. Bacteria in root nodules of beans fixed nitrogen in soil. A truly remarkable way of farming.

We don’t hear much about beans and squash, but corn saved the colonists. They used every part of the plant. Kernels, dried, roasted, ground or green, kept people alive. Leaves and stalks were fodder for livestock. Husks were woven into baskets, brooms or chair seats, or used to pad mattresses and collars for draft animals. Cobs became kindling and, of course, pipes. And corn liquor saved people from drinking bad water.

John Lawson was an explorer in the 1700s, a kind of self-appointed reporter who gave a pretty accurate, if optimistic, picture of the land. . . .Mild winters and a fertile Soil beyond Expectation produced everything that was planted to a prodigious increase. . .

He was less impressed with the homesteaders: he never saw one Acre of Land managed as it ought to be…and were the planters as negligent in their Husbandry in Europe as they are in Carolina their Land would produce nothing but Weeds and Straw. . .

We can make a couple of inferences from that quote. First, Lawson had a different perspective from the  farmer. He was briefly observing, not continually laboring under the grindstone of the wilderness.  Second, virgin soil, gift of the great forests had been building over centuries. It gave freely to the farmer, no prodding needed (though eventually it would give out from overwork).

Their methods might have been less-than-casual by Lawson’s standards, but eventually the colonists produced so much corn that New England sent vessels here to pick up cargoes of it, and wheat, too, that finally succeeded as a cash crop. (Stony soil and short growing seasons limited production up north.)

Those early days were often rough, especially if crops fell short and the winter was long. Then colonists traded with American Indians, or waited for supply ships, or went on half rations until spring.

Springtime brought the great fish migrations, and great joy, for with fresh fish came giddy salvation. Colonists learned from the Native Americans how to fish the rivers and salt the herring, small fish, to preserve them through the winter in buckets and barrels. Meals would consist of fried salt herring and cornbread washed down with yaupon tea. Three times a day.

(Yaupon holly is a robust, pest-free holly native to the coastal plain. The botanical name, Ilex vomitoria, comes from Native American rituals of drinking huge quantities, then purging before battle. In gardens today, its dwarf form is an excellent substitute for boxwood hedges.)

Self-Sufficiency

Scattered homesteads, isolated by swamp, produced self-sufficiency. Clearing, planting and harvesting were done with primitive tools: hoes, scythes, shovels and axes for the first hundred years until plows eased manual labor.

The great forests gave them skins and furs, especially deerskins, but birds and animals threatened crops. Bounties  on wolves and wildcats gave incentive for extermination.

Households produced their own food, drink, clothing (homespun of flax and cotton). They built their own homes, furniture and boats, planted gardens and orchards with apples and peaches for good eating and prodigious quantities of liquor.

Dunghill fowl (chickens) provided food and feathers for beds, and stocks of bees provided wax for candles and sweet treats. Corn was pounded by hand, until grist mills in the 1700s produced a smoother product for a small fee. (One early traveler commented that there wasn’t much difference between corn meal for the family and fodder for the horses.)

Farm animals fattened quickly. Cattle, horses, sheep and swine bred easily and spent the mild winters outdoors on their own. Before the Revolution, Carolinians grudgingly exported farm animals to stingy Virginians. Once the Revolution freed up trade, produce was sold up north instead, to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, at fairer prices.

As homesteads prospered, families  purchased ready-made clothing, shoes, sugar, salt, molasses, and rum from ships that came in from England and the West Indies.

Colonists had little money, so they bartered with each other for goods and services. Debts and fines were paid with country commodities: Indian corn, tobacco, wheat, port, or deerskins.

In time, a sort of division of labor for profit worked its way through society and particular skills were marketed: boat building and milling, for example.

As society became more complex, gold and silver coin and paper money supplanted barter and country goods.

Early Relations with Native Americans

Historians tell us these boats were crude, but creating a seaworthy hollowed-out canoe from a tree was a marvel of patient engineering that few of us could fathom today. Fire and scraping with oyster shell brought down a tall, straight hardwood tree weighing several tons. Fire and scraping with oyster shell sized and shaped the craft so it handled properly in the water. Animal grease waterproofed it.

Everyone was a Boat Builder

Colonists learned quickly. They borrowed techniques from Algonquians and from French Huguenot immigrants who constructed split log canoes.

Everybody became a builder of boats, adding flourishes to improve function and handling. No two boats were built alike, and the art of boat-building became part of life in the Albemarle, skills passed down from father to son. Today, the Carolina boat, product of generations of skilled boatbuilders is considered one of the finest for charter fishing and pleasure boating.

The Kunner

But before there were modern Carolina boats, there were beginnings. One of the earliest boats on the Sound was the kunner (colloquial for canoe). This was the colonial workboat from the 1600s to the Civil War. Sturdy, small, about 15 feet long,  simple to build with hand tools and patience, the kunner could be poled or paddled or rigged with a sail.

The kunner was a split-log canoe hollowed out of white cedar, a wood that is prized for its light weight and ability to resist rot. After the log was shaped, it was split down the length, and a separate wooden keel was inserted between the two shells, binding them together.

Of all the hand tools used in building a boat — the axe, the saw and the adze, the adze was the go-to tool for smoothing or carving rough-cut wood. It was also used for squaring up
logs or hollowing out timber.

Some craftsmen could make that adze sing until wood was trim and smooth and right pretty. From the 18th century on, skilled workmen and their heirs would become specialists in boat building, as the economy moved from subsistence to specialization based on marketable skills.

Shallow-draft vessels like kunners and skiffs ( small, V-bottomed boats), and flatboats could push far up rivers. Farmers and planters could ship directly from private docks. Wide rivers and bays provided good landings for larger ships, and towns would grow up around them.

Building Roads

Trails used by Native Americans became paths for colonists. But even after almost a century of settlement there were few decent roads and no bridges.

Tricky business, this making roads through swamps. The lay of swampy land, the willingness of an owner to give up land, and the needs of the community all figured in. How much cropland would a farmer be willing to lose so his neighbors could travel more conveniently? And how much should he be re-imbursed?

Colonial justices approved or rejected requests for new roads but a jury of citizens would determine routes. In retrospect, this sounds like pretty democratic county planning, but, like all democracies, it was not efficient.

By the time swampy terrain, negligent overseers, and complaints from unhappy property owners were considered, it could take a year to clear a road. Still, by the Revolution rudimentary highways and bridal paths eased travel.

Most people rode horses, though poor people walked. Simple horse carts or ox carts were transportation for most. By the end of the century, specially made pleasure carriages were a badge of social distinction for the gentry.

Ferries and the Railroad

Ferries became links to settlements. In fact, some counties provided free ferries across rivers. They were simple flat boats that were poled across waterways or, less commonly, pulled by ropes or cables that were faster and more efficient.

Ferries were normally large enough to hold a team of horses and a carriage or a wagon. Two cable ferries are still operating in the Albemarle area: Parker’s Ferry across the Meherrin River and Sans Souci Ferry across the Cashie River. Typically, these ferries carry two cars. To summon the ferry from the other side of the river you blow your horn. The shore-to-shore ride takes only a few minutes.

By 1730 ferry service linked the north and south shores of the Sound,  a run of about five miles that must have seemed like a carnival ride on windy days. A passenger paid 15 shillings for a one-way ride; if he had a horse, he paid 30 shillings.

Colonial justices set regulations for ferries. They dealt with petitions from ferrymen who wanted to increase fees and complaints from passengers who wanted better service. In 1758  magistrates ordered ferrymen to keep more boats to give better attendance for carrying over passengers.

Sail, steam, and finally diesel vessels that could haul mighty railroad cars gradually replaced the original flatboat ferries. A sign along NC 32 at NC 308 north of Roper commemorates this piece of history.

By 1883 the Norfolk Southern Railroad linked Norfolk, Virginia with towns in the Albemarle region.  In 1910 the Railroad built a wooden trestle across the Sound bridging the five miles south from Edenton to Mackeys Ferry and Plymouth. It operated through the middle of the century.

The trestle was eventually demolished in favor of a bridge across the Sound.

Steamboats and a Showboat

Ferries were not the only vessels on the water. During the 1800s the Sound was a busy thoroughfare. Coasters (small sailing vessels) carried cargo up and down rivers and between colonies. Larger craft bound for the West Indies loaded salt herring, lumber, tobacco, and corn in exchange for rum, spices, silk, and sugar on the return trip.

For almost a century, from the 1830s, steamboats  linked small towns to the world beyond. Bi-weekly trips from Norfolk to Albemarle towns dispatched mail, passengers, produce and circuses.

With shallow draft, as little as 15 inches, and a 5 mph speed they were a grand replacement for flatboats that were poled — laboriously — far up river where masted ships with deeper draft would founder. Plantations had their own landings, where steamers were flagged from the shore by day with white handkerchiefs and by night with torches, lanterns, or fires on the bank.

Even so, navigating rivers that wound through swamps could be tricky, and at times the cumbersome vessels had to be poled to avoid foundering. To assure unrestricted passage, state law prohibited felling trees into rivers.

