One ‘O’cocker’ way to resilience

Text and photos by Connie Leinbach

When many Ocracoke residents chose to raise their houses after the historic flooding five years ago from Hurricane Dorian, island native Alton Ballance chose a different path to resilience.

Ballance, who is author of the iconic book about Ocracoke, “Ocracokers,” was a Hyde County commissioner for Ocracoke for eight years in the mid-1980s, has been a teacher, is a retired NCCAT staffer and is the owner of the Crews Inn, built in 1908.

Both the inn and his old Ocracoke home along Irvin Garrish Highway were flooded when Dorian brought a 7.4-foot storm surge, the highest yet on Ocracoke.

The Crews Inn, along Back Road, has been reopened for business since June 2021 after Ballance made major renovations to the first floor with a nod to resilience the O’cocker way. O’cocker is the moniker for natives whose families go back generations.

His response to the deluge was to take out the damaged drywall, replace it with washable beadboard, redo the floors and raise all the outlets up four feet.

From that outlet line to the floor there’s washable foam insulation instead of fiberglass, which is above that line.

When he removed the wet drywall, underneath he found beadboard, a popular Ocracoke wood style for walls.

“This is the old, original beadboard from 100 years ago,” he said, as he showed a visitor the renovations.

And like past islanders, he chose to salvage it, clean it, Kilz it, prime it and caulk it.

After rebuilding his own house in this way, he did this second year-long rebuild with the help of Clayton Gaskill and Clifton Garrish and others.

“One of my big things is I would not go back for it (the Dorian flood) not to have happened,” he said, “because so many good things happened. This place is so much better.”

The living room walls had never been insulated, he said. The studs were done with the lumber they had at the time, and they also weren’t regularly spaced.

“We were able to get in there and restud the walls and heavily insulate it,” he said.

They also rewired the building so that instead of one single outlet on the baseboard in the dining room from which he had to run an extension cord there now are seven high-up, upgraded outlets on three different circuits.

The house was original to Ike and Sue O’Neal. Their daughter, Lucille, married a man named Jesse Garrish and the couple ran the Community Store, Alton explained.

They had one son, Danny Garrish, two of whose daughters, Mandy Jones, who works at the Variety Store, and Melissa Garrish, who works at the post office, live on the island along with a son, Wayne Garrish who with his wife, Jennifer, are former owners of the Bluff Shoals Motel.

After Lucille died, the children sold the house in 1985 to Alton’s brother, Kenny, who, with two other men, started the Crews Inn.

Alton and his crew rebuilt the floors, the planks of which originally had simply been nailed to the floor joists. They removed the planks, one piece of which was stamped Jesse Garrish, and installed subflooring.

“Then every one of these boards got put back and refinished,” he said. “We were able to save all of them.”

The upgraded bathrooms got waterproof flooring that many island homes have installed in the last five years.

“We even took time to build headboards out of leftover beadboard,” he said.

Resilience also means replacing massive sofas in the living room with furniture he can move himself.

Raising his home and the Crews Inn are not options.

“I like the level it’s on,” he said.

Moreover, the way old Ocracoke houses have multiple add-ons, though not impossible, his homes would not be easy to raise up.

A lot of old Ocracoke homes were built with a ground floor trap door to let the water in (and later out) so they wouldn’t float away, noted Tom Pahl, a building contractor and Ballance’s neighbor.

Alton is OK with how he is embracing resilience with a nod to the past.

“I have concerns,” he said. “Without old houses like mine and the inn, Ocracoke will lose its architectural history and look like other beach areas,” he said.