By Connie Leinbach
Since Alton Ballance decided not to raise his home or his business, The Crew’s Inn, after the unprecedented Hurricane Dorian flood, his compound illustrates the way Ocracoke developed.
It’s the type of housing cluster that developed on Ocracoke, informed by family ties, few regulations and few roads.
Ballance lives in the home built by his grandfather along Irvin Garrish Highway, which is the name of N.C. 12 in Ocracoke Village.
Ballance’s grandfather owned a swath of land that includes the area beside him, to Fig Tree Lane, extending to Back Road.
“He gave my aunt some property, and she built a house on it, and then they gave some to another aunt,” he said. “So, it got sectioned off like that.” His brother Kenny also owns part of the area.
“(Crew’s Inn) guests enjoy walking through my yard to get to (Irvin Garrish Highway),” Ballance said.
Tom Pahl, Ballance’s immediate neighbor, lives in a house next to Ballance. Pahl’s house, built by Leonard Bryant, was originally on the ground when he and his wife Carol bought it in 2007.
“(The house) was in remarkably good condition,” he said. “That speaks to the density of turn-of-the-century wood vs the plantation grown wood we use today.”
They then had it raised up a little over four feet, putting the finished floor just an inch above then code-required seven feet above mean high tide.
“When Dorian hit, the floodwater came onto the porch but stopped rising just an inch before it came over the threshold,” Pahl said. “That critical inch!”
A DIY-style of home elevation can still be seen on several homes along Lighthouse Road: short columns of bricks raised homes a few feet off the ground.
After Dorian flooded the island Sept. 6, 2019, the Ocracoke Advisory Planning Board (OAPB) approved raising the minimum building height to nine feet above the mean high tide.
Ballance had three feet of water in his house and elected not to raise it up but instead to raise up all of the electric outlets.
The old houses on Ocracoke were built low to the ground with porches in front so that they could engage passersby, said Pahl, a building contractor and former two-term Hyde County commissioner.
George Chamberlin, who first visited Ocracoke in the 1980s when his wife Betty Helen brought him here, recalled when he met Betty’s mother, Elizabeth Howard O’Neal, the then-postmaster and “a true icon of Ocracoke.”
Elizabeth and two of her friends were sitting on rocking chairs on the porch.
“It was a big impact for me to see that type of atmosphere,” he said.
“Architecture can be anything,” Pahl said, “and here it was very community oriented. There were no architects. People learned to build from their daddy.”
This was done almost unconsciously — in a way that was more useful to the inhabitants, or in the “form follows function” needs of the community.
“It was very much driven by family,” Pahl said about the placing of houses, such as along Howard Street. Subdivisions typically went to other family members.
Some lots straddle roads as property lines were haphazard because there were no roads.
“There weren’t cars on the island,” he said. “People just walked.”
As more people started purchasing large chunks of land on Ocracoke, in 1986 the Ocracoke Development Ordinance (ODO) was adopted to regulate the division of land. While it is not a true zoning ordinance, it established a minimum lot size of 5,000 square feet.
That way, the lots could be recorded, and this changed thinking of the land into grid fashion.
“Prior to that, it was very organic,” Pahl said. “There’s only one development zone. All of the (ODO) applies to the entire village.”
Then, as the island became a popular place to visit, people valued the view from their houses, which changed the way houses were built – for the view instead of proximity to family.
“It’s everywhere in America where there is a view,” he said. “The community is no longer a designing factor. Elevation changed the relationship with (neighbors) in the same way tourism has.”
The 5,000-square-foot lot rule and the installation of community water changed Ocracoke from a fishing village to a tourist destination.
“We do all of these things to make life easier,” Pahl said.
The ODO also restricted the number of travel trailers people could put on their lots to one, but that changed in 2014 when the Ocracoke Advisory Board amended the ordinance to allow for more trailers according to the lots’ water capacity. Travel trailers and mobile homes have enabled many people to live here who can’t afford a house.
Ocracoke is still a seasonal economy, with many shops and restaurants closed from November into March, based on when Easter falls.
Owing to its remoteness and access by ferry, the island may be safe from becoming a 12-month tourist economy.
“The Ocracoke Planning Board might be the most important board on the island,” he said, “and they need to be thinking what it’s going to look like in 20 years.”
