Driving past Buxton toward Frisco, you can´t escape noticing the positive effects of progress on Hatteras Island. The consolidated school has been renovated and expanded recently to separate the lower grades from the high school and to accommodate a broader curriculum. A new community center offers recreational activities and services for older adults. This is called the Fessenden Center, a name that serves as a reminder to anyone who knows the history of the place that, despite its remoteness ? and occasionally because of its remoteness ? the lower third of Hatteras Island has played a remarkable role in the military and technological history of the nation.

In 1901, Reginald L. Fessenden, a Swedish scientist on Thomas Edison´s staff, came to the Outer Banks to experiment with wireless telegraphy, the basis of modern radio broadcasting. At the time, wires were used for the transmission of telegraph signals and scientists were not at all sure whether sounds could be transmitted great distances through the air without large amounts of power being used. The best chance of success was expected from transmitting (or "telephoning," as was the term then in use) over water. So Fessenden built a 50-foot tower on Roanoke Island and another at King´s Point near Buxton. The following April, he sent musical notes across the 45-mile expanse of water from Hatteras and received them loud and clear, using just three watts of power. "I can now," he proclaimed, "telephone as far as I can telegraph, which is across the Pacific Ocean if desired."

Fessenden was right, of course, about the distance radio waves could travel. An oft-told, but unsubstantiated, story dramatically illustrates how soon the claim was proved here: Richard Dailey, a young wireless operator at Cape Hatteras in the employ of the Marconi Co., was also the great-grandson of a shipwreck survivor. So, on the night in 1912 when he started picking up a distress signal from the liner Titanic far away in the North Atlantic Ocean, he may have been more inclined than most to take it seriously. Aware, however, that the ship was built to be unsinkable, Dailey was incredulous at what he heard. The young operator, nevertheless, dutifully relayed the message by regular telegraph line to New York. The telegraph official there, also unbelieving, reprimanded Dailey for having passed along such nonsense and ordered him not to clutter the wire with further rumors. So, later that night, when a station in New York picked up a message from the Carinthia (perhaps actually the SS Carpathia, the ship that actually rescued Titanic survivors) that she was going to the aid of the sinking Titanic, Dailey refrained from relaying that message which he, too, had just received. Thus, the operator in New York got credit for informing the world of the disaster.

It´s interesting to note that, during the period of the rapid development of wireless telegraphy, as seems the case with any new technology, people had a hard time keeping up and adapting their procedures to the changes. But adapting to this particular change was not a problem on Hatteras Island, where responding to ships in trouble was second nature. It is documented in the logs of the SS Carpathia, that the Titanic radioed the then-customary distress signal "CQD" before trying the new signal "SOS," that had been adopted just four years earlier as the official international distress call but was not yet in wide use, according to the post-disaster Congressional testimony of Guglielmo Marconi, himself. The operator at Hatteras, however, would have recognized both signals. In fact, the first recorded use of "SOS" anywhere in the world was in August of 1909 when the SS Arapahoe lost its screw near Diamond Shoals and the call was acknowledged by the United Wireless station at Hatteras.

In 1923, five years after World War I was over and the German submarines that had caused the sinking of the Mirlo and about 10 other vessels off the Outer Banks were long gone, Billy Mitchell, then a U.S. Army brigadier general and veteran pilot, arrived in Frisco. Two obsolete Navy battleships were anchored near Diamond Shoals and Mitchell came to demonstrate how easily they could be sunk by aerial bombardment. He wanted to prove that the days of sinking ships from land or sea were over -- that naval warfare could be conducted far more efficiently from the air. Mitchell went to the Austin family store to enlist local men in building an airstrip for bombers along the beach. One of Mitchell´s recruits was six-year-old Shank Austin, son of the storeowner. The boy´s accounts constitute most of what we know today of those events. As a grown man, he told how the general had paid him a man´s wages for hauling buckets of sand on the back of his pony. Apparently, the airstrip was completed in short order and Mitchell´s complement of airmen had no trouble sinking the battleships; yet the high admiration these feats earned him among the Hatteras islanders wasn´t nearly enough to save the independent-minded Mitchell from later demotion and court-martial. Billy Mitchell Field, however, exists to this day as a working airstrip.

Nature and long-time residents of the island have their own ways of discouraging over-development. Limited growth and rising property values, therefore, are the most likely outcome for this relatively undeveloped 70-mile stretch that includes - north to south - the towns and villages of Rodanthe, Waves, Salvo, Avon, Buxton, Frisco, and Hatteras.

For more information on Hatteras Island real estate opportunities, give us a call today.