Introduction - Otway
When I was a young boy the old folks put shrimp in the garden as a fertilizer.
O. C. Lawrence, Otway
Otway is hard to miss, as it comprises one of the busiest crossroads and center of commerce Down East, with a gym, county library, pizza take-out, pharmacy, gas pumps, auto repair shops, and a Dollar General. Otway has been a crossroads community and center of commerce since the first gristmill was built on Dill’s point eons ago. The community sprawls along the east side of Ward’s Creek and is named for famed nineteenth-century privateer Otway Burns, who once plied the waters of the Straits and kept a house in Beaufort and Swansboro.
The people of Otway are always proud to share their connection to North Carolina’s famous privateer, Otway Burns. His ship, the Snap Dragon, was equipped at Elijah Pigott’s boatworks on the Straits as a ship of war in the early 1800s. With the Snap Dragon and her skillful crew, Burns plundered around $4 million from America’s enemies on the open sea, making him a wealthy man and the most successful privateer in American history. Otway Burns died in 1850 and was buried in the Old Burying Grounds in Beaufort, with one of the cannons from the Snap Dragon fixed upon his tomb.
The community of Otway has an agricultural heart and a history of participating in truck farming. Sterling Hancock’s father was a farmer. He helped his father pile potatoes into a large mound. “Bulrushes,” or marsh grass, was cut with their tractor mower, and used to cover the potatoes. Then the whole potato “bank” was covered in dirt for insulation. “You had a door that you’d go in, and get them whenever you wanted to,” Sterling Hancock recalled.
A striking figure in Otway’s business history is Oliver “Ol” Lewis, an early twentieth-century mover and shaker. Lewis sported a white Stetson hat and a tobacco-stained beard. He ran a general store and filling station, a farm, and a fish house. He was one of the first to truck fish and produce to distant markets, buying sweet potatoes and mullets from locals. “He owned a bank on Front Street in Beaufort; lost it during the Depression,” said Sterling Hancock. Lewis also owned the first automobile in Otway, a Model T. “He didn’t know how to drive it. He got in it and he took off and went right through the back of his garage,” chuckled Mr. Hancock. “And he was hollering at it, ‘Whoa! Whoa!’”
Decatur Gillikin is an Otway legend, as stories attest to his superhuman strength. Born in 1821, he was known throughout eastern North Carolina as the “Samson of Carteret County.” People say he was a giant of a man at 6 feet 6 inches tall and 260 pounds. Decatur demonstrated his strength in numerous wrestling matches against sailors docked in the area. One story, a favorite of Down East’s own “Fish House Liar,” Sonny Williamson, has Decatur sailing to Beaufort to trade. One day the sheriff confiscated his skiff for non-payment of taxes. It took six men to get the skiff out of the water and padlock it to the courthouse steps. After discovering what happened, Decatur snapped the padlock, dragged the skiff through town to the water, and sailed home to Otway. From that day on, Sonny Williamson claimed, Decatur Gillikin would make it a practice to drag his skiff through the streets of Beaufort, piling groceries and supplies into it like a shopping cart before sailing home.