Attachment20_CreationofCAHA.pdf

The Creation and Establishment of Cape Hatteras National Seashore The Great Depression through Mission 66

August 2007 written by Cameron Binkley Southeast Regional Office, Cultural Resource Division National Park Service

Attachment 20

Cultural Resources Division Southeast Regional Office National Park Service 100 Alabama Street, SW Atlanta, Georgia 30303 404.562.3117

This administrative history exists in two formats. A printed version is available for study at the Cape Hatteras National

Seashore, at the Southeast Regional Office of the National

Park Service, and at a variety of other repositories around the United States. For more widespread access, this administrative history also exists as a PDF through the web site of the National Park Service. Please visit www.nps.gov for more information.

Cape Hatteras National Seashore 1401 National Park Drive Manteo, NC 27954 http://www.cr.nps.gov/caha

Cover photo: NPS photograph, no date. Req.

number 1104 [?], CAHA File, NPS Historic Photograph Collection, Harper’s Ferry Center.

National Park Service

When we look up and down the ocean fronts of America, we find that everywhere they are passing behind the fences of private ownership. The people can no longer get to the ocean. When we have reached the point that a nation of 125 million people cannot set foot upon the thousands of miles of beaches that border the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, except by permission of those who monopolize the ocean front, then I say it is the prerogative and the duty of the Federal and State Governments to step in and acquire, not a swimming beach here and there, but solid blocks of ocean front hundreds of miles in length. Call this ocean front a national park, or a national seashore, or a state park or anything you please—I say that the people have a right to a fair share of it.

Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, 1938 vi Cape Hatteras National Seashore Administrative History

National Park Service vii

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: Origins of a Park Movement

Frank Stick Conrad Wirth The New Deal and “National Ocean Beaches” Cape Hatteras State Park The National Park Service and Frank Stick The North Carolina Beach Erosion Control Project The Acts Creating “Cape Hatteras National Seashore”

Chapter Two: Progress and Problems

Disposition of the Cape Hatteras Light Station Origins of the Cape Hatteras Seashore Commission Beach Preservation Spurs Park Planning Problems with the Cape Hatteras Seashore Commission

Chapter Three: Hiatus and Uncertainty

World War II “A Prospective Oil Boom” Out-waiting the General Assembly Reinvigorating the Project The Second Campaign Begins “The Shuffler Report” The Dark before Dawn

Chapter Four: Patrons and Opponents

The Heirs of Andrew W. Mellon Park Opponents Have Their Say The Murphy-Cairns-Stick Affair Conrad Wirth Meets the Villagers A Letter to the People of the Outer Banks

Chapter Five: Establishment of the National Seashore

Land Acquisition under Clark Stratton Oregon Inlet, Ferries, and Roads viii Cape Hatteras National Seashore Administrative History

Management and Interpretation in the First Years The Wild Ponies of Ocracoke Island The Fishing Pier at Rodanthe Condemnations and Awkward Judgments

Chapter Six: Developing the National Seashore

Mission 66 at Cape Hatteras Beach Development and Wilderness General Development under Mission 66 Interpretive Facilities The Impact of Hurricanes on Park Planning Museums, Observation Decks, and Ocean Views Coquina Beach The Navy’s Old Docks and Secret New Base A Management Review Erosion Control under Mission 66 Conrad Wirth on Vehicle Access, 1963 Dedication of the First National Seashore Park Hunting in a National Park The Herbert C. Bonner Bridge

Epilogue: A Model for Later Parks…

Seashores and Lakeshores The End of Erosion Control at Cape Hatteras

Appendix A: Chronology of Selected Events in Park History

Appendix B: Selected Congressional Acts, Executive Orders, and State Legislation Relating to Cape Hatteras National Seashore

An Act To authorize a study of the park, parkway, and recreational-area programs in the United States, and for other purposes

An Act To provide for the establishment of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore in the State of North Carolina, and for other purposes

An Act To amend the Act entitled “An Act To provide for the establishment of the

Cape Hatteras National Seashore in the State of North Carolina, and for other purposes,” approved August 17, 1937. (50 Stat. 669.)

An Act To amend the Act of August 17, 1937, as amended, relating to the establish-ment of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore Recreational Area in the State of

North Carolina

An Act To provide for the addition of certain Government lands to the Cape

Hatteras National Seashore Recreational Area project, and for other purposes

An Act To facilitate the acquisition of non-Federal land within the existing bound-aries of any national park, and for other purposes

An Act To amend the Act of August 31, 1954 (68 Stat. 1037), relating to the acqui-sition of non-Federal land within the existing boundaries of any national park, and

National Park Service ix for other purposes

An Act To provide for the addition of certain excess Federal property in the village of Hatteras, North Carolina, to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore Recreational

Area, and for other purposes

An Act To authorize the Secretary of the Interior to participate in financing the con-struction of a bridge at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, in the State of North

Carolina, and for other purposes

An Act To authorize the Secretary of the Interior to convey certain property to the

