History

Carteret County Wildlife Club Beginnings

The Carteret County Wildlife Club (CCWC) was founded by Walter Teich (pronounced “Tike”), son of German immigrant Curtis Teich (entrepreneur who developed mass marketing of color picture postcards). Walter came to Carteret County during World War II when he served with the Marine Corps. He settled in Adams Creek and had a successful career in real estate development. Walter's love of shooting sports led him to form a target-shooting group, probably in the mid-1950s, preceding the CCWC. Although we have no documentation for this period, club supporter Bill Simpson remembered participating in shoots during the 1950s.

The Carteret County Wildlife Club was formally organized at a meeting of 22 men in November 1958, Picture 1 and was incorporated in March 1959. The club received its charter as an affiliate of the N.C. Wildlife Federation (NCWF) in September the same year. Bylaws were drafted by Bob Simpson in 1967. After minor adjustments they were approved in 1968.

CCWC meetings were generally held on the second Tuesday of each month, usually with a catered meal and a presentation. Summer months were skipped when hunting was not in season. Meeting sites were scattered throughout the county to accommodate people in as many areas as possible. The membership was almost entirely male, and, when home-made meals were involved, women, often the wives of members, supplied and served the food. By 1969 meetings occurred year-round and were usually held at the Rex Restaurant in Morehead City. A few years later, meetings were moved to the National Marine Fisheries Lab in Beaufort and covered dish meals replaced more expensive, and less relaxed, restaurant meals. Membership hovered around 30 people and women were well represented.

Walter was the first president of CCWC and was re-elected several times throughout the 1960s. He was primarily responsible for deciding club activities and proposing environmental positions. His years as District 2b Director to the NCWF and his election as a vice president of that organization in 1962 gave the club considerable influence with the umbrella organization which provided it with a louder mouthpiece. CCWC members actively lobbied for hunting and fishing research and regulations; seeking, among other items, a hunting season for loons, a ban on night fishing and trash fishing, tighter enforcement of hunting regulations, more protection for game law enforcement officers, and evaluation of the effects of dredging on estuarine waters. In 1960 club members developed resting (no hunting) areas for migrating waterfowl in Salter Path and Harkers Island. The sites were stocked with feed corn. The program was abandoned after two or three years, apparently due to the unavailability of funds or a grant to cover the cost of corn.

CCWC activities focused on the shooting sports during the 1960s (the club was frequently identified as the “Carteret County Wildlife and Gun Club”). Competitive shoots, including muzzle loading rifles, often involved other gun clubs from the region, and were a strong draw for new members. Picture 2 Paying the $5 or $10 fee to participate in competitions gave automatic CCWC membership and, as a consequence, the club had over 100 members in 1959. Beside the shoots, the club hosted youth hunter safety classes and sponsored gun training for law enforcement officers.

In 1962 Walter's firm, B&T Real Estate and Development, leased a piece of property on the east side of McCabe Road in Morehead City to the Carteret County Wildlife Club. It was to be converted to a shooting range that would be available to the public. Rent on the property was $100 per year, plus $5.05 per month for electricity. The CCWC had an option to buy the property for $4,500 when the lease expired. A skeet shooting range became a reality in 1966, after years of fund raising, numerous donations of time and material, clearing trees, and constructing a covered firing line and backstops. Picture 3 A clubhouse was donated and plans were made to add rifle, pistol, and archery ranges.

The lease on the property expired in 1971 and the land was put up for sale. Club members pooled their resources and offered the $4,500 agreed-on earlier. However, land values in Morehead had skyrocketed and the offer of an option to buy was withdrawn, leaving a sour taste in the mouth of many club members. The land is now part of Brandywine Bay development. The next year Walter Teich died at age 59. The CCWC donated a book (Aldo Leopold's “A Sand County Almanac”) to the Carteret County Library in his memory.

With the loss of the McCabe Rd property and since the club's primary activities were still focused on the shooting sports, the club took advantage of a request from the Boy Scouts for members to build a rifle range at Camp Sam Hatcher (now a part of Camp Albemarle) off highway NC-24. Picture 4 Use of the range was shared with the Boy Scouts until the club passed it over to them in the mid-1970s. 

The Neusiok Trail Building Years: 1971-2000

For 1971-1973 Gene Huntsman was the Carteret County Wildlife Club’s president. His vision for the club was very different from that of Walter Teich, founder of CCWC in 1959. Gene sought a diversity of activities that would attract members with a wide variety of interests. Under his guidance, outings included hikes, canoe trips, bird watching, and cook-outs. But the primary activity involved building a trail for the Croatan National Forest.

