Saturday, September 5, 2026
By Brian Tress | Outer Banks Voice on August 25, 2026
Most visitors who climb the steps at Currituck Beach Lighthouse or walk the fields at Island Farm don’t know the name of the nonprofit that makes either place possible. Outer Banks Conservationists (OBC), incorporated in 1980 to save an abandoned lighthouse keeper’s dwelling from demolition, now owns and operates both sites.
“The farm and lighthouse were some of the grounding features of this area,” said Creecy Richardson-Creef, OBC’s associate director. “Preserving them is preserving a way of life that can teach the public very important things about working together, protecting the coast, and protecting food systems.”
“In a place where there’s a lot of pageantry associated with some of our attractions,” she continued, “the strength of OBC is that both of the sites speak for themselves.” The two sites —which operate from March to early December — draw close to 85,000 visitors a year between them, according to the N.C. Coastal Land Trust.
The organization runs lean: a five-member board, two of them founders whose institutional memory Executive Director Ladd Bayliss calls irreplaceable, and a staff that reaches 30 employees at peak season. Volunteers fill the gaps — close to 2,500 hours logged across both sites last year, Bayliss said.
Funding comes almost entirely from the public. “No recurring grants,” according to Bayliss. “We don’t rely on state or federal funding. We fund through donations and people who walk through our doors, and we seek grants for capital projects as they occur.” She put OBC’s current annual operating budget at roughly $2 million, with the largest share of revenue comprised of contributions and admissions.
OBC worked with the N.C. Coastal Land Trust to place both sites — which are on the National Register of Historic Places — under permanent conservation easements in 2022, ensuring they will remain protected regardless of the organization’s future.
“The sites can never be developed,” Bayliss said, “If something were to happen to OBC, they would go to the N.C. Coastal Land Trust. This can never be revoked, even through changes in ownership.”
When Currituck Beach Lighthouse was lit for the first time on Dec. 1, 1875, it closed the last dark 40-mile gap in the coastline between Cape Henry and Bodie Island, a stretch that had claimed ships for decades.
“Congress had actually set aside money for a Currituck lighthouse back in 1854,” said site manager Meghan Agresto, “but it went to Bodie Island, which needed to be replaced at the time.” Currituck’s turn came in 1873, when Congress appropriated funds again.
For six decades, keepers and their families tended the light by hand, climbing the tower each evening to set it burning and again at dawn to put it out. Automation ended that ritual in 1937, when the Coast Guard rigged the lamp to run on its own and did away with the keeper positions altogether. The keepers’ quarters sat empty from then on, falling into disrepair and occasionally taken over by squatters. In 1980, a group of local preservationists incorporated OBC and leased the site from the state to begin restoring it, ultimately purchasing the tower and its historic storehouse outright in 2003.
The tower itself is full of small distinctions. Its red brick exterior has never been painted — the only lighthouse in North Carolina left that way — a deliberate choice so mariners could tell it apart by daylight from the black-and-white striped towers up and down the coast. The interior spiral iron staircase is bolted together rather than welded, Agresto explained, a construction choice from a pre-welding era that has held up for a century and a half.
At the top sits the tower’s original first-order Fresnel lens — a design using rings of angled glass prisms, rather than one solid lens, to bend light into a beam powerful enough to be seen far out to sea. First-order is the largest of the traditional lens sizes, and only a handful of lighthouses in the country still operate on their original lens rather than a modern replacement.
The lighthouse is part of the way through a $1 million restoration, with the entire tower being repointed with new mortar in order to minimize water intrusion. “A lot of places, the mortar had just fallen out,” Agresto said. She expects the work to be finished by late October.
The lighthouse’s economic impact comes through tourism and it is also a cherished fixture for the community, according to Agresto. “Lighthouses are a must-see for some visitors — they are always built at the end of the earth,” she said. For locals, it’s less about visiting than living alongside it — the soft yellow light that bathes the streets at night, she said, or the ability to buy a season pass and climb the 220 steps every morning.
“I do think people here have a sense of ownership and appreciation,” she explained. “The community feels like it’s theirs.”
Island Farm’s roots on Roanoke Island reach back to 1757, when Adam Etheridge first leased 1,500 acres on the island’s North End. His descendants worked the land for more than two centuries, and the heart-pine farmhouse that anchors the site today was built sometime between 1845 and 1852. By the 1980s the property was headed toward residential development but the descendants intervened and by 1997, the family had donated the homeplace to OBC outright.
What followed was not a quick restoration. “Our board of directors took it slow,” Bayliss said. “Once the land was acquired, they began a fact-finding process — archaeology to determine where the outbuildings would have been, oral history interviews. The out-buildings were built based on the results. It took us twelve years to do all that.”
Furnishings, tools and livestock were all chosen to match a single interpretive year — 1847. “Everything you see at the farm is relevant to the time period we are interpreting, ” said Bayliss. The farm opened to the public in 2010.
Today Island Farm is staffed by interpreters working in the blacksmith shop, cooking in the kitchen and cultivating the fields with the kinds of tools and techniques the Etheridge family used in 1847, and increasingly tending to the same breeds of livestock. The heritage-livestock program, still in its early stages, has brought in Hog Island sheep, a small oxen team, a young Devon heifer, and a mule named Lillie — breeds OBC has identified as likely present on 19th-century Roanoke Island farms.
“The row crops this year were done via animal power,” said Jane Bailey, education manager at Island Farm. “We worked with our draft mule to harrow the field — we’re growing crops that the Etheridges grew, the same way they grew them. The work isn’t staged — it’s happening real-time and the visitors get to watch it.” Last year, the farm started a community food assistance program, where harvested crops are donated to support those in need.
It is the farm’s everyday work that captures what sets OBC apart as preservationists — a mule pulling a harrow through fields still growing corn, peas and Irish potatoes.
“It’s not just preserving a place, but a sense of place,” Richardson-Creef said. “The sights, the smells, the feeling of another time. It’s a lot more than just preserving architecture. We are actually farming here — real work, with real livestock. We plow fields and cultivate the land.”
Visit Outer Banks Conservationists website to learn more and to visit Currituck Beach Lighthouse or Island Farm.
Comments
Chip Py
Hi,
This article reads that Adam Etheridge’s “descendants worked the land for more than two centuries”. Were there any enslaved people involved in that work ? If so, shouldn’t their work be recognized also?
Always looking to be included
Chip, has anyone in your family ever been involved in enslaving people? If so, shouldn’t you owe them some of your paycheck?