1
EARTHSCAPE AND CLIMATE
âI chose Kitty Hawk because it seemed the place which most closely met the required conditions,â Wilbur Wright wrote his father, Bishop Milton Wright, on 9 September 1900. Inscribing his first letter from North Carolina on the stationery of the Hotel Arlington at Elizabeth City, the elder of the two Wright brothers who invented flight explained why the tiny fishing village on the Carolina coast provided the perfect place for conducting âpractical experimentsâ on what he called âthe flying question.â1
âAt Kitty Hawk which is on the narrow bar separating the Sound from the Ocean,â he continued, âthere are neither hills nor trees, so that it offers a safe place for practice.â Besides âthe wind there is stronger ⌠and is almost constantââsufficient, he believed, to lift from the ground a controlled, man-carrying flying machine. What he called âthe required conditionsâ at Kitty Hawk had been confirmed to him by both the worldâs foremost authority on flight at the timeâOctave Chanuteâand the U.S. Weather Bureau. Those required elements included several crucial items: sustained winds in one direction of twenty-one miles per hour; soft sands for many inevitable crashes; remoteness from the prying eyes of big-city newspaper reporters; and reliable transportation access from Dayton, Ohio. No other place known to either Chanute or the Weather Bureau contained all those factors the Wrights sought as their most permanent laboratory for testing several modes of flight.2
But neither Wilbur Wright nor his brother Orville had ever flown in an airship or a flying machine nor even attempted to make any kind of deviceâother than a kiteâthat would fly. Nor had they ever seen an oceanâmuch less the kind of barren, sandy, windswept barrier chain of islands they were about to experience for the first time on the coast of North Carolina. Wilbur described Kitty Hawk as unduly remoteâeven to the people in Elizabeth City. âNo one seemed to know anything about the place or how to get there,â Wilbur told his family.
Eventually, he got passage from Elizabeth City to the place with a local fisherman on a âflat bottomed,â âhalf rotted,â and âvermin-infestedâ boat that barely withstood, he thought, the high waves and surging currents of the treacherous waters between the mainland and Kitty Hawk Bay. He was certain that the skipper, one Israel Perry, was incompetentâthat the man could neither command his shabby boat properly nor capably ply what Wilbur perceived as the stormy seas of the vast Albemarle Sound. Wilbur thought it almost a miracle that he had survived the dangerous voyage.3
Finally arriving on the sliver of sandy and scruffy land between the normally calm Albemarle Sound and the surging waves and tides of the Atlantic Ocean, Wilbur and Orville Wright in 1900 began their experiments. Despite the distance from their orderly Ohio home, the unpredictable patterns of weather, swarming hordes of bloodsucking mosquitoes, roaming armies of hungry pigs, sand-filled shoes and blankets, chilling norâeasters, walloping hurricane-force winds from the south, and every other surprise of raw nature and guileless men, the brothers Wright forged aheadâstill unsure about their testing grounds.
