THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 26, 1996 TAG: 9605230222
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY LORRAINE EATON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 170 lines
EVERYTHING KEEPS changing, and that keeps Willard Jones searching.
A storm rages by and a row of old cottages surrenders to the sea. A sand road is blacktopped, and a few years later a new community flourishes at its sides. A beach is devoured by a winter nor'easter, and homes are hauled across the Beach Road. Roads are re-routed and buildings are razed.
``It has changed and changed and changed,'' said Jones, an Ahoskie history buff and mill owner who collects postcards of North Carolina's Outer Banks. ``If you don't keep on top of it,'' he said, ``you forget where something was, or how it looked, or that it was there at all.''
Jones started amassing cards 18 years ago, searching antique shops, flea markets and private collections. He was the first to advertise for eastern North Carolina cards in national dealer trade sheets. He concentrates on all of eastern Carolina, but his cards from Dare County chronicle nearly a century of head-spinning growth.
Imagine the Whalehead Club at Corolla in 1965 as an isolated mansion on a spit of bald sand. Or the lonely steel tower, the DeForest Wireless Station, that in 1906 was essential for communication at Cape Hatteras.
Or lovely ladies, dressed in flowing white skirts, Victorian blouses and fancy hats arriving at the Nags Head soundside resort by steamer early this century.
This is my first trip to Nags Head, have been here 2 weeks, like it fine. What are you all doing this summer. Aren't you ever going to come to see me?
Write soon. Love Hatte and Boby C.
In watery, faded ink, the card is addressed to Miss Lollie Williams of Richmond, Va. The picture is of the Hollowell Hotel, a grand lodging on the Nags Head soundside.
It shows the wharf, a smattering of cottages and the decked-out ladies and suited gents.
The postmark is 1914, from Griffin, N.C., the precursor of the Nags Head post office.
Jones' oldest Outer Banks cards are static, black-and-white (actually, brown-and-cream) pictures of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse and the small but bustling Nags Head soundside south of Jockey's Ridge that at the turn of the century was the whole of the Outer Banks resort.
Each card has a simple title scrawled across the bottom. The photographer had to write it backward on the negative.
``That's the reason the writing is so terrible,'' Jones said.
Postcards were invented in the late 1800s by an Austrian professor who convinced his government that the slim cards could reduce the bulk of the mail. In 1869, Austria issued a buff-colored card with the country's emblem on the front. Millions were sold.
The first mass-produced cards were introduced in 1893 at the World's Fair in Chicago. The ``souvenir cards'' cost 2 cents to mail, double the cost of pre-stamped U.S. ``postal cards,'' because the postal service didn't want competition.
By 1898, the rate dropped to 1 cent, and the cards caught on like pet rocks. Soon everyone was doing it, including visitors to the Outer Banks.
Dear Mother,
We've had a pleasant trip to Norfolk by boat. Drove to the Ramsey's Basket Factory this morning, then came down through the Dismal Swamp to Nags Head where we had a nice swim and will spend the night at this hotel.
Love, Ruth
The postmark is 1936. The picture is of LeRoy's Seaside Inn, which Jones said would later become the Croatan Inn and then the First Colony Inn. The latter was rolled down the Beach Road in the early 1980s to where it stands today.
``This is the only way we have to know how things looked,'' Jones said.
Or even where things were.
The real heyday of postcards was from 1905 to 1920, said Thomas H. Gunn, director of the library at Jacksonville University in Florida and a collector for 35 years.
During that time, cards pictured resorts, historic events, advertising logos and catastrophes such as train wrecks, auto wrecks and floods. There were cards made of leather, tin and wood. Gunn has one made of birch bark touting Vermont.
During World War I, GIs sent cards from Europe - pictures of bombed-out churches or military maneuvers.
``There was a sense of human tragedy in these cards,'' Gunn said. ``It was at a time when death was very often right around the corner. It may seem morbid, but it was acceptable at the time.''
``Anything that happened from the time of the camera to the present day is on a post card,'' said John H. McClintock, president of the International Federation of Postcard Dealers and director of the Postcard History Society, both based in Manassas, Va.
Jones believes this, too, and there are cards that have eluded him all these years.
``I`ve never seen a picture of the outside of the Casino,'' Jones said of the once-popular nightspot near Jockey's Ridge. ``I'm sure there's a postcard. There must be. I've never seen it, though.''
Dealers, called deltiologists (meaning love of little pictures), have devised elaborate networks for buying and selling cards. They have paid as much as $13,000 for a single card. There is a weekly, 40-page newspaper for dealers, and huge national trade shows promise ``1 million cards on the floor.'' Regional shows also are common.
``I don't go there,'' Jones said. ``I go to Dare County instead. I'd rather be in Nags Head than looking through cards in Charlotte.''
Some cards in Jones' collection might leave amateurs scratching their heads. Consider, for example, the picture of a patch of collards in Manteo from 1930, titled simply ``Collards Growing.'' Or the one of a lonely, sand-shouldered road that disappears into the horizon, photographed around the same time. The road is the newly built causeway from Manteo to Nags Head.
But why would someone want to send a picture of that to family in Duluth?
Jones said that's exactly what makes postcards so valuable: They are a record of the past. People with cameras take pictures of their families, of landmarks and pets. Postcards picture buildings, roads, hotels, bars and restaurants. They provide a point of geographical reference that is largely absent from personal photo albums.
Jones' favorite card, which carries a 1916 postmark, is of St. Andrews by the Sea, a simple church perched in a sea of sand. Today, St. Andrews is still a simple structure, but it is surrounded by cottages and flanked by two busy roads. It's hard to believe that not so long ago, this was what Nags Head looked like.
``The next storm that comes through here, it's going to change,'' Jones said. ``The Outer Banks changes every day.''
And so he keeps searching, collecting souvenirs that will stand the test of time. ILLUSTRATION: This original Dare County Courthouse, with its bell
tower still intact, was featured on a postcard from the 1920s.
This postcard from 1904 features the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. The
sender wrote a message on the face telling of a ``fine time'' at the
Outer Banks.
One of the Outer Banks' many shipwreckes was featured on this
postcard originally produced in the 1950s.
Staff photos
by DREW C. WILSON
LeRoy's Sea Side Inn was featured on the cover of a 1930s postcard
when the hideaway on the Nags Head oceanfront.
ABOVE: The Wright Brothers
Memorial at
Kitty Hawk was
featured in a colorized
rendition on a
postcard from
around 1940.
LEFT: The original
Wright Brothers Memorial
Bridge, a wooden
structure, greeted
visitors to the
Outer Banks and
it was featured
on a postcard
from the 1940s.
Courtesy of the
WILLARD JONES COLLECTION
Staff photo
by DREW C. WILSON
Willard Jones of Ahoskie collects postcards about the Outer Banks as
a way of chronicling the changes that have occurred on the Outer
Banks.
Postcards courtesy
of the
WILLARD JONES COLLECTION by CNB