Five Facts: Whalehead Club

By Katrina Mae Leuzinger

A century ago, Corolla was little more than a 200-person village with a one-room school, a church, a lighthouse and a post office. But all that began to change after a visit by Edward Collings Knight, Jr., who was heir to a vast family fortune in Philadelphia. By 1925, Edward had dredged a man-made island around his plot of land and established a grand residence unlike anything else ever seen before on the Outer Banks. Though it later fell into disrepair, the lodge now known as the Whalehead Club was expertly restored by Currituck County in the late ‘90s – and to this day, it still off ers visitors a fascinating glimpse into life during the Jazz Age.

1. FOR THE LOVE OF THE HUNT

The five-story, 21,000-square-foot lodge introduced a number of firsts to the Outer Banks – including electricity and a swimming pool. But for Edward and his new Canadian bride, Marie Louise, the extravagance had a practical side. Along with her spectacularly fiery temper and an impressive independent streak, Marie Louise was also an avid huntress at a time when hunt clubs barred women. Determined to make her happy, Edward built their mansion in the middle of prime waterfowl hunting territory – and extended hunting trip invitations only to friends who didn’t object to shooting alongside a member of the opposite sex.

2. WON’T YOU BE OUR NEIGHBOR?

Whether or not it was their intention, the Knights caused quite a stir on the northern beaches – and not every story that circulated in the village painted the couple in the most favorable light. Perhaps the most enduring local belief was that the flashy lodge was constructed to one-up the hunt clubs that had shunned Marie Louise…even going as far as to build a fifth false chimney in order to outnumber the four chimneys of the nearby Currituck Shooting Club. Still, the Knights didn’t keep themselves entirely removed from local life, and every December they held a lavish Christmas party complete with meals and wrapped gifts for all the villagers.

3. UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS

Despite examples of their generosity, fans of shows such as Downton Abbey shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that there were still some distinct differences between the Knights’ living quarters and the spaces the servants occupied. Step through a maid’s entrance from one of the opulent bedrooms and you might notice a beautiful Art Nouveau door handle on one side… and nothing more than a plain old metal knob on the other. In the narrow corridors connecting the servants’ rooms, pastel-colored wall paint also changes to generic white, carpets vanish, and in some places even the hallways and stairwells shrink down to passing room only.

4. CHANGING HANDS

After the Knights passed away within months of each other in 1936, the heirs to their estate were Edward’s two adult granddaughters. But even with the lodge’s rare counterweight elevator, a fully stocked wine cellar and all the hand-signed Tiff any lighting, the women decided it was much too modest for their tastes. Opting instead for married life abroad in Europe, the lodge sold to a businessman named Ray Adams in 1940 for $25,000 – approximately $358,000 less than it took to build just 15 years earlier. Sensing an opportunity to convert it into an elite sportsman getaway, Ray reportedly re-christened it the Whalehead Club after finding a stray whale bone on the edge of the property.

5. FUELING THE FUTURE

Ray Adams never saw his ambitions for turning Whalehead into a year-round tourist destination come to fruition, however. Although it was rented for a time as a private hunting ground for $50 a day, Whalehead also served a number of other purposes over the years, including being a receiving station for the United States Coast Guard during World War II and later hosting a boarding school for young men. But its most controversial use was when the Atlantic Research Corporation took it over in the 1960s as a secret testing site for rocket fuel. Luckily, the U.S. won the space race in 1969, eliminating the need to eventually transform Whalehead into a large-scale – and potentially toxic – rocket manufacturing plant.