Diamond City: A Community Carried Across the Water

The remarkable story of the Shackleford Banks families who moved their homes, rebuilt their lives and carried their coastal heritage forward. 

Visitors arriving on Shackleford Banks today find an undeveloped barrier island known for windswept dunes, maritime forest and the wild horses that wander freely across the sand.

It can be difficult to imagine that this quiet shoreline was once filled with homes, children, fishing boats, livestock, gardens, stores and the everyday sounds of a close-knit community.

That community was Diamond City.

Although storms eventually erased nearly every visible sign of the settlement, they could not erase the families who lived there or the culture they carried with them. The story of Diamond City continues in Harkers Island, Salter Path, Marshallberg, Broad Creek and Morehead City’s Promise Land, as well as in the memories and traditions passed down through generations of Carteret County families.

A Community Beneath the Diamonds

The settlement was originally known as Lookout Woods. It became Diamond City after the Cape Lookout Lighthouse received its distinctive black-and-white diamond pattern in 1873.

Diamond City stood on the protected sound side of Shackleford Banks, west of the lighthouse and sheltered behind a high dune. By the 1890s, Diamond City and two smaller settlements farther west were home to as many as 500 people. At the time, Shackleford Banks had a larger population than Harkers Island.

The people who lived along these banks became known as Ca’e Bankers, pronounced “Cay Bankers,” a local shortening of Cape Bankers.

Diamond City was the largest and best-known of the settlements, but it was not a city in the modern sense. It was a collection of modest homes and family groupings connected by sandy paths, the water and generations of kinship.

Its isolation required both resourcefulness and cooperation. Families relied on one another through births, illnesses, dangerous weather and the uncertainty that came with earning a living from the sea.

Life Built Around the Water

The sea shaped nearly every part of life in Diamond City.

Residents fished for mullet, croaker, spot, trout, flounder and other species found in the waters surrounding the Banks. Diamond City became particularly well known for the salted mullet its fishermen and processors shipped to mainland markets. The community’s reputation came from the care taken in cleaning, salting and packing the fish.

The Ca’e Bankers were also skilled boatbuilders. Boats were not luxuries. They were transportation, tools for earning a living and, at times, the only means of rescue or escape.

Men built sturdy skiffs and workboats without the detailed plans used by modern boatyards. That ability to judge the shape and balance of a boat by eye became part of the boatbuilding tradition later associated with Harkers Island.

One of the best-known figures connected to Diamond City was Devine Guthrie, who was a boatbuilder, whaler and preacher. His life reflects how closely work, faith and community were woven together on the Banks.

Families kept gardens and raised livestock where the soil and fresh water allowed it. Sweet potatoes grew near the dunes, while cattle and sheep grazed alongside the horses that lived on the island. Residents gathered oysters, clams, berries and other available foods.

Materials were used and reused. Salvaged shipwreck timber could become part of a home or boat. Nothing that washed ashore or could be gathered from the surrounding environment was casually wasted.

Diamond City also had small general stores, midwives and a schoolhouse. School was held only during part of the year because children were often needed to help their families. On Sundays and when traveling ministers arrived, the schoolhouse became a place of worship.

Life was difficult, but it was not empty. Families worked, worshipped, celebrated, mourned and raised children there. It was home.

Whaling on the Banks

Shore-based whaling was another important part of life around Cape Lookout and Shackleford Banks.

When someone spotted a whale offshore, crews launched small boats from the beach and pursued it in open water. Bringing a whale ashore required extraordinary strength, courage and coordination.

Once a whale reached the beach, much of the community participated in processing it. The blubber was cut away and heated to produce oil in a process known as “trying out.” Whale oil could be used for lamps and sold or traded, providing income that helped families through lean fishing seasons.

Whaling was dangerous, unpredictable and physically demanding. Yet it was also a community undertaking, one remembered in family stories long after the last crews went out.

The Storms That Changed Everything

Diamond City’s residents were accustomed to storms. They knew how to secure boats, protect their homes and help neighbors when high winds and water swept across the Banks.

But repeated hurricanes and nor’easters during the late 1800s gradually changed the island itself.

Storms damaged the maritime forest, pushed sand across gardens and contaminated wells with salt water. Fruit trees and other vegetation began to die. The protective landscape that had allowed families to live there was disappearing.

The hurricane of 1896 caused some residents to begin considering a move. A much more destructive storm arrived in August 1899. The San Ciriaco hurricane sent water across Shackleford Banks, damaged or displaced homes, destroyed boats and drowned livestock.

The storm also disturbed burial grounds, uncovering graves and scattering markers. Another storm later that year added to the destruction.

The hurricane of 1899 was not the single event that suddenly emptied Diamond City. It was the final blow after years of storms, erosion, saltwater flooding and increasingly difficult living conditions.

Families began leaving the Banks, but many refused to abandon the homes they had built.

They Took Their Homes With Them

Some Diamond City homes were taken apart board by board, loaded onto sail skiffs and reassembled across the water. Other houses were cut into sections. A few were placed whole upon boats or dories and floated across Back Sound.

Imagine standing along the Morehead City waterfront or on Harkers Island and watching an entire house move across the water.

For the Ca’e Bankers, taking a house along was practical. Lumber was valuable, homes were built for disassembly and families needed shelter wherever they began again. To people watching from the mainland, however, the sight must have been astonishing.

Many families settled on Harkers Island, where they could remain close to their familiar fishing grounds. Others moved to Marshallberg, Broad Creek and Salter Path.

Some continued west to Morehead City, settling near Bogue Sound in the neighborhood that became known as the Promise Land. One tradition holds that an observer watching the families and their homes arrive by water compared them to the Israelites traveling toward the Promised Land.

By the early 1900s, Shackleford Banks was nearly deserted. Homes, boats and families were gone, leaving cemeteries and scattered remnants to mark where communities had once stood.

Diamond City Lives On

The disappearance of Diamond City was not the end of its story.

Its families carried their skills, faith, language, foodways and close community ties into their new homes. Fishing and boatbuilding traditions continued on Harkers Island. Descendants helped shape Salter Path and the Promise Land. Family names and stories spread throughout Carteret County and far beyond it.

Willis, Guthrie, Lewis, Yeomans, Rose, Hancock, Gillikin, Davis and many other local families have connections to the people who once lived on the Banks.

When Coastal 55+ Guide first shared a shorter history of Diamond City, the response revealed how personal this story remains. Readers told of grandparents and great-grandparents born on the Banks. Some remembered relatives who were whalers or boatbuilders. One shared the story of a family home floated across the water, complete with a staircase so low that even someone 5 feet 4 inches tall had to duck.

Others remembered sitting with older neighbors and relatives while they built boats and talked about life on the Banks. There were recollections of traveling across the water in boats built by family members and stories of men going to the Banks to gather or work with the horses.

Those memories cannot always be found in official records. They survive because someone listened, remembered and chose to tell the next generation.

Every five years, descendants gather for the Diamond City Homecoming. They return to Shackleford Banks, visit the remaining burial grounds, share photographs and speak the names of those who lived there. The gathering is not simply a remembrance of a vanished settlement. It is a homecoming to a place that still belongs to the families whose roots remain beneath its shifting sand.

Diamond City may no longer appear on modern maps, but it has never truly disappeared.

It survives in the boats built by hand, in homes that crossed the sound, in the distinctive Carteret County brogue and in stories shared around kitchen tables. It lives in the people who still look across Back Sound toward Shackleford Banks and know that their family story began there.

Sources and Further Reading

This article was researched using historical information from the National Park Service’s Cape Lookout National Seashore archives, the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center, NCpedia, Core Sound Communities and Coastal Review.