![\"shrimp](\"\/\/ncseagrant.ncsu.edu\/coastwatch\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/13\/2014\/08\/southport-1_hazel_web-300x210.jpg\")
Though a teen at the time, Southport\u2019s Jim Harper says, \u201cI recall the sound of the wind and broken glass until this day.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Harper, former editor and publisher of The State Port Pilot<\/em>, would remember Hazel in his paper\u2019s 50-year retrospective as \u201cthe most transforming event of the 20th century for this community.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Days before coming ashore in North Carolina, Hazel swept over Haiti, where heavy rains caused massive landslides \u2014 taking lives, homes, businesses and valuable sugarcane crops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While the mountainous island tamped down Hazel\u2019s fury temporarily, warm surrounding waters intensified the storm. Early forecasts had predicted that Hazel would track offshore along the U.S. East Coast. But, by Oct. 14, she shifted course and headed for the Carolinas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All told, Hazel claimed between 400 and 1,000 lives in Haiti; six in the Bahamas; 95 in the U.S., including 19 in North Carolina; and 81 in Canada. Its trail of destruction caused an estimated $350 million in property damage from the Caribbean to Canada. Those 1954 dollars translate to roughly $2.8 billion today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stories of death, destruction and survival emerged from a storm that took many in Hazel\u2019s path off guard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Calabash, the small fishing village best known today for its distinctive seafood cuisine, first felt the impacts of Hazel\u2019s landfall. Residents there recall their losses, but also manage to count their blessings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For William Dixon, 15 years old at the time, the day began with bad news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI had planned to go hunting that morning, but Mom came in to say there would be no hunting. A bad storm was coming. Fishermen already were bringing their boats up into the canal in advance of the storm, so I stayed put. By 9 o\u2019clock, the winds were howling and we sat out the storm in our house in the Hickman\u2019s Crossing area,\u201d Dixon remembers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen it was over, the shrimp house was gone, a three-mast schooner was sitting in our front yard, and we began to hear horror stories of people who died out on Ocean Isle,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hazel took lives, property and livelihoods. \u201cAfter the storm, people grabbed a hammer and nails and did what they could to make a living. Dad helped tear down what was left of the motel in North Myrtle Beach. In return, the owner let him take pine paneling and hardwood flooring. We managed to pull a house out of a pile of rubble,\u201d continues Dixon, who later owned and operated a restaurant in Calabash. He now is a member of the town commission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now-retired Calabash commercial fisherman Samuel \u201cShorty\u201d Thomas worked on his father\u2019s 40-foot boat, Louise B<\/em>, at the time. \u201cThe tide was so high, the boat sank at the dock,\u201d Thomas says. \u201cAfter the storm, we hauled her out of the water, repaired her and went back to fishing. Oddly enough, shrimping was better than ever after the storm.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Salt water runs in his veins, claims Thomas, who operated tugboats for dredges up and down the southeast coast before returning to Calabash to resume shrimping for 10 years. Now retired, he opts for a rod and reel, and meets old friends every morning at Capt. Nance\u2019s Restaurant \u201cto see who can tell the biggest lies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Count on Anthony Clemmons to be at the table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMost in Calabash had never experienced a hurricane. We just didn\u2019t know what to expect,\u201d says Clemmons, who was about 14 at the time Hazel hit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMy family went inland, where houses may have been sturdier than the rickety houses in Calabash, mostly built in the 1920s and 1930s and of uncertain storm worthiness. Surprisingly, our house and some of the old shack houses withstood the wind force and tide,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Clemmons recalls one Calabash shrimper, Capt. \u201cKinky\u201d Coleman, who rode out the storm on his boat. Coleman told Clemmons that the Shallotte River looked like the ocean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAs the eye passed and all got calm and quiet, he thought the worst was over. He looked behind him, and here came a big wave \u2014 Hazel\u2019s other side. Somehow, Kinky made it through safely,\u201d Clemmons adds. \u201cFortunately, no lives were lost in Calabash.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It took Calabash more than a year to get back to normal \u2014 a new shrimp house, a new restaurant and one surviving oak tree left standing testified to the resilience of nature and people, Clemmons says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Clemmons and his wife, Frances, returned to Calabash after he retired from a career in the U.S. Navy. A former town mayor, he is writing a book on Calabash history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Brunswick County\u2019s south-facing barrier islands, including Sunset Beach, Ocean Isle, Holden Beach, Long Beach and Caswell Beach, took the full brunt of Hazel\u2019s 140 mph winds, 18-foot storm surge and treacherous waves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For Ocean Isle, the loss was staggering. In just one incident, eight of the state\u2019s 19 victims perished on the small barrier island across the Intracoastal Waterway, or ICW, from Shallotte.