Portsmouth Dipping Vats

Yesterday I wrote about the "Tick War" on Ocracoke Island in the early 1920s.  In the process of "digging around" on the web I found a transcript of an Ocracoke woman who recounted finding an old sheep dipping vat on Portsmouth Island. She had this to say:

"Well, they had like a corral, and they'd run 'em [the sheep] in it, and then there was this big sheet- matter of fact, I just got back pictures on it. I took pictures of it. And, uh, they had like a ramp going up to the thing, this big cement thing filled with some kind of stuff with dip in it, you know. And they [the sheep] would run off of the ramp into it. And it was so deep that they would go under, so that it completely covered 'em. And it was on a slant, and they would come out the other end. And they'd run 'em through that to kill the ticks. And, I mean, the park didn't know about it and didn't an- I mean, we find something that they didn't know about and we could tell them, and that's pretty exciting."

You can read the entire transcript here: https://ils.unc.edu/afporch/audio/dialect/36.html.

If you have ever wondered how the street you live on or vacation on got its name, or are just curious about other street names, take a look at this month's Ocracoke Newsletter. We have compiled a list of every official street in Ocracoke village, along with one or more paragraphs explaining how they came to be named. You can read the Newsletter here.