This is a story about the passage of time and impermanence and what, if anything, lives after us. The setting is Portsmouth Island, one of the Outer Banks, and a village that was founded there in 1754, peaked at roughly 600 residents a century later and was abandoned in 1971. If you go to Portsmouth today, you have to take a boat from Ocracoke Island, on the other side of the inlet. When you arrive at the island dock, you will discover a half-dozen old homes, a school building, a Methodist church and a few cemeteries, all looking as if local residents might just have stepped down to the shore for an hour or two and might be back any time.
Author: David Cecelski
Travels with Kingfish
I first met Bland Simpson at an oyster roast at the old hunting lodge at Lake Matttamuskeet. That was in the winter of 1997, and we were in the middle of a remote, swampy and unforgettably beautiful landscape. From the top of the lodge’s wildlife observation tower, the view took my breath away. In every direction, cane brakes, freshwater marshes, and juniper swamps stretched to the horizon, while thousands of Canada geese, snow geese, and tundra swans rested on the lake.
An Introduction: Historical Photographs of Maritime Life & Labor
This is the beginning of an occasional series of historical photographs that will explore maritime life and labor on the North Carolina coast between 1870 and the Second World War. My goal is to use the photographs to understand better the lives of coastal people in the past and their relationship to the sea.
Bad Girls at Samarcand
Karin Zipf’s Bad Girls at Samarcand is an enlightening book, but also a frightening one. It gives a terrifying look at the history of how the state of North Carolina has treated some of its most vulnerable children over the last century: those girls denied love at home, traumatized by incest and rape, living on the streets or scorned for being somehow “different.”
Music All Over the Ocean
In 2009 and 2010, an extraordinary community project, called “Raising the Story of Menhaden Fishing,” commemorated the central role that the menhaden industry played here in Carteret County, N.C, for generations. Inspired by the closing of the state's last menhaden factory, Beaufort Fisheries, in 2005, the project involved a series of community forums, school events and documentary projects. Led by cultural anthropologist and local fisheries activist, and my old friend, Barbara Garrity-Blake, the project’s organizers worked hand-in-hand with former menhaden fishermen and factory workers to create a unique community-wide period of reflection on the passing of a way of life.
Ella Baker Day
Last week was Ella Baker Day in Littleton, North Carolina. This one-stoplight town in Halifax County, 70 miles from Raleigh, was the childhood home of that extraordinary African American woman who became one of the most important civil rights activists in U.S. history. I wish you all could have been there. Her hometown’s first annual celebration in her honor was the kind of event that made me proud to be from North Carolina.
The Harlowe Patriots
Here is a sentence that I thought I'd never write: one of the highlights of my year was my induction into the Sons of the American Revolution.
David Cecelski 