In 1917, Christmas in Carteret County was ‘frozen solid’

Core Sound in Carteret County, N.C., froze over in the winter of 1917, when Bessie Willis Hoyt was 11 years old.

 

She wrote about that experience for “Christmas Memories,” a collection of stories assembled by The Mailboat publication in 1990-92. The small booklets have been preserved by Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

Bessie said the family Christmas custom was to travel from their home in New Bern to Morehead City and then take the mailboat to Davis in the Down East section of Carteret County to spend the holidays at her grandparents’ house there. 

In late December of 1917, “each night the weather got colder, and soon Core Sound began to freeze. It was three miles wide with a deep channel, but in a week, the ice was so thick the daily mailboat could not come. Papa had arrived on the last trip.” 

“The marshes where wild fowl lived were frozen, and ducks and geese came up into the gardens searching for food,” Bessie said. “Every garden had rows of collards, but they were frozen stiff and had to be cut with an axe.” 

“We had stewed ducks every day. My uncle said he was afraid that if he opened his mouth too wide, he would quack. Every night the grown folks sat around a tub in the kitchen and picked the mallards, red heads and black heads. Often there were geese. The supply of feathers for beds multiplied fast.”

 

She said two large black bears came up out of the Oyster Creek swamp and “promptly became food for those families who were tired of duck.” Her grandmother got a share of the bear meat and stewed it all day. 

“The meat was stringy and tough, but we ate it. ‘Now, we can growl,’ laughed my wise-cracking uncle.” 

The cold snap went into its third week, and Bessie’s father had to get back to work at the bank in New Bern, so he walked across the still-frozen marsh to Jarrett’s Bay. His brother took him to Beaufort, “and he caught the train for home.” 

“No deaths occurred and no babies were born during the big freeze,” Bessie said. There were some arguments, however, that occurred at Uncle Frank Davis’ store, where people would come to sit around the pot-bellied stove to warm their hands. 

“People up the road were Democrats and Missionary Baptists; the ones down the road were Republicans and Free Will Baptists,” Bessie said. “The arguing sometimes erupted into quarreling and name calling.”

 

The Washington (N.C.) Daily News called this period, which extended into January 1918, as the “big freeze.” The entire coastal region was “in the ice box.” The larger Albemarle and Pamlico sounds also froze over.

 

Writing for Our State magazine in 2014, correspondent Bryan Mims shared a story about the December 1917 journey of a small sailboat named Clem, which carried three fishermen from Sea Level out to dredge for oysters into the Neuse River near where it forms the Pamlico Sound. They were J.E. Taylor, Louis Elliott and Edward Salter.

 

“Before setting out, they had no seven-day forecast to consult, no computer models to foretell of the impending ice invasion,” Mims said. They didn’t know they were headed into a “polar purgatory,” but they were experienced watermen who knew “just about every slough, bay, gut, inlet, cove, bend, ditch, tributary, estuary and spit of sand along the wide-open mouth of the Neuse River.” 

Snow kept falling and the temperature kept dropping. Mims said that the men knew of a place called Henry Hills Harbor along a remote stretch of northern Piney Island across from Raccoon Island. Here, they threw down their anchor to wait out the storm. 

Mims cited an account written by Allen Taylor (brother of J.E. Taylor) stating that after three dark and stormy nights, Clem “was held firm in an icy grasp. The men sheltered themselves from the winter tempest inside the boat’s cabin. They had a two-burner oil stove that they used for cooking and for melting ice from their water barrel.” 

“Temperatures during the day barely broke out of the low teens. The men watched, hoped and waited through the week,” Taylor wrote. “The freeze became worse instead of better, ice forming around their boat four or five inches thick.” 

“They had a grim decision to make: Stay with the boat to freeze or starve to death, or strike out across the ice, which could very well be a death march itself.” 

Mims said it was clearly time to abandon ship…but now the choice was whether to “take the route over land, with its great expanses of marsh grass and ice-encrusted undergrowth – land thoroughly devoid of human habitation between here and home – or trek across the ice, with air holes waiting to swallow them?” 

They selected to walk the frozen water route, said a prayer and drove nails through the heels of their shoes to avoid slipping on the ice. Mims said the men carried what little food they had left, a frying pan, a hatchet and a boat hook to gauge the thickness of the ice. They also had 10 yards of rope. 

J.E. Taylor held the middle of the rope and led the men in a V-formation – “as the wild geese fly” – so that if he plunged through thin ice, Elliott and Salter could pull him back out. 

The men crossed New Stump Bay and Long Bay, edging southward, toward Sea Level. It took them six and a half hours to walk to Sea Level, about a dozen miles in a straight line but longer by their water route, Mims wrote.