Shocked that the Croatan had no hiking trails longer than a few miles, Gene began to explore the possibility that CCWC could construct one. With the help of U.S. Forest Service (USFS) District Ranger Ed Grushinski (also a club member) and a small airplane, a rough track for the trail was chosen in the eastern Croatan, running about 22 miles from the Neuse River to the Newport River. In January 1973, Gene and Bob Simpson guided an exploratory group to start hacking out a path beginning in the vicinity of Hope Road, north of NC-306 (which, before the ferry, was the dirt Barney Branch Road). Gene named it the Neusiok Trail after the tribe of Native Americans that had lived along the Neuse River.

Over the next two decades, club members used loppers, machetes, chain-saws and flagging to clear and mark the trail. Pictures 5a, 5b Once this was complete, the need for bridges and walkways was addressed. Gene successfully argued with the U.S. Marines that their civic responsibilities included helicopter drops of lumber for three bridges in otherwise inaccessible regions of the forest. Picture 6. Pilings were hand-driven into the muck of black water streams before stringers and treads were added. Picture 7 Elsewhere, walkways were built over chronically wet spots to ease the path for hikers and to protect wet areas from being damaged Pictures 7a, 7b.  At most building sessions, a hot lunch was prepared on site to sustain the hungry workers. Volunteers from local environmental groups, the Boy Scouts, and individuals provided invaluable assistance on the larger projects Picture 8 as did grants from the Friends of the Mountain-to-Sea Trail (FMST), the American Hiking Society, and North Carolina’s Adopt-A-Trail program. A section, north of Still Gut, lay on Weyerheauser property. To head-off potential land use conflicts, 1,345 acres that included that part of the trail was acquired for the Croatan National Forest thanks to Senator Walter B. Jones Sr. who allocated money from the N.C. Land and Water Fund to the purchase.

The long, straight stretch on Little Deep Creek Road Picture 9 was an anathema to Gene's non-linear mind, but repeated attempts to bypass even a portion of it were thwarted by the dense pocosin (mushy ground endowed with every briar known to eastern North Carolina), Picture 10 coupled with USFS concerns about environmental impacts.

Once the major boardwalks were in place, three shelters were added along the trail. These three-sided covered shelters with fire rings provide welcome rest spots or camps for hikers traveling the entire 22 miles. Picture 11

Even now, boardwalks are being added. But, since about 2010, work on the trail has focused on maintenance and on repairing storm damage. The first bridges are over a quarter of a century old and even treated wood eventually rots. Hurricanes such as Florence in 2018 downed huge swaths of trees and caused streams to flood, dislodging many trail bridges. Picture 12 The USFS plans to eventually replace wooden walkways with non-flammable, non-rotting, non-slippery, flood-resistant material. 

All of CCWC’s hard work has not gone unnoticed. In 1975, the North Carolina Wildlife Federation awarded CCWC with the Governor's award as the best Wildlife Club in North Carolina with fewer than 100 members, Picture 13 a recognition the club earned again in 2006.

North River Property: Finally, a Place to Call Home . . . and a Cautionary Tale

After losing the option to acquire the property and clubhouse on McCabe Road in 1971, several disappointed Carteret County Wildlife Club (CCWC) members searched for another piece of land that could provide a permanent base. In 1976 a tract in the North River community was put up for sale by Carteret County for failure to pay child support.

The land, on the west side of North River, was described as 41 acres, of which about thirty acres were identified as wetlands. With the help of Bob Simpson's friend, lawyer A. B. Cooper, Bob and Mary Simpson and Gene and Sue Huntsman bought the property for $2,500. They then sold it to the club in 1986 when the club had enough funds to cover the purchase price. Property tax ($21/year) was paid by the club until, in 1987, club president Alex Chester submitted a sufficient tonnage of documents to convince the IRS (and Carteret County) that CCWC qualified as a non-profit organization exempt from taxation. Later, it turned out that the plat maps had erroneously listed the size of the property. The actual area is 21.5 acres. Its estimated value was $7,865 in 2023.

A few hundred yards into the property was a trash dump. Unaware that this was a legitimate in-holding (privately owned land within the club's property), the club got rid of the trash and chained off “their” road. This was not well accepted by the owner of the inholding. Discussions with neighbors eventually straightened things out and dumping slowed to a manageable level.

The property is long and narrow, aligned in an east-west orientation. Picture 14a [In the photo, the area in yellow shows the property as described at the time of purchase. Twenty acres (below the red line) were later removed from the property and assigned to parcel #16, leaving the club with 21 acres.]  Access is provided via Old North River Road, a pothole-filled one-lane dirt track that runs east from Merrimon Road past several residences, then follows the northern boundary of the club property, to the river where, in the early the twentieth century, it connected to a bridge across North River. Elevation (such as it is) gets lower toward the river. Despite the risk of future submergence, and to avoid disturbing the neighbors, club members selected a site about mid-way to the river for their activities. There a decrepit outhouse provided hope that the area might usually be above water.

