Portsmouth Storms

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In the evening of September 28/day of September 29, 1806, a terrible hurricane passed along the coast, hitting the area of Portsmouth, Shell Castle, and Ocracoke. According to a post by the NC Maritime Museum in Beaufort, a report came in from Shell Castle saying "it was the most tremendous storm ever witnessed by a human being." Ellen Cloud, in her book "Portsmouth the Way It Was" (copyright 1996) describes it this way: "On Sunday night, September 28, 1806 a revenue cutter the 'Governor Williams' that was to transport William Tatham's baggage, instruments and his papers of a whole summers work to New Bern, riding anchor near Portsmouth was sunk by a severe storm. Records show that a storm of hurricane force rose with such fury that the vessel was sunk just two hundred yards from shore off Taylor's landing. Lost with the ship was all of Tatham's work and three men were drown. Tatham had left for New Bern in a whale boat earlier that day. He hurried back to Ocracoke Inlet after the storm, "such was the scene of distress when I arrived, that we lay on our oars and counted thirty one wrecked in one single view around us."

Map acquired from an article in Coastal Review Online, published 12/11/17: "Our Coast's History: Shell Castle Island". (They don't list a date for the map but it was a Jonathan Price map offered for live auction. It looks like it's from about that same time period.)

Photo and caption courtesy of Friends of Portsmouth Island Facebook page.

Photo 1: The Wallace-Grace-Coe House in snow.

Photo 2: Cecil Gilgo

The Hard Freeze - Cecil Gilgo

“When I was a boy the island was flat. You could look anywhere and see a goose or sheep or something like that. It’s all grown up now. You can’t see nothing.From Uncle Warren’s Creek to the old school house was just as plain... twern’t nothing onto it, no trees, nothing. If you had a plane you could have landed onto it. It made the prettiest landing field you ever seen in your life. I wish you could see it like it was when I was a kid. Where people lived, how they worked, the hard times they had. It was all hardship, twern’t no pleasure into it.I can remember when I was five years old. I remember because of the big freeze we had. There was snow, talk about ya snow! There was a fence that went around our yard. It was all fenced in and you couldn’t see it. It was all covered up with snow and ice. Mercy in this world, you could look out in the sound and all you could see was ice. It was froze solid. The loons would come and light and their feathers were coated with ice.We had a pond to the right of our house that papa had fenced in for the geese. They’d come in there and lay and hatch in the summer. The wild geese came and landed in there with our geese, they were bout froze. Someone would go out on the ice down near the Haulover and cut a hole in the ice and sit there on a box and wait. Them geese would come there and go under the ice looking for food. Boys, they were hungry, they were starved to death.”

A chapter from the book “Cecil Remembers Portsmouth,” compiled by Ellen Cloud.