Jacqueline DeGroot

Ocean Isle Beach-A History & Remembrance Jacqueline DeGroot

This book is about an eight-mile barrier island on the Atlantic coast. It faces due south, on the same latitude as Los Angeles, California and Damascus, Syria. The island enjoys a mild climate and its oceanfront consists entirely of sandy beach. It wasn't an island until 1934 when it was severed from the mainland by the construction of a section of the Intracoastal Waterway. On March 1, 1524, Giovanni da Verrazano, a Florentine in the employ of the King of France, made his first landfall at nearby Cape Fear. He stayed anchored off shore in the area that included the island for three days before exploring the North American coast. We are indebted to Verrazano for describing the inhabitants of our area in his day: These people go altogether naked except only that they cover their privy parts with certain skins of beasts like unto martens, which they fasten onto a girdle made of grass, very artfully wrought, hanged about with tails of diverse beasts, which round about their bodies hang dangling down to their knees. Some of them wear garlands of birds' feathers. The people are of color russet, and not much unlike Saracens, their hair black, thick and not very long, which they tie together in a knot behind, and wear it like a tail. They are well featured in their limbs, of mean [average] stature, and commonly somewhat bigger than we. After Verrazano, what is now Ocean Isle, slept in solitude for hundreds of years, disturbed only by a visit in 1791 of George Washington on his Southern Tour and by the U. S. Coast Guard's mounted sailors who patrolled the island's beach in WWll. In the 1920s, the long repose ended with an awakening by prohibition and the jazz age. Young flappers expended energy dancing the Charleston and imbibing bootlegged gin in Ocean Isle's first commercial structure, a honky-tonk on the island's welcoming beach.