by Rod Hackney
Page 1 : A Land of Beginnings
Here along the Alligator River, history hangs in the air as thick as the early morning mists rising from the rivers, marshes and sounds that have shaped this landscape for thousands of years.
It is an ancient terrain, yet a land of beginnings.
Within a stone's throw of the Alligator's broad and twisting banks, the first English settlement in the New World was attempted, and man first broke the bonds of Earth to sail the skies aboard a flying machine. Today, North America's first attempt at introducing an endangered animal back into the wild is still an experiment without conclusions.
This river of beginnings has yet to record the final chapter in success or failure for that troubled creature--the red wolf. The Alligator River's long and rich history would lend credence to the theory that if anywhere there is still a place for this shy but noble predator to recover, surely it is here.
In reality the Alligator River is not a river, but a small sound--one of the more significant fingers of the much larger Albemarle Sound.
The Alligator is nearly four miles wide at its northern confluence with the Albemarle, then tapers back to a width of less than a half mile near its southern tip, located some 25 miles away near the tiny community of Gum Neck.
Along with the Pamlico, Currituck, Roanoke, Croatan and other sounds, these fresh and brackish bodies of water separate North Carolina's mainland from the Outer Banks, the famous narrow ribbon of barrier islands stretching from the Virginia border southward for nearly 300 miles to Cape Fear below the port city of Wilmington.
While the early history of the Alligator River is sketchy, local historians generally agree that settlers of the 1700s probably christened the river after finding a significant number of the big reptiles slithering in and out of its waters. They could not have known then, of course, that this population of the American alligator represents the northern-most range of the species on the Atlantic Coast.
| About the TerraServer Images |
| This tour of the Alligator River region includes several links to the TerraServer website. TerraServer provides access to digitized aerial photographs from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and high-resolution satellite images from the SPIN-2 joint Russian/American venture. Images are presented in a format that allows the user to zoom in on or pan across large areas. More information is available from the TerraServer Website: |
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