Core Sound Communities

Preacher, I know there’s a God. When you got a boat in the water  

and you’ve got to make a decision, you know there’s someone helping you. 

Kenny Lewis, Smyrna  

“Where there is a crossroads, there is the beginning of civilization,” began a 1927 Beaufort News article about Smyrna. “Smyrna is a gathering point. Here have gathered the things which mean most in the well-ordered life of any community.” The article was written in a prosperous time, as Down East roads had recently been paved, Smyrna School had been expanded to accommodate consolidation, and a country doctor had set up home and shop across the road from the school. “Truck” farms were growing with their Irish potato crop in the spring and sweet potatoes in the fall, selling to northern buyers who bought produce by the truckload. Fish and produce could now be transported with ease, thanks to newly-graveled roads and wooden bridges.  

Smyrna was an epicenter of boatbuilding until the early 1900s. Smyrna builders were known for turning out large wooden sharpies, used as freight boats or to harvest oysters. A sawmill and marine railway operated in the community. Smyrna resident Van Sellers remembers working at the railways as a young man. “Lige Piner would come by and poke me with his cane – he’d say, ‘You better get going, I have other boats I’ve got to pull up here!” Dances were held at Piner’s railway on weekends.  

Dr. Joshua Judson “Shake It” Davis, who had been the only permanent physician on Hatteras Island at the turn of the century, moved to Carteret County in 1910 on a sailing schooner to find better educational opportunities for his twelve children. “He sailed here on his Hatteras-built schooner Maggie E. Davis,” said his grandson John Davis. “I have a model of it that I built.” After practicing medicine for more than a decade in Beaufort, he moved to Smyrna in 1922, opening his practice as well as a pharmacy where he made his own medicines. “He was always dressed in a suit with a white shirt and a bow tie,” Davis recalled. “He always wore a hat.” Down East people nicknamed him “Dr. Shake It,” mimicking the instructions he gave with each bottle of medicine: “Shake it before you take it.”  

Just south of Smyrna is a collection of houses with a community name not found on maps: Tusk. More of a neighborhood than a community, Tusk is a “clump of houses and a cemetery” that remains a quiet hammock of working families and retirees, surrounded by marshes and creeks bordering Core Sound and fertile soils for farming and grazing. 

Today Smyrna remains an important community crossroads with schools, churches and businesses. For travelers, this intersection is an important link to the main corridor of Highway 70 from the side roads of the byway.  Roads from Marshallberg and Gloucester connect back to Highway 70: west leads back to Beaufort, while east threads through more Down East communities and intersects with Highway 12 to the Cedar Island-Ocracoke ferry terminal.