Included in PORCHSCAPES: THE COLORS OF BEAUFORT by Mary Warshaw
BEAUFORT, NORTH CAROLINA
An Introduction by Tony P. Wrenn
Who knows when a love affair begins or what will stoke it as it develops. Mine with Beaufort has been around since 1942 when I began collecting post cards and became aware of the North Carolina coast. History was, even then, my main interest and I sought not just cards but whatever any chamber of commerce or visitor agency could provide. Carteret County, Beaufort, Fort Macon and Cape Lookout became implanted in my mind and have not since been forgotten.
It was a long distance love affair until 1954 when I completed my junior year at Wake Forest and sought employment away from the tobacco farm on which I had, to that time, spent my summers. I accepted employment with the North Carolina State Park System at Fort Macon State Park that summer, and Beaufort sun, sand and sea became a reality.
The fort was built to protect Beaufort harbor and the shipping lanes from the Atlantic into it. A brick pentagonal fort of unusual size and exceptional workmanship and beauty, Fort Macon more than lived up to my childhood visions of it, as it became a place I haunted and was haunted by. Used in every war through World War II, it still displayed graffiti lampooning the Nazis and their allies. History literally leapt off the walls to you.
On off hours from my park duties, I walked the sandy beach between the state park beach, where we lived and worked, and Fort Macon. Early on I stumbled onto the one afternoon each week when a Marine from Cherry Point came to the fort with his trumpet. As he practiced in one of the casemates—he frequently changed location—I and others gathered to wander through the fort, amazed by its incredible capability to capture and echo sound. As sunset approached it became sound and light fused into son et lumière at its very best.
Another day, when rain drove me inside during a thunder storm, I discovered that Nature was an equally memorable musician. Thunder, reverberating through the casemates, water rushing through the drains and waves smashing against jetties, provided water music of unequaled intensity. During such times one could easily imagine being in the midst of battle—for the fort came alive with sound.
Years later, in 1970, at an Easter sunrise service within the fort, the combination of horns, percussion and human choirs, performing from the steps that led into the casemate surrounded parade, produced music that few cathedrals—designed to contain and control sound—could match. A storm could have added the deep notes of a mighty pipe organ to the tamer sound of choir and lesser instruments, but no storm was needed. The architectural beauty of the fort, and its ability as a sounding board, made that sunrise service one I shall never forget.
In 1954, I also discovered Cape Lookout, at the southern end of the Outer Banks, the entrance from the Atlantic Ocean to the Beaufort Channel. Its jeweled marking, substantial Lighthouse Keeper’s House, surround of dunes and their grasses, and sound of the Atlantic, made Cape Lookout another place to spend as much time as possible. I often sat on the dunes and read or dreamed.
Between the fort and the lighthouse, facing south toward the Atlantic, I found Beaufort to be more than I had thought it to be. I hitched a ride over whenever I could and wandered the streets, often sitting by the water or on a bench within the Old Burying Ground, sometimes on someone’s front steps with a sandwich and soda, absorbing Beaufort. What was so amazing to me was that it was all there. The aluminum and vinyl siding salesmen had made no local inroads. Ticky-tacky had not been substituted for the solidity of the past, and almost nowhere could one find a mobile home in front of an old house being torn down, something that elsewhere had become the norm for American small towns.
Beaufort’s buildings were almost exclusively of wood, and painted white. There were no Painted Ladies, but then there were few Queen Anne houses. Most houses were vernacular, satisfying the needs of the climate and the builders. Though Beauforters were aware of the tastes and capabilities of other areas—after all, their livelihood was mainly the sea and they traveled it—they were unselfconscious in the application of that taste in Beaufort.
Their outlook was outward, to the sea both northward and southward. The train had not connected Beaufort to inland North Carolina and the rest of America until 1906, and highway access, Route 70, was not connected to inland North Carolina until 1926. The Old Burying Ground showed marked stones and iron from Boston, Charleston, Baltimore, Brooklyn and Purdy’s Station, New York, but from within North Carolina, only Wilmington makers appeared, and Wilmington was a port just to the south.
There were no mansions in Beaufort, and little resemblance, until the twentieth century, to inland North Carolina. Gable-roofed houses might show five or more planes as the roof shifted pitch to cover the house below. Raking cornices were flush and simple. Porches often had no ceilings but openings at second-story or attic-floor levels to pull sea breezes into and cool upper levels. Clearly the influence was from the islands southward and not from inland North Carolina or Virginia to the north. The Beaufort porch and roofline is almost completely unknown in other area towns and cities.
