History Banks - Salter Path: An Island Within an Island

history banks Salter Path:

An Island Within an Island

Salter Path Develops as First Village on Bogue Banks

The fishing village of Salter Path was the first section of Bogue Banks to be inhabited by American settlers.

They began to come in the mid-1880s, to fish, farm and work odd jobs just to make ends meet.

Kay Holt Roberts Stephens, who has compiled “Salter Path – A Brief History,” said these first Salter Pathers came from “Shackleford Banks, Hunting Quarter (Atlantic and Sea Level), Straits and other Down East locations in Carteret County.”

As the local whaling industry declined, many people from the Cape Lookout area and Shackleford Banks moved whole houses by boat to Salter Path. Others disassembled their houses and floated them board-by-board.

“The first Salter Path houses were nestled among the trees on the sound side of the island,” Stephens wrote.

She said: “Families brought their livestock; cattle roamed freely on the banks, grazing and drinking water at the various fresh water creeks. Hogs ate the wild grapes, roots and acorns as well as corn given to them by their owners.”

“Settlers cultivated a variety of vegetables and supplemented their seafood, pork and beef with the meat of wildlife on the banks.” They baked opossum and raccoon and stewed loons and various ducks.

Stephens said a trail ran by Riley Salter’s house, connecting the sound to the ocean beach, which became known as “Salter’s path.”

Whatever happened to Riley Salter is uncertain. Other sources believe the path was actually named for Owen Salter. A portion of that path is still visible, Stephens said.

Salter Pathers have always lived for the “Mullet Blow,” the official start of autumn fishing season.

“When the mullet ran in big black schools out in the ocean,” the entire Salter Path community once came to the beach, Stephens said. The fishermen “would encircle the mullet with the long nets, which had been knit so patiently by their women. Hundreds of pounds of mullet would be brought to shore.”

Richard Ehrenkaufer of Emerald Isle is a fishing instructor whose “stage name” is Dr. Bogus. He tells us: “Sensing a blast of northeast wind, the finger mullet and hardhead mullet know when it’s time to head south for their winter spawn.”

“The mullet themselves provide good eats. Some people pickle or can the finger mullet like herring or sardines, and of course, the striped mullet is famed for its succulent roe, while the whole fish is often butterflied and grilled or smoked.”

“The massive migration of mullet out of our creeks and sounds rings the dinner bell for fall to begin, and drum, flounder and speckled trout” are in hot pursuit, Dr. Bogus says. Salter Path: ‘An Island on an Island’

Salter Path was once a village that “lay quiet and peaceful, nestled in trees … almost like paradise,” reported Rodney Kemp, Carteret County historian extraordinaire. “It seemed like an old quilt pieced together with an old hand.”

He shared these thoughts with Ann Green, a contributor to the Coastwatch publication of the North Carolina Sea Grant program.

In a sense, Salter Path is the heart of the Bogue Banks. The late Lillian Smith Golden (1901-85), a native Salter Pather, once wrote:

“If there was ever a heaven on Earth, it was here. There was wild country on each side of us. We had a church. We had a school. We had a feeling for each other, a love for one another....”

Development has encroached on Salter Path. Today, it is the only unincorporated community on Bogue Banks – 81 acres that form an island on an island.

Green found Salter Path’s Kathleen McMillan Guthrie to be a willing and able tour guide. It used to be that men gathered at Irvin Smith’s store and exchanged fishing stories. “Most of these men were competitive,” Guthrie said. “The competition was not for money. The competition was for who caught the prettiest scallops and shrimp.”

After Irvin’s store closed down in the 1980s, the gathering place became the Save-A-Stop convenience store. Local men – from retired ferry captains to commercial fishermen – start arriving around 6:45am to sit on stools and share news.

Postal Service Delivers the Mail to ‘Gillikin’

The first U.S. post office on Bogue Banks opened in 1915, which in effect, changed the name of the unincorporated village of Salter Path to “Gillikin.”

This occurrence also opened a new chapter in Carteret County history. Now, the county had two communities named in honor of the same person – a young woman named Sarah Elizabeth “Bettie” Gillikin Adams. That is quite a rarity.

Records show that Bettie Gillikin was born in 1881, the daughter of Chewe Pigott Gillikin and Caldonia Goulding Gillikin of Otway, a community located in the Down East section of the county.

Chewe operated a small general store next to his home in Otway. He was the first and only postmaster at Otway. (Otway’s post office was established in 1902 and discontinued in 1924.)

Bettie had served as an assistant to her father in Otway, and she was credited with helping him establish a new post office in 1903 at a nearby settlement on the North River. “In appreciation of her assistance,” that new post office as well as its community was named, simply, “Bettie.”

