38 WBM september 2014 didn’t have a passenger, he’d try to gather steam and just pour it on and sail right over that old rickety trestle,” remembers my grandfather. “That was quite a sensation because he’d really open it up. I used to have recurring nightmares about that, thinking the tracks would disappear and we’d just be sailing through the air. I reckon I had those dreams for years and years.” Shell Road, now Wrightsville Avenue, made of crushed oyster shells, along with Oleander Drive, were the main arteries connecting the beach to town. “I can remember my dad telling me he courted my mother some-times by renting a buggy and driv-ing down to the beach on Shell Road. He being an old farm boy, he would have known how to manage a horse, you know. I reckon that was one of the things people did in those days,” my grandfather says. There used to be a boardwalk on the east side of the island, Ocean Avenue. “Through the years, that disap-peared because hurricanes took all those houses out on the east side of the boulevard and on the west side too,” my grandfather recalls. “I can remember as a boy seeing people fish off their front porches. The surf would come right underneath the house — at high tide as well as low tide until it just finally took them out, you see. I remember standing down there one time with my dad. We were one street south of our house on the ocean side. We sat there and watched one house wash right into the Atlantic Ocean. That September, a storm just took it right out.” The family had several dogs during those years at the beach. Drake, the family’s Chesapeake Bay retriever, was partial to my grand-dad, who used to harness him to his IMAGES COURTESY OF NEW HANOVER COUNTY LIBRARY IMAGE COURTESY OF NEW HANOVER COUNTY LIBRARY
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