Harkers Island, North Carolina

Harkers Island is a census-designated place (CDP) in Carteret County, North Carolina, United States. As of the 2020 census, Harkers Island had a population of 1,127. Harkers Island is unincorporated and receives most public services, including law enforcement and public education, from Carteret County. A membership cooperative provides the island with electric and water services. Major industries on the island include fishing, boat building, tourism, and waterfowl decoy carving.

Formerly named Davers Ile and Craney Island, Harkers Island was occupied by Native Americans of the Coree tribe when the first European explorers arrived in the 16th century. Ownership of Harkers Island was first titled to Farnifold Green, a native of the Carolina colony, by the lord proprietor in 1707. Ebenezer Harker purchased the island in 1730, settled there with his family, and built a plantation and boat yard. The island became known as Harkers Island soon after his death. A large immigration of islanders fleeing the hurricane-ravaged Outer Banks in 1899 dramatically increased the island population, which largely depended on fishing and boat building. Separated from the mainland for centuries, many Harkers Island residents speak a distinct dialect of English, earning them the nickname "Hoi toiders."

History

Before the arrival of European explorers and settlers, Harkers Island was inhabited by Native Americans of the Coree tribe, who likely spoke a language of the Algonquian family, like most coastal tribes. The nearby Core Sound and Core Banks are named after the Coree. The Coree left little in the way of evidence of permanent habitation on Harkers Island, except for a large mound of oyster shells at Shell Point on the eastern end of the island. Similar shell mounds were found by Europeans on the Shackleford Banks and other islands of the Outer Banks. The exact purpose of the mounds for the Coree remains unknown, but varying cultures of indigenous peoples in the Southeast had been building major earthwork mounds since 3500 BCE, the Middle Archaic period, usually related to religious and ceremonial uses.

In 1584, an English expedition financed by Sir Walter Raleigh and led by Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe explored the North Carolina coast for a suitable site for the first English colony in North America. Two Native Americans, Wanchese and Manteo, accompanied the expedition back to England in the fall of 1584. According to local island legend, Wanchese was a Coree from Harkers Island. The island was first charted on the maps drawn by John White during the 1584 expedition, but it was unnamed at the time. The island appears on a 1624 map of the greater Virginia coastline created by Captain John Smith. On that map, the island is labeled "Davers Ile", probably for Sir John Davers, one of the founders of Jamestown in 1607.

On December 20, 1707, Farnifold Green obtained the first patent for land in the Core Sound area from the lord proprietor of the Carolina colony, which had been established by the English monarch Charles I in 1633. This patent included Harkers Island, which was then known as Craney Island. On June 25, 1709, Green sold the island to William Brice for £5, who on the very same day sold it to Thomas Sparrow III (1674–1717) for £10. Sparrow soon sold the island to Thomas Pollock, who would twice be governor of North Carolina (from 1712 to 1714 and again in 1722). Pollock did not take up residence on the island, but had several farm buildings erected and then leased to settlers. The 1720 lease to a Captain Stone was £3 a year. Thomas Pollock's son George inherited the island upon his father's death on August 30, 1722.

Settlement of Ebenezer Harker

George Pollock sold Craney Island to Ebenezer Harker on September 15, 1730, for £400 and "one boate twentey foot long with oars & mast". Harker had immigrated to Massachusetts from England on a ship that set sail from Wales. Living in Boston, Harker had been involved in the whaling trade, and became familiar with the North Carolina coast during this time. Harker had moved to Beaufort, North Carolina, by 1728, where he was appointed a tax collector for the whale oil revenue generated in the area. After purchasing the island, Harker took up residence there with his family and began building a small plantation and boat yard. Harker sold half of the island to his nephew John Stevens of Onslow County on March 8, 1733, for £300, with many restrictions on its agricultural use. Prohibited from farming or ranching the land for profit, Stevens eventually sold his half of the island back to his uncle on June 9, 1737, for just £180.

The Harker plantation and boat building facility were located at the western end of the island, near Harker Point, and grew to support an extended family with three sons, two daughters, and at least nine African slaves. Ebenezer would be the last sole landowner of the island. In 1752, he deeded approximately of the island to his daughter Hepsobeth and her husband Nathan Yeomans as a wedding gift. On his death in 1762, his son Zachariah inherited the western third of the island, an adult slave woman named Vilet, and a young female slave named Daisie.

Another son, James, inherited the eastern third of the island, an adult slave woman named Hague and a young male slave named Peter. Ebenezer Jr. inherited the central third of the island, an adult male slave named Jeffrey, and a young male slave named Sutton. Hepsobeth inherited "one barrel of corn", and Ebenezer's other married daughter, Sarah Freshwater, was given a female slave named Hope. The fate of an elderly female slave named Badge and a young male slave named Ben was left to the heirs to decide.

In 1864, the first school on the island was established when Miss Jenny Bell came to Harkers Island from Boston, sponsored by the Northern Methodist Episcopal Church. A fish oil factory was built on the island in 1865 and remained operational until 1873. Despite these difficult beginnings, Harker's Island has one of the highest percentages of residents as members of the Latter-day Saints of any locality in North Carolina.

Twentieth century

Harkers Island gradually became more connected to North Carolina and the world at large early in the 20th century. With the influx of new residents from the Outer Banks, a post office was opened in 1904. The first public road to extend the length of the island, Harkers Island Drive, was built in 1926 when a footpath was widened and paved with the oyster shells from the Coree mound at Shell Point. The road was hard paved by the county in 1936. The road and the post office were connected to the mainland by a ferry service until the Earl C. Davis Memorial Bridge was built in 1941.

