WEDNESDAY MAY 19TH

A rainy morning in Beaufort, North Carolina. It is very dry here, so don’t want to complain too much about it. It pretty much stopped raining by 11:00, so we ventured out. 

Bought tickets for a historic tour around the town on an old double-decker bus. 

We took the chance that the rain had ended and sat up top. Much better view from up here, but we had to duck several times to avoid tree limbs and branches. 

The homes here are very old and have stood through many hurricanes. There is not natural stone in this area, so any brick or stone you see on these houses arrived here as ballast in the hold of a ship. 

This house belonged to a relative of a famous female spy named Emeline Pigott. Emeline would come here and visit often. She fell in love with a Confederate soldier who was killed at Gettysburg. At that point she decided to spy for the Confederates. The women wore huge hoops skirts back then and she had pockets sewn inside that she would smuggle messages, mail, guns, knives, food, even boots. She would have Federal troops to her home and feed them. All the while pumping them for info and then passing it along. She was finally suspected of spying and captured. Of course it wouldn’t be proper for a man to search her. While they looked for a woman to do the search, Emeline ate several of the military messages and destroyed most of the remaining mail and messages she was carrying. She’s considered a hero and we saw Emeline Pigott dolls for sale in the shops. 

This is the house that the girl who is buried in the keg of rum once lived with her family. It was on the shoreline with many other large homes, so they were obviously very wealthy. 

In the afternoon we took a guided walking tour. We were the only two signed up so we had the guide to ourselves. We toured the old apothecary/doctors office. Photography wasn’t allowed, but I snuck a picture anyway. She spoke quite a bit of the medicines available at the time. Most mixtures were a combination of about 80 plus proof alcohol, laudanum(opium), chloroform, cocaine and formeldehyde. Wouldn’t have cured anything, but you wouldn’t have cared! The guide said most women were addicts because they had been given these “medicines” for so many ailments. 

There was a large sports fishing boat named the Tenth Frame that came in to the dock. A few days before they were out fishing and saw something floating in the water. They drove over to it and it was 3 people clinging to a cooler!! Their 20 foot boat had been swamped by a wave 2 days previous and sunk before they could get their lifejackets. The boat sank 12 miles off shore. The current had taken them out 30 miles when they were found. The captain commented that he called the Coast Guard and when they arrived they were very rude to him and the crew. Not even a thank you. And they started inspecting his boats for flares and what not. The Coast Guard didn’t want to provide the survivors with life jackets and made the fishing captain give up three of his. Not a very glowing report on the Coast Guard.