County of Dare. State of North Carolina, and for other purposes

An Act To authorize the appropriation of funds for the Cape Hatteras National

Seashore

Secretary of the Interior’s Order Establishing Cape Hatteras National Seashore

A Note on the General Authorities Act of 1970

Summary of Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina regarding Cape Hatteras National Seashore

May 7, 1935, Chapter 332, Public Laws of North Carolina, 1935 222 March 30, 1939, Chapter 257, Public Laws of North Carolina, 1939 222 March 8, 1941, Chapter 100, Public Laws of North Carolina, 1941 222 March 5, 1943, Chapter 475, Public Laws of North Carolina, 1943 223 March 19, 1945, Chapter 811, Public Laws of North Carolina, 1945 223 June 23, 1952, Resolution, North Carolina State Council 223

Appendix C: Conrad L. Wirth’s “A Letter to the People of the Outer Banks”

Appendix D: “Short Title for Cape Hatteras National Seashore Recrea-tional Area Project”

Appendix E: Dedication Speeches,Cape Hatteras National Seashore Roger Ernst, Assistant Secretary of the Interior Conrad L. Wirth, Director of the National Park Service Paul Mellon, President of the Old Dominion Foundation

Appendix F: Superintendents of Cape Hatteras National Seashore, 1952-1973

Appendix G: Visitor Statistics, 1955-1973

Appendix H: Frank Stick, an Early Conservationist on the Outer Banks

Bibliography x Cape Hatteras National Seashore Administrative History

National Park Service xi

Acknowledgements

Too many provided assistance in completing this complex study to mention everyone, but the author would like to name a number of key individuals and institutions deserving recognition, although none bear responsibility for my judgments or errors. First, I am grateful for the support of Cape Hatteras National Sea-shore staff. In particular, the cheerful camaraderie of Steve Harrison and Doug Stover helped sustain this project. Second, from the NPS Southeast Regional Office, I thank Jennifer Dickey (now Curator, Martha Berry Museum) and Steve Davis for research assistance along with Tommy Jones who edited the manuscript after my term appointment expired in August 2007. A special thanks to the staff of the Outer Banks History Center, North Carolina, especially Lois Bradshaw, a true Banker, who was particularly resourceful in finding obscure photographs. Similarly, I thank independent scholar Jim Senter for his assistance and for several interesting conversations about the history of the Outer Banks. Of course, I thank Banks author David Stick for reading the draft manuscript and recalling obscure facts from long ago.

Among important institutions, I thank the staffs of the National Archives and Records Administration in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. Similarly, I thank the Special Collections staffs of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and of Clemson University, South Carolina. All provided efficient and professional archival assistance as did the staffs of the NPS His-toric Photographs and NPS History Collections at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where one can always expect to find serendipity.

I would also like to acknowledge former Chief Historian Dwight Pitcaithley, who encouraged me to strive for the highest professional and academic standards, and Richard West Sellars, whose exemplary history of the National Park Service guided my way. I thank former NPS Bureau Historian Janet McDonnell for access to the records of the National Center for Cultural Resources and for good sense advice during the course of this and several previous studies. Better role models could not be found.

Thanks are due as well to J. Anthony Parades, John Ehrenhard, Heather Huyck, and Tracy Smith, the last of whom endured a blustery winter research trip to the Banks and served as project muse. Not direct partici-pants in this study, they nonetheless had faith in my work, which was perhaps the most important contribution. Finally, I thank all those who strove in their time to create and establish Cape Hatteras National Seashore where charismatic history is as pervasive as the ocean breeze.

Cameron Binkley Deputy Command Historian U.S. Army, DLIFLC & Presidio of Monterey March 2008 xii Cape Hatteras National Seashore Administrative History

National Park Service 1

Introduction

In 1937, Congress authorized the creation and establishment of Cape Hatteras National Seashore—America’s first national seashore park.

This authorization reflected a strong desire to preserve a significant portion of the unique and “primitive wilderness” of the Outer Banks, the chain of barrier islands that guard North Carolina’s mainland coast. The legislation also directed the National Park Service to develop extensive facilities for recreational beach-goers and to allow continued use of park resources by both sport and commercial fishermen as well as by hunters. During the seashore’s creation, the Park Service also committed itself deeply to combating the natural processes of shoreline erosion and accepted, grudgingly at first, enthusiastically later, the development of extensive roads along the entire length of the park.

The intrusion of roads and other facilities into a natural environment set aside for protection seems a discontinuity with the intent of the “Organic Act” that created the National Park Service in 1916. That act specified that the natural and cultural resources

FIGURE 1. Aerial view down the Outer Banks. (Photograph by Doug Stover, CAHA)

2 Cape Hatteras National Seashore Administrative History within national parks must be preserved and transmitted “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” At Cape Hatteras, as at many other parks, the Park Service has had to face the dilemma posed by simultaneously trying to preserve and to use these protected resources. Whether a discontinuity or not, efforts to create a national seashore reflect how the Park Service expanded both its physical and intellectual domain by embracing new notions about what parks could be.