Steamers regularly brought circuses and side shows to small towns for almost a hundred years beginning in the 1830’s. Big-time entertainment came to eastern Carolina and the Chesapeake in 1913 with the arrival of the massive, 128-foot-long, two-story, shallow-draft James Adams Show Boat.

Residents would eagerly line the docks to watch the floating theater secure its moorings, then race on board to offer help in exchange for tickets to shows. Otherwise, they would pay ten cents to enjoy melodramas, singing, dancing, juggling and vaudeville routines in an elegantly appointed gold and blue 500-seat theatre.

Showboat entertainment delighted audiences for more than twenty years until attendance began to fall off. Movies, then in their infancy, enthralled patrons and became a regular substitute for the occasional showboat visit. Upkeep and repairs on the floating theater were constant. And the depression squeezed pennies.

The life and times of the floating theater was immortalized in Edna Ferber’s novel, Showboat,  which was made into a Broadway musical and two movies.

Although the novel takes place on the Mississippi River,  her intimate knowledge of showboat life came from living on the James Adams Floating Theatre and joining its crew for four days in 1925, until it docked in Elizabeth City, on the Pasquotank River in the Albemarle area.

It was, she wrote, the most leisurely and dreamlike of journeys.

The Beloved Shad Boat

And then the shad boat sailed in like cavalry to rescue an economy shattered by the Civil War.

Shad boats were built only for fifty years, from 1880 to 1930. They operated only in eastern North Carolina. Yet no sailing craft speaks of eastern North Carolina more eloquently than the shad boat. In 1987  the shad boat was designated the official state historical boat of North Carolina.

Watermen called the shad boat “smart”. It was fast and  easy to handle, a thing of grace  and beauty, with sleek curves and a shallow draft. It could maneuver treacherous shoals with confidence. It was powered by three sails–a main sail, a jib and a topsail.

Shad boats quickly became the choice for fishing and ferrying, and progging, vernacular for doing anything from loafing on the water to hauling fish or fowl or produce.

It happened that the shad boat made its debut when fishing was becoming more efficient. Mighty seine nets, pound nets, gill nets were laid down to round up herring and shad that swam into the Sound and up rivers by the millions to spawn each spring.

It was a time of the great Albemarle fisheries, when fishermen worked day and night to land catches that would be exported to a nation clamoring for more and more fish, and still there would be plenty left to process for keeping people fed throughout the rest of the year.

And so the shad boat,  sturdy and durable, was named for the fish it hauled. An 8-foot beam gave it stability, especially when handling heavy pound nets. The round bottom and the deep V-shaped bow could take on steep, choppy waves even when heavily loaded.

Smaller boats, like kunners and skiffs could not have handled enough volume to make the fisheries profitable.

Typically, a two-man crew, the captain who steered and manned the sails and his mate who bailed or adjusted ballast, kept the boat square in the water. Ballast consisted of dozens of fifty-pound sandbags stitched by women back home.

As the hold was piled with the day’s catch and sand bags (wet and heavy now) were no longer needed, they would be stacked on narrow side decks. (This was cardio in the days before gyms.)

Now we shall meet the original creator of the shad boat, George Washington Creef, or Uncle Wash, as he was affectionately called, gentle and sociable, tall, with large, graceful hands and a flowing gray beard.

He was a fisherman and a boat builder, and he was loyal to the Union during the Civil War. In his words, I was employed by the U.S. Navy freighting coal in my own vessel. 

After the Civil War, Creef had an idea for creating a stronger, larger boat, 24 feet long, that could haul large catches and handle well in unpredictable Sound waters.

His plan was to overlay the split-log construction of the kunner with planking and add interior struts for strength.

Monumental effort went into building those first shad boats. And imagination, too, rooted in a deep knowledge of local waters. Creef and crew used basic hand tools, a hand saw, an axe, and an adze, to fell and prepare the cedar and cut and plane the planking, all held together with copper nails.

Then the hunt would begin for just the right cypress knees that would become curved ribs, or braces, for the interior of the boat.  It could take days trekking through swamps to find a cypress stump that would yield a proper curved rib, or maybe two.

The hunt for cypress knees could mean working knee-deep in water in early spring to beat bugs and snakes, hoping that one tool or another — a six-foot crosscut saw, an axe, an adze, wedges and a maul  — didn’t fall into the swamp during use. Once extracted, the spurs were taken to a sawmill for finishing.

Local builders began to replicate the original shad boat in great numbers, though after the cedar forests were cut down, construction was modified to plank on frame.

Shad boats became an extension of a waterman’s life well into the 1930s and beyond. When engines replaced sails, around 1910, they became even more versatile in shallow waters.

It was the pick-up truck of its day, but its design elements live on in modern pleasure craft that enjoy smooth and seaworthy travel in Albemarle waters and beyond.

You can find original shad boats on display at the George Washington Creef Boathouse in Manteo, the Roanoke River Maritime Museum in the town of Plymouth, and the Museum of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City.

 

Albemarle Sound: Voyage through Centuries Part VII

Antebellum Albemarle

America was riding its destiny. She had defeated the most powerful navy in the world, not once but twice. Cotton crops were thriving. Northern cotton mills were humming. Settlers were going west. Fish hauls came in as fast as you could bring ’em on land. Canals were opening. Ports were bustling and commercial ships crowded the waters.  It was called the Era of Good Feelings.

In the Albemarle and across the South, gifts from land and water, still largely unspent, were full of promise and ready to be plucked by freemen for profit and slaves for masters.

The Albemarle was still a rural backwater. Travel over land was tricky and lack of a deep-water port prevented large vessels from trading directly. But livin’ was easy, as Ella Fitzgerald sang in Summertime.  Of course, how easy depended on your place in society: planter or merchant; yeoman farmer; slave.

Planters and Merchants

Planters were the elite minority. Many could trace their ancestry to aristocratic families in England. They owned the best land. With connections and credit they had acquired large tracts, anywhere from 500 to 1000 acres with discounts if they brought in indentured servants or slaves. Isolated because of  large holdings, plantations were prosperous and as self-sufficient as small towns.

Plantation life was a clubby, closed-circle capitalistic operation. Rich soil and long summers with mild winters were good for growing cash crops that needed special care, like cotton, rice,  and tobacco. When rice and tobacco languished in the Albemarle, cotton became the cash crop, especially after the invention of the cotton gin (cotton engine) that speeded separation of fibers from seeds. Slaves provided the power and the profits.

Planters became powerful members of state government, as much to maintain order in the state as to feather their own beds. Owning land was a requirement for serving in the legislature; at one point 85 percent of its members were planters, more than any other southern state.

This was a gay time for planters and their families, when even the humdrum took on a luster of romance. A tutor for the Capehart family wrote of afternoon visiting, fine dining, fishing and hunting, fetching mail at the post office, holiday festivities, and summer vacations on the beach in Nags Head.

Merchants were the other powerful class of people, and they usually lived in the finest houses in the community. They ran maritime empires that stretched from New England to the West Indies and across the Atlantic Ocean.

Here’s a small sampling of items offered by mercantile businesses: shoes, coffee, sugar, tobacco, horse powder, calico, jeans, soap, medicine, cheese, candles, salt, molasses, and bags of shot. Other profitable enterprises: credit to locals and shipping for commercial farmers.

If you were wealthy, you and your friends had special privileges. You could become part of the summer social scene in Raleigh to escape disease-carrying mosquitos that swarmed on the coastal plain.

Or you could retreat to the barrier beaches, where fresh sea breezes swept the pests away; where chartered packets brought in fresh produce twice a week; and where you could enjoy swimming, fishing, afternoon naps, and in the evenings, dancing to music at the hotel.

 

The Working Man

Most people had no connections to aristocracy nor the wherewithal to form shipping empires or take vacations by the sea. Nor did they own the sizeable tracts of land that would allow them to have a voice in state government.

In 1837 The Fayetteville Observer wrote: The great mass of our population is composed of people who cultivate their own soil, owe no debt, and live within their means. 

Yeoman farmers and free blacks lived on small farms, around a hundred acres or so.  They did not grow cash crops. They grew corn and raised livestock  and hunted to feed their families.

Deer were native and wild boar had been introduced in the 1500s  by the English as a reliable source of food. Most livestock roamed freely, fattening on abundant mast from native trees, so little care was needed, except for keeping them away from the cornfield.  Planters and yeomen alike dined on free-range beef and pork.

In spring families caught enough fish to salt for the winter. They sold excess produce or a bale of cotton, picked up odd jobs to meet the tax bill and purchase necessaries or an occasional luxury. 

Some time during the mid-19th century and into the twentieth century, the mule became a fixture on southern farms and in fisheries. They withstood the heat of summer, their small size fitted nicely into cotton fields, and they ate a lot less than a horse. 

An ambitious entrepreneur could add income by specializing in light industry: tanning hides; milling (75 to 80 cents to turn a bushel of corn into meal); fulling (cleaning and shrinking wool fibers); weaving cloth; cutting shingles and staves; and building boats.

