An Outer Banks Reader by David Stick

Author:David Stick [Stick, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807847268
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1998-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Pumping and Grinding

TUCKER LITTLETON 1980

Nineteenth-century visitors to the Outer Banks must have had difficulty figuring out why there were so many windmills. Almost all of them were post windmills, designed primarily for grinding corn. So why were there so many of them on the isolated barrier islands of the Outer Banks where practically everybody fished for a living and nobody grew a significant amount of corn? In time visitors no doubt learned that it was common practice for fishermen to sail across the sounds with boatloads of surplus fish to trade with the mainland farmers for corn. If the fishermen happened to have a big haul of shrimp—one product of the sea that few residents would eat until recently—the farmers would take that in trade also, for use as fertilizer. Tucker Littleton of Swansboro, part-time preacher and rest-of-the-time historian, carried on a determined search for coastal windmill information, identifying more than sixty-five that had been in operation at one time in Carteret County alone. The following article describing post windmills and their operation appeared in the October 1980 issue of The State.

During the early years of the Civil War, Charles F. Johnson was a part of the Union campaign against the North Carolina sounds. Johnson, who wrote an account of his war experiences and observations in the Outer Banks region entitled The long Roll, was astounded at the number of windmills dotting the North Carolina coast. He wrote that in the northern part of the Tar Heel coast he had seen more windmills than he had “supposed were in existence in the whole country. . . .” While my research has shown that Johnson was not exaggerating, I find it hard to understand how so many windmills could have been so soon forgotten. But today’s Tar Heels are largely unaware that there were ever windmills on our coast, and many of my inquiries regarding windmills have been greeted with such replies as, “You’ve got to be kidding!”

Nevertheless, the historic coastal windmills, almost totally belonging to the type called “post mills,” reached their greatest abundance during the mid-1800’s and then rapidly declined near the end of the nineteenth century. By the beginning of the twentieth century, perhaps not more than a dozen of the historic windmills remained; and by 1920 apparently every vestige of the old post mills had disappeared from the Tidewater region.

Only recently has a visible reminder of the age of the windmills reappeared on the Tar Heel coast. Mrs. Lynanne Westcott of Manteo, N.C., was determined that the windmill would not be completely forgotten, and she has undertaken at Nags Head the long and expensive task of restoring the windmill to a segment of the Outer Banks landscape. Mrs. Westcott’s new windmill is an exact replica of the typical nineteenth-century windmill once so popular on our coast. Every detail has been authenticated, and this memorial to the age of windmills . . . offers a genuine educational experience to both out-of-state tourists and native Tar Heels.

While Mrs. Westcott’s

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