Originally, NPS founder Stephen T. Mather ordained that national parks must by definition be of a type and class wholly distinct from local or state parks where more recreational and athletic pursuits were typically expected. Cape Hatteras National Seashore departed from this norm.

Things began to change in the 1920s. At the request of President Calvin Coolidge, a “National

Conference on Outdoor Recreation” was held in May 1924. Conference attendees advocated a national policy to coordinate various levels of government in the promotion, development, and use of recreational resources, but also to coordinate their conservation. The National Park Service had an important stake in this area.1 On June 14, 1926, Congress passed the Recreational and Public Purposes Act (44 Stat. 741) to stimulate state development of recreational areas by allowing the Secretary of the Interior to convey to the states by sale, lease or exchange certain public lands for park or recreational purposes.2 Clearly, the nation was beginning to think of recreation as a federal policy issue.

In 1928, the American Forestry Association and the National Parks Association sponsored a report entitled “Recreation Resources of Federal Lands” calling for a new federal policy on recreation and land planning. The report noted that development and commercial pressure were increasing recreational use of public lands in the absence of federal planning for such use. First, it concluded that cities were responsible for urban playgrounds and ball fields. Second, while states had more sizeable areas available for “transient enjoyment and relaxation out-of-doors,” the report claimed that “man cannot replace the wilderness and the remaining wilderness of America, modified as inevitably it has been, is now found only in Federal ownership.” Thus, the report continued, it was “the great responsibility of the Federal Government to provide those forms of outdoor life and recreation which it alone can give and which are associated with the wilderness.”3

By an act of July 10, 1930 (46 Stat. 1021), Congress enunciated another important principle— conserving the natural beauty of shore lines for recreational use. This idea was first applied to federal lands bordering certain lakes and streams in Minnesota used for boating or canoe travel. To carry out the act, Congress prohibited shore line logging to a depth of four hundred feet from the natural water line. The legal and policy underpinnings now existed to propel the National

FIGURE 2. Lindsay C. Warren (l) and his successor in Congress, Herbert C. Bonner, who together represented the Outer Banks of North Carolina from 1925 to 1965. (Photograph courtesy of Special Collections, University of North Carolina)

1. Harlan D. Unrau and G. Frank Willis, Administrative History: Expansion of the National Park Service in the 1930s (Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1983), 107.

2. A Study of the Park and Recreation Problem of the United States (Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1941), Chapter VI: Legislation.

3. Harlan D. Unrau and G. Frank Willis, Administrative History: Expansion of the National Park Service in the 1930s (Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1983), 108.

National Park Service 3

Park Service into coastal recreation and conservation planning.

NPS movement into recreational planning is an important theme underlying the creation of Cape Hatteras National Seashore. A corollary theme is economic development. In fact, specific NPS interest in the windswept Outer Banks was motivated by the Great Depression and the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency of the United States.

On the eve of his nomination as the Democratic Party candidate for president, Roosevelt promised the nation a “New Deal.” To fulfill that pledge in his legendary “First Hundred Days” as president, Roosevelt directed the creation of a series of relief programs intended to put an army of unemployed citizens to work on projects that benefited the nation. Federal agencies soon found themselves administering numerous labor-intensive efforts in national and state parks and forests, on other federal lands, and even on private lands. The National Park Service had an especially vital role in facilitating New Deal programs like the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).

The need to devise work-relief programs encouraged new thinking. Why not create national parks more suited for active recreational use instead of exclusively for the passive appreciation of nature and history? Indeed, the Park Service began planning for the Natchez Trace Parkway in 1934 (linking Nashville, Tennessee, and Natchez, Mississippi), while planning for the Blue Ridge Parkway (linking Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains national parks) began in 1936. Both parkways were conceived as work-relief programs justified on the basis of their utility in fulfilling the growing needs of an increasingly mobile public interested in recreational motoring. Similarly, the Park Service assumed responsibility for the vast reservoir created by Hoover Dam near Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1935. Later known as Lake Mead National Recreation Area, the reservoir was the first of several areas added to the park system under the justification of the need to make recreational activities more widely available to Americans.

In the same period, the Park Service initiated a national survey of coastal areas suitable for protection. Private development was rapidly consuming the nation’s coasts. As it did, people who could not patronize private hunting clubs or exclusive resorts lost beach access. Such development also destroyed natural beauty and wildlife habitat.

It was no coincidence, then, that the Park Service actively sought to manage the main work-relief project on the Outer Banks—shoreline erosion control. Bankers wanted federal help to stem the threat to property by violent storms and strong ocean currents, which routinely reconfigure the topography of the fragile islands. Many locals also hoped that such efforts could provide jobs to help offset declining income from commercial fishing and private hunting. Once working on the Outer Banks, the Park Service also became more familiar with its unique character and historical significance.

Roosevelt authorized the Park Service to assume greater nationwide responsibility for historic preservation in 1933 and the agency deliberately sought to use this authority to expand its responsibility in the eastern states. In North Carolina, the 16th-century exploits of Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonists near Roanoke Island, the aeronautical experiments of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, and the romantic heritage of lighthouses and of sea rescue by the U.S. Life-Saving Service (a predecessor to the U.S. Coast Guard) helped cement NPS attention. Another theme in this study is thus how NPS efforts in recreational planning and work-relief combined with historic preservation and local economics to foster a long-term conservation agenda on the Outer Banks.

