News

REMINDER: Our FPI fall membership meeting is only a little over 6 weeks away! It will be held at the Sanitary Restaurant in Morehead City at 10:00 AM on Saturday, September 16, and our guest speaker will be Dr. Stanley Rule who will be speaking about the hunt clubs of Portsmouth and the surrounding area. Dr. Rule is a well-known Morehead City pediatrician, but he also enjoys boating, kayaking, water bird photography and carving, and studying nature. He is active in the Core Sound Decoy Carvers Guild and is a volunteer for the Rachel Carson Reserve in Beaufort. Dr. Rule is very knowledgeable about the history of the hunt clubs in the area, and we are looking forward to his presentation! You do not have to be a member to attend and the public is cordially invited. A Dutch treat lunch at the Sanitary will immediately follow the meeting. See you there!

MEMBERS – the Spring/Summer Doctor’s Creek Journal is in the mail! We hope you enjoy this current issue full of news and photos.

Save the date! Our fall membership meeting will be held at 10 AM on Saturday, September 16, 2023 at the Sanitary Restaurant in Morehead City. We encourage all to stay for a Dutch Treat lunch after the meeting to help support the Sanitary Restaurant. Stay tuned for more meeting details and plan to join us! As always, our meetings are open to the public and we welcome all who wish to know more about Friends of Portsmouth Island.

Those of you who were at our September 2022 meeting saw Heather Walker give her presentation on the Middle Passage and Portsmouth. We hope you will plan to attend this event if you are in the area. It will take place at Shell Point, adjacent to Harkers Island Visitor Center. In the event of inclement weather, the event will be held indoors at the nearby Core Sound Waterfowl Museum, located at 1785 Harkers Island Road, Harkers Island. A marker will be placed in the village at a later date to commemorate this important part of Portsmouth history.

Don’t forget our spring membership meeting at Ocracoke on Saturday, May 20! We will meet at NCCAT at 10:00 am. Meeting details are in our previous post, so scroll down for more info. If you are on Ocracoke that day, come and join us – you do not have to be a member to attend. If you are a walk-on from the ferry, NCCAT is located right at the ferry terminal on Silver Lake. See you there!

Our spring membership meeting will be held at the NCCAT building on Ocracoke on Saturday, May 20, at 10:00 AM. NCCAT is located right off the Silver Lake ferry dock. You do not need to be a member to attend and all are welcome.

Our guest speaker will be Margaret Miller Growe. Ms. Growe is the Executive Director of The Tamassee Group, which was founded in 2016 to promote cultural and environmental education via the conservation and preservation of significant natural and historical resources. Those of you who attended our 2022 Portsmouth Homecoming may have seen crew members who were filming at that time, working on a documentary of the history and the culture of the Outer Banks.

If you plan to attend the meeting, please make any needed lodging and ferry reservations ASAP, since there are a number of events taking place on Ocracoke at or around that time. We hope to see you there!

Photo courtesy of Ricky Daniels

We are very happy to report that FPI has been given a great opportunity to raise money for continued restoration work in Portsmouth Village. A generous donor has offered to match DOLLAR FOR DOLLAR any donations we receive between now and December 31, 2022, up to a maximum of $25,000. We have notified our members and would like to give anyone who loves Portsmouth as much as we do a chance to contribute, member or not. All donors will receive a confirmation letter for tax purposes. If you would like to take advantage of this opportunity to make a donation and have it matched dollar for dollar, you may send to it to FPI at P.O. Box 2303, Morehead City, NC 28557. All donations will be earmarked for restoration work only, and we will provide updates on this at our September meeting, in our newsletter to members, and also in posts to this page and our website after December 31. Thank you for your consideration! An example of restoration work in the village is shown here with the McWilliams-Dixon House in photos of the post-restoration house and the way it looked before restoration. Quite a difference!