Many Proud Old Ships

The Beaufort News, Beaufort, N. C. on Thursday, Aug. 21, 1941, published an article by Aycock Brown titled "Many Proud Old Ships Lie Buried Beneath The Sands Of Ocracoke Island."

Brown wrote, "To the visitor going to Ocracoke for the first time, the island is a very strange place. It is a land of dead live oaks, tame wild geese and fresh salt mullet. It is also a place where the finest people in the world make their homes. On the beach are the remnants of proud old ships which were lost in the graveyard of the Atlantic and came ashore in the backwash of tides swirling through Hatteras Bight. Ocracoke, like Hatteras Island, the "Cape Stormy" of the Atlantic Coast, is wind swept and storm swept, but so far there is no record of anyone ever losing their lives there during a hurricane, and no house has ever been blown down by the winds. It is true that a few houses have been undermined and washed down during severe gales which brought sea tides across the village but these cases have been very few indeed. The people of Ocracoke are proud of their ancestry. They know that they are descendants, perhaps, of ship wrecked mariners but they are proud of this whether their ancestor was of Anglo Saxon or Arabian stock. Ocracoke probably had its founding as a result of a ship wreck, and this is a story about some of the ships."

You can read the entire article here: http://newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn91068210/1941-08-21/ed-1/seq-14/.

Our latest Ocracoke Newsletter is a history of Village Craftsmen (1970 - the Present). You can read the Newsletter here: https://www.villagecraftsmen.com/history-village-craftsmen-ocracoke-island/.