The North Carolina Coast Sights

Shopping Performing Arts

1. Portsmouth Village

This coastal "ghost town" is like nowhere else on the southeastern Atlantic coast, and the few thousand people that make it here each year are stunned to realize it exists.Inhabited from 1753 until the early 1970s, Portsmouth had 685 permanent residents at its peak in 1860, making it one of the largest settlements on the Outer Banks. It was a "lightering" town, where ships heavy with cargo had to unload to smaller boats that could navigate the shallow Ocracoke Inlet. But the Civil War and the dredging of a deeper inlet at Hatteras were the beginning of the end for the town. By 1956 there were 17 inhabitants; the last two left in 1971. Today the public can tour the one-room schoolhouse, the Methodist church, the post office and general store, and the turn-of-the-20th-century lifesaving station (a multiroom Coast Guard station), each of which has been restored following the devestating flooding of Hurricane Dorian in 2019. Guided tours are available June 1 to September 1. Bring your own food, water, and bug spray (the mosquitoes could carry you away). Rudy Austin's Portsmouth Island Boat Tours runs a small passenger boat from Ocracoke.