Real Estate History Of The Outer Banks-Installment Two
Installment One left us with the Brisbane Tracts between Buxton and Hatteras Island being purchased for land to build more hunting clubs and not for the miles of untouched ocean frontage that came with the purchase! Times sure have changed.
This brings us to 1926, the men from New Jersey and the next chapter of our real estate history. Allen R. Hueth and Frank Stick, both from Asbury Park, came here on a hunting trip. Unlike other hunters who visited our barrier islands, these men fell in love with the place. As residents of the booming Jersey Shore they envisioned a time when the little resort community of Nags Head could spread from Kitty Hawk to Hatteras. They soon began buying up Outer Banks real estate. Among their earliest purchases was an ocean-to-bay tract which included Kill Devil Hills and the site of the first flights in a heavier than air machine by Wilbur and Orville Wright. Hueth and Stick subsequently sold the tract to Charles Baker and Susan Sutton, also residents of the Jersey Shore, to raise cash for other real estate activities. A condition of the sale was that Baker and Sutton were required to donate Kill Devil Hill to the federal government if ongoing efforts to have a memorial erected were successful. The oceanfront part of this tract, which extended north for nearly a mile from the Kill Devil Hills Coast Guard Station, was first developed as Carolina Shores, then changed to Kitty Hawk Shores. The undeveloped back part is now the site of the Kill Devil Hills town hall, beach library, First Flight schools complex, and the Baum Bay subdivision.
Hueth and Stick purchased another ocean-to-bay tract a mile or so north of Kill Devil Hill and began developing it early in 1927 under the name of Virginia Dare Shores.Associated with them in this venture was Captain Dan Hayman, a Kitty Hawk native, and the centerpiece of Virginia Dare Shores was a one hundred-foot wide avenue (as compared with the sixty foot-width of other streets in the development) named Hayman Boulevard. Virginia Dare Shores was laid out in blocks running 500 feet east to west and 200 feet north to south.Ocean Boulevard extended the length of the development, 250 feet back from the high water mark, and Bay Avenue paralleled the shoreline of Kitty Hawk Bay. In time a long dock was built as the south side end of Hayman Boulevard, with two large buildings over the water on the south side of the dock. One of the buildings was used as an office, kitchen and dining room. The other, the pavilion, was designed for concerts and programs for excursions coming in by steamboat from Elizabeth City and tidewater Virginia, and for dances. There were two cement block cottages owned by the Virginia Dare Shores developers on the south side opposite the dock. In addition, one private summer cottage, also made of cement blocks using beach sand as the aggregate, was built adjacent to the proposed Ocean Boulevard. Known as the Weeks Cottage, it was the first summer cottage built north of the old Nags Head resort. And is still there, on the northwestern corner of the intersection of Virginia Dare Trail and Walker Street.
For the 25th anniversary of the first flight, December 17, 1928, the Virginia Dare Shores pavilion served as headquarters for the commemorative festivities and banquet, and Frank Stick met Orville Wright and rode in the back of a pick-up truck from Virginia Dare Shores to Kill Devil Hill with Amelia Earhart Putnam, the famed aviatrix.
Not only was Virginia Dare Shores the first full-scaled planned real estate development on the Outer Banks, in a relatively short period of time it also became the first real estate failure. The total lack of roads and bridges for vehicular access to the Outer Banks was a known problem. The death of Allen R. Hueth by heart attack on the Kitty Hawk-Point Harbor ferry was something else again. And by 1929, when Frank Stick moved his family from New Jersey to Skyco on Roanoke Island, the great depression cast an ominous shadow over the future; He had to give up on the Virginia Dare Shores venture in order to save what he could of his other real estate investments on the Outer Banks.
Frank Stick emerged from the depression retaining only a one-quarter interest in his Croatan Shores subdivision in Kill Devil Hills, and a tract in Salvo which he donated for the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, the proposed ocean park he had conceived and ardently promoted. In the process he lost his one-half interest in a large ocean-sound tract in Nags Head extending from just south of today’s Village at Nags Head to below Jeanette’s Pier; his one-third interest in a tract on Big Colington Island (now Colington Harbour); and other smaller pieces of property, from Duck to Avon, which in most cases were taken over by former fellow-investors from the Jersey shore, or were bought in at the courthouse door by local businessmen.
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