Cape Hatteras National Seashore
Park History
Sourced
A thin, broken strand of barrier islands curves out into the Atlantic and back again, sheltering North Carolina’s mainland coast and sounds. For thousands of years these islands of the Outer Banks have survived wind and sea; Cape Hatteras National Seashore protects their beaches, dunes, marshes and maritime forests of oak, cedar and yaupon holly. Offshore lie the shifting sand ridges of Diamond Shoals, in waters called the Graveyard of the Atlantic: more than 600 ships wrecked here, the park brochure counts, and in World War II German submarines sank so many Allied ships that the area was also called Torpedo Junction. Villagers served in the U.S. Life-Saving Service from the 1870s, kept the lighthouses — Ocracoke’s of 1823, Cape Hatteras’s of 1870, Bodie Island’s of 1872 — and buried the dead when rescues failed. [1]
Congress authorized Cape Hatteras as the first national seashore in 1937, and it was formally established on January 12, 1953. [2] [1] It stretches more than 70 miles across Bodie, Hatteras and Ocracoke islands; eight villages that predate the park lie among them but are not part of it. The park’s 2011 foundation document lists those who have made these islands home — Native Americans, farmers, watermen, enslaved people, lighthouse keepers and surfmen — and calls the seashore a living laboratory for the study of climate change and its effects on sea level. [2]
Indigenous peoples
The first written account of the Outer Banks, Verrazzano’s of 1524, tells of many Native people meeting his crew off what was likely Hatteras Island; in David Stick’s 1958 retelling, they hauled a sailor tumbled by the surf onto dry sand and later sent him back to his boat. In 1590 John White speculated that the lost Roanoke colonists had joined the friendly Indians at Croatoan, now Hatteras Island — a theory never substantiated. The park’s 2005 ethnohistory reports that in the early 1700s about 80 Indians, likely Hatteras, lived in the Cape Woods along the sound; the archaeological record suggests theirs were the island’s only permanent settlements. Quoting Gary Dunbar (1956), it says they were described in 1715 as “in great poverty,” and that a 1733 cartographer counted “6 or 8” at Hatteras living among the English. Stick found the last reference to the Hatteras Indians in a 1788 deed from “Mary Elks, Inden, of Hatteras Banks.” [3]
Black history
Slave ownership on the Banks was minimal but present; under Union occupation during the Civil War Hatteras Island held about 1,200 people, almost 100 of them enslaved, by historian David Stick’s count. [3] Richard Etheridge, born enslaved, who had served three years in the army’s 36th Infantry (colored), became on January 24, 1880, the first African American to command a life-saving station when he was named keeper of the Pea Island station, after its all-white crew was dismissed for negligence following an 1879 wreck. His all-Black crew — the only all-Black life-saving station in the country — rescued all nine people aboard the schooner E.S. Newman in a storm on October 11, 1896. The crew went unrecognized during the station’s years of service; on March 5, 1996, Etheridge and six surfmen were posthumously awarded Gold Lifesaving Medals. [4]
Climate & environment
Most of the seashore’s barrier islands are less than 400 meters wide and lie entirely within the 100-year flood zone, and the U.S. Geological Survey’s 2005 assessment found relative sea level at Beaufort, about 75 kilometers southwest of Ocracoke, rising about 3.7 millimeters a year — roughly twice the global average — and rated 27 percent of the nearly 120 miles of shoreline it evaluated at very high vulnerability to sea-level rise and another 27 percent at high. [5] At Cape Hatteras, the 2003 cultural landscape report says, erosion had claimed about 1,800 feet of beach in front of the original 1803 tower by 1872; in 1999 the entire light station was moved southwest to a site about 1,600 feet from the shoreline. [6]
Labor & the New Deal
In the early 1930s North Carolina planned three parallel lines of ocean-front dunes from the Virginia line to Ocracoke Inlet, and the work was turned over to the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Work Projects Administration. [3] Crews erected sand fences, piled brush from trees downed in the 1933 storm along the beach to trap sand, planted grass and dug roads and ditches; islanders recall camps at Rodanthe, near the Cape Hatteras lighthouse and on Ocracoke, where workers built theirs from lumber salvaged from the 1935 wreck of the Nomis. Some of the young men, paid $30 a month, married local women and stayed. [7] Near the lighthouse, the 2003 cultural landscape report finds, the CCC and WPA dunes of 1935–36 held the shoreline back for thirty years. [6]
Sources
- NPSHistory.com: Cape Hatteras National Seashore archive page — overview (NPS brochure text, 2011) and establishment block
- Foundation Document, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, North Carolina (NPS, 2011)
- Impact Assessment, Inc., Ethnohistorical Description of the Eight Villages adjoining Cape Hatteras National Seashore and Interpretive Themes of History and Heritage, Vol. 1 (NPS, November 2005)
- Stover, Pea Island Life-Saving Station, Rodanthe, North Carolina, Coast Guard Station #177: Historic Resource Study (NPS, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, 2008)
- Pendleton, Thieler & Williams, Coastal Vulnerability Assessment of Cape Hatteras National Seashore (CAHA) to Sea-Level Rise, USGS Open-File Report 2004-1064 (2005)
- Vincent, Cape Hatteras Light Station Cultural Landscape Report (NPS Southeast Region, 2003)
- Impact Assessment, Inc., Ethnohistorical Description of the Eight Villages adjoining Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Vol. 2 (NPS, November 2005), §8.7 WPA/CCC
FLAGGED FOR REVIEW: Interpretive materials
In 1933, Cape Hatteras became a national seashore, the first of its kind in the National Park Service system, protecting the treacherous 'Graveyard of the Atlantic' from development.
Cape Hatteras Light Station, built in 1870, is the tallest brick lighthouse in America at 210 feet. The cape's shifting sandbars and shallow waters earned it the nickname 'Graveyard of the Atlantic' for centuries of shipwrecks. Originally designated as Cape Hatteras National Seashore in 1937; represents the first federal effort to preserve a seashore ecosystem.
From the internal review records: “This package is all the waysides for Bodie Island District of CAHA. All need to be reviewed for natural resource language potentially non compliant with SO.”
Why this matters: Cape Hatteras protects a unique coastal ecosystem where maritime history, geology, and ecology intersect. Over 2 million people visit this site each year.
- “The Air We Breathe” — removed
This package is all the waysides for Bodie Island District of CAHA. All need to be reviewed for natural resource language potentially non compliant with SO.
On the doule panels, map panels do not need to be reviwed, just the interp panels on the right.
Some I have digital files for, other I do not (do not have digital files for the panels that accompany the maps)
Photographs attached to this park's records in the leaked NPS review database.
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