Core Sound Communities

We walked from Gloucester to Marshallberg to the show on Saturday night. 

Eloise Nelson Pigott, Gloucester 

Gloucester, tucked between the communities of Straits and Marshallberg, is truly “off the path” and almost hidden, although at one time it served as the central hub when the ferry to Harkers Island docked there. Once known as “Up Straits,” Gloucester was renamed by Josephus Pigott when the Post Office was established in 1910. “Captain Joe” ran the schooners Charmer I and Charmer II to the West Indies and New England from his homeport on The Straits. He suggested the name Gloucester after his favorite port in Massachusetts. Pigott also ran a general store, later run by his children Bill and Florence Pigott.   

At 205 Railway Landing, Lloyd Pigott operates Straits Railway, a traditional boat repair business founded by his grandfather and namesake. Pigott has two rails and a mechanized wench used to pull trawlers and other boats out of the water for bottom repair and painting. Straits Railway is the last of its kind Down East and makes for an interesting visit for those seeking to understand more about this region’s close connection to the water.    

Gloucester was an important business and transportation link, serving as the gateway to Harkers Island via a private ferry before the construction of the Harkers Island bridge in the early 1940s. A favorite story from the ferry days tells of Oliver Chadwick, known as “Ob,” who owned and captained the ferry between Gloucester and Harkers Island. That service continued until the Harkers Island Bridge was completed and opened January 1, 1941. The original ferry was small, about twenty feet wide and forty feet long. “It ran so regularly that when our clock stopped, we set it by the ferry,” recalled Erma Hansen. She also remembered the day when a circus was ferried from Gloucester to Harkers Island. The trucks arrived at the dock in trucks too large or heavy to be ferries all together. “It took forever to get the elephants out, one at a time,” she remembered.  “Each elephant tested every board on the dock before crossing it.” 

The Gloucester Community Center, a humble building in the shade of tall pines, can be found at the corner of Pigott and Ferry Dock Road. The club is the site of two events that infuse the sleepy community with hundreds of people each year. The oldest event, the Gloucester Community Club Chicken Barbecue, began in a potato-grading shed that was on site in 1955. Now held twice each summer, proceeds from the chicken barbecue go toward the Woodrow and Mary Dudley Price Memorial Scholarship for a graduating high-school senior. Woodrow Price, former managing editor of the Raleigh newspaper News and Observer, lived in Gloucester with his wife Mary Dudley, and was an avid outdoorsman. Mary Dudley Price, a journalist in her own right, volunteered with North Carolina State’s seafood laboratory and contributed to Joyce Taylor’s cookbook Mariner’s Menu.  

The chicken barbecue is quite the cultural event, as a crew of “chicken flippers” meet at the barbeque pit and light massive amounts of charcoal, placing some 260 chicken halves on racks and “dobbing” them with secret sauce. When the crew chief decides it’s time, two men cross their arms, grab each end of the rack, and flip the chickens, walking down the pit until each rack is turned. The women of the Gloucester Community Center spend the afternoon making slaw, baked beans, and plating a dazzling array of pies, cakes, and cookies. When the crowds show up to eat, the members form a serving line, chatting and joking with friends and neighbors far and wide, almost all of them repeat customers season after season.  

The Gloucester Mardi Gras is another annual event at the Community Club, started in 1992 by Gloucester boatbuilder and musician Bryan Blake as a way to bring a little color to a gray February day. Modeled after the rural Mardi Gras celebrations of southwest Louisiana, this is a true community effort. The ingredients for the gumbos and twenty-one turkeys (to be deep fried, Cajun-style) are donated. A children’s king and queen march is a highlight of the day. There is also a “Fool’s Procession” that takes to the streets of Gloucester complete with musicians, people in costumes, and makeshift “krewes.” Gloucester Mardi Gras is held at the community center on the Saturday of President’s Day weekend or the Saturday before Fat Tuesday, whichever comes first.  

 The official Gloucester Mardi Gras live recording, recorded in 2010, tells the tale:  

Once upon a February, deep amid the shivering pines and frosted marshes of Down East, a single speck of glitter fell from the sky and landed on a picnic table in Gloucester, North Carolina. All the people gathered around, wondering what to make of it. As folks ruminated, a boat builder broke out a fiddle and started a crazy little tune. An accordion sang out, and a fisherman on the fringe found himself shuffling his white rubber boots. Wishing her neighbors full bellies, a young mother showed up with butter and a sack of flour. So a welder from Marshallberg fetched his black iron pan and started making a roux. Around and around and around he stirred, and twenty years later he looked up to find the Gloucester Mardi Gras going full bore. What is this mysterious Cajun spell brought by a single sparkle in the dead of winter? Each February people far and wide gather at the Gloucester Community Club under sheets of rain, salty winds – even drifts of rare coastal snow – a motley krewe dancing on the end of winter’s long tail. Gumbos bubbling, turkeys frying, little kings and queens spinning in an orbit of beads...Here’s to twenty years of a little place and time touched by a wayward speck of something shiny.