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Southport\u2019s The State Port Pilot<\/em> reported the tragic story of Sherman and Madeline Register, their 10-year-old son, Buddy, and their daughter and son-in-law, Sonja and Bunky Bellamy. The family had gathered for Thursday evening dinner at the Registers\u2019 Ocean Isle cottage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By 6 a.m. Friday, Oct. 15, with Hazel\u2019s winds pushing onshore, it was too late to return to the mainland. The two-car ferry had stopped operating once its pulley cables went under rising waters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Within two hours, winds exceeded 100 mph and angry ocean waters were advancing across the low-lying beach. Three couples from High Point, also stranded on the island, made it to the Registers\u2019 cottage seeking help. In a last-ditch effort, all 11 of them piled into Sherman Register\u2019s work truck to attempt the drive to the highest point on the island.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With winds reaching peak force by 10 a.m., their efforts were no match for the deadly storm surge that washed over the truck, dumping all 11 into the roiling waters. Seven were lost. Somehow, Bunky Bellamy, barely conscious, landed on a road west of the ICW; an unconscious Sonja Bellamy floated ashore elsewhere; and one of the three High Point couples survived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Oct. 20 edition of Southport\u2019s The State Port Pilot<\/em> editorialized that \u201cby some miracle death was cheated\u201d with their survival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, along with Sherman, Madeline and Buddy Register and the two High Point ouples, death claimed one more life: Southport\u2019s Joe Dock drowned during his heroic, but unsuccessful, attempt to rescue the stranded Ocean Isle people by rowboat, the paper reported.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the early 1950s, Long Beach was just becoming a destination for people who loved the beach, and good surf and pier fishing. With only a handful of pay phones on the island, it was a good place to \u201cget away from it all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n By October 1954, there were 357 houses on the beach. One of them was the newly completed \u201cdream home\u201d of now-deceased Sam and Mattie Carr and their 14-year-old son, Sam \u201cButch\u201d Carr.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Butch Carr recalls, \u201cWe moved in just days before Hurricane Hazel struck.<\/p>\n\n\n Long Beach, now part of Oak Island, was beach sand, dirt roads and lots of maritime woods.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carr and his friend, Charles \u201cSkeeter\u201d Trott, learned of an approaching storm \u2014 and possible evacuation \u2014 after school on Thursday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDad and my grandfather turned on the shortwave [radio] for a weather update. They were predicting that the storm would be 75 miles off shore. So, no one seemed fazed,\u201d Carr remembers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is, until dawn on Friday when the family\u2019s parakeet escaped its cage and woke Carr\u2019s sleeping parents. By then, Hazel\u2019s wind, waves and rain were pounding the shore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOur 1953 Buick wouldn\u2019t start, so we drove our 1949 station wagon to my grandparents\u2019 house. I kept watching the ocean rolling and churning toward the house. We heard the screen porch creek and begin to separate from the house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We knew it was time to go,\u201d Carr recalls. His grandparents, the late C.C. and Sadie Carr, built the first permanent residence on the island, part personal home and part boarding house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was about 7 a.m. There were about four or five cars in our group \u2014 my grandparents, aunts, Ellen Gilmore (postmistress). The water was rising fast on the full-moon tide. We encountered standing water, but managed to get across the old swing bridge to the mainland,\u201d Carr says. \u201cWe may have been the last people off the island before Hazel made landfall.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n They waited out the storm at Southport\u2019s First Baptist Church, which had been turned into an American Red Cross shelter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Hazel passed, the family returned to Long Beach to search for remnants of their lives. \u201cAfter the storm, everything was gone. We followed the debris field from where our house had been to the edge of the woods,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Looters had emptied one chest of drawers, but hadn\u2019t discovered his mother\u2019s cedar chest under a heap of rubble. Mattie Carr\u2019s fur stole was inside \u2014 a bit damp, but not damaged. She hung it on a tree branch to air while the family continued searching for other possessions. When they returned, looters had stripped the fur stole from the tree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The only clothes any of them had were on their backs, Carr says. \u201cI wore the same clothes and my galoshes for a week until my cousins came from Goldsboro with clothes for us. My grandparents\u2019 friend offered us an apartment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carr\u2019s parents, grandparents and aunts, now deceased, rebuilt their homes on Long Beach and moved back in 1955 \u2014 safely on the second row.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carr graduated from Southport High School in 1959 and joined the Air Force. He and his wife, Susan, returned to the area in 1995 and reside in Boiling Springs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carr\u2019s long-time friend and former island neighbor, Charles \u201cSkeeter\u201d Trott, also remembers the day vividly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was the day before my 13th birthday. Not many of the families we knew were lucky enough to live year-round on Long Beach,\u201d says Trott, whose late father, Charles Moore Trott, was a Long Beach real estate developer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With news of the coming storm, the elder Trott sent his wife, Vida Hood Trott, and son to Southport with neighbors Charlotte and Robert Jones, and their young son, Butch. They were to stay with the Arrington family in what today is the Brunswick Inn, a bed and breakfast facing Water Street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMy dad stayed behind, saying he needed to keep things safe on the island. He woke up before daylight on Friday with the house shaking,\u201d Trott says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The rising ocean washed away the family car