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The
place names of this area reflect the early Native American heritage.
Currituck is a derivation of a Native American work meaning “land
of the wild goose.” Chowanog, Poteskeet and other tribes
that lived on the mainland used the barrier island as fishing
and hunting grounds and named it for its abundance of geese. Europeans,
who began settling in the area in the 1600s applied the word to
the barrier island, the county, the sound and two inlets.
In the late
1600s and early 1700s, a few European settlers resided on the
northern barrier islands, but most people preferred to live on
the mainland. Until the early 1800s, Currituck Banks was separated
from Virginia by Old and New Currituck inlets and from Duck by
Caffeys Inlet, so getting there was only possible by boat. |
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By
the mid-1800s there were several communities, tiny hamlets really, dotting
the northern Outer Banks.
There was
Wash Woods nearest to the Virginia line, Seagull a little farther down
near Penny’s Hill, Jones Hill, a.k.a. Whalehead or Currituck Beach
(now Corolla), and Poyners Hill between Corolla and Duck. The communities
were extremely isolated and remote, set amidst the untamed marshes and
dunes of the banks.
The early
residents of the banks fished and hunted to make a modest living. They
tended gardens and raised livestock, which ran at large on the barrier
island. The bankers patrolled the beach to salvage items that washed
ashore from numerous shipwrecks, and they recycled many of their goods
in creative ways because suppliers were hard to get. They traveled by
boat to the mainland to sell waterfowl or fish, to purchase supplies
or to visit friends and family. The locals also found work guiding and
helping wealthy sportsmen from the north who hunted on the Currituck
Sound.
In 1892, a
writer from Harpers Weekly wrote about the Currituck Banks, “If
there were any spot on earth that one would expect to find untenanted,
it surely would be this stretch of sand between ocean and sound. …Yet
there is a hardy race who have lived here from father to son for over
a century. They exist entirely by hunting, fishing, rearing cattle and
acting as guides.”
Of these villages,
the only one that stood the test of time was Corolla. Other villages
petered out as times got hard, but a few residents always hung in there
at Corolla. The village was able to thrive partly because of its abundance
of government jobs, which offered steady pay. In 1873, when the village
was still known as Jones Hill, construction began on the Currituck Beach
Lighthouse. The red-brick lighthouse, which towered over the small village
and the banks, was completed and lit on December 1, 1875. The light
keepers and their families added several new residents to the village.
In 1874 the
U.S. Life Saving Service established the Jones Hill Life Saving Station
just east of the Currituck Beach Lighthouse site. This station, which
was later known as Currituck Beach Life Saving Station, was one of the
seven original life-saving stations on the Outer Banks. Seven local
men were hired to staff the station from December through March. The
keeper in charge received a salary of $200 a year, while the six surfmen
were paid $40 a month for four months, with an additional $3 for every
wreck they attended. The surfmen lived at the station, while their families
resided in the village.
By 1895 Jones
Hill was busy enough to have its own post office. The postal service,
notorious for changing the traditional names of Outer Banks villages,
required that the villagers send in several suggestions for an official
name. The story goes that they submitted Jones Hill and Currituck Beach
and were looking for other suggestions when someone mentioned that the
inner part of a flower is called a corolla. That name was submitted
and chosen by the postal service, forever changing the name of the small
village.
Corolla’s
population was large enough to require a church and schoolhouse. The
children of the village had been attending various small schools, but
in 1905 Currituck County was ready to support the one-room local school.
The county provided a teacher, schoolbooks and standardized grading,
and all the children of all grades attended the school together.
In 1922 another
work opportunity arrived in the village when Edward and Marie-Louise
LeBel Knight began work on Corolla Island ( now the Whalehead Club).
When the massive house on the sound was finally was finished in 1925,
it must have been quite a sight to the modest-living locals. The residence
provided many work opportunities for the locals. The Knights employed
local men as caretakers and hunting guides to accompany their invited
guests.
In the 1930s
it is said that more than 100 people lived at the village of Corolla.
