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A Story of Sea Oats by Angel
Ellis Khoury
In the fall of 1908, Nathaniel Gould walked down the beach at Bodie Island, an unlikely place to farm, with unlikely seeds to plant. Three or more years before, he had sown the seeds of his first crop: odd bits of driftwood, uprooted yaupon and myrtle bushes and a miscellaneous flotsam of barrel staves and fish boxes. Interspersed between this random harvest culled from the sea were bristling rows of fence posts running parallel to the ocean, cut from the tops of young pines, their needles left clinging to catch the wind's drift. The orderly piles of debris had taken root, and out of those brushy furrows grew long, lovely rows of sand.
Now Gould was ready to sow his second crop, though it would produce no grain fit for the table. His goal was not to harvest these oats, but to let them take root in the sand, spreading laterally, and then each autumn, cast their seed on the ocean breeze, until soon, ridges of dunes would rise up out of the hard-packed beach that now stretched for miles with nothing to break the wind or the waves.
These were sea oats, and he hoped the botanists in Boston were right, and that this sturdy species, Uniola paniculata, would stabilize the beach and keep the ocean from overwashing the ponds he maintained for waterfowl hunting at the Bodie Island Club.
Martha, his 4-year-old daughter, trailed along beside him, and he let Mattie, as she was called, put her hand into the burlap sack and draw from it handfuls of the flat, straw-colored oats to spill out onto the sand row, where almost as soon as the sawtooth-edged seeds landed, the wind covered them over with a thin layer of sand. Gould, the former keeper of the Chatham Beach Lifesaving Station, had begun visiting Cape Hatteras regularly beginning in 1893, and in 1898 he moved to Roanoke Island to open a hotel there. While owner of the Chatham Beach Hotel at Cape Cod, he had watched the aftermath of the destruction of maritime forests on both of these northern and southern capes, and wrote articles decrying their loss. Once heavily forested with live oak and cedar, Hatteras Island had become a source of ships' timbers beginning about 1820, and it was after this that the island began to change dramatically.
The Cape Hatteras Light Station, surrounded by maritime forest in 1803, by 1870, stood watch over an open landscape left with only beach grass and shrub thickets to make a stand against the blowing sands. Even that vegetation, forage for free-roaming livestock, gradually disappeared.
An 1890 story in Scribner's Magazine about "The Sand Wave of Hatteras" described how dunes had moved 100 feet into the thickest part of the maritime forest at Kinnakeet in just five months. As the sand covered anything in its path, likewise, it uncovered things long hidden, from shipwrecks to burial graves.
Thoreau found sand waves overtaking entire buildings when he first began visiting Cape Cod in 1849, and described an abandoned school where the sand was piled as high as the desks.
At Cape Hatteras, the lighthouse still stood tall, but by 1893, with no vegetation left to trap the sand, the dunes had disappeared, leaving a flat, inhospitable terrain. In Nags Head, when houses, and entire hotels, were swallowed up by sand, they were said to have been Òsanded. " A guest at Lowe's hotel described how, in the summer of 1893, Òthe sand came so high to the windows that a sedge hen got into the hall one day and I chased her down the hall and out a window to finally capture her in the sand." Meanwhile, the nearby Jacob's hotel was completely covered over. In less than a century, then, the transformation from an Atlantic coastline of thriving maritime forests to barren beaches was nearing completion, and its economic effects were not unnoticed.
Gould's former hotel at Chatham was moved four times before it was finally razed in 1904. That same year, five wealthy sportsmen from Boston formed the hunt club at Bodie Island, comprising 3,000 acres of land and 200 acres of ponds. Gould, who served as superintendent of the club from 1904 until his death in 1924, was put in charge of site rehabilitation. In his position as manager of the Bodie Island Club, Gould tried a number of erosion-control methods. One of his first efforts was to fence the property to keep livestock from overgrazing. Eventually, he gave up maintaining the fences, and put them to another use catching the blowing sand. With that success, he constructed even more sand fences, made from young pines driven 2 feet deep, with 4 feet between the palings, erected in double rows 6 feet apart. The fences were one of his daughter Martha's earliest memories. "Just as soon as I could walk, I went with him on long jaunts to see how his sand fences had fared during the latest gale," she said in a 1962 article. When the sand reached the post tops, he would raise them again, gradually building dunes 30 feet in length.