Illiteracy remained high, because children were needed on farms. Still, a large majority of voters approved legislation to establish a public school system in 1839. Academies, forerunners of today’s high schools were founded at this time as finishing schools or college prep schools. Between 1789 and 1860 more than 300 were chartered in the state. Quality of instruction varied by instructor.

It was a peaceable life, called dull and even monotonous by one writer, punctuated by parties during the Christmas season, weddings, and eagerly awaited travelling circuses or musical revues brought by steamboats. Sale of liquor was overseen by the state, but merchants wholesaled it anyway and yeomen farmers produced liberal quantities in their private stills.

Still, people who lived on the edge and depended on gifts from land and sea could come into tough times if the environment dealt a bad hand. This was the case in 1828 after Currituck Inlet, the last of several inlets along the northerly barrier beaches, shoaled in.

Without regular exchange of ocean and sound waters, salinity decreased. Oysters and other shellfish that families depended on for food could not adapt to the change and disappeared. Mosquitos multiplied, and Malarial diseases. . . were much more general and more malignant.

Petitions to the federal government for relief from shellfish losses and disease made no headway. Dredging to reopen the inlet would have been futile in restless waters. The story of how survivors coped is not recorded.

Yellow fever and malaria were still common in coastal areas. Those who fell ill were treated in their own home by someone they knew, a family member or a neighbor, rarely a doctor. Sometimes patent medicines would be purchased from a storekeeper. Many housewives kept recipe books that included everything from baking an apple pie to making soap to remedies for croup.

 

Slaves: Power Without Destiny

Few people who saw Gone with the Wind ever thought much about how a plantation functioned. The grand entrance and broad staircase, the canopied bed and velvet curtains, the crested silver and globe chandeliers were delicious distractions.

Behind the elegance and the romance  of a plantation were hundreds of slaves, invisible.

Planting and harvesting crops; or clearing land; or digging ditches that drained the land; or digging canals that enabled shipment of produce to market; or preparing naval stores for export — these backbreaking tasks brought in the cash that made the romance possible.

But there were also carpenters, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, coopers, cobblers,  plasterers, harness makers, brick masons, butchers, tanners, teamsters, couriers, bodyguards, nurses (midwives, too), seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, cleaners, hunters, fishermen, trail guides, boatmen, river pilots, lockmasters (for canals on rice plantations).

And The Nanny who was the comfortable face of slavery to the world.

Collectively, slaves powered life on the plantation. But they owned none of it.

They were valuable commodities to the planter, each with a price on his or her head, each a number on the planter’s balance sheet when the time came to figure assets and taxes. Yes, each slave had a tax value, and the balance sheet determined whether the planter retained or sold a slave.

Slave women were valued for their ability to beget new slaves. (The Marquis de Lafayette, respected military leader in both French and American Revolutions, on a cross-country tour in 1824 at President Monroe’s invitation, remarked casually on the change in the complexion of slaves from fifty years prior.)

A later painting by Eyre Crowe depicts the transport of slaves from Richmond to Ridgeway, North Carolina and points south. While, geographically, this is not directly related to the Albemarle, we include it because these two paintings strongly influenced anti-slavery attitudes in England and America.

How was humanity stolen from slaves?

In the early 1700s, the Albemarle was  a patchwork of wilderness settlements. Slaves in the North Carolina colony, still limited to the coastal plain and rolling Piedmont, numbered about 800. It was not unusual for a settler to own one or two slaves for domestic or field work.

The owner-slave divide may have been firmly etched, but it was focused more on grubbing existence from a strange land than on amassing profits. Often bondsmen (euphemism for slaves) lived in the household, sharing their culture with the family and interweaving lifestyles in a cooperative venture for survival.

For example, it is possible that eastern Carolina’s vinegar-and-pepper barbecue grew out of culinary customs in the West Indies and Africa, where  cooks used lime juice and hot peppers to season meat. It’s a short step to experimenting with vinegar, more readily available than limes, for a new twist that’s become a staple today on the coastal plain of the Carolinas.

Within several decades, the owner-slave divide had deepened: the Revolutionary era became a watershed for slavery in the Albemarle. Lack of a port city precluded slave trade here, except among private individuals, so slave owners purchased slaves in Virginia and transported them to North Carolina.

This inconvenience did not slow the vast increase in slave numbers in less than a century. Slave population at the time of the Revolution:  100,000. Plantations were rising and fortunes were growing. Owning slaves became a path to wealth and would remain so until the Civil War. The relationship between master and slave was now and would continue to be based on exploitation. All men are created equal did not apply.

From a slave’s perspective, this oratory about freedom and the rights of man was simply hollow chatter, though many participated in the war, on either side, hoping for freedom from bondage somehow.

But talk of liberty stirred souls and a restlessness grew among many who were in bondage, stirrings that would lead to constant turmoil during this Era of Good Feelings and beyond.

Most slaves lived on plantations (though Albemarle plantations never reached the size of the vast plantations of the Deep South). But they also worked as domestic servants, skilled artisans, and field laborers on small farms and in towns and cities.

Treatment  of slaves depended on the owner. As one traveler observed, The keep of a negro…does not come to a great figure, since the daily ration is but a quart of maize and rarely a little meat or salted fish.

Most owners realized that the value of their property could not be maintained on a poor diet, and there was always the whip to spur action. Daily allotments were supplemented with produce from slave gardens, which in turn saved money for the planter.

There was once an oft-repeated myth of the happy slave. Records of laziness, theft, arson, desertion, and murder bury that myth along with layers of passive aggression and outright anger. Newspapers frequently ran ads with descriptions of runaways.

 

Some sardonic observers commented that malingering slaves were only mimicking the behavior of their owners.

Planters disciplined minor transgressions; the courts meted out punishment for more severe crimes that might result in the loss of the right ear and fifty lashes. Troublesome slaves were conspicuously branded. Jittery communities felt they could keep slave society under control, but they were ignoring a deeper reality.

Religious Revival

Religious fervor would unexpectedly become part of the stirrings. Around the turn of the century, religious revival meetings swept through the country. The movement came to be known as the Second Great Awakening, one of four great awakenings that would boost Protestantism and religious fervor over the course of three centuries.

 

…There had never been anything like it. Here’s a meeting of 3,000 people out in a field, blacks and whites together, listening to a preacher who says, “Here in my message is a new life for you, here’s a new chance for you. Here’s a God who had your interest at heart. Here’s a God who may deliver you.” – David Blight, historian.

Many slaves who had clung to former religions were moved to abandon them and gladly accepted these new messages of spiritual equality before God. Methodists and Baptists especially welcomed converts from the black and white working population.

Slaveholders Tighten Restrictions

But numbers of slaves tripled from 1800 to 1860 and embracing a kinder religion would not contain discontent. Slave populations in Albemarle counties were about 35 to 45 percent of total population. Further west, in some counties along the Roanoke River, numbers rose to 60 per cent.

The state of North Carolina passed several laws to protect the rights of slave owners and restrict the rights of slaves. Slave patrols were initiated, though it was difficult to round up willing participants. They were, after all, securing planters’ property, not necessarily their own.

The restrictions on slaves spilled over to freed blacks. They lost their right to vote, along with other personal freedoms. However skilled as artisans, they were considered inferior to white craftsmen and were paid and treated accordingly. General harassment and loss of dignity caused many to migrate north or west or sail for Africa and a new life.

From the time of the American Revolution to the beginning of the Civil War white fear of losing domination over slaves invaded thinking and actions at all junctures in society.

The Panic of 1819

As euphoria faded, unrest exploded in 1819.  Factories closed.  Unemployment rose. Banks failed. Mortgages foreclosed. Cotton prices plummeted. Investment in land collapsed. Deflation followed soaring inflation. Debt hung over the country from the Louisiana Purchase and the War of 1812.

Some historians  call it the first Great Depression. Like a whirlwind, it seemed to have spun itself out by 1823, but damages to the fabric of society had yet to be repaired. Low crop prices and depressed land values hit eastern North Carolina hard, and many slave owners sold their slaves and farmers abandoned their land and headed west for virgin land and a new start.

Resentment was building in the middle class against banks and corporations. They saw these institutions as privileged monopolies, and conflict between creditor and debtor was splintering the economy.

The Era of Good Feelings would never return, but there were still profits to be made from the land.

Cashing in on Natural Resources

Gifts from land and water were still largely unspent before the Revolution. The environment was full of promise and ready to be plucked by capitalists for profit and slaves for masters.

Colonial settlers had used natural resources sustainably. This was not by philosophical inclination. Even the wealthy did not yet have the manpower nor the tools to make large-scale inroads on the environment.

Remember the motto of the Lords Proprietors, the first governors of the colony back in the 1660s: The Taming Makes the Land. That idea was ingrained. After the Revolution the southeast would became the purveyor of natural resources to the world for the next two centuries.

Not until an army of slave power came on, could the land be tamed.

Fortunately, technology was not yet so efficient that wholesale destruction of resources took place during the nineteenth century. That would happen in the next century.

Logging the Forests

Shipyards from New England to Philadelphia and across the Atlantic were eager to expand their fleets. Virgin stands of North Carolina cedar, cypress, oak and pine were fed, board by board, into their ships.