Finally, this study notes the important role played by several key figures who were unrelenting in their commitment to create, establish, and develop the seashore. The first of these figures was Frank Stick (1886-1966), an outdoorsman and successful commercial illustrator. Stick was involved, at one time or another, in construction, conservation, newspaper reporting, and wildlife painting. It was Stick’s involvement in real estate, however, that positioned him to appreciate how development might affect the Outer Banks. Two other key park supporters were North Carolina Congressmen Lindsay C. Warren (1889-1976) and his successor

4 Cape Hatteras National Seashore Administrative History

Herbert C. Bonner (1891-1965). Warren introduced the legislation to create the seashore. Bonner, who first served as Warren’s aide, continued to champion the park through its establishment and early development. Several NPS employees were also important, most of all Conrad L. Wirth (1899- 1993), who became director of the National Park Service in 1953. Wirth first gained familiarity with the Outer Banks while supervising the Service’s CCC program for state parks and was a champion of NPS involvement in recreational planning. Wirth was involved with Cape Hatteras from the early 1930s until the end of his directorship in 1964.

As these themes suggest, Cape Hatteras National Seashore embodies the essence of New Deal idealism in several fundamental ways. First, the seashore’s origins are tied to President Roosevelt’s work-relief programs, the expansion of the National Park Service through involvement in those programs, and the Service’s embrace of new parks focused upon history and recreation. Second, the seashore’s creation reflects the traditional thrust by progressives to promote both conservation and economic development by establishing parks that preserve wildlife and wilderness while attracting and catering to visitors. Finally, Cape Hatteras is the first national park to recognize that the federal government has a responsibility to maintain public access to the nation’s beaches.

This study is a narrative history about the creation and establishment of Cape Hatteras National Seashore, the major characters involved, and the key decisions they made.4 It follows a straightforward historical methodology. Park documents likely to provide factual information or to shed light on important events have been reviewed and presented in a chronological fashion. Where appropriate, the chronology is subdivided by topic as represented by various chapter and section headings. This method makes the document both easier to read and to reference. Major sources of information include park annual reports, official NPS correspondence relating to the park, newspaper clippings, and oral history interviews. Various NPS studies and publications are also used. All sources are carefully cited by notes. Where bias is obvious or points of view differ, sources are weighed against each other.

The author’s intent is to minimize speculation and to let the record speak for itself, although inferences and conclusions are stated where appropriate.

This history covers the origins of Cape Hatteras National Seashore in the 1930s through its main period of development under “Mission 66,” a ten-year program of development inspired by Conrad Wirth and pegged to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Park Service in 1966.

Informational insets and charts, historic photos, detailed citations, appendices, and a selected bibliography have also been added to contribute to the reader’s deeper understanding of the seashore’s colorful, complex, and at times contentious past.

FIGURE 3. The wreck of the George A. Kohler, a large schooner driven ashore at Cape Hatteras during a storm in September 1933. This ship sat on the beach for ten years before it was burned for its iron fittings during World War II. (NPS photograph by Roger A.

Toll, November 8, 1934, courtesy of Harpers Ferry Historic Photograph Collection)

4. An administrative history, this study presents and analyzes the management of an individual park unit, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, from the 1930s through the 1960s. The study traces the park’s origins, interaction with associated institutions or stakeholders, and over-arching themes of institutional development according to guidelines published by the National Park Service. See Janet A. McDonnell, ed., National Park Service Administrative History: A Guide (Washington, DC: National Park Service, 2004). Administrative histories provide historical perspective that staff members and stakeholders can use to make informed decisions on current policy issues. No study could cover all the events, people, and issues that are represented in the long history of a national park. Instead, an administrative history selects key topics with the goal being to provide both a meaningful handbook and a long-term perspective.

National Park Service 5

Chapter One: Origins of a Park Movement

The story of the creation of Cape Hatteras National Seashore could begin at many points. No national park is suddenly brought into being except by a chain of milestones that lay the basis for an act of Congress or a presidential proclamation. Formally, Congress authorized the creation of the nation’s first national seashore in August 1937, but the park was not actually established until January 1953 when the National Park Service possessed sufficient land to meet legal requirements. Subsequently, more time was needed to develop facilities to meet both visitor and management needs and this necessity forestalled the park’s dedication until 1958. A span of over twenty years thus links the cre-ation of the seashore to its formal opening. Key events in the park’s history preceded its authori-zation, and much important development actually followed its formal dedication. In order to cover the creation and establishment of Cape Hatteras National Seashore, one must look as far back as the early 1930s and as far forward as the early 1970s.

A good place to begin the story is 1933, the year that Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the presidency of the United States. To address the stagnation and poverty of the Great Depression, Roosevelt imme-diately proposed a series of reforms and work-relief strategies known as the “New Deal.” Essentially a program of progress, hope, and economic stimu-lation through the agency of an effective and activist government, the New Deal was to bring long-lasting change to the Outer Banks.

