In the days prior to the American Revolution, early settlers seeking land near Lockwood’s Folly River applied for patents and received warrants for surveys of selected tracts.

Upon payment of fifty shillings for each 100 acres, the warrantee could receive a permanent grant from the Royal Governor, Arthur Dobbs.

In 1756 Benjamin Holden bought four mainland tracts and the island between his plantation and the ocean. This island extended from Lockwood’s Folly Inlet west 6 miles to Bacon Inlet.

Benjamin and his sons used the island for fishing and cattle grazing.

Museum Quality Giclées Prints Of This Photograph By Ken Buckner Available In Our Islands Art & Books Store Here!

During the Civil War Holden Beach and Lockwood’s Folley Inlet became the resting place of several shipwrecks: the Confederate blockade runners CSS Elizabeth and CSS Bendigo and the Union blockade ship USS Iron Age.

The remains of the Bendigo can be seen on the eastern end of the island during the periods of low tide. Its wreck is marked with an orange navigation warning buoy and is located between Holden Beach and Oak Island.

While the vessel’s wreck is roughly 200 feet (61 m) long, only the base of the engine’s exhaust funnel and a small portion of superstructure are visible above water.

The ship is easily reached during low tide by swimming, but the wreck is extensively covered in abandoned fishing hooks and gear that may present potential hazards.

Read More About This Wreck And Watch A Drone Video Of It In Our Related Story Here

John Holden, Benjamin’s grandson, started a commercial fishery on the island and in 1924 surveyed a section which he called Holden Beach Resort, the plat of which represented the first subdivision of beach property in Brunswick County.

In 1925, he built the Holden Beach bridge; it was subsequently destroyed by the Inland Waterway construction. “Mr. Johnny” negotiated with the state of North Carolina for the institution of a public ferry to reach the island, but he did not live to see the ferry begin operation in 1934.

Luther S. Holden, John’s son, operated the old hotel that his father had built, started development of the property nearby and became a permanent resident in 1946. Soon afterwards, John F. Holden (Luther S. Holden’s son) began building other homes and renting them to vacationers.

Some time later, other smaller developments were started west of the ferry location. In the early 1940s one could buy an oceanfront house with the land for about $600. John F. Holden and his wife Johnsie actually began the development of Holden Beach that would slowly become a resort area. The Holdens had two sons, Lyn and J. Alan Holden, the seventh generation of Holdens to live on Holden Beach.

Museum Quality Giclées Prints Of This Painting By Miller Pope Available In Our Islands Art & Books Store Here!

In 1954, the island had about 300 homes and a turnbridge. After that year’s destructive Hurricane Hazel, which hit on Oct. 15, 1954, the rebuilding was slow.

On February 14, 1969, the island was incorporated, and on May 13, 1986, the Town of Holden Beach dedicated a new high-rise steel and concrete bridge, allowing better access to the then more than 1,900 homes on the island.

The one church on the island, the interdenominational Holden Beach Chapel, began as a Bible study in the home of Luther S. Holden and several other resident families on the island. Eventually land was donated and the church was erected in the 1940s.

It was destroyed by Hurricane Hazel in 1954 but was rebuilt shortly thereafter. Today the chapel serves the many hundreds who live on and around Holden Beach and the numbers of visitors who vacation on the island during the summer months.

One day in the spring of 2000, Ocean Isle Beach’s building inspector, Larry Cook, discovered a corroded piece of history and legend that had emerged from the sands of the island’s east end just a few blocks west of  The Winds Resort. What he found were the remains of a World War II Navy fighter temporarily exposed by the waves and shifting sands along the beach.

“I knew it was there from folklore,” Mr. Cook said. “It was rumored to have been there and sure enough she came up.”

The wreck of the propeller-driven plane had been spotted intermittently over the years, but it had never surfaced long enough to attract the attention that surrounded it that week.

“The previous building inspector told me it was there,” Cook said. “He’d heard some kids had dug down five feet and found a wing. Yesterday we found a machine gun. It wasn’t even low tide. People were just digging around it like a treasure hunt.”

The area was roped off and an ordnance disposal team from Pope Air Force Base was sent to check for any remaining live ammunition. None was found.

The plane was first thought to be an F-6F Hellcat but was later identified as an Army Air Corps P-47D Thunderbolt after further excavation and inspection exposed the plane’s numbers on the wings.

Air Corps flight records show that Lt. Robert Boyd, based during the war at Bluethenthal Field, now the Wilmington airport, went down on June 29, 1944, at 1615 hours when he failed to switch to his auxiliary fuels tanks and literally ran out of gas.

Lt. Boyd landed on the beach with his wheels in the up position but was not injured in the crash,
although he probably suffered a bruised ego when his fellow fliers heard about the incident.

While the plane’s recent emergence has drawn crowds of curious onlookers to the beach, the rediscovery has also provided several longtime residents, who had seen parts of it intermittently exposed over the years, a chance to view the whole thing.

Eldridge Stanley of the Brick Landing area first spotted the plane back in 1944 as an eleven-year-old, he said, when the barrel-shaped plane plunged out of the sky, skipped across the ocean, and skidded onto the then uninhabited beach.

