Up-the-Road Down-the-Road Tells the Story of Kitty Hawk and the Outer Banks

Bill Harris took on a lot of roles in his life. He served in the Coast Guard for nine years. He had a rich and very successful career with the National Park Service. He served on the Kitty Hawk town council and was mayor at one time.

But for anyone who spent any time with Bill, more than anything else, he loved the town of Kitty Hawk, and he was a trained historian who was fascinated by the small details of life that created the town. And it’s no wonder that he felt the way he did about the town—his ancestors were among the area’s first residents, arriving sometime in the late 18th or early 19th century.

With the publication of Up-the-Road Down-the-Road, that love of place and love for history come together in a remarkable book that tells the story of Kitty Hawk from its earliest days. Yet the book is more than an overview of how a small, almost forgotten village on the Outer Banks became a thriving tourist mecca. Harris’ understanding of how larger events impacted the everyday life of the people and families that created Kitty Hawk makes the book at once personal and a history of the state and nation.

It was the Kitty Hawk school system that gives the name of the book, and how that came about is a fascinating look into the story of public education in North Carolina. As Harris points out, although the North Carolina constitution encouraged education for all, neither funding nor state supervision existed until sometime after the Civil War.

As the state moved to create a more standardized school system, county boards of education were created and given considerable power to decide where and how to create schools. In 1889, Kitty Hawk was part of Currituck County, and the county board of education decided there would be a west Kitty Hawk School and east Kitty Hawk School—or the Up the Road School (west) and Down the Road School (east) as they came to be known.

Kitty Hawk became part of Dare County in 1920, and in 1924, the local Kitty Hawk School committee went to the Dare County Commissioners and asked for “a special tax election to erect a consolidated school in Kitty Hawk.”

The result was an overwhelming vote in favor of the tax. As Harris notes, “Kitty Hawk…wanted a better school system for their children and were willing to tax themselves to achieve it.”

Opening in 1926, the new school, Harris writes, “must have been something of a culture shock to Kitty Hawk students…Instead of a one or two-room school with all-age students under one teacher, the new school had six classrooms…”

Like most rural schools at that time, the school did have an outdoor basketball court. However, unlike every other school they played, the Kitty Hawk court was sand, giving the Kitty Hawk five a remarkable homeport advantage.

“It was almost impossible to dribble a basketball on the sand…Knowing this, the Kitty Hawk teams developed a playing style that included many passes and limited dribbling…It was a playing style that confused the opposition and led to scoring opportunities for Kitty Hawk.”

In the book, Harris covers a wide range of topics, everything from place names—many of them now forgotten—to the Wright Brothers in Kitty Hawk to the Life-Saving Service, which after 1915 became the Coast Guard.

There are also surprising subjects covered—and some of those give extraordinary insight into life in Kitty Hawk 100 or 150 years ago.

It was not until 1931 that North Carolina took on the responsibility of maintaining public roads. Before that, “Work on public roads was performed by the resident males of the communities under the general supervision of a ‘Road Overseer.’”

There were not that many roads in the town, although a number of those early roads still exist. The Woods Road, through Kitty Hawk Woods, was one of those early roads, as was Twiford Road. That is known because an important 19th to early 20th century place name was the Sign Post “ at what is now the intersection of ‘Twiford and Woods Roads.”

With a historian’s eye for detail and storytelling, Harris gives the backstory to why there was a Road Overseer and responsibility of resident males to work.

“This community road maintenance system was a carry over from the early days of settlement,” Harris writes. “The colonial government required each able-bodied white freemen of sixteen years and older and all able-bodied slaves of twelve years and older for work one day a year on the public roads.”

Then there is the chapter A Local Legend—Colorful Chloe that tells the story of Chloe Jarvis Midgett.

With a 1930s flair for exaggeration—well, outright lies—about who she was and her circumstances, Midgett created a mini mail order boom in the town. The problem was, as Harris writes, “Chloe was an early proponent of not letting fact interfere with a good story, and she was a master at telling her story.”

Her scheme was not truly a mail order scam since she did, in fact, send the product she promised, but her tale of woe tugging at the heartstrings in the letters she sent had no basis in reality.

It’s touches like this that make Up-the-Road Down-the-Road such a wonderful book to read. Harris, who graduated from Guilford College in Greensboro in 1962 with a degree in history, created a book where every historical detail is confirmed.

If there was a starting point for the book, it was when he was at Guilford College and his senior project in 1961 and 1962. That was when he recorded the recollections of older residents of Kitty Hawk, and they are a treasure trove of insight and memories of life on the Outer Banks. The recordings are available at the Outer Banks History Center in Manteo.

Bill passed away in 2017, and in her afterword, Bill’s daughter, Judith Fearing, writes that she promised her father she would get the book published. It did need some editing and organizing—and some life events slowed the process down, but just in time for Christmas, the book is available in local stores.