Atlantic Hotel anchored Morehead’s early tourism industry

Following the destruction of the “old” Atlantic Hotel in Beaufort due to the Hurricane of 1879, an investment group was quickly formed – known as the Morehead City Hotel Company.

A subsidiary of the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad, the new enterprise was dedicated to building a “new and improved” Atlantic Hotel…but relocated to Morehead City, which was deemed “a safer place” than Beaufort – less likely to be struck by a major storm in the future.

Another factor: The railroad tracks ended in Morehead City. Travelers going on to Beaufort had to ferry across the Newport River. Sometimes, weather complicated things.

Why not eliminate “the complication” by building a new hotel adjacent to the railroad line? Then, as now, the railroad ran down the center of Morehead City. 

Passengers could step off the train right onto a covered platform and enter the hotel. How convenient.

The new hotel, constructed in the “exuberant Victorian” style of architecture, opened on June 21, 1880. It immediately became “coastal North Carolina’s premier resort destination.” 

The three-story wooden structure faced Arendell Street, between 3rd and 4th streets.

 

 

It was written: “Every door, window and piazza of the huge hotel (233 rooms) opens to the water; from the front or railroad side can be seen the pretty shore opposite where the village of Beaufort makes a pleasing picture, with its old-time houses and church spires….”

Featuring modern conveniences such as gas lighting and running water, the hotel included its own barber shop, telegraph office, lounge, billiard room and “ten pin” alley. The facility offered expansive covered porches along the front, and boardwalks at the back along Bogue Sound.

The ballroom and main dining room seated 300. It had a high-vaulted glass roof and large windows opening to the water. From a second-floor balcony called the “Buzzard’s Roost,” older hotel guests could observe activity below. Dancing would be followed by midnight suppers and moonlit sails on Bogue Sound.

 

Excursion boats took guests to view the Cape Lookout Lighthouse and to see the wild horses at Shackleford Banks. Visitors also went to the seashore for a “surf-bath.”

Many guests made long visits; some stayed for the entire summer season (typically June through October).

In 1884, Richard Beverly Raney (shown below) of Raleigh signed an eight-year lease to manage the Atlantic Hotel. He was the proprietor of the Yarborough House, a popular Raleigh hotel. Raney marketed Morehead City and the Atlantic Hotel as the “Summer Capital of North Carolina.”

 

The heyday of the Atlantic Hotel lasted into the 20th century, but Morehead City’s tourism industry dried up during the World War I years and afterward because of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. (More than 500 million people – about a third of the world’s population at the time – became infected by the virus through April 1920.)

It wasn’t until 1921 that the “old crowd” began to come back to the hotel for summer vacations, but a “return to normalcy” was thwarted by the arrival of hard economic times during the Great Depression.

Tragically, on April 15, 1933, fishermen noticed smoke coming from the resort. 

Fire departments from five other communities responded to help the Morehead City firefighters. Trucks came from Newport, New Bern, Kinston, Washington and Greenville.

The hotel’s heart pine construction made it vulnerable to the flame and in little more than an hour, the building was reduced to ruins.

The hotel had not yet opened for the summer season and was unoccupied.

The hotel was never rebuilt. Many of the regular hotel guests began to build their own family cottages along the shore, and the tourism landscape began to change once more.

Beaufort’s grand hotel re-emerges as ‘tourist destination’

Once Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox (Va.) Court House on April 9, 1865, to effectively end the Civil War, communities throughout the South began to pick up the pieces and restart their economies.

 

Carteret County was no exception. The center of commerce was Beaufort, and the heirs of Josiah Solomon Pender renovated the Atlantic Hotel, which had looked like a “giant haunted house,” wrote the late Virginia Pou “Sammy” Doughton (shown below).

The grand hotel had been trashed by Yankee soldiers in 1862…but then was miraculously revived as a Union hospital. It was scrubbed from top to bottom by the Sisters of Mercy, a contingent of nine Catholic nuns who came from New York City to nurse injured and ill soldiers back to health.

The Atlantic Hotel reopened in June 1866, “and almost immediately recaptured its former reputation as the social headquarters of North Carolina during the summer season,” Doughton said.

The Pender family sold the 100-room hotel in 1874 to Capt. Robert Davidson Graham (shown below), a Charlotte attorney. (His father was William Alexander Graham, a U.S. Senator from North Carolina, who went on to serve as North Carolina’s governor.)

 

Doughton said that Capt. Graham arranged for “excursion trains from Charlotte to Morehead City” via the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad. 

Guests boarded sailboats for the last leg of the trip to Beaufort…“a wonderful relief from the hot cinders of the rail ride.”

 “Salt air breathed deeply was supposed to relieve any type of illness, mental or physical. The hotel stayed full,” Doughton wrote.