Bettie Gillikin attended the public high school in Atlantic and then enrolled at Graham Academy in Marshallberg, were she earned a teaching certificate.

The Graham Academy was founded in 1888 by Methodist Rev. William Quincy Adams Graham to provide religious and moral training to the youth of the county. It was open to boys and girls and attended by day students as well as boarders. The pastor considered Marshallberg to be an ideal location, as “the nearest saloon was 40 miles away.”

Bettie Gillikin took a job as a school teacher, first at Diamond City near Cape Lookout and then in Otway.

In 1910, she married Macajah C. “M.C.” Adams of North River. He was “a fisherman and a boatman.” The couple made their home at Salter Path. Bettie Gillikin Adams became the teacher at the Salter Path one-room school house.

“The name of the town was changed to Gillikin in honor of ‘Miss

Bettie Gillikin’ when the post office opened in September 1915 (even though she was now an ‘Adams’),” according to research conducted by Walt Zaenker of the Pine Knoll Shores History Committee.

In 1918, when Bettie and M.C. moved to Morehead City, the name to the post office and the village on Bogue Banks was changed back to Salter Path.

Through it all, Laura Frances Willis Smith served as the first Gillikin/Salter Path postmaster.

When the Salter Path post office was closed in 2011, its assigned zip code of 28575 was combined into 28512 at the Atlantic Beach post office. Indian Beach and Pine Knoll Shores are also within 28512.

Paving the Road to Salter Path Was an Ordeal

The Works Progress Administration was an American “New Deal” agency, and it partnered with the North Carolina State Highway Commission to begin building a roadway west from Atlantic Beach, extending about nine miles to Salter Path.

Completed in 1940, the road was surfaced with a “packed sandclay” mixture, which was guaranteed to “prevent the road from rutting and becoming sticky in wet weather.”

The new road was wide enough for one vehicle, creating some interesting challenges related to “sharing the road.”

In 1953, the road was given a “macadamized” surface of compressed, crushed stone and tar and widened to two lanes.

Today, the road is known as N.C. Hwy. 58, and the section from Atlantic Beach to Salter Path was officially designated as the “George W. Smith Highway” in 2005 by the N.C. Board of Transportation.

From the 1920s forward, George Smith was Salter Path’s revered mailboat captain. “He was known to all simply as Grandpa George, Uncle George or Capt. George,” according to grandson Charles M. Smith.

Capt. George used his own vessel, the Florabell, to travel back and forth to Morehead City with incoming and outgoing mail. He also served as Salter Path’s justice of the peace, was head of the elections board and was a member of the school committee.

Later, Capt. George would drive the yellow school bus along the beach to Atlantic Beach and cross the bridge to transport up to 10 students from Salter Path to Morehead City High School in the Charles S. Wallace Building. This job paid $40 per month. (He always found room on the school bus to carry a handful of Salter Path women to and from work at the Morehead City Garment Co., owned by J. W. and Edna P. Jackson in Morehead City.) Strawberry Patch Incident Was the ‘Last Straw’

When Alice Green Hoffman, the New York socialite lived in what is now Pine Knoll Shores, she was widely regarded as “queen of Bogue Banks,” said Carteret County’s historical wizard Rodney Kemp.

Alice Hoffman was pretty close to famous. Her niece, Eleanor Butler Alexander Roosevelt, was married to President Theodore Roosevelt’s eldest son, Ted Roosevelt.

Hoffman lived in a large house with modern conveniences like “electric lights.” To run her household, she employed many from the neighboring village of Salter Path, including the legendary “Aunt Charity” who worked as her cook.

“Aunt Charity was the matriarch of the Salter Path community,” Kemp said. (She was the wife of the honorary Salter Path mayor, George Washington Smith.)

Hoffman didn’t seem to squabble over the fact that most of the 35 Salter Path families were living in houses built on land she owned. But then one day, she found Salter Path cows in her strawberry patch.

She sued the residents over the trespassing cattle in 1923. Many of the Salter Pathers had been living there for more than 40 years, arguing that they had received “permission” to build on the land from a landowner who preceded Ms. Hoffman. (Some sources say the property on Bogue Banks was owned during the late 1880s by W. Alonzo Thomas of Beaufort.)

The court judgment in 1923 upheld the claim that the land was legally owned at the time by Hoffman, but that the current Salter Path inhabitants and their descendants could occupy the village land as long as they did not allow their cattle to roam east of the village, did not build outside the boundaries or on the oceanfront … and did not cut live trees.