Harkers Island in North Carolina was originally called "Craney Island".
We found an article on an unusual museum there.
A few people on Harkers Island still remember when hunting
waterfowl for food was a natural part of life, not a recreational sport.
They remember carving duck decoys to attract ducks for the table, to eat, not to decorate the mantle over the fireplace.
The CORE SOUND WAATERFOWL MUSEUM has been created to honor that
Down East Heritage and encourage the carvers who practice the old art.
The museum is housed in a small house rented for a dollar a year, but it
attracts visitors from all over the world.
The carvers--old-timers and new enthusiasts--work on the porch
of the little museum Wednesday through Sunday, carving, explaining their
techniques, and telling stories about the long tradition of decoy carving in
coastal North Carolina.
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L. C. Kure built the first fishing pier into the Atlantic Ocean in 1923, using timbers cut nearby. The pier was 16 feet wide and 120 feel long, and it fell in a storm in the first year. The following year, Kure rebuilt his pier with concrete posts reinforced with railroad iron, doubling the length and width. It has since been damaged by hurricanes eleven times and rebuilt every time. In 1952, Bill Robertson, then Kure's son-in-law, bought the pier and with relentless promotion made it into a big attraction, the most popular fishing pier on the coast. Three phenomenal months of fishing in the fall of 1957 didn't hurt any. People hauled fish off the pier in wheelbarrows. In a single day, more than 80,000 fish were caught from the pier. Bill, who died in 1988, wrote a book about the pier called Man! You Should Have Been Here Last Week. His son Mike now operates the pier |
In a wooded area near the town of Bath is a series of saucer-sized depressions in the earth that have mystified people for nearly 200 years. Nothing grows in the depressions, and debris placed in them will not remain. Legend has it that the depressions were made by the hooves of a spirited horse ridden by a young man named Jesse Elliott in a race shortly after the turn of the nineteenth century. Local people frowned on Sunday horse racing, but Jesse and a group of other young men scorned them. During one Sunday race, just after Jesse shouted, "Take me in a winner or take me to hell," his horse dug in its hooves, throwing Jesse into a nearby pine tree and killing him instantly. The hoofprints are unmarked but regularly visited. |