Gould first planted the dunes with a grass called Cape Cod grass, probably Ammophila breviligulata, according to a 1940 report by Stratton and Hollowell. Laws mandating the planting of such grasses on Cape Cod were in place when Thoreau visited there in July 1855. 'They dug up the grass in bunches, which were afterward divided into several smaller ones, and set about three feet apart in rows, so arranged as to break joints and obstruct the passage of the wind,Ó he wrote in Cape Cod. But grasses alone were not enough. Upon learning of the use of sea oats to control erosion in Massachusetts, Gould ordered some for the Bodie Island Club, and according to another daughter, Adele, he had them shipped by barge to the Outer Banks. " The Department of Agriculture [there] had experimented with various types of grasses in order to find one that would grow close to the ocean and be salt resistant, rust resistant, but would retain its wildness, its tenacity," she said in a 1995 interview. Adele, born in 1913, recalled that by the time she was a child, the sea oats on Bodie Island had become well established.
little more than 10 years after Gould's death, the hardy perennials that had proven their ability to thrive in salt spray became one of the plants of choice in a massive re-vegetation project when in September 1935, a CCC camp opened just southwest of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. The 200 young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps had come to the Outer Banks to build artificial dunes at what was then Cape Hatteras State Park, as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's plan to bring the country out of the Great Depression by creating public works projects for the unemployed. While the SP-6 Beach Camp's 20 structures included barracks, an education building and even tennis courts, the men who lived there apparently had little time to play. By 1940, the same year the park was re-designated the Cape Hatteras National Seashore Recreation Area, the landscape not only on Hatteras Island, but all along the Outer Banks, from the Virginia line to Ocracoke Inlet, had changed dramatically.
"In total, 115 miles of Outer Banks beach was protected with 600 miles of log and brush fences," according to the National Park Service's Cultural Landscape Report, and artificial dunes had formed, anchored by beach grass and sea oats. In addition to planting grasses, the CCC workers set out on an even more ambitious project Ð to reforest Hatteras Island. They built five nursery areas near their camp, where in beds totaling more than 19,000 square feet, they raised seedlings collected from Buxton Woods, and nurtured native species such as willow, red bay, wax myrtle, persimmon, live oak, loblolly pine, prickly ash, yaupon, holly and red cedar.
"When the CCC left the Outer Banks in 1942," the report stated, "native grasses planted on the dunes totaled an area of 142 million square feet. Behind the dunes, 2.5 million tree seedlings and shrubs were planted." Gould's "crop" may now become an alternative for struggling tobacco farmers, thanks to N.C. Cooperative Extension Agent David Nash. Like Gould, he discovered how difficult sea oats are to propagate, making the 6-foot-tall plants one of the more expensive to grow, especially from seed, with only an average of 2.24 seeds per spikelet being fertile. Nash developed a method based on tobacco germination techniques, growing seedlings on floating greenhouse beds. With more than a million dune plants needed to restore damage from Hurricane Isabel on the Outer Banks alone, it appears there is a ready market.
It seems only right to protect what, after such an effort, is now the dominant species on foredunes and dune crests. State law makes it illegal to "dig up, pull up, or take from the land of another or from any public domain the whole or any part of any Sea Oats (Uniola paniculata) without the consent of the owner of that land," a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum fine of $200. In Nags Head, bonfires are prohibited within 50 feet of sea oats. On the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, visitors must cross the dunes at designated access points, a good practice anywhere on the beach. Today, when you walk along Outer Banks beaches, or ride along more than 70 miles of undeveloped shoreline on NC 12 through the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge and the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, you'll see the legacy that began with Nathaniel Gould and his daughter, furthered by the young men of the CCC, conserved by local, state and federal efforts, and now offering tobacco farmers a new source of income.
In the last hundred years, those waving stands of sea oats, first pale green then ripening to gold, that undulate along the dunes for miles, have now become as much a part of the seascape as the ocean itself.
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