Nineteen thirty-three also was important to Bankers, as residents of the Outer Banks are often called, for an all too familiar reason— hurricanes.

The slender spit of barrier islands, which jut out into the Atlantic Ocean some thirty miles from the mainland, was often hit by intense hurricanes, but in 1933, a record was set for the number of Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms that would stand until 2005, and two of those storms swept the Banks that year. The second was so strong it knocked the Bodie Island Coast Guard Station off its foundation and devastated communities up and down the Banks. Indeed, at Portsmouth, a small fishing village at the northern tip of Core Banks, residents were so undone that many never returned, signaling the end of a viable community. Villages on the islands of Ocracoke and Cape Hatteras fared better, but tre-mendous erosion affected the beaches, including an area surrounding the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse near Cape Point that was severely eroded.

The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, first illuminated in 1870, was by then quite famous as one of the most remarkable structures of its kind. Made of granite, brick, and iron atop timber footings, the light stood 208 feet tall, the tallest in the nation, and projected a life-saving beam twenty miles or more out to sea.

The light and its keepers quarters originally stood half-a-mile west of the ocean, but previous erosion and the stormy season of 1933 left the station so perilously close to crashing waves that the Light-house Service decided to abandon it.5

5. The Coast Guard tried to stem erosion around the lighthouse by using heavy steel piling and concrete to construct a protective barrier but it was undermined and destroyed by the sea. See Hugh R. Awtrey, Associate Recreational Planner, Letter to George H. Copeland, New York Times, June 29, 1939, in Records Group 79, Records of the National Park Service, Central Classified Files, 1936-1952, Entry 81, Box 48, File Number 0-35 Proposed Monuments, Cape Hatteras National Seashore to Kill Devil Hill National Monument, Folder 1, Mid-Atlantic Records Center, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Philadelphia.

6 Cape Hatteras National Seashore Administrative History

Adjacent to the forty-four acre lighthouse reser-vation were about 1,250 acres of land owned by the family of Henry Phipps (1839-1930) where the hur-ricane stripped away most of the vegetation that protected the dunes from erosion, rendering the land nearly worthless. One of the nation’s best-known philanthropists, Henry Phipps had made a fortune as Andrew Carnegie’s partner in steel before turning to real-estate investment, becoming one of the pioneers in development of Miami and Palm Beach. The Phipps family had previously purchased large tracts of land on the Outer Banks, and much of the land they used to establish duck and goose hunting clubs, including the Buxton Club and the Kennekeet Club.

The Phipps family faced a predicament. Its land was now of little value and impossible to sell in the midst of the Great Depression. The family began to con-sider donating it to the State of North Carolina rather than pay taxes on it.6 Apparently, the real estate agent who helped them to do that was Frank Leonard Stick. A man of intriguing character, Stick was to become one of the chief promoters of a great national seashore park in the Outer Banks. Stick saw the Phipps donation as the first step in that process.

Frank Stick

On July 21, 1933, Stick published an article in the Elizabeth City Independent promoting his “dream” to create a national seashore park. Entitled “A Coastal Park for North Carolina and the Nation,” the article argued that such a park was needed “for the satisfaction of the esthetic and recreational need of the people, for the conservation of migratory wild life and for the better defense of an open and unpro-tected coastline in event of war.” Stick envisioned Cape Hatteras and Hatteras Island as the focal point of a national seashore park that, while excluding Nags Head, Buxton, and the other villages along the Banks, would include over a hundred miles of the barrier islands as well as the site of Fort Raleigh on Roanoke Island, and the recently established Kill Devil Hills National Monument (now Wright Brothers National Memorial) near Kitty Hawk.

Some areas were to be preserved as wildlife refuges while others would be opened to tourists by the construction of a roadway down the banks, including bridges across the inlets. Stick thought the economic benefits of such tourism “would be enormous, and employment would be given to thousands.” W.O. Saunders, the paper’s publisher, had apparently raised the topic himself years before and editorialized in support of Stick’s plan.7

Born in Huron, Dakota Territory, on February 10, 1884, Stick was a noted commercial artist before

FIGURE 4. Frank Stick, outdoorsman, nature illustrator, conservationist, and real estate man.

Stick is credited with first popularizing the idea of creating a national coastal park in North Carolina. (Photograph courtesy of the Outer Banks History Center, Manteo, NC.)

6. Ben D. MacNeill, “Mellon Money Mysteriously Brings Hatteras National Park Project Back to Life,” Greensboro Daily News, December 21, 1952, Newspaper clipping collection, Cape Hatteras National Seashore archives (CAHA archives).

7. As quoted by David Stick, “A Half Century of Observations,” chapter one, 2, unpublished manuscript detailing the role of Frank and David Stick in the establishment of Cape Hatteras National Seashore, no date, CAHA file, Harper’s Ferry Center, (HFC), Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. See also, David Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958), 247-248. Stick published a similar article in “A Coastal Park for North Carolina,” The State, November 17, 1933. In that article he wrote that it is “a strange, an unfathomable thing, that no effort has heretofore been made to retain for the use of the people, in all its natural beauty and appeal, a stretch of our coastland…”.