I went back to Wake Forest in 1954, graduated in 1955 and spent the next four years in the Army, discovering small towns of great charm throughout Europe. Back home, out of the Army, I moved to Washington, DC, studied and found employment at the National Archives, and then the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In November 1969 Dr. H. G. Jones, of the then North Carolina Department of Archives and History, asked me to undertake a study to locate and copy documentary material relating to Fort Macon, constructed between 1826 and 1834, and then undertake an architectural survey of Beaufort.
Saying “yes” was easy, and I cleared up other duties almost immediately and sped to Beaufort. Eventually I located more than 100 sheets of pre-1900 drawings, plans and elevations of the fort and its supporting buildings in repositories in North Carolina, Washington and New York. Surveys, maps, and several thousand sheets of unpublished material relating to the construction appearance or use of the fort, were copied many more carded. We were able to place Robert E. Lee among the Corps of Engineers associated with annual inspections of the fort, and identify him as designer of jetties to protect the fort from washing into the sea as had two previous forts.
For the first time I could live in Beaufort, and found a garage apartment to the rear of a house that overlooked the water. It was private, and my landlords were always solicitous of my safety, my need to get work done—and my appetite.
Driving into town in 1970 I noticed teams of young people wading in the shoals around town, evidently listening to team leaders, taking notes and collecting samples. Marine biology, which had come to Beaufort in the nineteenth century with Johns Hopkins and established permanent residence with the Center for Estuarine and Menhaden Research early on, had moved from international research facilities on Piver’s Island, into the local school system.
Marine research and study at all levels was a natural. Beaufort was oriented southward, toward the Atlantic Ocean, and its most noticeable occupation was fishing and fish related industries. Later I learned just what this research meant to the area. Dr. John Costlow, who headed Duke University’s research facility, invited me to an afternoon cocktail party, the first I had been invited to in Beaufort. Dr. Costlow and his wife held these affairs for researchers, students and visitors to the Duke facility and others who might be interested in marine biology. In their simple frame house on Ann Street I discovered an international group using at least five languages in addition to English. It would have been difficult to find more depth in any other educational or cultural center.
I sometimes eavesdropped, or was invited into conversations on menhaden, and the aroma from the smoke they spread over town when the fleet was in and the fish were being cooked. Some turned up their noses, but most were pleased at the continuation of an industry a couple of centuries old. Some were pleased for another reason as well, for those with financial interests smelled not just fish being cooked, but “Money!”
I walked every block and looked at every building, recording and photographing 194 buildings—I listed 135 as historically or architecturally important, others important as part of the Beaufort scene. Forty years later I would probably include more in both categories. I often talked with residents. The town may have been insular, but there was nothing insular about those conversations. They ranged from the art of Turner and Reynolds to the need to preserve stands of first growth bald cypress.
After the Beaufort survey was completed I returned to Beaufort twice to “house sit” Jean and Copeland Kell’s second-level home at The Cedars. There was very little difference looking out over the Atlantic from views owners had in earlier years. Sitting on the second-level porch, reading, dreaming, having a meal, listening to the pianist who lived downstairs, made almost every day dream time. One could look almost directly south, across Town Marsh and Bird Island Shoals to Fort Macon and the open beach beyond. The fort itself was hidden behind sand barriers, but the Coast Guard Station was within ones line of vision and the fort easy to spot in relation to the station.
The channel into the state port at Morehead City crossed directly across Beaufort’s waterfront and ships entering and leaving the port presented broadside views to Beaufort. Fishing boats came and went, and at any given time there may have been twenty or more in the harbor—the cut between Town Marsh and Front Street. During the menhaden season one could almost walk across the water to Town Marsh by stepping from boat to boat. Sail was frequently seen, as was the occasional grand yacht that had strayed from the Inland Waterway.
Wild marsh ponies grazed on Town Marsh. Porpoise occasionally broke water at play in the cut, within a hundred feet of Front Street. There was never a time when there was nothing to see or feel, for sea breezes always kept the porch comfortable and peaceful. I can never again think of Beaufort without thinking of the serenity, comfort and peace of that porch. And, as hard as I try, I can never think of a moment in Beaufort when I was bored.
In the report that I did after the Beaufort architectural survey was completed in 1970, I quoted descriptions of Beaufort from the eighteenth, nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Little had changed in descriptions of the town or the pleasures of being there. My own memories are also from a past century, the last half of the twentieth, and again—little has changed.
In the twenty-first century Beaufort survives—simple, pure, friendly and aware. For romantics such as I, it is the sort of place one falls in love with. I will spend future hours with this book, learning much that is new to me—and dreaming. Memories will come back, and they will be good ones, for Beaufort is that rare American survival that not only endures, but has kept its soul.
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It also delineated a historic district, established restoration principles, objectives and recommendations.
This report was used in the application for the Beaufort historic district to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Wrenn also wrote the nomination for Fort Macon's entry onto the National Register of Historic Places.
