10/13/2021
The Seven Sisters
One of my favorite legends, though it has a bit of a sad ending for me. Long ago, when the first houses were being built on the coast by wealthy landowners from the plantations inland, the entire families and households would come to the beaches of the Outer Banks to escape the thick still summer heat and mosquitoes that permeated the inland plain. Since they spent the entire summer in these homes, they brought everyone and everything, including their enslaved servants.
In one house, seven women, sisters by birth or pledged in bo***ge, worked for a family. They had promised each other that they would all work to free themselves as a group, and stay together through both their enslavement and their freedom. Finally came the day they could all buy their way free, and they did not wait a moment to leave their former owner. All seven women set forth from the beach of Nags Head toward the sound, Roanoke Island, and anywhere that was away from enslavement.
That very evening, a huge storm blew up, twisting up the coast and churning the usually calm Atlantic Ocean's summer waves. No one had time to escape or move the homes back from the sea. The old houses were equipped with a trap door in the floor that could be flung open to let water flow through, in hopes that the houses would not be lifted from their pilings and float away. So the homeowners stayed, and watched, and hoped against the worst.
The next morning, on the sound side, where the seven sisters had trod away in a group, seven sand dunes formed in a low line, as if marching together toward freedom. They were given the name The Seven Sisters.
The dunes remained there for over a hundred years until they were pulled down in the 1980s to build the Outer Banks Mall.