Tar, pitch, and turpentine (naval stores) along with masts, staves and shingles: eastern North Carolina led the world in producing and exporting these for over a hundred years, until the great forests gave out and second-growth saplings took their place.

Pine trees were tapped for oleoresin that exuded from multiple cuts and was processed into turpentine. By 1840 eastern North Carolina produced almost all naval stores used in the United States. By 1861, 4,000,000 barrels of turpentine, worth $40,000,000 when distilled, were being processed annually by almost 5,000 laborers and 150 stills.

Slave labor was crucial to profits. Collecting and distilling the resin was long and arduous. It was solitary work done in winter. Conditions were particularly harsh and workers would run away or set fire to the forest to avoid the punishing drudgery

(Of interest: Tarheel is a moniker from this period that has stuck to the North Carolina mariner. It may have originated from workers in tar yards who often got tar on the soles of shoes.)

Farming On Grand Scale

Once cleared and drained, this was good land, wrote a colonist in 1654, with a most fertile, gallant rich soil, flourishing in all the abundance of nature…

This land would become the bedrock of fine plantations, but there were limitations to what the soils could give.

Cotton was a small-time crop until 1793. It would take one farm hand 100 days to separate seed from crop in a single cotton bale. Said Moses Brown, owner of the first powered spinning mill in Rhode Island, The unripe, short, and dusty part. . . so spoils the whole as to discourage the use of southern cotton in the machines.”

Small jenny mills run by hand, mules or oxen produced crude yarn for homespun cloth, no match for the fine cotton imported from the West Indies.  (Pre-revolutionary colonists wove and wore this rough cloth as a symbol of their patriotism, sacrificing the comfort and looks of the good stuff to avoid paying unfair taxes to England.)

Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (cotton engine) changed the game. It did the work of ten men and it removed the dust that clogged milling machines. By 1840 cotton was a leading cash crop for North Carolina farmers.

Cotton grown in the Albemarle  was hauled overland and on river boats to Columbia on the Sound’s south shore or to Elizabeth City on the Pasquotank River. From there it was shipped north to New England textile mills.

Eventually, to keep profits on home turf, cotton mills  would open in  the South. Edenton and Elizabeth City operated cotton mills in the Albemarle.

Cotton was saving the South. The world couldn’t get enough of it.

But cotton is a heavy feeder. Soil here is rich when first lumbered and replenished by regular flooding of rivers. But the environment was being altered by logging and ditching.

Let’s look beyond the grand entrance to the plantation house and focus on the fields. At any one time, only about a third of a plantation was planted in cotton. The rest was a mosaic of woodlands and disturbed patches, recently cut over, vegetable gardens and facilities for repairing harnesses or building carts or plows.

To a northern farmer who was used to tidy rows, southern farms seemed helter-skelter. This mosaic was a primitive form of crop rotation. Untidy cut-over fields would eventually be cleared for planting cotton, and the spent field would lie fallow, possibly planted with wheat or cover crop.

While the Albemarle held its own, the growth of King Cotton throughout the South came from continually opening new land to cultivation.

Cotton production increased steadily until well into the twentieth century, though the boll weevil took a toll. By then, chemical fertilizers and pesticides were on their way. By 1925, North Carolina was producing 1,102,000 bales of cotton, including farms on the coastal plain and the rolling hills of the Piedmont to the west.

Returning to Antebellum decades, records show that in 1850 Avoca Plantation, situated on a peninsula flanked by the Chowan River and Salmon Creek in western Albemarle Sound, owned about 5,000 acres valued at $49,000, and 203 slaves. The farm produced 8,500 bushels of corn and 200 bales of ginned cotton that year, with livestock worth $4,000 and profitable fisheries off Bachelor’s Bay in Albemarle Sound.

Avoca Farms today is a multi-million-dollar company specializing in botanical and medicinal products.

*******************************

The Era of Good Feelings ended ominously. As class conflict sharpened, a crisis over slavery erupted like a firebell in the night, wrote Thomas Jefferson. He was referring to Missouri’s application for statehood and its implications for slavery in western territories.

Though the Missouri Compromise dampened angry spirits for the moment, John Quincy Adams predicted that it was only the title page to a great tragic volume.

 

Albemarle Sound: Voyage through Centuries: Part VIII

A War that Wasn’t Wanted

North Carolina did not want a fight.

South Carolina must have been itching for one because she seceded in 1860, before President Lincoln took office. She commandeered federal forts in the state, then dared Lincoln to provision the troops at an unfinished Fort Sumter by firing on it.

North Carolina was enjoying unprecedented prosperity.

Her economy was booming. Wealthy planters did not want to lose their investments or their power. Small farmers were doing well and weren’t interested in fighting to support planters’ interests. Lincoln didn’t seem so threatening, though he hadn’t even been on the ballot in North Carolina. And, generally, people liked living under the protection of the federal government.

Debate over secession could be acrimonious, but as late as February, 1861 the vote by the legislature in Raleigh (the new capital) was overwhelmingly pro-Union.

A month after the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 and Lincoln’s immediate proclamation to stop the rebellion, North Carolina became the 11th and last state to vote to secede.

She had no choice. She would have been at war with her neighbors, fighting her Sister States. The vote was unanimous. 

Pro-Union sentiment was strongest in the eastern and western parts of the state. Many pro-union planters, fearful of ruin,  moved family and slaves to the central part of the state; others aligned with the Confederacy.

North Carolina had nothing to gain and everything to lose by seceding. And lose she did. 

She sent 130,000 of her young men into the war. She lost 40,000, half to disease. More than any other confederate state on both counts.

Albemarle counties raised volunteer units, many of whom saw the full brunt of the war, including the fateful Pickett’s Charge in Gettysburg. Captain Benjamin Skinner wrote of the constant whistle of the musical minnie… above our heads.

There was no standing army but each county had its own militia. It was not unusual for troops to be furnished with firearms purchased from private citizens. Sometimes daily rations amounted to as little as a few crackers and a quarter pound of meat, and men might go for a month without a change of clothes.

Wrote the same Captain, Sufferings, privations & hardships have been endured such as no modern armies of their countrys have ever been called upon to undergo…but the… greater our sufferings now the more glorious will be our greater triumph…

Within a year, General Ambrose Burnside’s Expedition had captured towns in the east and established a blockade.

Control of Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds was firmly in Union hands in a bid to cut off General Lee’s southern supply routes to Virginia.

Hatteras had fallen. Roanoke Island was falling.

Union troops and a fledgling Navy easily outmaneuvered seven small Confederate boats they called The Mosquito Fleet to capture the Island. On land volunteers tangled with Burnside’s men but were no match for the larger forces.

They were captured and three weeks later they were paroled. They then set about forming a new company with others and joined another regiment.

Apparently the release of captives was common in the early years of the war. Prisoners of war would be held for a while, then freed, sometimes after taking an oath of allegiance to the Union. Whether they re-enlisted was an individual decision.

Life in Albemarle counties was overturned. Sound and rivers became thoroughfares for gunboats. Towns were shelled in skirmishes to maintain the Union blockade.

To counter Union action the state authorized counties to form guerilla bands called Rangers to harass Union forces. Rangers in the Albemarle were most effective, since their members were so familiar with its forbidding terrain. They also prevented slaves from crossing Union lines and terrorized Union sympathizers.

Stating that they were virtually bandits, an angry Union commander threatened serious reprisals. Locals, too, were not happy with the depredations and the secretive nature of these bands.

Meanwhile, Albemarle residents had been smuggling supplies for Lee’s army. Provisions would be shipped from Norfolk Virginia through the Dismal Swamp Canal into northeast North Carolina.

From there they were ferried  west through swamp and river, then back up north to Lee’s army in Petersburg, or further north to Richmond, Virginia. The hand-off of supplies was probably done relay-style, from crew to crew.

To stop the smuggling, federal forays destroyed bridges and roads but the supply stream did not stop.  The Union then organized Negro troops to intervene, a move that was bound to incite citizens, particularly in light of reputed atrocities. It worked. Citizens were kept in a state of fear and panic.

A truce of sorts was arranged. The Union would remove Negro troops if citizens stopped the smuggling and the Rangers were disbanded.  A jittery peace was restored, though it a Union captain acknowledged later that this circuitous supply route through northern North Carolina remained effective during the War.

Exports of cotton, lumber, ships stores and fishery products that were expected to pay the bills were halted by the blockade. Imports of necessary goods were blocked. Basics became luxuries.

From 1862 to 1865 prices soared because of profiteering by smugglers: a barrel of flour went from $18 to $500; corn, a staple, went from $1 a bushel to $30. Parched corn was used to make coffee and sorghum was grown and processed for sweetening, instead of sugar.

Wrote one resident, Sure this War is meant to check the profusion in which we have lived & to teach the rising generation economy & the employment of their resources.

Many southerners could not believe that slaves would want to escape bondage. They were quite sure that slaves felt such a strong attachment to their masters they would never leave, that they were being driven or enticed to federal camps. When slaves took advantage of the Emancipation Proclamation, planters felt betrayed.