The Depression hit hard in the rest of the country, but on the banks
people were able to survive off the wealth of the land and sea. During
the period after the Depression, CCC and WPA boys were hired all along
the Outer Banks to construct the high dunes and plant stabilizing grasses
along the oceanfront. This project changed the geologic patterns of
the barrier islands, preventing ocean overwash in serious storms. Little
did anyone know then that these dunes would eventually lead to increased
soundside erosion.
World War
II had a strong impact on the village of Corolla. The U.S. Coast Guard
leased the Whalehead Club to use as a training base, bringing hundreds
of sailors to the village. The Coast Guard had barracks and support
buildings around the village and out on the beach near the Coast Guard
Station (formerly the Life Saving Station).
German U-boats
came close to the shoreline of the Outer Banks, and locals were required
to darken their windows and use no headlights when driving on the beach.
The village bustled with the influx of servicemen; the church services
were full and the post office and store were always busy.
After the
war, the population of Corolla dwindled rapidly. Many residents left
the banks to look for jobs on the mainland. The lighthouse, electrified
in 1938, no longer required several keepers, just a caretaker. (The
villagers, however, didn’t get electricity until 1955.) In the
late 1950s Corolla’s population reached its lowest point. The
school closed for lack of students, and there were only three families
residing in the village. The church sat empty. The Whalehead Club was
empty most of the year, though it was used as a boy’s school,
Corolla Academy, in the summers. Later the Whalehead Club was converted
into a most inappropriate use as the headquarters for Atlantic Research,
a rocket fuel testing facility.
In the 1970s
only about 15 people lived in the village. People who visited or lived
there back then say that Corolla felt like the absolute end of the earth.
The road leading to Corolla was just a clay trail along the soundside,
with “truck-swallowing holes” and sugar-fine sand that was
nearly impossible to drive through. The Whalehead Club and lighthouse
buildings were in grave disrepair. Corolla was wild and rugged and overgrown.
It was the last coastal getaway of the grandest kind, and anyone who
ever went there fell in love with it just exactly like it was.
In the 1970s
alternative vacationers were beginning to discover the isolated beaches
of the Currituck Banks. Since there were no paved roads leading into
Corolla, people drove on the beach from Virginia or Duck. But in 1974,
U.S. Fish and Wildlife blocked the Virginia border to prevent excessive
traffic in its Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Corolla residents
were given special passes to be able to go through the gate. The border
is still closed today.
Meanwhile,
developers were buying up sizeable chunks of the Currituck Outer Banks.
Ocean Sands and Whalehead were the first large-scale developments on
the banks north of Duck. To access these properties, in 1975, one of
the developers built a private road from Duck almost all the way to
Corolla. To keep people out of the private developments, the developers
constructed a guard gate at the south end of the road. The guard was
not allowed to let anyone but property owners past the gate. Sightseers
were turned away, but many of them drove up on the beach anyway.
The southern
guard gate didn’t come down until October 1984, when the state
took over the road and made it part of N.C. Highway 12. The state extended
the road to pass thought Corolla, and it was the village’s first
paved road. With the road open, interest in real estate jumped immediately,
and the rest of the Currituck Banks story is quite apparent today.
Development
came quickly. Former residents say the change was cataclysmic. Over
the next decade, more than 1,500 homes were built on the Currituck Banks
between the Dare County line and Corolla village. (In 1984 there were
422 homes, but by 1995 there were 1,966 homes.) By the year 2000, there
were 2,750 homes in that same area. Almost all of these homes are second
homes and vacation rentals, sitting empty for most of the year. More
than 50 percent of the homes are greater than 5,000 square feet.
All this development
quickly filled the empty land on the Currituck Banks, the land that
used to provide a nest of isolation to Corolla village. Miraculously,
the tiny village has managed to keep its boundaries and to keep typical
Outer Banks development out, though it is a much different place today
than it used to be. Many of the historic buildings have been adapted
to modern uses, but their character and the sense of village is still
intact.
But don’t
mistake what you see today for what Corolla village used to be. Many
of the buildings you see today are new construction or have been moved
to the village from other places. Down the road, the Currituck Beach
Lighthouse and the Whalehead Club have developed modern appeal as tourist
attractions. Even so, these attractions and old Corolla village buildings
stand in marked contrast to the modern development of the Currituck
Outer Banks, helping us to remember that Corolla does indeed have a
past.
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