“It kicked up a lot of spray because that propeller was still turning when it hit the waterway,” Mr. Stanley said.
He recalled it was one of two military aircraft that crashed onto the beach as he and his brother stood outside their grand- father’s fishing shack on a clear, late summer morning.

“There was always two,” said Mr. Stanley, who retired from the Army Corps of En-gineers after years of recovering downed jets from Pamlico Sound. “They patrolled the beach every day. It got to be where we would watch for them.”

Some days the pilots would fly low enough as they patrolled to wave at the two boys. Mr. Stanley speculates that the planes were possibly searching for German submarines known to prowl the Eastern seaboard during the war.

“All of a sudden this one veered off,” he said. “We thought it was going to land on the beach strand. . . . You know how a rock skips? Well, that’s just the way she skipped.”

The other plane crashed only minutes later near Shallotte Inlet and Mr. Stanley, who was fishing on Ocean Isle Beach at the time, witnessed both crashes. The second aircraft was recovered by a barge sent up from the Charleston Naval Shipyard in South Carolina, he said.

The first, however, was not as easy to recover and was left where it went down. Due to the strange coincidence of the dual crashes, Mr. Stanley said, rumor was that sabotage was involved but it remained a matter of local speculation.

Both pilots emerged from their wrecks unscathed. Mr. Stanley remembers that the men met back at his grandfather’s fishing shack to wait for the Coast Guard to pick them up.

When the wreck reemerged, Ocean Isle Beach town manager Greg Taylor went through weeks of phone calls and e-mails back and forth from Army and Air Force contacts to determine who had salvage rights to the plane. It was finally decided that the town had ownership but had nowhere to keep it safe and preserved. In the end the town donated the remains of the plane to the Carolina History of Aviation Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, where it was transported for preservation.

Records indicate that more than 15,000 P-47D Thunderbolts were built. Only 60 of the aircraft are still intact, with about a dozen of those in condition to be flown though not the one that met its untimely demise decades ago on Ocean Isle Beach.

The excerpt you are reading is from the book “Tales of the Silver Coast” by author and illustrator Miller Pope and author Jacqueline DeGroot.

Buy it in the Island Life Store here!

 

The Coast of North Carolina was fraught with activity during World War II as planes, battleships, submarines, and armies protected our shores. One such plane, the Thunderbolt P-47D, ran out of fuel and crashed on the beaches of Ocean Isle.

Ocean Isle, for the most part, was unpopulated at the time, and the place wreckage became buried by the sand, remaining there for decades. It wasn’t until the summer of 2000 when a particularly bad storm unearthed the wing of the plane.

Town officials roped off the remains of the plane and over time carefully had it excavated. It was moved to Charlotte, North Carolina to an outdoor aviation museum where it is paired with a non-wrecked version of the same plane.

January 19th marks the 154th anniversary of the Second Battle of Fort Fisher.

In the final years of the war between the States, Wilmington, North Carolina was the second most important city to the Confederate States of America. Only Richmond, the Confederate capital, was more crucial to the South’s fortunes.

Wilmington, connected to Richmond by railroad, was the closest seaport that could supply Lee’s Army. By late 1864, in fact, virtually every other Southern port on the Atlantic seaboard had been closed by the Federal blockade.

But south of Wilmington the Confederate army had constructed some of the world’s most sophisticated fortifications for the time, and blockade runners could still get into the port city. Mighty Fort Fisher and the other defenses successfully frustrated Union efforts to close the two entrances to the Cape Fear River and this to Wilmington.

After the Union’s disastrous attempt to take Fort Fisher in December 1864, a second massive attempt was undertaken in January 1865. The second assault was all out.

The Union navy unleashed the largest bombardment in history up to that time, and the federal army landed an overwhelming number of soldiers to assault Fort Fisher from the land.

Col. Lamb and his men made a truly heroic defense but to no avail. The young colonel was badly wounded and the fort fell.

The garrisons of forts Holmes, Campbell, Pender, and Caswell were withdrawn to reinforce Fort Anderson, whose turn would be next.

By January 19, 1865, Federals controlled everything up to Battery Lamb, only four miles from Fort Anderson but they waited to amass overwhelming force before attacking.

By February 1865 the Confederates had managed to assemble about 2,300 men to defend Fort Anderson. This would be a pitiful force, however, compared to the
numbers against them.

When word reached the commander of the Cape Fear District, Gen. Hoke, that Fort Anderson was about to be invaded from the rear and cut off from Wilmington, he ordered the fort evacuated to save its garrison.

The defenders of the fort quietly slipped out on the night of February 18 and marched up the road to Town Creek, where they took up new positions to further delay the fall of Wilmington.

With the dawn, the Union tide broke over the empty fort and was greeted by shells from their own ships in the river. The last shots fired at Fort Anderson were blue on blue! The Union navy was fighting against the Union army.

The excerpt you are reading is from the book “Tales of the Silver Coast” by author and illustrator Miller Pope and author Jacqueline DeGroot.

Buy it in the Island Living Store here!