By Cole Dittmer and
Miriah Hamrick
Staff Writers
The rainy weather accompanying a passing cold front Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2014, was no match for what the residents of Wrightsville Beach experienced that same day 60 years earlier. For many who lived through it, the landfall of Hurricane Hazel Oct. 15, 1954, still lives vividly in their memory banks or it lives in stories passed on by those now gone.
Wrightsville Beach Museum of History director Madeline Flagler said countless visitors, from South Carolina to New England, have stopped by the museum to unfurl their stories of Hurricane Hazel.
“There are an awful lot of people who come through talking about remembering Hurricane Hazel or hearing their family talk about it,” Flagler said. “I have had a handful of people that have come in and said that was actually their very first memory as a child. I assume it was because they were 3 or 4 years old. It was just such a dramatic time and their parents obviously would have been upset.”
Wrightsville Beach native Linda Robinson remembers thinking the event was “a big adventure” and evacuating the beach the night before the storm hit.
“Daddy took us — my brother, my mother, and me — to what was then called the Azalea Motor Court, up on Market Street,” Robinson recalled. “I think we got one of the last rooms left in any motel in town. Daddy came back to the beach because he was a volunteer fireman, so he was helping, knocking on people’s doors, making sure people were evacuated.”
Millie Knowles’ father, Marion Calhoun “M.C.” Vestal, was the volunteer Wrightsville Beach Fire Chief at the time and lived at the corner of Lindy Lane and South Channel Drive on Harbor Island with his wife, Mildred. Millie was their only child. With his duties as fire chief, Knowles’ father would not leave Harbor Island until the very last minute the day Hazel hit.
“We got in the car, which was an old green Packard, went around the traffic circle and water started coming in the doors and it flooded the car completely,” Knowles said. “In that storm, with a couple suitcases and carrying our dog Poochy, we started walking. The current was bad, the wind was blowing and we carried everything all the way up to the Causeway with the water up to my waist.”
The aftermath Hazel left in its wake was not a sight Knowles and Robinson would forget, with large boats washed up along Airlie Road and Causeway Drive. However, both the Knowles and Robinson homes incurred relatively little damage compared to others around them. Robinson remembers their home, near Lumina Pavilion, was saved by a pole.
“When the Crystal Pier broke up, those huge pilings ran into other buildings and that’s what ran into the Schloss cottage [next door],” Robinson said. “We had a sign out front that said ‘Shorecrest Rooms and Apartments for Rent,’ and it stuck out from the side of the house on a steel pole and that steel pole stopped one of those pilings from Crystal Pier from coming right into the house.”
The death toll for Hurricane Hazel totaled 600 on the storm’s path up the eastern seaboard into Canada with 19 deaths in North Carolina. Hazel’s landfall coincided with an incoming lunar high tide, causing the estimated damage to skyrocket to $1.1 billion for the state and $2.8 billion total.
Southport photographer Art Newton published a collection of photographs illustrating the havoc of Hazel in his book, “Hurricane Hazel Lashes Coastal Carolinas,” shortly after the storm in 1954. In his forward, Newton captured the sentiment of the residents of the coastal Carolinas after the storm.
“At this writing none who lived or owned property on these beaches has been heard to say that the ocean has won,” Newton stated. “All these fine folks have a deep love for their seashore and most of them feel like the one who was heard to say, ‘I’ll start building back as soon as I can get hold of a dollar to start on.’”
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For a feature-length Hurricane Hazel story, see the October edition of Wrightsville Beach Magazine.