Yet as soon as Union troops arrived in an area slaves would follow their camps. Slaves that did not flee often piloted Union ships and revealed the location of Rangers.

The Freedman’s Colony

If you can cross the creek to Roanoke Island, you will find safe haven.

Roanoke Island became a refuge for escaped and freed slaves. Protected by the Union army, over 3500 refugees would settle there in a camp called the Freedman’s Colony where community life flourished: families could live as families, children could attend schools, gardens could grow and going to church was central to life.

Some freedmen from Roanoke Island and other camps in eastern Carolina offered their skills to Union forces, or became spies, guides and scouts, built forts and bridges and served in four Union regiments.

After the war the land was returned to the original owners and colony members became refugees again. Reports of depredations by some of these refugees and others caused counties to establish militia to maintain control.

The Expedition Hurricane

It wasn’t all rosy for Union ships on Burnside’s Expedition. Bad weather plagued them in turbulent seas. In November, 1861, the Expedition Hurricane scattered a Union fleet of 75 ships off Cape Hatteras. Two vessels sank, and others were wrecked by Confederate forces. Storm surge was so high it  inundated Hatteras Island.

Words from one sailor: Wind continued to rise till at 11 pm it blew almost a gale…The scene was fearful but magnificent. The ship was tossing and pitching…The waves were rolling at least 20 feet high.

Words from another: Last night was the worst I ever saw. I could not sleep for I had as much as I could do to hold myself in my bunk. Reynolds got thrown out of his…8 am Window in stern got stove in the night…water was three or four inches deep. Shoes, guns, knapsacks…floating round in fine style.

Then, on a stormy New Years Eve in 1862 the ironclad warship, the Monitor, sank in 300 feet of water almost 200 miles off Cape Hatteras, losing 16 of her crew. She had performed extraordinarily well in service.

The Merrimack and the Monitor

The first ever duel between ironclad warships had taken place near the mouth of the James River when the smaller Monitor clashed with the formerly wooden frigate Virginia. The Virginia had previously sunk, then was raised and re-outfitted as an ironclad and rechristened the Merrimack.

The Confederacy hoped to use the Merrimack to break the Union blockade, and before the Monitor arrived, she had already destroyed two wooden Union ships.

The battle ended inconclusively; the blockade remained. But the clash between two ironclads marked a major turning point in the history of naval warfare, and the two ships are memorialized in the names of Hampton Roads tunnels.

The Union and Confederacy had both developed steam-powered ironclads because ships built from wood could no longer withstand fire power from late-model heavy artillery.  European countries took note of this battle and immediately stopped construction of wooden ships.

The Monitor’s location is a watery historic site, and the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, VA tells the story of that time through exhibits and artifacts.

Only a few months before the Monitor sank, the Merrimack was blown up by her Confederate commanders as Union troops approached Norfolk to tighten the blockade. She was heavily salvaged, so few remnants remain as relics.

There was only one major battle fought on Albemarle Sound, a year before the end of the war. Three confederate warships, including the Albemarle Ram, an ironclad built in a cornfield, and eight Union gunboats faced each other. The battle ended indecisively at sunset.

(During the Civil War, much action in the Albemarle centered on the rivers and towns north of the Sound and will be found in profiles of rivers as they are posted.)

Picking up the Pieces After the War

Left with a shattered economy and a broken society  — devalued land, bearish cotton prices, a crumbled plantation system, destroyed homes and businesses — citizens began to find ways down new paths.

The social fabric of the community had been frayed. Soldiers came back wounded, or they didn’t come back at all. Families were broken by death and disease. Livelihoods were cobbled together by every member of the family.

Going to school would not put food on the table. Money was so tight that the personal surety bond, a sign of trust that was used regularly before the war, was replaced by the mortgage.

The country store and gristmill, many now in disrepair, had offered antebellum farmers more than essential goods and services. Along with churches, they had been the  nucleus of community life. Rural folk, whether landowner or tenant, free black or white, converged to purchase supplies, have their corn ground, or simply visit with neighbors and friends.

The structure of county government changed. Instead of Justices being appointed to manage affairs, county commissioners were elected to govern, a more democratic process that allowed for participation by blacks, who now voted and began to hold county offices.

Heavily in debt, Albemarle’s county governments struggled to provide aid to the poor, repair bridges, roads and ferries and restore public schools that had been closed early in the war.

Loss of labor, unstable race relations, and an uncertain political future reduced the wealthy to poverty. The Capeharts of Scotch Hall whose plantation had been bringing in $100,000 a year were left with $1200. Still, that was a tidy sum compared to assets of most people.

Class and color remained strong points of division throughout the century. Planters had trouble accepting the new equality enjoyed by blacks, and especially the idea of blacks holding public office. Blacks aligned with republicans, putting democrats in the minority.

The Perquimans Record opined in 1892 that the white element in the Republican party is the best class of our people, wealthy, Intelligent and refined. 

Democrats  worked very hard to gain the majority, presupposing that once in power they could reduce the Negro to his former subservience. The rise of Populism that attracted many farmers, slowed them down, but by the 1900’s they were firmly entrenched with a racist agenda.

Cotton and corn crops were good that first year after the war. They fetched high prices. People were optimistic. But rains brought poor cotton crops the next couple of years, and there was barely enough corn for bread.

The 1870 census revealed devaluation of farm acreage, livestock and crop yields. Cash value of farms dropped by half or more.

Freed slaves and poor whites lacked the money to purchase even devalued farmland and supplies to start them on a new life. Planters  were so deeply in debt that they could not pay workers up front, so they divided up their property and worked out a system of sharecropping or tenancy.

Tenant farmers rented the house and the land they tilled. They had control over what  crops they grew and how they were sold. Out of the cash they received they paid the planter and any merchants the money due for rent and supplies and kept the rest.

Sharecroppers seldom owned anything. They rented the land and the house they lived in, along with all supplies needed for farming. They were told what to plant and had no control over sales. After harvest the planter took what was owed to him and paid what was left to the sharecropper.

Most bought supplies from local merchants on credit with the hope that they could pay off their debts after harvest. For many it was an endless cycle of debt and  poverty, reminiscent of the miner in the country-western song, Sixteen Tons, who owed his soul to the company store.

 

Sharecropped farms occupied about 35 percent of farmland north of Albemarle Sound, much less in counties along the south shore. Easing the penury were gifts from Sound and rivers, the dependable, annual running of herring and shad that could be freely taken.

The prosperity of antebellum years never returned to the Albemarle. Post-war industrialization elsewhere in the country did not reach here and farmers still planted their crops and watched the weather.

Those swamps, managed to keep the world away. A low population and lack of an industrial base protected the environment from smokestacks and warehouses. This watery oasis was not seen as a destination for building a bustling metropolis.

Future threats  would come along and would-be moguls would try to exploit the environmental wealth, but they did not succeed with any permanence, even in the twentieth century.

This lack of commerce and industry created some of the poorest counties in the state. Yet there was not a vast exodus of African Americans from the Albemarle  during either wave of the Great Migration during the  twentieth century.

Families with long lineage here, black and white, close-knit and close-by, have given support and comfort to each other through centuries, and a relatively benign climate eases life.

Lack of heavy commerce maintained a relaxed pace of life that allowed for neighborliness, deferential respect, and time-honored values of God, family and country. In fine weather or flood, people count on each other for help.

Whatever hurt remained from the war, every spring communities could look forward to those heady days when the fish swam up rivers. And they knew that life in the Albemarle would be sustained for yet another year.

 

Albemarle Sound: Voyage through Centuries Part IX

The Mighty Herring Fisheries

When the shadbush bloomed in spring, the hard work and celebrations began. Schools of shad and river herring teemed in from the ocean through inlets and into the Sound and up rivers, bound for their birth places to spawn a new generation.

At a time when people lived off the land, these silver fish brought great joy and the promise of full cupboards, a fine reason for exuberant annual celebrations.

Buckets, baskets, nets, poles. Families scooped up fish that would feed them throughout a long winter.  Shad had to be kept on ice to stay fresh, so it was eaten immediately, but the oily flesh of herring lent itself to salting, pickling and drying that would preserve it for a year or more.

(Well into the twentieth century you could find community celebrations of herring runs — and barrels of corned herring in country kitchens.)

Around the end of the 19th century, herring could be purchased on river banks in spring for as little as one dollar a thousand, though the average price was $2.50. A dollar a month, wrote one Chowan County native, would procure for a person the most usual diet of much of the population — herring, cornbread (corn was 40 cents a bushel) and tea brewed from native yaupon holly.

From the 1760s on, commercial fisheries were operating on Albemarle rivers, catching fish in cunning, labyrinthine weirs of poles and reeds. Pickled herring were shipped up the coast to Baltimore, New York and Boston; west to the Great Plains; and south to the West Indies. By sail. By steamer. By rail.

A century later, about the same time shad boats were first skimming waters, the pound net was introduced, while huge seine nets were catching vast numbers of fish  with breathtaking efficiency.

