Monday, July 29, 2019

Living on an Island - Part II

In 1938 Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, published the following statement:

“When we look  up and down the ocean fronts of America, we find that everywhere they are passing behind the fences of private ownership.  The people can no longer get to the ocean.  When we have reached the point that a nation of 125 million people cannot set foot upon the thousands of miles of beaches that border the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, except by the permission of those who monopolize the ocean front, then I say it is the prerogative and the duty of the Federal and State Governments to step in and acquire, not a swimming beach here and there, but solid blocks of ocean front hundreds of miles in length.  Call this ocean front a national park or a national seashore, or a state park or anything you please--I say that the people have a right to a fair share of it.”

The Secretary’s statement was in response to the 1937 establishment of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, the first National Seashore in America’s National Park System.

In order to accommodate hunting interests, in 1940 the name was changed to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore Recreation Area and, until 1952, was passively managed by the National Park Service.

By this time the post-war increase in travel and tourism along with  growing concerns about severe erosion of the Outer Banks themselves led to a greatly increased interest in bringing the nominal National Seashore more into the mainstream of National Park organization.

In order to purchase the desired land total and to provide for infrastructure needs, the State of North Carolina (under the proactive leadership of Governor Kerr Scott) was joined by the philanthropic interests of Paul Mellon, heir of Andrew Mellon of the Mellon Bank and Pittsburgh Steel fortunes.

North Carolina put up $618,000 and Mellon more than matched it with $700,000 and the official establishment of Cape Hatteras National Seashore as we know it today happened on January 12, 1953.

As residents of Ocracoke, Trish and I live on the southernmost island tip of the National Seashore.

Ocracoke Island is made up of approximately 2,800 acres of land, about 2,100 of which is National Seashore land.  The island is about sixteen miles long lying between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pamlico Sound and marked by Hatteras Inlet on the north and Ocracoke Inlet on the south ends.

The island is narrow for most of its northeast to southwest length, but it bulges near the south end and that is where Ocracoke Village lies on the sound side of the island.  The location of the village has slowly migrated over nearly a 300 year time period to be at the safest spot on the island in time of storms and flooding.

All of the nearly sixteen miles of beach is National Seashore property.  There is no building anywhere on the beach, a fact that adds protection to the island during severe storms as the village itself is nearly a mile from the ocean front.  The front row of dunes can wash away during a storm and then come back in the next season.  If there were ocean front houses there, they would all be gone in such a storm.

The beach itself was rated this year by Dr. Stephen Leatherman (known as “Dr. Beach”) as the number two beach in America.  Number one this year was Kailua Beach Park in Hawaii.  In 2007 Ocracoke was number one and after being ranked first that year, that honor cannot be repeated for a number of years. Most years since then we have been either two or three.

America's Number 2 Beach For 2019

One section of the beach is lifeguard protected; it is the nearest to the village itself.  The rest of the sixteen miles is often so empty of people that you can find your own private stop with no one visible in any direction even on the busiest of summer days.

If you come here and plan to go in the water, our strong advice is to go to the Lifeguard Beach as rip currents are both invisible and notorious.  If you want to simply walk, read, sun, or escape from the world, then you might want to find your own private spot farther from the village.

Walkway To The Lifeguard Beach

I wish that Harold Ickes could come here today and see that, due to his early concern, Cape Hatteras National Seashore is one of America’s treasured open-to-everyone public seashore-beaches.

Our Beach On A Crowded Summer Day

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