By 1879, the hotel had been refurbished, and every room freshly painted, by the new proprietor, Dr. George Kendrick Bagby, a surgical dentist in Beaufort.

The Atlantic Hotel’s amenities included “a bar with the best wines, cigars and liquor, a billiard room and 10-pin alley, amusements for children, croquet on the lawn” and nightly dances.

North Carolina Gov. Thomas Jordan Jarvis and his wife, Mary Woodson Jarvis, were guests in the hotel during August 1879.

The three-story hotel was at 100% occupancy on Aug. 17, 1879, when a storm was detected approaching Beaufort. Surf watchmen reportedly sent word to the hotel manager urging him to evacuate the hotel.

He declined, convincing Gov. Jarvis and the vacationers that Beaufort hadn’t had a major storm in more than 20 years, and “there was nothing to worry about. Guests went to bed that night without a care in the world,” Doughton wrote.

Two local men stepped up. Henry Congleton sounded the alarm about 3 a.m. on Aug. 18. He and Capt. Palmer Davis helped get people out, as an 8-foot surge overwhelmed the hotel. Davis grabbed as many children as he could carry.

Hurricane-force winds were reported to be in the range of 138 to 165 miles per hour (the equivalent of Category 4 and 5 in today’s grading system). The Jarvises were on the second floor and barely got out before the hotel collapsed.

 

“The good people of Beaufort went to their attics and found clothing for 150 destitute refugees,” Doughton said. 

“Gov. Jarvis was given a sailor suit that had been used in the War of 1812; his elegant wife seemed happy for a calico wrapper, the equivalent of today’s housecoat.”

Congleton perished trying to rescue people, as did guests John Dunn and John Daves Hughes, both of New Bern. They were believed to be the only three fatalities from the Hurricane of 1879.

Gov. Jarvis expressed his sympathy and hailed their heroism. He gave Capt. Davis a special citation.

(Capt. Davis, a native of Davis Shore in Down East Carteret County, was the well-known pilot of the mailboat that shuttled between Beaufort and Morehead City.)

Beaufort’s Atlantic Hotel transitions to Civil War hospital

When Union soldiers overwhelmed the Confederate troops at Fort Macon on Bogue Banks in April 1862, Beaufort prepared for an extended period of “Union occupation.”

Sure enough, the Northern boys quickly misbehaved. They helped themselves to the provisions stocked at the exquisite Atlantic Hotel, emptying the wine cellar and draining the liquor cabinet.

They ransacked and trashed the majestic hotel, turning it into ruins. What a shame.

The grand and luxurious 100-room lodging facility was built overlooking Taylors Creek in Beaufort, between Pollock and Marsh streets, in the early 1850s. 

 

It became the “favorite place to stay” for traveling man Josiah Solomon Pender of Tarboro in Edgecombe County.

Born in 1819, Pender was a poet, artist and successful jeweler who visited Beaufort frequently. He acquired three steamships and became Capt. Pender for the purpose of “carrying on trade between the ports of Beaufort, New Bern, Bermuda and New York City.”

Pender bought the Atlantic Hotel in 1856, and the property became his base of operations. 

The late Hugh B. Johnston Jr., a noted historian from Wilson, N.C., wrote: “When it appeared that a civil war was imminent, Pender (at age 42) raised and completely outfitted at his own expense a company” – about 50 militiamen known as the Beaufort Harbor Guards.

“On April 11, 1861, the day before the historic attack on Fort Sumter, S.C., they marched without official orders upon the unsuspecting federal officer at Fort Macon…and replaced the Stars and Stripes with an improvised flag showing a green pine tree with a coiled rattlesnake at its foot,” Johnston said.

 

North Carolina Gov. John W. Ellis wanted a “more experienced fighting team” in charge at Fort Macon, so he immediately ordered the “Goldsboro Rifles” unit to relieve Pender from his command.

“Josiah Pender involved himself and his ships in something that would prove far more advantageous to the Confederate war effort, the running of the blockade then being implemented in Carolina waters by the Union navy,” Johnston said. 

“He transferred his family and his base of operations to Hamilton on the island of Bermuda.”

Meanwhile, what was left of Pender’s Atlantic Hotel in Beaufort became Hammond General Hospital, named for Dr. William Alexander Hammond, U.S. Surgeon General, who served under President Abraham Lincoln.

 

Union Gen. John Gray Foster brought in nine Catholic nuns from the Sisters of Mercy at St. Catherine’s Convent, Manhattan, N.Y., to provide nursing and spiritual care. They arrived in July 1862 to treat “200 wounded and sick soldiers.”

 

Conditions were deplorable. The place was filthy with no medicine or bandages. One straw broom stood lonely in the cleaning supplies closet.