National Park Service 7 moving to the Outer Banks in 1929. He had spent his youth hunting, trapping, sketching, and painting throughout the Midwest and began to write about and illustrate his experiences for outdoor magazines before enrolling at the Chicago Art Institute in 1904.

He stayed only briefly before moving to New Jersey to study with the great illustrator Howard Pyle, who also taught Maxfield Parrish as well as Stick’s con-temporary N.C. Wyeth. Stick married around 1907, had two children, and settled with his family at Interlaken, New Jersey, where he opened a studio.

Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Stick continued to work as a commercial artist, selling his work to such publications as Sports Afield, Field and Stream, and The Saturday Evening Post. He also illustrated stories by his friend Zane Grey that appeared in Outdoor America. By some accounts, Stick was one of the most successful commercial artists of the early twentieth century.8

Apparently, Stick became disillusioned with the art business in the 1920s, especially the necessity of “turning out pictures on demand,” and began to pursue other interests, including real estate invest-ments. He also began spending time on the Outer Banks, attracted in part by the area’s superb duck hunting and fishing. By 1927, although still living in New Jersey, Stick was sufficiently involved in real estate on the Banks and in boosting its prospects that he and several other landowners contributed a few acres to help establish the Kill Devil Hill National Monument near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, commemorating the first successful flight of the Wright Brothers there in 1903.9

With the onset of the Great Depression, Stick retired permanently to the Outer Banks. According to his son, David, who himself later became a Banks booster and author, the elder Stick owned large tracts at Whalebone Beach (South Nags Head), Col-ington Harbor, Kitty Hawk Shores, Baum Bay in Kill Devil Hills, and on Hatteras Island.10 Although Frank Stick was active in real estate, he realized sooner than most that unrestricted development would eventually destroy the Bank’s basic appeal, which was as a recreational paradise. While con-tinuing to promote economic development in the area, Stick sought to preserve significant sections of the Outer Banks for the enjoyment of his favorite recreational activities. In this way, he became an important early 20th-century conservationist in North Carolina.

Even though land was relatively inexpensive during the Depression, little precedent existed to suggest that the federal government would be willing to pur-chase beach property for park purposes. Land would likely have to be donated and the government would have to be persuaded to accept and admin-ister that donated property as a park; reaching that point would be a time-consuming process. In the meantime, there appeared to Frank Stick and many others a more immediate prospect for bringing jobs and income to the Outer Banks—Federal relief programs.

In his 1933 article, Stick described the physical dete-rioration of the banks’ shoreline and sand dunes due to weather-driven erosion as well as unre-stricted livestock grazing and deforestation caused by Bankers who over-utilized their frail coastal and maritime forest environment. He proposed a labor-intensive program of barrier dune construction and re-vegetation whose goal was to restore and pre-serve the barrier islands, to protect private property, and to create work opportunities that would not compete with private business. The latter requirement was key for approval of New Deal work-relief programs, which were not to compete with the private sector in putting the unemployed to work. Stick’s proposal was not based upon any deep scientific understanding of the physical dynamics of the coastal environment. Fifty years later the Park Service would reevaluate this early vision of how government should care for the barrier islands, but at the time Stick’s proposal to promote erosion control as well as a “national coastal park” met with widespread acceptance.

One reason for optimism over Stick’s proposals was the reorganization of the NPS that got under way in the summer of 1933 after President Roosevelt ordered the Park Service to assume authority for military battlefields and national monuments

8. Michael F. Mordell, Frank Stick: Splendid Painter of the Out-of-Doors (Tucson: Settlers West Galleries, 2004); and “Stick, Who Promoted the Outer Banks, Dies,” The Virginian-Pilot, November 13, 1966, newspaper clipping file, CAHA archives.

9. Andrew M. Hewes, Wright Brothers National Memorial: An Administrative History (Washington, DC: NPS Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation, 1967), 10.

10. David Stick, “A Half Century of Observations,” chapter one, 2.

8 Cape Hatteras National Seashore Administrative History located on lands belonging to other departments as well as for historical sites in Washington, DC. NPS historians would later credit this occasion as being “arguably the most significant event in the evolution of the national park system.”11 The reorganization expanded the scope of NPS activities, increasing its interest in managing areas with significant historical importance, especially on the East Coast. At the same time, the Park Service began to supervise projects of the Civilian Conservation Corps or CCC.

The CCC was created to employ thousands of jobless young men in a program of conservation, rehabilitation, and construction in national and state parks, national forests, and occasionally on private property.

Conrad Wirth

In 1931, NPS Director Albright hired Conrad L.

