| MANTEO, NORTH CAROLINA: |
|
| The Outer Banks of North Carolina run
a mere 175 miles south from the state's northern border. A thin
line of low flat islands, they are not exactly a significant land
mass. Nor are they all that easy to get to from our country's major
airports. It's a 90-mile drive, for example, from Norfolk, Virginia
but the islands' remoteness is one of their charms. When you finally
arrive you feel you have achieved something and found your own New
World. You've discovered serenity. (800-446-6262 www.outerbanks.org
) |
|
 |
 The town of Manteo on Roanoke Island comes up first when cars roll in from the west. It's not only a perfect springboard for any tours of the area but a destination in itself. |
"This is a great, little place - it's the county seat so it's a working town," says Steve Brumfield who has managed Manteo Booksellers for 18 years. "It's an old fashioned town but that's what makes it so nice. Kids walk to school in Manteo. This is a spot where not much happens." |
|
   |
|
     |
He's kidding, of course. A lot has happened in Manteo and is still going on. On his shelves he has more than 250 books that deal with his island's history. He has great reading on lighthouses, shipwrecks and pirates; and books going from the famous Lost Colony of 1587 to the Wright Brothers' discovery of flight in 1903, and more recently, in 1999, the incredible move of the beleagued Cape Hatteras to a safer site 2,900 feet inland, completed just before Hurricane Dennis struck the coast. At 208 feet high, it's still the tallest lighthouse in the country; it was built in 1867 at a cost of $75,000 -- the move to higher ground (done because shifting sand had exposed the pylons that were rotting) cost $11.8 million. |
| If history is not enough, Brumfield's store
has regional books on nature trails, seafood recipes and local legends. |
|
 |
Local folklore includes ghosts. One is of a former postmaster, Roscoe Jones, who lived in a house built in Manteo in 1860; it became the Roanoke Island Inn and his presence has apparently been felt in an upstairs storage room. The other ghost is the lighthouse keeper's daughter in the North Room of the old 1874 Currituck lighthouse in Corolla one of the most northern towns on the islands. It is known the lighthouse keeper's wife died of tuberculosis and his daughter drowned in the surf. |
 |
|
|
|
| Then, of course, there's the local story of Blackbeard who died in a fierce skirmish with the Royal Navy at nearby Ocracoke Inlet in 1718. There were further naval battles at Roanoke Island and Hatteras Inlet in the Civil War | |
| PAGE 1 2 |