Writing for Our State magazine in August 2014, the late Philip Gerard said that Mother Mary Madeline Toban sent her tally of needed supplies and equipment “directly to Gen. Foster, with an ultimatum: If the supplies are not forthcoming, she will take her eight sisters and return to New York.”

“A short time later,” Gerard said, “a small miracle steamed into Beaufort Harbor – a vessel loaded with food, medical supplies, cleaning tools and kitchen equipment.”

Military historian Grant Gerlich said: “When the Civil War broke out, both sides were woefully unprepared for the flood of wounded and dying from the battlefields. Unsanitary conditions took their toll; infection and disease claimed the lives of many of the injured and infirmed.”

“The only trained nurses were women of religious orders. They cared for Union and Confederate soldiers alike, officers and enlisted men, rich and poor, no matter their religion or heritage.”

“Motivated by love of God, they compassionately cared for the sick and prepared the dying for eternity.”

Popeye always pops in at the Spinach Festival in Lenexa, Kan.

During the 1930s, The Kansas City Star labeled rural Lenexa, Kan., as the “Spinach Capital of the World,” saying the soil around Lenexa was “perfect for the crop.”

The ability of local farmers to produce “high-quality spinach helped the community survive and thrive during the Depression,” local historians say. And the community rode a crest of popularity attributed to the arrival of Popeye the Sailor in 1929 as a national comic strip character. Eating spinach gave him superpowers.

 

Much of the spinach grown in the Lenexa area during this period was shipped by rail to big canning factories located in Chicago, Ill., bringing premium prices…and profits…to farm families in the Lenexa area.

Interestingly, the first white settler in this section of the Kansas Territory in 1857 was 20-year-old James Butler Hickok, a farm boy from Illinois. He staked a claim for 160 acres and was hired as a township constable. 

Later in life, Hickok engaged in other pursuits…under the name of “Wild Bill Hickok.”

 

In 1876, Wild Bill Hickok was shot and killed while playing five-card stud poker in a saloon in Deadwood, located in the Black Hills region of the Dakota Territory (present-day South Dakota), by Jack McCall.

 The hand of cards that Hickok supposedly held at the time of his death has become known as the “deadman’s hand” – two pairs: black aces and eights. The hole card was unknown.

A town began to form in 1869 along the north-south rail line of the Missouri River, Fort Scott & Gulf Railroad, which ran for about 150 miles, connecting Kansas City, Fort Scott and Baxter Springs near the Oklahoma boundary.

The land for the railroad was donated by orchard owners Charles and Sarah Bradshaw. Some folks wanted to name the place “Bradshaw,” but the couple modestly declined the offer.

Instead, the community became “Lenexa,” derived from the name of a Native American member of the Shawnee Nation. She was Na-Nex-Se, wife of Chief Black Hoof. 

A statue in the center of the city commemorates her life. (The Shawnee people had relocated from Ohio in the mid-1820s.)

 

By 1930, the official population of Lenexa in Johnson County was 452. Today, 60,375 people reside in Lenexa, which has emerged as a popular suburb within the Kanas City metropolitan area.

About 600 farms are said to remain within the county, and there is pressure to ensure that some reasonable balance in land use planning is attained, thereby preserving an agricultural presence in Johnson County.

The Lenexa community continues to honor its spinach heritage with the annual Lenexa Spinach Festival, a free event that features the “World’s Largest Spinach Salad.” 

The recipe calls for 150 pounds of spinach, 600 mushrooms, 100 cloves of garlic and 12 jars of bacon bits – dressed with 75 cups of vinegar and 50 cups of salad oil.

This year’s festival is on Saturday, Sept. 12. It’s a full day of spinach-related activities and fun, including recipe contests with cash prizes. Available for purchase is the Lenexa Historical Society’s cookbook “Spinach Tyme,” which includes hundreds of food dishes and recipes from past winners.

 

Festival goers can enjoy cooking demonstrations and sample spinach dips and spinach smoothies. Additionally, there are arts and crafts vendors on site as well as a food court and live music.

Popeye, Olive Oyl and other familiar characters from the comic strips and cartoons will be making their rounds to add to the festivities. 

A highlight is always the “Swee’Pea Baby Crawling Contest.”

 

Children can enjoy crafts, inflatables, face painting, balloon twisting and age-appropriate games and activities.

Also, there’s a kids’ cane pole fishing tournament for channel catfish, bluegill, sunfish and largemouth bass as well as a rock skipping contest at Rose’s Pond within Lenexa’s Sar-Ko-Par Trails Park.

 

(Sar-Ko-Par was another Native American. He was a Creek warrior who served in the U.S. military during the Creek War of 1836. After his death, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln deeded 160 acres of land to Sar-Ko-Par’s heirs in payment for his military service.)