Mailboats

Typical US Mail Boat

Prior to bridge and road construction in the eastern part of the Carteret County, mailboats were a lifeline for folks. The boats were used to deliver passengers and cargo, as well as mail to points east of Beaufort, all the way to Ocracoke Island. 

Before his appointment as postmaster at Beaufort in 1933, Wiley Higgins Taylor Sr. worked on the mailboat to Ocracoke.

At one time Matthew Marshall ran the mail boat from Beaufort. The Down East community of Marshallberg was named for him; before it became a village, it was known as "Deep Hole Point." (It is said that clay dug from the area was used to fill ramparts and cover easements at Fort Macon on Bogue Banks - leaving a large hole.)  

Kelly Willis was mail carrier for Harker's Island when the bridge was completed in 1941, when he began transporting the mail by car. Beaufort's mailboat was in service until the 1957. 

One of the murals in the Beaufort Post Office depicts Orville G, the supply and mailboat on its way to nearby Cape Lookout Lighthouse. In conveying the boat with a stormy sky and rough sea, the artist* shows the hardships incurred by the crew of the boat and by the keeper of the light.

*This and four other murals, painted in 1940 by a Russian immigrant Simka Simkhovitch, are now considered by the US Post Office and historians as a national treasure. Simkhovitch was engaged by then-postmaster Wiley Higgins Taylor Sr. and was paid $1,900 for his work. Simkovitch's fee was funded by the Fine Arts Program, a federal project that provided work for artists during the Great Depression.