When he got across the Albemarle Sound to Kitty Hawk on 11 September, Wilbur was welcomed as an out-of-state guest and as a temporary boarder at the home of William J. and Addie Tate. The Tatesâ small clapboard and wooden-shingle house served doubly as their family residence with their young daughters Irene and Pauline and as the official U.S. Post Office for Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Being able to perch for three weeks in a local home was a godsend for the young man from Ohio.4
His hosts possessed the inherited ways in which coastal peopleâIndians and immigrating Europeansâfor thousands of years had coped with their unusual world. It was an environment that was inviting when the weather was fair and hellish when winds and storms and ripping tides lashed across the narrow threads of sand. During the day Wilbur worked in the barren yard of the Tate house, cobbling together the first Wright flying machine. In the evenings he sat at supper with the family, hearing about the wild animals that lurked across the scraggly land and the ways humans withstood the persistent assaults of weather, sand, and biting insects. This initial encounter with the Tates would never be forgotten. The Tates remained lifelong friends and advocates of the Wrights and their pioneering flights on the Carolina coast for the remainder of their lives. Bill in particular later styled himself as an official guide to the Wright brothersâ Carolina coast and promoted in both North Carolina and Washington, D.C., the creation of a monument marking the most important site of Americaâs first powered flights.5
When Orville arrived almost three weeks later, the brothers supped on duck and rabbit and fishâstandard local fare in those partsâwith the Tates and listened to more coastal lore until 4 October, when they ventured on their own into nature. For the next nineteen days, the brothersâinexperienced as campersâfelt they had mounted a wild and unpredictable steed. They set up a tent on a sandy hill half a mile from the Tate homeâroughly halfway between Kitty Hawk, a cluster of houses on the sound side of the banks, and the Kitty Hawk Life-Saving Station on the Atlantic shore side. To their consternation, their tent was blown down repeatedly by winds ranging from thirty to forty-five miles per hour. They took their first flying machine, a smallish device, out and tried to fly it as a kite. That worked well. They then tethered it by ropes to a wooden derrick they had built for testing the craft. But the flying machine was thrashed around and upended whenever they tried to work with it. Although Wilbur built the machine to carry five times his weight, it would not carry him aloft when it was flown as a glider. Adding insult to injury, the machine crashed and was left in a heap of broken rubble when crosswinds threw it into a dune known as âLook Out Hill,â which the brothers renamed the âHill of the Wreck.â6
But all was not lost. When the machine would not lift Wilburâs 130 pounds, along came a small boy, Tom Tate (a nephew of Bill Tate). He was âa small chap [70 pounds] ⌠that can tell more yarns than any kid of his size I ever saw,â said Orville. The crude flying machine rose with the diminutive Tate aboard without difficulties. But when the smallish dunes at Kitty Hawk sometimes lacked the constant winds they sought, the brothers moved four miles southward to the much larger Kill Devil Hills. There, they found both perfect winds and an open terrain more suitable for flight. These large dunesânear no town, but adjacent to the Kill Devil Hills Life-Saving Stationâbecame the locale for all the brothersâ tests in their subsequent trips to the Carolina coast across the next eleven years.7
In addition to reckoning with the gusting and swooping winds, the brothers also began to understand the earthscape of the place where they hoped to fly. âBut the sand!â exclaimed Orville. âThe sand is the greatest thing in Kitty Hawk, and soon will be the only thing,â he prophesied. Kitty Hawk was once âa fertile valley, cultivated by some ancient Kitty Hawker,â he thought. He and Wilbur could see the results of recent shifts in the sands in the landscape of rotted limbsâonce belonging to proud treesâthat protruded from the sand. âThe sea,â he observed, âhas washed and the wind [has] blown millions and millions of loads of sand up in heaps along the coast, completely covering houses and forest.â One night a â45 mile norâeasterâ struck their camp and âtook up two or three wagon loads of sand from the N.E. end of our tent and piled it up eight inches deep on the flying machine we had anchored about fifty feet southwest.â While this was happening, the sides of their tent snapped repeatedly, sounding âexactly like thunder.â8
While the Wright brothers marveled at the moving landscape of their test grounds, a young geology professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Collier Cobb, attempted to explain the ebb and flow of sands on the barrier island chain for the National Geographic Magazine in 1906. According to Cobb, the advancement of sands and the formation of great new dunes around 1900 was the result of years of people denuding the pine forests that had flourished on the Carolina banks for eons. âThis movement of the sand was started just after the Civil War by the cutting of trees next to the shore for ship timbers,â he wrote. He found that an entire fishing village on Hatteras Island had been buried by sand near a spot known as The Great Woodsâwhere ânot a stick of timber stands upon it today.â Cobbâs assessment of the changes was the best guess in an era that lacked essential data on the rise and fall of oceans that would be available to scientists a century later.9