Every plantation had a shoreline of smooth sand where fish were landed and processed. Capstans, or windlasses for hauling seines in, salting houses, processing sheds, and offices created a mini fishing town.

During fish hauls, two ten-oared boats would carry a seine more than two miles long and several feet deep off shore. Boatmen would row in opposite directions extending the seine, which had a line of corks on top to keep it afloat and a line of lead weights on the bottom to sink it. The seine would be strung out in a direction to block the herring as they swam upstream to spawn.

In 1861 Harper’s Weekly published a moment-by-moment rapid-fire account of hauling in a catch. Here is an excerpt. It begins after the fish have been caught in the seine and the seine is attached to capstans.

In this instance, mules are used to turn the capstans to tighten the seine until the fish are crowded and surrounded by net on shore.

Fifty stalwart men rush into the water, waist-deep. The captains shout and swear, the gulls and eagles scream, and dashing into the melee, audaciously snatch their share of the spoil.

A few minutes of heavy dragging and the flashing, wriggling mass is rolled upon the beach; a line of wide planks is hastily staked up behind, the net withdrawn, and the boatmen again put off cheerily to repeat the haul.

The women and boys now rush knee-deep into the gasping heap. The shad are first counted into baskets and carried to the packing-house; while the herring are headed, cleaned, and thrown into tubs, ready for the salters—all of which is transacted with merciless coolness and the most wonderful celerity.

It requires from five to seven hours to complete a haul ; and as there is no respite by day or night, three and four hauls are made within the twenty-four hours. The only time allowed for eating and sleeping is during the odd hours snatched by the different classes of workers when their especial branch of service is suspended. When the hauls are not heavy the cleaners and salters have an easy time between landings. The boatmen sleep while the mules wind in the net; the mules browse and bray while the boats are out.

A first-class fishery employs from eighty to a hundred bipeds, and a dozen or twenty quadrupeds, and the labor during an active season of six weeks or two months is equal to that of a brisk military campaign in face of an enemy.

Of all the striking views of this exciting and picturesque business the night-haul is pre-eminent in interest. Here the lively scenes of the day are reenacted amidst the glare of pine torches, which exhibits the wild figures of the fishermen and the death-struggles of the finny captives in the most dramatic light possible.

Besides needing captains and crews, cleaners and packers, skilled seine menders were valued for keeping the seines, which had to be tarred, in top shape. Holes in a net meant lost profits. Coopers made barrels for storage. A manager attended to details on shore and sold to customers on the beach.

Even children who were hanging around would be put to work where needed; their pay would be a bucket of fish for supper. Regular workers were paid a share of the profits.

It was not uncommon to take a hundred thousand river herring in a haul, though most hauls were smaller, five thousand up to thirty thousand. Since it cost between five and ten thousand dollars to establish a fishery, only wealthy planters could afford the upfront costs. The vast majority of farmers gathered their fish for personal consumption in dip nets or bow nets.

Every river had its haul of fish, though uniqueness of terrain and flow created differences in the personalities of rivers.

By the end of the 19th century the herring and herring roe of Albemarle Sound had won widespread fame. In a world where herring fisheries ruled, Albemarle fisheries were king.

In a curious twist, settlers here  — laboring mightily in an inhospitable but richly endowed land, living on the edge, isolated,  self-reliant, insular — grew to have standing on the world map. Markets in New England, Europe, the Caribbean, even Russia eagerly sought their fish, their naval stores, their cotton and produce, their lumber.

We are fortunate today to have a rich photographic record of this era. During the 1870s the U.S Fish Commission sent scientists into the field to document fisheries nationwide. They produced a multi-volume report; the photographic collection is housed in Smithsonian Institution archives.

The North Carolina History Museum in Raleigh also houses archival photographs. Historian David Cecelski has reproduced many of these photographs in his blog posts about the herring fisheries. He tells an insider’s tale of coastal North Carolina life and fishing traditions.

And Then the Fish Stopped Coming

As far back as the 1840s, a few prescient people sensed that the fishery could not last under such colossal landings. But it did not occur to most people that there could ever be an end to this bonanza. They simply assumed they could count on these fish to arrive on time each year, in the millions, as expected, forever.

Even the eminent scientist, Thomas Huxley, president of the Royal Society in England, saw no reason for concern. I believe, then, that the cod fishery, the herring fishery…and probably all the great sea fisheries are inexhaustible…(1883)

By 1896 0ver 1100 pound nets in Sound and rivers had replaced the labor-intensive haul seines, and fishermen were landing over 20 million pounds annually.

So many pound nets blocked passage of river herring that the state enacted the Vann Law in 1905 that required fishermen to leave a channel in the Sound to allow fish to migrate to their natal waters for spawning.

Still, the fishery continued to decline in the twentieth century. During the 1950s total catches were about 11 to 12 million annually. By the 1970s they had dropped to about 8 million, and in 1993 came the crash, down to one million.

Northeast North Carolina was not the only area that suffered losses. In 1965 the entire range of Atlantic states harvested over 64 million pounds. Forty years later total harvest for the combined area was under 100,000 pounds, almost a 99 percent decrease.

The fishery had died. In 2006 a moratorium on commercial fishing was declared in North Carolina. Three New England states, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, joined the moratorium, but other coastal states did not. The fish did not come back.

The demise of the river herring fishery has vast implications for life in the sea. It is, for instance, probably responsible for the weakening of the cod fisheries in New England and Canada.

The river herring, after all, is low man on the food chain. It is born to be eaten. Half of a herring’s year is spent out in the Atlantic Ocean, anywhere from Canada to South Carolina or Florida, being eaten by the big fish that count on the silvery slivers swimming in massive schools.

For eons the silver slivers have been dinner and dessert for big creatures of the ocean like cod. Without them and their cousins the food chain collapses and nobody gets dessert.

In the Albemarle river herring are the preferred food for the rockfish, or striped bass, another great Albemarle fishery whose story most appropriately belongs to the Roanoke River. Can you imagine the turmoil, the frenzy, the catching and losing, as river herring and striped bass jostle in that race of millions to find their particular spawning grounds?

Let us return for a moment to the first American settlements when tools were few and simple, and survival depended on the wit, skill, and hardiness of those early men and women.

The environment provided everything they needed if they learned its ways. And if the rains failed one season, or a drought or a flood came along, well, they would have to work harder, and they might lose anyway.

They were conservationists by default because they could tame the environment with only their sinew, and maybe a mule to help them along. They could not claim control over the land.

Then we developed bigger, more efficient tools, and the search for ease of living and profits replaced survival with two hands. (Can you blame us?)

We pursued technology that would control the environment and meet our needs and expectations. (Can you blame us?)

We thought our rational approach would solve problems, so we substituted that for an intimate understanding of wild ways, a knowledge that is only gradually acquired, with patience, a knowledge that doesn’t lend itself to committee meetings and graphing.

We set no boundaries. There was great good, but there was greed…

We lost touch with the ways of the land, and we did not know what we were losing. Not just here in the Albemarle but all over the country.

Progressive loss of touch and delight in progress undergird the loss of the river herring fishery–and many more losses.

When losses became too great, we woke up. We studied. Lots of studies. One is of particular interest because its scale had local and national focus.

Urged by a generation of activists who came along after the first Earth Day in 1970, farsighted congressmen took note of declines in fisheries across the country. In the 1980s they sponsored legislation that would fund major studies of estuaries.

The Albemarle-Pamlico Estuarine Study (APES) was born. Scientists, government officials and private citizens cooperated to explore reasons — and seek solutions — for declining catches.

Turns out these little ten-inch-long fish that weigh half a pound have had the book thrown at them.

Here is how we messed up and how we are trying to reconcile the damage:

Decades of overfishing.

• In times past there was a balance between juveniles and older fish in schools of river herring.
• Juveniles need to wait three or four years before they can spawn, and their first year of spawning is usually only a warm-up.
• Older females become  more and more productive with age and can release up to 100,000 eggs annually. However, they are exhausted after spawning and vulnerable to predators. They return to the ocean to recover and refuel.
• If you decimate either class, you lose the future. Hence the moratorium on commercial fishing for herring in 2oo6. It is still in place.

Activity in the Atlantic Ocean.

• During the late 1960s and early 1970s fleets of foreign trawlers with mammoth nets were intercepting herring out in the Atlantic Ocean on their way to the Sound, 24 million pounds caught in 1969 alone.
• In 1977 the Magnuson-Stevens Act forbade fishing within the 200-mile band of waters called the Exclusive Economic Zone of the United States.

Barricades block fish migration

• Nets once reached across rivers until regulated.
• Dams alter river flow.
• Streams are forced into culverts as roads are built across them.
• Today, where possible, bridges replace culverts and dam-flow is altered to aid spawning (with mixed results in the Roanoke River)

Loss of Habitat

• Wetlands ditched. Woodlands clear cut. Pavement laid down. Development favored.
• Streams rerouted. Riverbanks reworked.
• Rainwater that once seeped lazily into streams pulses unchecked into waterways that become an open fire hose flushing larvae and young fish.
• Today, permits are necessary for work done near water courses that are protected under the Clean Water Act. Not all of them are protected and permitting can be sketchy.

