Location: U.S. Hwy 158 at Carolista Drive, Nags Head
County: Dare
Original Date Cast: 2023
Carolista Fletcher Baum was born in 1940. She earned an undergraduate degree in art from East Carolina University and an MFA and a PhD in graphic arts from Penn State. Although living and working in the Chapel Hill area in the 1970s, every summer her family closed their local shop and relocated to Nags Head, where they had a second business. Both communities knew her for her handcrafted jewelry, her dynamic, generous personality, and as a self-appointed warrior to protect the historic and natural environment of North Carolina’s barrier islands.
The Baum summer home was near the 12-mile post of the U.S. Highway 158 just across from the large Jockey’s Ridge dune system, and Baum let her children roam and play on the dunes during the day. Dunes such as Jockey’s Ridge once extended north along North Carolina’s Outer Banks from Oregon Inlet all the way to the Virginia State line, but most were flattened and otherwise removed by development.
The dunes near the Baum home were not public land, however, and its landowners wanted to develop the area. In August 1973, as the Baum children were about to head home, they spied a bulldozer grading the sand, and rushed home to tell their mom. She immediately confronted the driver by standing in front of the bulldozer and telling the driver, “I’m not moving.” The driver stopped and went home. Baum went home too and hatched a plan. This action started the process of saving Jockey’s Ridge.
Baum’s husband Walter crafted a petition while she was blocking the bulldozer. The idea was to get people to sign the petition in support of creating a park. They placed copies of the petition in local businesses and eventually the petition garnered between 25,000-40,000 signatures.
Baum recruited people to her cause. She formed The People to Preserve Jockey’s Ridge organization and the group raised money to purchase the land. The group sold memorabilia to raise cash; crafty logos such as S.O.S Save Our Sand Dunes! popped up all over the Outer Banks. The group started “Buy A Piece of the Ridge,” where a $5 donation got the donor a commemorative certificate for a “title” to a square foot of the sand dune. Baum placed a “Jockey’s Ridge Headquarters” sign in front of her jewelry shop.
Determined to save Jockey’s Ridge, Baum determined to get North Carolina’s governor to help her. Every day for a week she drove to Raleigh requesting an audience with Governor James Holshouser. Then Lt. Governor James Baxter Hunt fondly remembers Baum “hounding” him about Jockey’s Ridge until he finally “pitched in to help save it.” She persuaded song writers to write about the dunes. Her outreach even motivated poet Carl Sandburg. “Save the dunes,” Sandburg said, “They belong to the people. They represent the signature of time and eternity. Their loss would be irrevocable.”
The People to Preserve Jockey’s Ridge also appealed to local and state government to save the dunes. For many years, the local community near the dunes had been talking about saving Jockey’s Ridge. As early as 1964, the Town of Nags Head had proposed a park, but momentum for the creation of the park lost steam as the Nags Head Chamber of Commerce could not convince the landowners to preserve the dune. Nags Head allowed a rezoning request for condos at the base of the dune in 1972. Another group, Friends of Jockey’s Ridge, organized to stop that project. The Outer Banks Association, comprised of 301 property owners in Dare County, advertised in the local paper to preserve the dune. These two groups drew attention to Jockey’s Ridge but, once again, nothing came of their efforts due to a lack of funding to purchase the land. The People to Preserve Jockey’s Ridge built on these earlier efforts and asked the state’s Division of Parks and Recreation to do a feasibility study on creating a state park. The division reported favorably in 1973 and the National Park Service declared the dunes a National Natural Landmark in 1974. The North Carolina legislature then appropriated money to purchase the land in 1975.
There was concern about the high cost of the land to create the park. The legislative appropriation was significant but not enough with the small, developed parcel on the outer edge of the sand dune driving up the cost of the land. Fortunately, North Carolina was proactively creating state parks at this time and had received Federal matching dollars. The original purchase by the state was for 152 acres. A purchase by the Nature Conservancy increased the size to 266.8 acres. Having obtained their goal, The People to Preserve Jockey’s Ridge voted to dissolve in 1977 and transferred its assets to the State of North Carolina for use in the park.
The establishment of the park was due in no small part to Baum’s hard work to keep the park in the public eye and her tireless lobbying of the legislature and other state officials. Without her energetic effort, it is probable that Jockey’s Ridge would have been privately developed and lost. Today visitors enter the state park via a roadway called Carolista Drive. Jockey’s Ridge State Park now encompasses a total of 426 acres and is a favorite destination in the state’s park system, welcoming about 1.8 million visitors annually.
References:
WRAL, “State parks system reports record number of visitors,” January 24, 2020, available athttps://www.wral.com/state-parks-system-reports-record-number-of-visito….
Danny Berstein, Mountains-to-sea Trail Across NC, 2013.
Arthur W. Cooper, My Years In Public Service: An Ecologist’s Venture into Government, 2017.
Samantha Crisp (Outer Banks History Center director), Carolista Baum and the Fight to Save Jockey’s Ridge (presented at Dare County Public Library), 2022.
Johnny Molloy, Coastal Trails of the Carolinas, 2020.
Sarah Perry, “Where Sand Meets Sky: Jockey’s Ridge,” Our State Magazine, 2013.
Larry Tise, Circa 1903 – North Carolina’s Outer Banks at the Dawn of Flight, 2019.