File:Coast watch (1979) (20650694562).jpg

Title: Coast watch
Identifier: coastwatch00uncs_12 (find matches)
Year: 1979 (1970s)
Authors: UNC Sea Grant College Program
Subjects: Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology
Publisher: (Raleigh, N. C. : UNC Sea Grant College Program)
Contributing Library: State Library of North Carolina
Digitizing Sponsor: North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

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G ^^^^one are many of the old landings and wharves where generations of Currituckians labored, shipping out fish and fowl and farm harvests. In Poplar Branch, the rotted and ramshackle wharves were burned April 23, 1Q6Q, by the Lower Currituck Fire Department at the request of the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission. A public boat ramp was installed as locals lamented the loss of another piece of the past. The Whalehead Club in Corolla features huntingf displays. them," Wilson Snowden says. A businessman and lifelong resident of Currituck County, Snowden helped raise and restore the battery blind owned by the Currituck Wildlife Guild, the only one he knows of in the county. "You'd set there, and the ducks come floatin' in right in front of you, just like you walked out there in neck-deep water." JL/ut putting ducks on the water was only a part of the market gunner's task. Getting them to market was the other. Steamboats such as the Cygnet, Comet and Currituck generally ran three times a week along a route from Norfolk to central Currituck Sound, stopping at Munden Point on Knotts Island, Waterlily on Church Island, Aydlett and on to the Poplar Branch landing. Early on, Poplar Branch evolved as a major commercial hub of the Currituck Sound region, with grocery stores, dry-goods merchants, barbershop, locksmith, gun shop and at least one hotel. Saunders remembers it well. There was a gristmill near the landing, a store and barrel factory on the end of the dock on the left-hand side and a long, wooden wharf where the steamers tied up, with skiffs and shad boats bobbing on both sides. Down the middle of the wharf ran a track of 4-by- 4 planking on which a railroad truck about 10 feet long was mounted for help in loading and unloading freight. Near the far end of the track, out over the water, was the fish and fowl house where ducks were stored and packed for shipping. "When the season opened," Saunders recalls, "and they went to shooting, Mister John Luke Gregory had a place they called the cooler that was always full of ice where they would hang the fowl up. I've been in it many times, just a rough building, boards up and down with battens on the cracks, and inside where the framing was, it was drove full of nails. The whole place would be lined with ducks, all the way around it as high as a man could reach. I'm satisfied in my mind that there would be from 300 to 400 in there sometimes." Descriptions of the packing process vary slightly but follow a general pattern: Birds were shipped unplucked and with all entrails intact. (Game birds can typically be stored in such fashion for a week or more, depending on the weather.) The fowl were packed in wooden fish barrels large enough to hold 150 pounds of perch, black bass, carp or eels. Often a stovepipe was first inserted into the middle of the barrel and filled with ice, and birds were packed around it. As the ice melted, the water drained out of the stovepipe and more could be added. Sometimes a chunk of ice was simply laid into the center of the barrel and birds packed tightly around it, with heads folded under the wings. Prices paid for waterfowl varied through the years. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper reported in 1878 that canvas- backs brought $ 1.10 per pair "on the waters to dealers." Brimley visited "Uncle Ned" Midyette's lodge on Church Island in 1884 and noted that gunners were paid cash on the spot by game buyers: $ 1 per pair of canvasbacks, 50 cents per pair of redheads, 30 cents per pair of "common ducks" and 25 cents for a foursome of teal, bufflehead or ruddy ducks, also called boobies. C o n t i n u e d COASTWATCH 11

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