Pollution from Agriculture

• Sediment that runs off farms and construction sites clogs gills and buries larvae.
• Nitrogen and phosphorus in fertilizer runoff  cause algae to bloom. When algae die, they break down, robbing water of oxygen, causing fish kills. (A particular problem in the Chowan River).
• Best Management Practices (BMPs) used on farms and forests reduce runoff, minimize erosion.
• Integrated Pest Management on crops encourages farmers to use less pesticide (which saves them money, too).Algal blooms on the Chowan River

Pollution from Municipalities and industry

• Toxic organics, heavy metals, and oil from roads and parking lots.
• Nutrients, bacteria, heavy metals,  and chemicals from the sewers of industries and cities.
• Updated treatment plants treat waste water from municipalities and industry. (Fortunately, minimal urban sprawl and industry here has limited pollutants.)

 

The great herring catches are shadows now.  We are trying to mend damages from two hundred years or more. We have removed too much critical habitat for the great fisheries to be reclaimed, but we have shifted toward conservation.

Wildlife refuges, state and county parks, and game lands protect land and provide habitat for wildlife and outdoor experiences for people.

People must feel that they have a stake in protecting the vitality of land and water, their land, their water. Public education must focus on developing an understanding of natural cycles and how we can live in harmony with them.

The Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership (APNEP) is  doing just that as today’s successor to the original estuarine study (APES).

As its name implies, it partners with a variety of groups to support research, restoration and public education. It is a comprehensive approach to protecting our land and water.

This coastal plain where the rivers meet the sea is still compelling, still beautiful, still a respite for many. With care, it can continue to be so.

Legacy

Some of the counties surrounding Albemarle Sound are among the poorest and least populated in the state. They are also the most vulnerable to rising seas, as we shall see in the final chapter.

Poverty and isolation are not particularly evident to a casual observer because families and communities are close knit. But outside interests have coveted resources here with little regard for the future.

Logging, farming, and intensive silviculture have taken precedence over environmental values.

Fighting Environmental Justice

There was a time, several decades ago, mostly forgotten now, when the wetlands south of Albemarle Sound were considered ideal for a hazardous waste incinerator.

After all, when you fly over this land, what can you see? A few clusters of houses, a lot of farmland with manmade ditches, maybe some ducks or geese, tangles of swamp that defy GPS, just a bunch-a-nuthin to a fly-over.

The Hazardous Waste Incinerator Indeed, this looked like an ideal place to build a regional hazardous waste incinerator. Not enough people around to make a difference. No matter that these wetlands are prone to hurricanes and floods.

Technology will take care of any problems that crop up. Massive roads. Rumbling trucks with poisons. Belching of tainted air.  Even a poisonous spill that would infiltrate  wetlands and networks of ditches that flow to native waters.

Residents fought this injustice. How they fought it! Through public education and public meetings, and presentations to county commissioners who saw the incinerator as a plus, a way to bring jobs to a community that desperately needed them.

The people prevailed. Their inherited lineage, their love of the land, overrode any modest income offered by the outsiders.  No, thank you, they did not want the menial, and perhaps dangerous, jobs that came with this intrusive behemoth.

A Noisy Airfield There was a time, in 2001, when the United States Navy eyed this good-fer-nuthin place with a few people and a lot of birds as a good prospect for an OLF, an Outlying Landing Field for pilots to practice on a new line of fighter jets housed at its Oceana base in Virginia Beach.

Residents in Virginia objected to noisy take-offs and landings near their communities.

Exporting the deafening noise to this nowhere land around Albemarle Sound seemed like a good idea to the Navy and everyone else who did not live in the Albemarle.

Residents of this land of black bear, snow geese and tundra swan, residents who are serenaded by choruses of crickets and katydids on summer evenings, were appalled.

This was a David-and-Goliath battle without the promise of a quick victory, or any victory at all. It was automatically assumed The Albemarle could not prevail because it had no political clout. It became a thirteen-year battle.

Residents lived on tenterhooks. They set aside their lives, met often to plan strategy, held rallies and pig pickins, organized post-card-writing campaigns, all the while haunted by the sacrifices people would be compelled to make and the losses to community life in exchange for the bones the Navy was prepared to throw into the pot.

After eight years, the Navy lost its case in court and the voluminous environmental statements prepared by a firm in upper New York State were declared flawed. The Navy came back for another round that lasted five years, before finally giving up on the ill-fated proposal and quietly retreating, giving residents their lives back and leaving black bear and tundra swan and katydids in peace.

During all those years of campaigning and lobbying lawmakers, activists conducted themselves with grace and dignity. There were no arrests for disorderly conduct or property damage. There was simply respectful patience and determination.

Both the incinerator and the outlying landing field were prime examples of environmental injustice.

A hazardous waste incinerator is never located near an affluent community.

Nor is an OLF.

Creative Approaches to Conserving Land

We’ve come a long way since those decades when wetlands were nuisances, and the coastal plain was prime ground for exploitation.

Ironically, it was back in the 1930s, during the depression, that land conservation began, strictly to protect threatened waterfowl. The efforts proved to be a godsend to desperate residents, too, who were given jobs by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to clear brush, build roads and construct impoundments for the new refuges.

By the 1970s, after those first heady Earth Days, we had learned that preserving ecosystems as entire units, instead of trying to save limited habitats for threatened creatures was a better way to protect the environment.

In the Albemarle this meant purchasing land to forestall development and accepting donations of land from corporations who no longer had interests in the Albemarle. It meant cobbling together donations of land, brokering property exchanges, and guiding land divestments by corporations. Who were the players?

• The Nature Conservancy
• The Conservation Fund
• The Richard K. Mellon Foundation
• The State of North Carolina
• The US Department of Interior
• And even the IRS (to evaluate tax consequences of corporate donations)

Thanks to their creative diligence we have a mosaic of national wildlife refuges, state parks and wild game lands that add up to more than half a million acres. Within this acreage, agencies are working to reforest woodlands and restore wetlands if necessary.

Alligator River, Pocosin Lakes, Mattamuskeet and Roanoke River are some of the National Wildlife Refuges here, administered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. As for state parks, Pettigrew, Dismal Swamp, and Merchants Millpond are some examples.

They are oases in the Albemarle for all of us and a small hedge against rising seas.

Identity Change Develops Momentum

There is a highway along the south shore of the Sound that used to be considered a tedious miles-long pass-through for vacationers hurrying to a sparkling ocean and a lively Outer Banks (OBX) tourist scene worth a billion dollars annually.

Today, people are stopping along that highway south of the Sound and other highways along the north shore of the Sound.

The Albemarle area is developing its own identity; it is becoming known as the Inner Banks (IBX). It’s a special place where vacationers can slow down and discover a venerable part of the country that has been — well — forgotten by the outside world.

Communities in northeast North Carolina are capitalizing on their history and their roots. Towns have visitor centers,  friendly museums or nature centers, galleries and arts centers featuring local craftsmen, boardwalks, river views, walking tours or tram rides, even tree houses for rent. Ice cream cones, too.

Here you can find an intimate step back into the history and environment of the earliest pioneers in the country.

The Albemarle is not glitzy. There are no fern bars. It’s inviting and comfortable and unhurried. And there is good fishing.

Natural areas — a network of wildlife refuges, state game lands, state parks, community parks offer visitors a place to have a picnic and photograph wildlife, or a chance to linger along a creek or hike a trail, or join a guided tour for hands-on experiences.

These collective invitations to explore the Albemarle come from loose consortiums of public and private agencies.

Non-profit groups like The Nature Conservancy and North Carolina Coastal Land Trusts acquire and broker land for conservation.

NC Land of Water, Roanoke River Partners, and Bertie Water Crescent promote eco-tourism.

Coastal Wildlife Society, NC Coastal Reserve, and the Red Wolf Coalition are among many that work to conserve eco-systems.

Support comes from federal and state initiatives. Recent rollback of protection for streams and wetlands under the Clean Water Act has been reversed.

Oysters. once a staple of life in Albemarle waters but now struggling, partly because of changes in salinity and water quality, are being given helping hands. Oystermen are helping with initiatives, and, in the process, helping to promotethe industry.

Funding through the North American Wetlands Conservation Act, matched by partners in North Carolina, will conserve habitat for waterfowl and shorebirds.

The state is generously appropriating money for parks and recreation and clean water trust funds. Town and county governments are seeking funding and working with non-profits to promote eco-tourism.

Seeking Green Industry

But to preserve society here, the soft tread of ecotourism needs to be augmented by green industry. Renewable energy featuring wind farms and solar arrays are punctuating the landscape, bringing income to farmers and the community.

Offshore wind farms, not offshore oil-drilling platforms, make sense to most. Technology has brought the costs of solar and wind power into competitive range, and the environmental and human losses created by, devastating oil spills would become sad memories, not future threats in hurricane-prone seas.

To move forward, there must be political will that overcomes regressive political and industrial moves. Piping in natural  gas or replacing coal facilities with fracked-gas facilities, or building small nuclear plants are environmentally unsound, now that wind and solar power are cleaner and becoming more affordable.

