101 Glimpses of Nags Head

By Sarah Downing

Nags Head boasts a plethora of natural wonders. From an ecologically unique maritime forest to breathtaking coastal dunes, the dynamics of the area corroborate the sentiment Thomas Nixon expressed in his 1964 classic. Indeed, as early as the 1830s, merchants and planters from the Albemarle region of North Carolina and Southside Virginia brought their families to Nags Head via boat to exchange the oppressive inland summer heat for cool ocean breezes. In this striking photographic collection, Downing illustrates why this scenic spot on the Outer Banks has been beloved for generations by sun-seekers, sightseers and surfers alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781625842848

Sarah Downing

Sarah Downing loves history. Most of her career she worked at the Outer Banks History Center in Manteo, North Carolina. Sarah authored four books with The History Press about the Outer Banks region. Her fifth book is about her hometown of Norfolk, Virginia. In 2015 she pulled up stakes and headed for the hills. She continues to write a history column for Outer Banks Milepost magazine from her home outside of Asheville, North Carolina, where she is also trying to learn to play guitar.

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INTRODUCTION

EARLY HISTORY

Nags Head has the distinction of having been a resort long before the other areas of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. As early as the 1830s, merchants and planters from the Albemarle region of North Carolina and Southside Virginia brought their families to Nags Head via boat to escape the oppressive summer heat inland and to take advantage of ocean breezes, sea bathing and the general healthy climate. These stays were long, and visitors brought everything they would need for an extended vacation—furniture, tutors, servants and livestock.

George Higby Throop, writing under the name of Gregory Seaworthy, penned a fictional account of his stay at Nags Head as a tutor for a wealthy family prior to the Civil War:

The resort was soon thronged. A hotel was built, and a chapel. Roads were cut through the woods, and among what the bankers call the up-guoines (sand-hills). The song and the dance; the fox-hunt, the bowling-alley, and the delicious fish were powerful recommendations, and Nag’s Head became but another name for happiness. Lovers walked on the sea-shore. Doctors practiced without fees. It was respectable to be seen in homespun.

Map of Nags Head, North Carolina. Legend has it that land pirates would drape a lantern over the head of a nag and then walk the horse over the dunes. At sea, ships would assume the light was another ship on the ocean and would sail too close to shore, where the stranded vessel was plundered. Map by Stuart Parks II.

Unlike many other seaside resorts, Nags Head was largely composed of privately owned homes. Families, friends and neighbors vacationed amongst one another. This gathering place for the well-to-do was very much a social climate where relationships were forged that would last generations.

During the Civil War, General Wise of Virginia made his headquarters at Nags Head, bringing men and supplies down the beach from Princess Anne County, Virginia, or by a ferry near the site of the present-day Wright Memorial Bridge. Wise suffered high fever and an attack of pleurisy and was too sick to command his troops. He would lose his son, O. Jennings Wise of the Richmond Light Infantry Blues, at the Battle of Roanoke Island in February 1862. Before retreating with a contingent of his men, the hotel in which he had made his headquarters was burned and much personal property was destroyed so that it would not fall into enemy hands.

After the war, it wasn’t long before families once again began to summer at Nags Head. The original resort was located on the sound side, where families and their belongings arrived on sloops and steamers that landed at long docks extending into the sound or anchored off shore, where passengers were ferried ashore in smaller boats. Later cottages were built on the oceanfront. Mrs. C.W. Hollowell, née Parthenia Gatling, wrote of her early experiences in Nags Head for a column in the Elizabeth City Daily Advance in 1933:

In the spring of 1868 my father, James Lawrence Gatling, of Cedar Vale in Perquimans County near Hertford, decided he would build a cottage on the ocean side at Nags Head. So he bought an acre from Francis Nixon the elder, paying $25.00 for the lot. The timber was cut and prepared for the house just as it was to be set up on arrival on the site at Nags Head. Every piece of