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.)