Ocracoke
Discover Ocracoke
A concise introduction to Ocracoke, its geography, history and culture.
Introduction
Ocracoke is a village of a few hundred people at the southern end of Ocracoke Island, in Hyde County, North Carolina. There is no bridge. The island is reached by ferry, private boat or small plane, and almost everything beyond the village belongs to Cape Hatteras National Seashore and is undeveloped by design.
The Hatteras people used the island as fishing and hunting ground long before European settlement, and the name descends from their Wokokon. Piracy kept settlers away well into the eighteenth century: Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, was killed in the channel off the island in November 1718, and Springer's Point, the wooded shore associated with him, is a nature preserve today.
The village that grew afterwards lived off shipping and piloting vessels through the inlet, then off the United States Life-Saving Service as the schooner trade declined. The lighthouse of 1823 is still in service. In the British Cemetery lie sailors from HMT Bedfordshire, torpedoed offshore in 1942, in a plot maintained under the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The remains of Fort Ocracoke, built by Confederate forces and abandoned in 1861, were located near Beacon Island in 1998.