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On May 4th, 5th, and 6th, 2001, the Hatteras Keepers Descendants Homecoming welcomes back about 1,200 keepers’ family members to the Cape Hatteras Light Station. A copy of the commemorative book Hatteras Keepers Oral and Family Histories was given to each registered descendant upon his/her arrival. The Outer Banks Lighthouse Society is the cosponsor of the event with the National Park Service. Throughout the weekend, descendants had an opportunity to learn about the keepers’ duties, meet for family photographs, and visit the lighthouse and the keepers’ quarters. Several children who were born in the keepers’ quarters came home for the first time in decades. The event was videotaped and media were present to interview family members. The special programs were for the descendants only, but the light station remained open to the public as usual. On the evening of May 6, the National Park Service rededicated the Cape Hatteras Light Station, to bring closure to the relocation project.
It was a sunny summer’s day last June on the Outer Banks when I drove to meet Annie (Fulcher) Pellegrini in Frisco for an oral history interview. She was my introduction to a number of Hatteras Islanders and other keepers’ direct descendants who have been integral parts of an intriguing project. Through recorded conversations, a valuable piece of American history from our North Carolina coast has been revealed.
With the sun hot on my back and a steady ocean breeze blowing my carry bag containing my notes and recorder, I began my journey back in time in the villages of Kinnekeet, Buxton, Trent, and Hatteras Village during the early 1900s. This was a time when family helped family, and a neighbor was like family; it was a time when there were three modes of transportation: by foot, by sailboat, or by horse and cart. Interviews with Annie and her two sisters, Day and Jennie, toured me through four decades at the turn of the twentieth century on Hatteras Island. And they were just the beginning of my tour.
In an effort to record the last direct connections to the keepers of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, a search for keepers’ descendants began in April 2000. The oral histories have been married with family history research by Sandra MacLean Clunies in a commemorative book under my editorship. There have been thousands of man-hours invested in locating the keepers’ descendants, extending an invitation to the special weekend planned for them, creating family charts, and the recording, writing, and editing of the oral and family histories.
In the oral histories, we find tuberculosis, diphtheria, and influenza deadly enemies; many children didn’t grow to adulthood. Numerous families were separated by quarantine in sanatoriums. The Julian H. Austin story reveals the pain endured by families who were separated from one another and the keeper kept up his duties at the lighthouse while carrying for young children. We learn of “Doc Folb” who diverted a diphtheria epidemic by soliciting the help of the Navy in the 1930s, and of Rovena, the midwife, who delivered nearly every baby born at Cape Hatteras Lighthouse during the twentieth century. And we hear Norma (Gray) Rhoden speak of plenty of skinned knees from skating on the sidewalks at the lighthouse, and the laughter of a passel of children piled on two beds at the keepers’ quarters, giggling their way into a night of secure sleep with friends and family while the beam of the Cape Hatteras Fresnel lens glided through the bedroom every seven and one-half seconds. We listen over and again to the statement, “It was the best place for a child to grow up.”
Next, we discover that these families living from around 1900-1930 were living much as Americans did in the previous century. A visitor would have had a difficult time in the 1920s and ‘30s deciding what century he had stepped into while looking at sand roads, traveling by sailboat or horse and cart, using oil lamps to illuminate the absolute dark after sunset, storing food with blocks of ice, washing clothes by hand, and having little access to a camera to record the experience. Not until the late 1930s did things on the island begin to change when a few families, usually the keepers’ families since they had the best-paying jobs on the island, bought Delco battery-charged electrical systems, kerosene refrigerators and washing machines, and perhaps a car. Legend has it that the first two cars on Hatteras Island managed to collide.
The great boom of the 1920s was faintly heard on Hatteras Island, just as the Depression was a near non-event. Mainland and world events echoed quietly and in past tense for the most part, except when the enemy showed up on their front doorstep in the form of submarines chasing the oil-laden ships supporting Allied efforts in 1918 and again in 1942. Keepers’ children and grandchildren remember the German U-boats and still feel the chilling fear of those days. Ominous strangers lurking in their waters are expressed as “the extreme dangers there [at the lighthouse] for my father and for us.” Times that were tough for friends and relatives on the mainland were buffered by a government job on Hatteras Island. Because maritime trade was a priority and lighthouses were at the heart of ensuring safe passage, a keeper’s job was secure as long as the job was done efficiently. Although a keeper’s pay was meager, it sustained his family and often an extended family as well. Fishing provided people with food, gardens were a tradition, and farming other resources on the island had been a skill since man first stepped foot on sand.
In the family pictures, we can see the people age; there are happy children interrupted by the rare camera photograph, then studio wedding pictures, and then a picture of the same couple thirty years later. We get a sense of time passing and the modern world coming to the island and realize how short life is, even when lived on “island time.” And we get to hear people who have experienced the twentieth century, the century of change, tell their stories about family life, joys, struggles, and survival. These are the “real” survivors who created a proud heritage for their children despite informal schooling and living with little amenities. We also realize what a privilege it is to look into these rare family photo albums because a great many have been lost to home fires and “the tides,” the term used by the “old ones” for the flooding of the island from storm surges.
A keeper’s family was one of the most respected families in the community; the job title carried an air of authority and respect. The keeper’s wife was often the key coordinator of home and hearth while raising large families and attending to all needs that arose around her at the light station. Common characteristics that I have noted among these upstanding people are that the children and grandchildren inherited a strong sense of right and wrong, frugality, and dedication to one’s job. And there is one more thing—among the keeper’s children and grandchildren, there is a consensus that helping a fellow man is an act of human kindness, and well, just plain common sense.
This story appeared in the
May 2001 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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