Yesterday’s Outer Banks O
nce roads and bridges came to Dare County’s Outer Banks beginning in the 1930s, the beaches there opened up to a new wave of tourists. Especially after World War II, anyone with an automobile and sense of adventure could make it to the Outer Banks. Entrepreneurs both foreign and domestic catered to this mobile crowd by establishing hotels, rental cottages, restaurants, bait shops, fishing and hunting excursions, and the usual roadside attractions and tourist traps. A new book of more than 120 pictures shows the proprietors, their businesses and the tourists who visited them. In “Vintage Outer Banks: Shifting Sands & Bygone Beaches,” Sarah Downing assembled images of some of the betterknown beach hotels, restaurants and assorted hangouts, along with the moods of their patrons and staffs, to exhibit summer life at these Outer Banks from the 1940s through the 1960s with glimpses of a few as they faded away into the 1980s. Sarah Downing is assistant curator at the Outer Banks History Center in Manteo, a regional archives and research library, that turned 20 years old this year, administered by the North Carolina State Archives. Many of the photographs came from the history center, which was first established with the huge collection of materials donated by the late Outer Banks historian and writer David Stick. Included are
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pictures by legendary local photographers Aycock Brown, Roger P. Meekins and Drew Wilson, whose work played a major role in attracting people to the Outer Banks. The pictures are accompanied by narratives and anecdotes on each establishment ranging from the Nags Head Casino to Mann’s Recreation Center, from The Croatan Inn to Dowdy’s Amusement Park.
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Photos show a bathing beauty at the Nags Header Hotel, an aerial view of the Jockey Ridge Restaurant and a young lady placing a coin on the ceiling there in the 1950s, and the Sir Walter Raleigh statue in Manteo, 1978. None of the places remain today.
The book is available from bookstores or the publisher. “Vintage Outer Banks” 128 pages, 7x10, softcover, $19.99 The History Press 18 Percy St Charleston, SC 29403 (843) 577-5971 www.historypress.net