Since the road once provided access to a bridge and Down East, it seemed logical that it should be maintained by the state’s Department of Transportation (DOT). Mary Simpson (when she was club secretary) wrote a series of letters to the DOT, but they had no record of maintaining the road going as far back as 1930 when the department was created. Furthermore, widening the road to comply with DOT maintenance guidelines was impossible due to a canal on one side and encroaching homes on the other. So the road has remained as bad as ever.

The idea of building waterfowl resting areas again caught the club's attention – twenty years after the club designated two resting areas in 1960 – but on a smaller scale. In 1980 Gene contacted the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries and the Army Corps of Engineers for permission to blast ten waterfowl resting ponds in the marsh. Perhaps surprisingly, the permit was granted.

Gene notified the neighbors that there might be some loud noises, and did the calculations for appropriate quantities of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil. The sites were selected well out into the salt marsh. One by one, primer cords were lit and the blasts occurred, blowing neat round holes in the marsh. The only factor that no one had considered was what would happen to all the black goo that would be explosively displaced. It had only one direction to go – UP! As it rose into the air like a great brown cloud, the breeze gently wafted it – toward the spectators. Picture 14b That's when gravity began to assert itself. Sue Huntsman and her daughter were specially selected. Instead of dashing into their truck, they continued sitting on the tailgate, not thinking about the implications of the approaching cloud. They were splattered from head to toe – completely soggy, stinky, and black, with no fresh water available to clean up!

Nine potholes were blasted (satellite photos show a miscalculation – four are actually south of the property). They were promptly occupied – by alligators. The reptiles left trails connecting the various holes and their booming voices were occasionally heard from the clubhouse. Widgeon grass, an aquatic weed and a choice feed for ducks, appeared and waterfowl followed shortly thereafter.

CCWC member Steve Warner, a landscape architect, sketched a detailed blueprint for developing the land. It included an elevated clubhouse with a deck, an access road with three dozen parking slots, a pond, and a rifle range. Gene's plans however, were more modest – a simple screened shelter on pilings. In 1982 before any structure could be built, Ben Ball, a realtor and friend of the Simpsons (Bob always had friends willing to provide useful skills or materials) offered to donate a small house that had belonged to his father. In January 1984 Humphrey House Movers transported the house from Morehead City to reside atop the already installed pilings. Picture 15

During the next two years, club members spiffed up the property and the clubhouse. Steps and a deck were added to the house. A 150-foot wooden walkway was built connecting it to the access road. Targets were constructed. A martin birdhouse was installed as was a pitcher pump. Many pleasant hours were spent sitting on the house's deck admiring the view across the marsh and the river. On a clear day it was possible to see the Cape Lookout lighthouse. The site became popular for bird watchers. Marsh birds and raptors were almost always visible. Ornithologist John Fussell brought groups to spot the rare black rail. It was idyllic.

One lovely winter evening in 1987 CCWC members held a meeting to officially dedicate the clubhouse. Gene lit a fire in the little wood stove that came with the house and raised a toast to its future as a home for the Carteret County Wildlife Club. Discussions included the possibility of bringing in electricity. After a few drinks and a good meal, happy and optimistic, everyone returned to their homes.

The next day devastating news spread. The little house had burned to a crisp. Only the pilings remained. Picture 16a Apparently the chimney must have cracked during the move to the property and sparks from the celebratory fire in the wood stove got into the roof. It was almost a year before Gene could bring himself to see the destruction.

Sea level rise meant that the building site had become wetland over the intervening years, and a permit could not be obtained for another closed structure. But it was okay to build an open platform on the existing pilings. The platform was built, largely by club member Billy Freeman. Picture 16b Railings and benches were added. Cookouts with target- and clay pigeon-shooting demonstrations were held. Picture 16c, 16d The view was still spectacular but, without the common goal of working together to create a clubhouse and to landscape its surroundings, enthusiasm for organized activities never returned. The last CCWC cookout at the property was a hot dog roast in March 2003. Individual members returned occasionally to practice target shooting or watch birds, but storms and the years took a toll on the structure and its access steps.

A group of CCWC members made a final visit in 2022. The scene from the platform was still breathtaking as hawks soared over the seemingly endless marsh. Picture 17 At the subsequent meeting, club members voted that the property was not worth the liability for accidents and voted to donate it to the N.C. Coastal Federation, which planned to destroy the observation platform.

Contributed by S. Huntsman, last updated 12-10-24