Rather swiftly, the Union’s army and navy tag-team, routed the Confederate defenders of two forts on North Carolina’s Hatteras Island in an early Civil War battle in August 1861.
About 900 Union infantrymen and seven warships easily subdued some 650 Confederate soldiers stationed at Fort Hatteras and Fort Clark. There were few casualties (one Union dead and 12 Confederate dead), although several hundred Confederates were taken as prisoners.
Confederate officers at nearby Fort Ocracoke quickly decided to abandon that garrison and skedaddle over to Portsmouth after rendering the fort useless to the Yankees.
An evacuation order from New Bern brought the soldiers stationed in Portsmouth scurrying back to the mainland. Most civilians living in Portsmouth opted to vacate, too.
The Hatteras “victory” gave the Union navy an important fueling station, strengthening its blockading effort along coastal North Carolina to control the inlets of the northern Outer Banks – Oregon, Hatteras and Ocracoke.
When the war ended, some of the people who had been displaced began to return home to Portsmouth, but not all, by any means.
The U.S. National Park Service reported: “The 1860 census recorded 117 slaves living in Portsmouth. After the war, just six African-Americans chose to return to the village, this time as free people.”
There were 685 white villagers on the roll in 1860, but only 331 whites were recorded in the 1870 census.
Clearly, economic and political factors had begun to transform a once bustling port town into a quiet fishing hamlet.
One of the great Southern writers from this period was Edmund Ruffin of Virginia. He visited Portsmouth before the Civil War and offered an astute observation, writing:
“If Ocracoke Inlet should be closed by sand (which is no improbable event), the village of Portsmouth would disappear or…remain only for its other use, as a summer retreat for transient visitors, sought for health and sea-bathing.”
Was he a prophet?
With each passing generation, fewer and fewer families chose to cling to their homes in Portsmouth. The NPS reported 220 people were living in Portsmouth in 1880.
The village got a little
boost in 1894 when a fancy U.S. Life-Saving Service station was built in
Portsmouth. Its architecture was modeled after the famous station at
Quonochontaug near Charleston, R.I. (The Algonquin word is pronounced
“QUAN-no-CHAWN-tawg.”)
The NPS noted: “Given that most of the Life-Saving Service’s early employees on the Outer Banks were local men, it was somewhat unusual that the first Keeper of the Portsmouth Life-Saving Station, Ferdinand G. Terrell, was a native of Long Island, N.Y.
(Perhaps his bosses thought Terrell might know how to say the “Q” word, if queried.)
The most famous rescue by
the Portsmouth station’s surfmen occurred in 1903, when the three-masted Vera
Cruz VII ran aground in a storm. Originating in the Cape Verde Islands off
the west coast of Africa, she carried 399 passengers and 22 crew members.
The NPS said that “the rescue required 32 trips in the lifeboat plus every available skiff in the community before all the passengers were ashore. To this day, the rescue of the 421 victims of the Vera Cruz VII remains the largest rescue from a single vessel.”
The Life-Saving Service transitioned into the U.S. Coast Guard in 1915, and the Portsmouth station continued to operate until it was deactivated in 1937, “depriving Portsmouth of another reason for being,” according to the NPS.
Yet, there was resiliency
in the bones of those Portsmouth-ites. They were determined to survive.
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