The Coastland Times

hour and see them. It's a fine ride when the tide is out, and I am not going to wait another 12 years, nor 12 weeks either before I see Corolla again.

Corolla people also got a lot out of the horses, cattle, hogs and sheep which had free range on these beaches, and as on the entire coast, proved through the years the most destructive and damaging force imaginable. They devoured the branches of the trees, dug up shrubs and grass, tearing out the last roots, and denuding the land which became a prey to merciless winds. Loose sands, left exposed to tides, departed the higher ground and the hills. Salt air and waters killed the forests, and our outer banks went through a long decline headed for death that most people refused to recognize.

There is one fine thing left at Corolla. The mere handful of people are still friendly and helpful. There is no lack of the old spirit of hospitality that made of the coastland a region a race apart. Natives of Corolla are not left. The friendly postmaster Johnny Austin actually came from Hatteras. His wife was Virginia Tillett of Nags Head.

I believe Corolla is coming back, but it will be a new village. It will be peopled by another race. The electrical lighting of its warning lighthouse is where once whale-oil lamps were borne aloft. Wild ponies used to pull crude carts where jeeps roll today. Standing majestically over the community 80 or 90 years ago was the Lighthouse Club where a half dozen wealthy northern men, according to record in the old log they left behind, used to leisurely kill a thousand wildfowl in the run of a week; where not a thousand are now killed in a season by all the hunters that come to Corolla.

At a later date, I am going to write something about the castle that commands Corolla and how it will play a mighty part in its future. It was built 40 years ago on the site of the old Lighthouse Club by an aged Philadelphia financier to satisfy the vulgar vanity of a temperamental French wife. Behind the Knights, now dead, remains this castle, the largest on the North Carolina coast; and its five miles of ocean front, with what some people call Carolina's finest bathing beach.

What men do in vanity lives long after them. Achievements founded on greed sometimes trickle out into charitable purposes. The castle of Edward C. Knight Jr. and Louise LeBel the actress stands brooding on the shore at Corolla, but I predict that it will be tied in with a newer and expanded destiny of this community, and as the preachers might agree, in God's own time-and perhaps soon-good will come out of Nazareth.