Beacon Island Lodge

Story
Decoys
Credits

🔴 LOW RESEARCH VOLUME

OWNERS

Capt. Bill Gaskill

Floyd Simmons

Date-early 1900s

?1926

OTHER ASSOCIATIONS

The Edgewater Club–1935-1937

LOCATION
Northern Core Banks, within Ocracoke Inlet

Story

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Beacon Island

“Captain Bill Gaskill, according to his son Thurston (seen in photo at left), owned a hunting club on Beacon Island. The wooden building was about 30-by-26 feet with a fireplace and rooms lined with red paper. As a guide, he carried hunters to the camp in a big flat-bottomed skiff made of cypress and cedar, and they would stay for four to five days.”

“After market hunting was made illegal, ‘guiding’—taking visitors out to duck blinds so they could hunt—became an important occupation.”

“In an interview before his death at age 96, Thurston Gaskill of Ocracoke talked about hunting geese and ducks with his father, Captain Bill. They hunted from blinds and batteries, Thurston said, using live and wooden decoys, with the goal of selling them. During the great freeze of 1918, they were trapped for three weeks on Beacon Island, an island off the coast of Ocracoke, and while there, they shot 325 ducks, brant and geese. New restrictions brought an end to this kind of hunting and, as Thurston stated, ‘There are not as many birds as there used to be.’”

(from The Hunting Traditions of Hatteras and Ocracoke Islands, Island Free Press, 12-30-2010)

Beacon Island, in Portsmouth Township, Carteret County, is an island in Ocracoke Inlet.

Originally, about 20 acres in size, it was part of the trading port in the 1700s and was the site of the Beacon Island Lighthouse built in 1853. The 38 foot brick tower was refitted in 1855 with a fixed, 6th order lens light. A keeper’s dwelling sat alongside. It was designed to be a range marker for the channel in conjunction with a light-vessel. Congress removed it from service in 1859.

The Confederate Fort Ocracoke sat on Beacon Island during the Civil War.

In 1928, the first Brown Pelican nesting site ever documented within North Carolina occurred. This time overlaps with the use of the island hunting camp. The island continued as a productive nesting site for several bird species. It had shrunk to 7.5 acres by 2014 but still supported 558 nesting pairs of pelicans that year. The Audubon Society became owners in 2014. (Wikipedia)

Typical of the time, Cape. Bill used both live and wooden decoys.

Floyd Simmons after an upland game hunt with a hen turkey—standing in front of the Edgewater Club in Morehead City, 1937. He was known for his coaching career at Davidson College and time affiliated with the University of North Carolina. (Steve Anderson of the Carteret County Historical Society tells the expanded story of Floyd Simmons in the society newsletter, 2022.

Floyd Simmons hunted and worked as a guide out of Portsmouth, Morehead City, Ocracoke and Hatteras, as well as upland game lands. When Simmons established his Edgewater Club in the late 30s, he also built a camp at Cape Lookout. These photos of Beacon island are from his archival collection at the Carteret County Historical Society.