A wooden structure, the bridge connected the northwestern end of Harkers Island to the small town of Straits directly to the north. The location of the bridge was a matter of some local controversy at the time. Most islanders would have preferred a bridge to the west, connecting the island directly to the city of Beaufort with its commercial infrastructure and the county hospital. Local politics and the shorter distance to Straits likely dictated the final location of the bridge. A local political effort to relocate the bridge during its renovation to a steel structure in 1966 also failed. In November 1941, the construction of a new United States Marine Corps Air Station at Cherry Point, to the northwest of Harkers Island, brought more wage-earning jobs to the local economy. When the United States entered World War II, Harkers Island was on the front lines. German submarines patrolled the North Carolina coast and sank merchant shipping traffic, especially oil tankers. Island residents could watch the tankers burning offshore at night.

Conversion of the Banks to a national park brought much turmoil to Harkers Island. Many Harkers Island fishermen discovered that cottages and other improvements they had made on the Banks were on land that would be condemned. Many land deeds had recording errors, some had been poorly surveyed, and natural changes to the shorelines affected many claims. Few of the cottages that had been built were on land that the builders owned. Legal eviction and condemnation proceedings lasted into the 1980s. The creation of the park also ended the open grazing of livestock on the Banks by December 31, 1985. A herd of wild horses, allegedly descended from Spanish horses that swam to shore from shipwrecks in the 16th century, was allowed to remain on the Banks. In late December of that year, a series of arson fires destroyed most of the major structures on the Shackleford Banks, including a recently constructed park visitor center. An inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation failed to discover the arsonists. At its highest point, the island is above mean sea level, in an area known as the "sand hole", on the western end of the island, made up of mostly white sand on rolling dunes.

Harkers Island is protected from the Atlantic Ocean by the barrier islands of the Shackleford Banks to the south and the Core Banks to the east. The body of water directly south of the island is Back Sound. To the east is Core Sound, to the north is The Straits, and to the northwest is the mouth of the North River. The Straits are shallow but navigable by those with local experience. There are two small bays on the north side of the island, Westmouth Bay and Eastmouth Bay. North of Eastmouth Bay is Browns Island, which is accessible only by boat. Harkers Island Road, designated as State Road 1335, connects the island to the mainland by the Earl C. Davis Memorial Bridge, a steel swing bridge built in 1968 to replace a wooden bridge built in 1941.

Government and services

Harkers Island is unincorporated and receives most public services, including law enforcement and public education, from Carteret County. Law enforcement on the island is provided by the Carteret County Sheriff Department. The only public school on the island, Harkers Island Elementary, educates students from kindergarten through fifth grade, and is operated by Carteret County Public Schools. The school has won the state Battle of the Books competition twice and has been to the competition for four years in a row; both are state records. There are no hospitals on Harkers Island. The local newspaper is the Carteret County News-Times, published in Morehead City. Electricity service and drinking water are both provided by the Harkers Island Electric Membership Corporation, a cooperative operating as both a Rural Electrical Authority and the manager of the water system for the Harkers Island Sanitary District since 1969. The Core Sound Waterfowl Museum, operated by a separate board of directors from the Carvers Guild, is a major year-round tourist attraction for the island. The museum building is a structure located on property leased from the National Park Service. In addition to telling the history of local waterfowl and the traditions of decoy carving, the museum operates exhibits of local historical interest. The museum also hosts events during Waterfowl Weekend, held on the same weekend as the Decoy Festival. The festival weekend is the most important annual event for the Harkers Island tourism economy.

Demographics

As of the census

Pronunciation in Harkers Island English can be different from the English spoken in the rest of the United States. "High tide" spoken in Harkers Island English might sound like "hoi toide", "time" sounds like "toime", "fish" is pronounced close to "feesh", "fire" sounds like "far", and "cape" is pronounced "ca'e". Words with "oi" substitute the pronunciation "er": "Toilet" sounds like "terlet". Words with a short "a" substitute schwa: "crabs" become "crebs". Words beginning with "i" frequently receive a prefix aspirated "h": "it" becomes "hit". Words ending in a vowel are frequently suffixed with an "r". The traditional word for a porch across the width of a building, "piazza", loses the "t" of the Italian pronunciation and becomes "poyzer".

Thus, "Hit's so hot the blue crebs hev come up on the poyzer to git in the shade," and "hit was so rough there were whiteceps in the terlet." Another phrase is "The ersters hev arroived;" the large fish with a prominent dorsal fin is a "sherk". The island dialect has also retained anachronistic vocabulary in regular usage. Some examples include "mommick", meaning to frustrate or bother, "yethy", describing stale or unpleasant odor, and "nicket", meaning a pinch of something used as in cooking. The islanders have also developed unique local words used in regular conversation, including "dingbatter" to refer to a visitor or recent arrival to the island, and "dit-dot," a term developed from a joke about Morse code, and used to describe any visitor to the island who has difficulty understanding the local dialect.

Religion

In 2006, Harkers Island had eight Christian churches. Established churches and religious organizations on Harkers Island include the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Free Grace Wesleyan Church, Grace Holiness Church, Harkers Island Pentecostal Holiness Church, Harkers Island United Methodist Church, Huggins Memorial Baptist Church Parsonage, the Lighthouse Chapel (non-denominational), and the Refuge Fellowship Church (non-denominational).

References

External links

Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center, Harkers Island
Core Sound Decoy Carvers Guild
Carteret County News-Times
The Carteret Herald
Harkers Island Pentecostal Holiness Church
Harkers Island Bridge Scenes