Wirth as an assistant director for Land Planning.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1899, Wirth was a trained landscape architect. He followed in the foot-steps of his father, a director of the much admired Minneapolis park system. Wirth joined the Park Service after serving on the National Capital Park and Planning Commission. Albright specifically wanted him to coordinate CCC projects in federal, state, and local parks.12 Wirth was later widely praised for succeeding in this task and CCC-con-structed structures, including buildings, bridges, roads, roads, trails, and amphitheaters, have become legendary for their rustic craftsmanship and ubiquity on federal and state lands. At its peak Wirth would oversee a program that employed some 120,000 enrollees and 6,000 additional professional supervisors in 600 CCC camps. One hundred and eighteen of these were based in national parks, but the rest were set up in state parks.13

As Assistant NPS Director for Land Planning, Wirth was also responsible for recreational development.

For the Park Service recreation planning and the concept of establishing recreational areas within national parks was a new idea in the early 1930s.

Progressive reformers had long pushed the impor-tance of open-air recreation for maintaining social health in burgeoning industrial cities. There was a growing interest in bringing national parks, gen-erally located in remote areas, closer to where the majority of people lived, since many could not afford long-distance travel. The Service had sup-ported a state park movement since 1921. It particularly promoted the idea that local parks should include recreational areas to meet regional outdoor activity needs. Traditionally, the principal purpose of national parks was seen to be aesthetic enjoyment by hikers, campers, and those who could afford expensive resorts of the type built in many national parks in the early twentieth century. Recre-ation, per se, was not thought to be consistent with the National Park Service ideal of federal protection of iconic landscapes, such as Yosemite and Yellow-stone, or highly significant cultural sites, such as Mesa Verde. Yet, the Park Service was drawn into recreational planning when it assumed responsi-bility for coordinating relief work in federal and state parks. Many states did not have sufficient park plans, and some had no state parks at all. The National Park Service had to push for legislation to promote comprehensive planning. In 1936, Con-

11. National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (U.S. Department of Interior, Washington, DC, 2005), 28.

FIGURE 5. Conrad “Connie” L. Wirth, who was Assistant Director for Land Planning during the 1930s. (NPS photograph courtesy of Harpers Ferry Center)

12. Douglas Caldwell, “Conrad L. Wirth, 1899-present [1993],” online at <http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/ sontag/wirth.htm>, accessed July 2006. Conrad L. Wirth was widely known widely as “Connie.”

13. National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System, 46.

National Park Service 9 gress passed the Park, Parkway, and Recreation Study Act, which enabled the Park Service to work with other federal agencies, state governments, and others to plan parkways and facilities at federal, state, and local levels across the nation.14 The final report from this important nationwide survey was not published until late in 1941 by which time the onset of World War II delayed significant action on its recommendations.15

Conrad Wirth’s long interest in the development of recreational resources in parks, an interest that con-tinued throughout his NPS career, proved critical to the ultimate achievement of Frank Stick’s dream to create a great coastal park for the nation. These two men, whose stories are at the heart of the creation of Cape Hatteras National Seashore, overcame often tense and problematic relations to advance a shared conviction that conservation could both preserve precious natural resources and serve as an engine for regional economic growth and development.

The interests of Frank Stick and Conrad Wirth first began to come together in the summer of 1933. Offi-cials in North Carolina were heartily supporting Stick’s proposal for a coastal park that included erosion control and reforestation as goals. R. Bruce Etheridge, a former state legislator whose family had deep roots in the Outer Banks, was chosen to head the newly formed North Carolina State Department of Conservation and Development.16 He became an early proponent of coastal conservation but also later resisted the creation of a national coastal park.

The New Deal and “National Ocean Beaches”

In September 1933, Etheridge sent his representa-tives to meet with local citizens, including D. Brad Fearing of Manteo, chairman of the Dare County Board of Commissioners. After a tour of the area conducted by the Chicamacomico Lifeboat Station crew, several state officials gave their opinion upon the prospects for coastal erosion control to the Eliz-abeth City Daily Advance. J. S. Holmes, State Forester, stated that he was “satisfied, after seeing the section, the stumps of the trees that were here not so long ago, and having examined the soil, that this beach section can be made one of the finest timber producing areas in the country.” If trees would grow there, thought H.J. Bryson, State Geol-ogist, then “there is no question but that reforestation along this beach would stop the erosion in a large degree. Fill this long stretch of sand banks with trees and grass, and the land will build up more rapidly than anyone expects.” Access was an issue, but H.D. Panton of the State Highway Department stated that “the road building program is not near so hard as one might think. …and the building of it so it will stay here is only a matter of good engineering.”

Finally, Paul Kelly, a spokesman for Etheridge, summed up the state government’s reaction to the scheme: “I am carried away with the prospect and the promise of such a wonderful site, and I know the state, through my department, will back the propo-sition with every influence it has.” He “found the dream of a few farsighted men like Frank Stick and his own chief, Mr. Etheridge, and the Governor of the state [J.C.B. Ehringhaus], more of a practical probability than he had ever dared to hope for.”17 The Daily Advance agreed and stated on October 3, 1933, that it “can see no reason why Frank Stick’s once seemingly extravagant and remote dream of a great national park along the banks from Currituck to Carteret and perhaps beyond, with all that it would involve from roads to schools for the banks people, may not be realized.”18

Etheridge next called a meeting with coastal officials and representatives of the Federal Public Works Administration (PWA) in Greenville, North Carolina. This group passed a resolution directing Etheridge to call another meeting to create “an orga-nization for the promotion of the purchase of national parks and forest in Eastern North Carolina.” Specifically, North Carolina Congress-man Lindsay C. Warren, whose Third District

14. National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System, 46.

15. See A Study of the Park and Recreation Problem in the United States (Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1941).