and he was stranded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Soon the Trotts\u2019 home succumbed to forceful winds, and the two-story house next door blew \u2014 or floated \u2014 across the road. His dad found refuge in a house the wind had wedged into the woods across the island. There, he waited out the storm clinging to a mattress atop a refrigerator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAfter the storm passed and the tide ebbed, Dad began the 4-mile walk to the swing bridge that would take him to the mainland,\u201d Trott adds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile in Southport, the storm raged. It was too dark to see anything. \u201cWhen the eye passed over, Butch and I sneaked out to have a look,\u201d he remembers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The boys were stunned to see what the first wall of Hazel had done to Southport\u2019s waterfront \u2014 fish houses, Harrelson\u2019s grocery store and most waterside structures were gone. Boats were pushed up into yards and houses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe second eye wall bashed what was left standing and water pushed up into Bay Street and along the boat basin,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe storm was scary, but not knowing what happened to my dad was terrifying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Was he dead or alive? Southport was ravaged. What must have happened on the island? We feared the worst,\u201d Trott recalls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As soon as they were allowed, they headed to Long Beach. As they got to the bridge they saw a figure walking toward them. It was his father. Tears of relief flowed freely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like most residents on Long Beach, the Trott family lost most of their possessions. Remarkably, they discovered a corner china cabinet lying on its side at the tree line. Looters had taken the family silver, but the china was intact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLong Beach looked like a desert. The dunes were leveled and Hazel\u2019s surge cut a temporary inlet through the island. Only five houses remained. We felt lucky, even though we lost so much. We came out of it alive,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trott graduated from Southport High School in 1960 and soon began a 36-year career as an ammunition inspector at Sunny Point Military Depot. He married in 1962. \u201cAnd, by the way,\u201d Trott adds, \u201cmy wife\u2019s name is Hazel.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n More developed than Brunswick County beaches at the time, New Hanover County\u2019s Wrightsville Beach and Carolina Beach homes and businesses were ripe for the taking by Hazel\u2019s wind, surge and waves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Wrightsville Beach, Hazel wiped out oceanfront cottages, promoting second-row cottages to front-row properties. The iconic Ocean Terrace and Seashore hotels were destroyed and popular fishing piers washed away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The causeway was littered with fishing boats that broke loose from their moorings and were driven inland by the relentless wind and waves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Newspapers reported that 14 blocks of Carolina Beach were flooded during the storm, with 362 buildings destroyed and another 288 severely damaged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jean and Andrew \u201cPunkie\u201d Kure, now 85 and 87 years old respectively, say the ferocity of Hurricane Hazel took many Kure Beach residents off guard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt had been wonderful summer and fall seasons. Up to the day before the storm, fish were biting two at a time at the pier,\u201d Jean Kure recalls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They found themselves in the thick of evacuation plans by mid-afternoon on Thursday. Andrew Kure, volunteer fire chief\/emergency manager, received word that the storm was fast moving, hard hitting and aiming at the Carolina coast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He hustled his wife and six-year-old daughter, Linda, across the swing bridge to stay with relatives on the mainland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The year-round population of Kure Beach at the time was about 100. But there were more than double that number of cottages and apartments in the burgeoning seaside community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI called the troops together \u2014 six volunteer firemen and one police officer \u2014 to begin knocking on doors to get people off the island. The wind was howling long before Hazel made landfall,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe continued to knock on doors until we were satisfied that everyone had left or was in the process of leaving. We received little resistance, except for one group of visiting fishermen who were intent on riding out the storm. We warned them that they were in peril, that neither they nor the cottage were likely to survive the storm. They sobered up quickly, packed up and left,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With warnings complete, Kure fought his way against the wind to retrieve his cat, Tom. They hunkered down with the rest of the crew in the church shelter to wait out the storm, listening to the sound of buildings being ripped apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There were some close calls, Kure points out. The bridge tender at the bridge over Snow\u2019s Cut \u2014 a manmade canal that connects the Cape Fear River to Myrtle Grove Sound \u2014 reported seeing a house break loose and wash through the canal. When the eye passed and winds shifted to the opposite direction, the same house rode the rushing water back through. Somehow, the bridge was unscathed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hazel downed most oceanfront structures. The Kure Pier was destroyed and the pier house left on toothpick-like stilts. Five feet of sand covered U.S. 421 in most places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fishermen\u2019s rental cottage? As Kure predicted, it did not survive Hazel\u2019s fury \u2014 nor did the Kures\u2019 own oceanfront rental properties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI had never seen anything like it before \u2014 or since,\u201d Jean Kure