Creeds, Va., has piqued our interest as a road trip destination. The Oak Grove Baptist Church Cemetery there has four gravesites that honor British sailors who died in World War II when their ships were destroyed in U.S. coastal waters by German U-boats.
One cemetery marker has a special connection to Morehead City, N.C. It’s the grave of Seaman Alfred Dryden, 32, of Berwick-on-Tweed, Northumberland, England, who was a crew member aboard the Bedfordshire.
The armed trawler sailed out of the Morehead City port on the morning of May 11, 1942, and she was sunk off Cape Lookout later that night. The vessel was torpedoed by Germany’s U-558. All 37 hands aboard the Bedfordshire perished.
Weeks later, Dryden’s body washed up on the western bank of the Pamlico Sound at Swan Quarter in Hyde County. Although his body was initially interred at Swan Quarter, his remains were relocated on Feb. 2, 1943, to the cemetery at Creeds, a hamlet within Princess Anne County, Va.
The church graveyard is
one of 23,000 war memorials and war cemeteries around the world with the
network of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission commemorating 1.7 million men
and women of the Commonwealth forces who died in World Wars I and II.
It’s about 190 miles from
Carteret County to Creeds. The preferred route requires a ferry boat ride from
the village of Currituck in Currituck County across the Currituck Sound to
Knotts Island.
The North Carolina
Department of Transportation operates the Currituck-Knotts Island ferry as a
public service. The 5-mile trip takes about 45 minutes. There are five
departures each way per day.
It’s only about a dozen
miles from the Knotts Island ferry terminal up the road into Creeds, but
there’s no rush. Nobody is in a hurry on Knotts Island.
Locals say the place “may have been discovered” in 1594 by English explorer Capt. James Knotts. “Or maybe not.”
Knotts Island resident Frank Jennings recalled meeting a woman several years ago who had come from Ohio. Her name was Edwyna Knott. She had seen Knotts Island on a map and had driven to find possible relatives.
Jennings said: “I am sorry to inform you Ms. Knott, but there is NOT a Knott on Knotts Island. Her face showed the greatest disappointment and disbelief after driving so far. Thus continues the question of where did all the Knotts go? Maybe to Ohio.”
Currituck County
historian W. K. Ansell once wrote that Knotts Island looks like it was “belched
forth from Virginia.”
Indeed, Knotts Island is actually a peninsula. It’s a strangely weird appendage hanging down below Virginia…appearing to be dangling precariously from the top of Currituck Sound and bounded by Back Bay and Knotts Island Bay.
Knotts Island has had a post office since 1819, and about 2,070 people reside in the town today. Our State magazine’s Jeremy Markovich wrote: “Most Knotts Island people, it seems, grew up here, or came to be left alone.”
Today, there are more birds than people living on Knotts Island. All sorts of waterfowl and birds inhabit and migrate through the “great marsh” that was once owned by Joseph Palmer Knapp, a wealthy New York City printing magnate, conservationist and philanthropist. He formed the Ducks Unlimited organization in 1936.
The property was acquired
by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in 1960 to become the 8,138-acre Mackay
Island National Wildlife Reserve. Today, it’s a birder’s paradise, situated on
the Atlantic Flyway, where swans, geese and ducks like to stop over.
Once, Knotts Island was a
haven for celebrity duck hunters who flocked to scores of private hunting
lodges scattered throughout this area. Some of the famous outdoorsmen who hunted
at Knotts Island were Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson
Rockefeller.
Knotts Island…Here we
come!
Knotts Island, N.C., is one of the favorite places in the world for Richard Nilsen of Asheville, N.C., to visit…mostly because you’ve got to take a state ferry from Currituck to get there.
The journey is music to Nilsen’s ears.
He said he began his love affair with ferries about 45 years ago in Washington state, crossing the Puget Sound from Seattle to Bainbridge Island.
“I was alone on the crowded ferry, with the constant churn of the motor under the deck, staring out the rain-spattered window at the expanse of water. There is something about water, and about moving across its surface that I found soothing in my loneliness.”
Nilsen said a ferry ride is calming, therapeutic and good for his mental health. “It is the flatness of the water, disturbed by the wind into a disruption of skitter that sticks in my mind each time I take the boat…giving me the sense of being part of something bigger than myself. At any rate, ferries give me a kind of mythic jolt,” he said.
Nilsen said he actually discovered the natural beauty of Knotts Island several years ago when he was teaching at the Virginia Beach campus of Tidewater Community College.
“I would take my photography students down to Mackay Island National Wildlife Refuge on Knotts Island. There was everything to photograph – waterfowl, reeds and water lilies. I went there on my own many times, sometimes just to soak in the brackish air and watch the stretch of water.”
He said that he and his
wife would gather up several friends to attend the Knotts Island Peach
Festival, held each July, organized by the Knotts Island Ruritan Club.
“We went to the orchards
to pick bushels of fruit. We spent days processing the peaches into jams and
chutneys.”
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