16. For more about the political career of R. Bruce Etheridge, see David Wright and David Zoby, Fire on the Beach:

Recovering the Lost Story of the Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 254-255.

17. As quoted by David Stick, “A Half Century of Observations,” chapter one, 5-6. See also Stick, The Outer Banks of North Carolina, 248.

18. Stick, “A Half Century of Observations,” chapter one, 7.

10 Cape Hatteras National Seashore Administrative History included Dare County, proposed that “Governor Ehringhaus be requested to appoint a coastal planning commission consisting of five members representative of the entire eastern section of North Carolina to study and recommend developments for the preservation of the natural resources of the area.”19 As requested, Governor Ehringhaus enacted Warren’s plan and created a North Carolina Coastal Commission with Frank Stick as chairman.20

Stick soon met with relief-agency officials in Wash-ington and Baltimore. He reported that up to $1,420,000 was going to be made available for the Outer Banks. The Independent quoted Stick as saying “excepting the appropriation for the airport at the Wright Memorial and that for restoration work at Fort Raleigh, the $640,000 so far allocated by the Public Works Administration between Cur-rituck and Carteret will be for beach rehabilitation in the interest of preventing erosion through sand fixation and reforestation.”21

This program would not only create jobs on the Outer Banks, it would bring the transient workers to fill them. At the time, the Federal Works Projects Administration (WPA) was attempting to address the plight of “transients,” or homeless and unem-ployed workers who roamed the country by the thousands looking for work. In July 1933, the WPA’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) established a Transient Division, which proposed to fund transient work programs in any state that had an approved plan. Virginia established a camp at Fort Eustis near Richmond. In October 1934, FERA took over the management of Fort Eustis and appointed A. Clark Stratton as assistant director and business manager in charge of the camp’s sixty-five hundred or so transients.22 Stratton, who later became an NPS associate director, was destined to play an enormously important role in the creation of the future national seashore.

On January 1, 1934, the Daily Advance published remarks by Frank Stick. Stick said that the federal government was planning to put four or five

19. Stick, “A Half Century of Observations,” chapter one, 7-8.

20. Ibid., 11. R. Bruce Etheridge and Public Works Commission chairman E. B. Jeffries sat on the board.

21. Stick, “A Half Century of Observations,” chapter one, 11-12.

FIGURE 6. View north of Bodie Island Coast Guard Station in 1930. By then electrical power lines had been run down the island, but as yet no road. (CAHA archives)

National Park Service 11 thousand men to work in the Outer Banks, although these numbers later proved overly optimistic.

Camps and schools were to be established immedi-ately and “transient labor is to be used on the beach project,” Stick said. In fact, he went on, the federal government planned to place men to work “from other more congested sections where there are not enough projects nor sufficient quota allotted to take care of them.” Stick said fifteen thousand men “were afoot in Florida with no work and no means of subsistence and many in other states.” Still, Stick also promised jobs to local people whom he planned to hire as “head men.”23

By the spring of 1934, efforts were well under way to establish transient worker camps in the Outer Banks. According to David Stick, that project began in June 1934 when accommodations were made to base the “initial transient force” of some one hundred laborers at the Parkerson’s Hotel (later known as the Nags Head Casino). These men were to construct the camps where larger numbers of men would be housed. Stick recalled how his father with local help spent the summer designing and constructing “portable barracks” at several sites along the coast to house the expected workers.

Unfortunately, if predictably, given similar experi-ences elsewhere, the “Transient Service” got off to a hard start. Landowners and summer vacationers near the hotel became “incensed” that men whom they thought vagrants would be brought into the area. This attitude worsened when locals further heard that some of the forthcoming transient camps might be manned “entirely by colored people” although Frank Stick tried to tamp down such con-cerns.24 However, full-scale deployment of workers did not start until early in 1936.

In the meantime, Stick prepared a detailed pro-spectus and work plan for the “North Carolina Coastal Reclamation Project,” as he called it. Stick was concerned about project management. “It is my firm conviction,” he stated in the plan’s intro-duction, “that unless this highly specialized project is properly supervised from the beginning by a bureau or a department divorced from political interference, prejudice and exploitation by selfish interests, the undertaking will not only fail of accomplishing any real benefit, but it may and in all probability will prove to be seriously detrimental to a vast territory, both from an economic, a physical and an aesthetic standpoint.”25

In the spring of 1934, as preparations for the beach reclamation project went forward, NPS Director Arno B. Cammerer submitted a memorandum to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes that “recom-mended the investigation of areas suitable for national beach parks.” Whether Banker interest in a “national coastal park” had anything to do with this memorandum is unknown, but Ickes approved a preliminary survey and the study of…