With its climate and topography, North Carolina, and especially the Albemarle, can become a leader in producing renewable energy.

There is much progress to be proud of, but we face an unsettled future, as we shall see in the next part of this series.

Albemarle Sound: Voyage Through Centuries Part XI

Rising Seas and Sinking Land

Nathaniel Batts may have been a recluse when he died in 1679, but he was a virtuoso wheeler-dealer in his younger days as fur trader, land owner, pardoned murderer, serial debtor, swindler, explorer who discovered an inlet, and friend of people in high places. (A prenuptial agreement forbade him to use his wife’s fortune to satisfy his debts; he found forgiveness elsewhere.)

Batt’s colorful life surely deserves a ten-part mini-series, but for now we are more interested in his grave as an expression of what has been lost to rising seas and sinking land.

The North Carolina Gazetteer says that in 1749 the island called Batts Grave was 40 acres in area and had houses and orchards on it; by 1756 it had been reduced to 27 acres.

By mid-twentieth century Batts Grave was reduced to a fly-speck on a map. Today it is gone.

Rising seas, hurricanes and nor’easters ate at the island.  Sinking land played a lesser but inexorable role. These geologic forces are continuing today.

In fact, rising and falling seas that seem so dramatic to us today have been changing coastal landscapes for eons.

The Suffolk Shoreline referred to in the caption of this picture is the remains of an old shoreline that existed when the earth was much warmer than today, around 100,000 years ago. Sea level was 25 feet higher then.

The entire Albemarle area was below water, a shallow continental shelf. The barrier islands that we know today did not exist.

The map below shows that the coastal plain (Inner Banks) at just a few feet above sea level will begin to flood as polar ice caps melt.

Further rise in sea level will bring sea water up to the Suffolk  Shoreline, already discussed, is 25 to 50 feet above sea level, drowning the Inner and Outer Banks. The Suffolk Shoreline will flood if the ocean reaches the Fall Line.

The Fall Line, in black, is where the rolling hills of the Piedmont begin. Interstate 95 generally follows this ridge, which is about 150 feet above sea level today. If  both polar ice caps melt, the ocean would rise to the Fall Line.

All land east of the Fall Line would be flooded. Millennia before glaciation, when temperatures were higher and the world was a warmer place, the ocean reached the Fall Line.

Our lives are so short we can only observe nannoseconds of geologic change. We are lulled into assuming that the land always looks the same, unless we change it.  Yet change is constant. We simply don’t see it.

Let’s look more closely at why the coastal plain is slowly sinking.  In a word, past glaciation is the cause. How can that be, you ask, when this land was never glaciated?

During the last Ice Age, 20,000 years before present, glaciers extended as far south as Long Island. Tons of ice from these glaciers compressed the land beneath, pushing it down. In response, unglaciated land to the south (the Inner Banks) reacted by easing upward. (Like a slo-mo see-saw.)

As climate warmed and glaciers finally melted, the land that had been compressed under them was released and began to rise. Land to the south (the Inner Banks) reacted and is still reacting by sinking to previous levels. (Now the slo-mo see-saw has changed direction downward for those living on the Coastal Plain.)

This action takes centuries. We are only seeing some of the results of this geologic change today, and lately the changes seem to be measured in decades.

Where decades ago, land seemed dry, today, there are puddles and flooded streets after storms, worrisome to anyone living in a vintage family home where water now encroaches on the front porch during rainy times.

But this is only a small part of the story.

Let’s go back in time, say 15,000 years ago when glaciers are beginning to melt, and ocean water is still bound up in glacial ice.

The ocean is about 400 feet lower than today. Land would have extended some fifty miles east of today’s shoreline. A barrier beach, like the Outer Banks, if it existed, would have been just east of that. The Outer Banks, as we know it today, would not form until sea level rose to today’s levels.

The land is tundra-like, but warmer than you might expect because of the Gulf Stream that slides along the periphery. As climate warms, lush marshes and swamps will grow up, wonderful habitat for ice age mammals and birds — and early man.

As the earth warms and sea level rises, the shore line is flooded by the ocean and pushed westward. Marshes are flooded and die and are born anew on higher ground. They replace swamp forests whose trees have drowned but scattered seeds that will take hold on higher, dryer land.

As sea level rises, there is an inexorable migration of water and life to the west.

How long did this take? How far out on the continental shelf did early man live?  These are questions that cannot easily be answered.

The Albemarle area holds a plethora of  fluted points and artifacts, including a dugout canoe from about 6000 years ago. But artifacts of Paleo-Indians could date from 15,000 years ago, or earlier, and these are drowned in open seas today, so we can only imagine the extent of their occupation.

Let’s look at life from the perspective of Early Indians. They were hunter-gatherers who followed the food. They did not have vested interests in real estate and infrastructure. They accepted what the land had to offer, and moved on when necessary. You could say they were resilient.

It wasn’t necessarily an easy ride. There were great storms and droughts, and floods and freezes and forest fires, even a mini-ice age that lasted almost 1500 years.

Fossils of plants and animals and micro fossils of pollen tell stories.  By analyzing and carbon dating the kinds of life found in core samples of strata, scientists can read the ancient waves of climate change.

Coring on Roanoke Island by the NC Coastal Geology Cooperative reveals a combined rate of sinking land and rising sea level as follows:  Only three inches prior to the 19th century. Seven inches by the end of the 19th century. A whopping 16 inches by the end of the 20th century.

Can this be possible? Remember Batts Grave. Our own casual observations of water levels on our bulkhead tell the same story: about 6 to 8 inches rise in thirty-five  years.

Albemarle lands are among the most threatened in the country by a combination of sinking land (subsidence) and rising seas.

Do you remember the Suffolk Shoreline that rises west of Albemarle Sound and was under water  100,000 years ago?

As earth continues warming, rising seas are expected to reach the Suffolk Shoreline sometime in the next 100 to 500 years. We are seeing the beginnings today with consistent flooding of roads, farms and yards. The earth’s climate is constantly changing.

What Do We Do Now?

Where scientists could not persuade, hurricanes, flooding, loss of low areas and the appearance of ghost forests are turning skeptics into believers in sea level rise.

How will communities respond to threats to their way of life?

We are beginning to realize that we can no longer do battle with rising water and storms. Past knee-jerk reaction has been to harden structures — create seawalls, build jetties, erect bulkheads, pile on the rocks, or the  sandbags — to keep that water in its place.

Such efforts cannot be maintained in a dynamic environment where change is coin of a watery realm. Water will always win.

Tuning in to the natural world, and working with it, is the best way to preserve our well-being.

All that we have done to the land — ditching, draining, clear cutting the magnificent forests, building dams, laying down pavement — all this  speeds up and re-routes the natural flow of water and makes the land — and its people — more vulnerable to the forces of climate.

Spongy wetlands allow water to seep ever so slowly through the landscape. Mighty trees in acres of forests have vast networks of roots that drink copious quantities of water. Once removed, water quickens, and erosion and puddles and muck follow. Ugliness, too.

New ideas must bubble up through collaboration of scientists, government and communities. Like paleo-Indians we need to develop resilience, a concept that has been adopted by many planners.

Resilience to storms: Are we just mopping up after storms, or are we making decisions that will reduce future damage?

Communities need help in planning, developing shovel-ready projects that can put fixes in place immediately after a government call for proposals.

Resilience to rising sea level. Close kin of resilience to storms. We need to accept that we can’t prevent sea level rise, but we can develop long-term strategies tailored to sites and community needs.

Some examples that emphasize natural solutions:

• moving homes to higher ground
• planting trees whose roots are efficient at absorbing  water
• removing impervious pavement
• removing ditches to promote more natural flow of water
• making ground more spongy so rainwater percolates slowly instead of running off

The mills of government can grind slowly. Rising seas do not wait.

As we already know, it is people brainstorming who will find ways to protect our environment and care for human needs.

People are our most precious resource.

Jess lives on a 75-acre farm with a Charlotte’s-Web roster of chickens, ducks and geese, and a 250-pound pot-bellied pig who once singlehandedly chased four bears that dared to trespass.

A few years ago her family grew corn, wheat and soybeans on ditched and drained land. Now their fields are part of the federal Conservation Reserve Program. In exchange for rent, they have dedicated their land to hardwood trees, not crops.

In time these young trees will have deep and wide-ranging roots that will drink up rainwater and begin to take the land back to the days when mighty forests reigned.

With political will and dedication  and support from communities, we can tackle the tasks before us and make sensible plans that will take us into the future.

We can’t know all the answers because we can’t predict the curve balls to come, but we can develop the resilience that grounded those Paleo-Indians long long ago.

We thank the many career professionals and dedicated volunteers who are helping to protect Albemarle Sound, its land and rivers, and its wildlife.

This Voyage grew exponentially out of a grant the Albemarle Environmental Association received from the Albemarle-Pamlico Estuarine Study thirty years ago to produce a series of Profiles of Albemarle Sound and its rivers. The original versions can be found on the website AEA on the Web.