Island Inn

For months one of Ocracoke’s most iconic buildings, the Island Inn, has been sitting empty and neglected. A “For Sale” sign fastened near the front door announces that its future is uncertain. Now an ad hoc committee of four concerned islanders, Johnny Giagu, Ed Norvell, Bill Rich (County Manager), and Tom Pahl (County Commissioner), have put together a proposal that could save the building and make it available for community use.

In 1900 James and Zilphia Howard sold the one-acre tract of land to the trustees of "Ocracoke Lodge No. 194 Independent order of Odd Fellows" for use as a "Lodge room or such other purpose as they may deem proper." A two-story wood frame building, the center section of the current structure, was built in 1901. It housed the Odd Fellow's Lodge on the second floor. Soon thereafter two island schools were consolidated to create one public school which was held on the first floor.

Odd Fellows Lodge, OPS Photo, Earl O'Neal Collection

Over the next 117 years the “Lodge,” as it came to be called, was added to and modified. Over the years it variously served the island as a private home, inn, restaurant, coffee shop, WWII officers quarters, and gift shop. In the early to mid-20th century it was the center of community social life. Islanders gathered there for Saturday night square dances accompanied by the music of fiddle, banjo, guitar, and triangle.

On December 7, 2017, the ad hoc committee (the “Island Inn Preservation Committee”) secured a purchase agreement from the property’s current owner which allows the committee 150 days to negotiate additional agreements with adjoining property owners, the Occupancy Tax Board, the Tourism Development Authority, Hyde County, and the Ocracoke Preservation Society.

Immediately Tom Pahl and Johnny Giagu met with the Executive Committee of the Preservation Society to present their proposal. At the meeting on December 7, 2017, the members of the OPS Executive Committee voted to “support the plan brought by the ad hoc committee … and … to work with the ad hoc committee toward accomplishing the goals presented,” which included using $150,000 of OPS’s “Save an Old House” revolving fund as down payment on the property, to accept initial ownership of the property, and to transfer the property, with conservation easements, to “another community entity” in the future.

Still to be negotiated during the 150-day period are funding to pay mortgage payments, demolition of the two badly deteriorated wings, and stabilization of the historic center section. Sale would not be final, nor funds committed, until those details of the project were established.

Although the initial goal is simply to preserve the historic center section of the Lodge, future plans might include turning the building into a visitors center with public restrooms, space for community meetings and gatherings, and “green” areas for picnicking and other outdoor activities.

This month's Ocracoke Newsletter is my analysis of a sentence penned by surveyor Jonathan Price in 1795. The sentence reads, "Occacock was heretofore, and still retains the name of, an island. It is now a peninsula; a heap of sand having gradually filled up the space which divided it from the bank."  You can read my analysis here: https://www.villagecraftsmen.com/description-occacock-1795/.