says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her father, a lineman with the power company, worked day and night for weeks to reset power poles and lines downed by the storm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEveryone pulled together. The Red Cross and Salvation Army stayed for a long time with shelter, food and water. And the Health Department came to all affected communities to administer typhoid shots to prevent waterborne diseases,\u201d she points out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The day after Hazel, Andrew Kure, who had retired from the U.S. Marine Corps as a pilot not long before the storm hit, was asked to fly a plane for Jim Jeffries, a photographer with The Greensboro News and Record<\/em>. They followed Hazel\u2019s course along the southeast coast for an aerial survey of her destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sixty years later, Kure is still at a loss for words to describe what he saw. \u201cIt was hard to take in all that devastation,\u201d he says shaking his head. \u201cIt was shocking.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carteret County, some 120 miles north of Hazel\u2019s landfall, was not spared the storm\u2019s wrath. Surging waters flooded waterfront homes and businesses, including the landmark Sanitary Seafood Market and Restaurant, where John Tunnell, now 83, worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He remembers the early warning \u201cof a big one coming our way,\u201d heard through radio messages from ships at sea. Tunnell helped restaurant owner Tony Seamon Jr. prepare for the worst. \u201cWe lashed the building to pilings and cut holes in the floor to equalize pressure if the water came in. It came in all right,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the storm, he helped the owners clean up. \u201cWe set up the Sanitary as a round-the-clock feeding center for work crews from as far away as Tennessee and Alabama doing cleanup in the area,\u201d says Tunnell, who still reports for work at Sanitary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Margaret Daniels of Williston, who lived with her family on Cedar Island in 1954, remembers Hazel very well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe wind was howling while we were eating breakfast. The house was shaking and the walls were swaying. Suddenly the chimney fell through the roof \u2014 right into my plate,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn the middle of all this, a neighbor came by to ask if she could pick up the pears that blew off the tree in the high winds. Can you imagine that?\u201d Daniels asks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Natalie Willett Johnson, of Harkers Island, will never forget her wedding day to her late husband, Reis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They were supposed to be married on Oct. 15 at the home of the groom\u2019s aunt. It had been a whirlwind romance. He was 25. She was 18, spending the summer on Harkers Island before she was to begin her freshman year at East Carolina University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe fell madly in love and decided to marry before he entered the Coast Guard that fall,\u201d Johnson relates. It would be a double wedding with Reis\u2019 cousin Coreen and her fianc\u00e9 Ronnie Chadwick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the day of the storm, the wedding party braved the treacherous wind to drive across the bridge to the aunt\u2019s mainland brick home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, the preacher couldn\u2019t make it. So, the couples married the next day. But when the storm washed out the North River Bridge, plans for a honeymoon in Beaufort or New Bern were dashed. Instead, the newlyweds \u2014 both the Johnsons and the Chadwicks \u2014 honeymooned at the Sea Level Inn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After her husband\u2019s Coast Guard career, the Johnsons returned to Harkers Island in 1969, where they resumed life as a commercial fishing family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Down East fishing communities, including Sea Level and Atlantic, also suffered losses and close calls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mildred Willis Gilgo of Atlantic, who was eight years old at the time, recalls what happened to her father, Julian Willis. \u201cMy dad left the fishing grounds to get ahead of the storm. The current was cut off on shore early to prevent electrocution, and that meant there would be no lights on shore to guide him as he crossed the shoal. He would be in serious trouble,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The alert went out through the fishing community, and dozens of people lined up their vehicles along the shore, lights on, to guide him in safely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s the way we \u2018neighbor up\u2019 in a close community,\u201d Gilgo observes. \u201cIf you choose a life on the water, you learn to be resilient.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This article was published in the Autumn 2014<\/a> issue of <\/em>Coastwatch.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nCALABASH RESILIENCE<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
OCEAN ISLE TRAGEDY<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Southport](\"\/\/ncseagrant.ncsu.edu\/coastwatch\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/13\/2014\/08\/southport-5_hazel_web-300x198.jpg\")
LONG BEACH SUCCUMBS<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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SOUTHPORT SAFE HAVEN<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Charles](\"\/\/ncseagrant.ncsu.edu\/coastwatch\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/13\/2014\/08\/charles-skeeter-trott-at-southport_web-224x300.jpg\")
NEW HANOVER BEACHES HIT<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
KURE BEACH DASHED<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Andrew](\"\/\/ncseagrant.ncsu.edu\/coastwatch\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/13\/2014\/08\/Andrew-and-Jean-Kure_hazel_web-300x224.jpg\")
CARTERET COUNTY ON THE EDGE<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"John](\"\/\/ncseagrant.ncsu.edu\/coastwatch\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/13\/2014\/08\/john-tunnell-at-sanitary-seafood_web-224x300.jpg\")
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