Aside from the constantly shifting sands, one of the other fundamental modifications in the shape of the Carolina coast was the never-ending creation and melting away of inlets from, and thereby outlets to, the Atlantic Ocean across its barrier islands. The island chain experienced by the Wright brothers in 1900 looked nothing like the coast that had been encountered by the explorers sent to the same region by Sir Walter Raleigh three hundred years earlier. In fact, when Raleighâs explorers first arrived in 1584, the island chain between what would become the Virginia border and the Oregon Inlet contained at least four additional inlets that would be long gone by 1900: Currituck, Musketo, Carthys, and Roanoke. Musketo Inlet disappeared in 1671. Currituck was replaced by a new Currituck Inlet around 1713. Oregon Inlet evaporated in 1770 but then reemerged in 1846. Well before Oregon reopened, all the other inlets of the upper banks region had closed seemingly for good: Carthys and Roanoke in 1811 and the New Currituck in 1828. But a major shift in the banks occurred in 1846 when Oregon Inlet reopened. A new inlet that took the name Hatteras also appeared then for the first time in recorded history. By 1900 there were only three principal openings between the Atlantic Ocean and North Carolinaâs vast body of sound watersâOregon, Hatteras, and Ocracokeâall three constantly being furrowed and maintained by the skills of government engineers.10
But since all these inlets for salty ocean waters were also outlets for North Carolinaâs freshwater rivers, the opening and closing of the inlets also had important implications for both the natural and the geopolitical development of the Carolina coastal region. First, the closing of the old inlets meant that North Carolinaâs tiny port towns no longer had natural barely navigable outlets to the sea. The inlets were never deep enough for seagoing vessels to pass through easily anyway. Even Sir Walter Raleighâs explorers three centuries earlier had used small, shallow-bottomed pinnaces to transport people and cargo across the banks to Roanoke Island. Nevertheless, a modest seagoing trade emanated from Edenton, Bath, and New Bern during the colonial era. It continued in a limited manner until the inlets of the upper banks closed in the early nineteenth century. Although small vessels were used primarily in a vibrant coastal trade that ranged from Boston to Florida, by the time of the Civil War, even these shallow craft could hardly make it to sea.
In the postâCivil War period when the U.S. government was flexing its engineering muscle all along Americaâs coasts, North Carolina politicians and entrepreneurs constantly lobbied Congress and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to deepen the channels through Oregon, Hatteras, and Ocracoke Inlets. An expensive project to dredge a channel through Ocracoke Inlet was completed in 1897. But in a demonstration of the futility of attempting to alter the forces of nature, two years later the channel had shoaled, leaving the upper reaches of the Carolina coast without a single navigable channel to the sea, even for shallow coastal craft.11
A second consequence of the closing of the inlets was a much happier one for people who admired observing or plucking fish and fowl from one of the worldâs richest natural habitats. Whereas the Atlanticâs salty waters had spilled into the sounds through porous inlets twice daily with the rise and fall of every tide, the disappearance of these water channels transformed the upper banks region of North Carolinaâthe Albemarle Soundâinto a gigantic freshwater sea. As one of the largest freshwater habitats in America, the Albemarle became a lush environment for the growth of wide spans of the grasses beloved by migrating fowl. In the process, this inland sea became a perfect laboratory where the Wright brothers could study the behavior of soaring and swooping birds in flight. The seasonal shifts of millions of duck, geese, and other migratory birds from Canadian to South American habitats made the inner side of the Carolinaâs barrier islands one of the richest sites for the targeting of waterfowl in the Americas.
Another result of the closing of the inlets was a modification in the fish and shellfish culture of coastal Carolina. The transformation of the Albemarle Sound into a freshwater environment meant that its population of shad, herring, and striped bass exploded. Every February through April thereafter millions upon millions of these and other freshwater species could be harvested without depleting the abundance. But the disappearance of salt water north of Roanoke Island also meant that these waters could no longer produce oysters. Indeed, when North Carolina in 1887 commissioned a study of its coastal waters for the purpose of expanding the cultivation of oysters, its principal scientist excluded the entire Albemarle Sound region from its survey of existing o...