Beaufort, North Carolina: A Century of Marine Science

The waterfront in Beaufort, North Carolina, has been a destination for marine scientists for well over a century. In the late nineteenth century, Johns Hopkins University operated a research laboratory here on the waterfront.

In eighteen ninety-nine, the United States government opened a fisheries laboratory here in Beaufort, choosing this location because of the unusually diverse and accessible marine environment of the surrounding sounds and estuaries.

Rachel Carson, the biologist whose nineteen sixty-two book Silent Spring transformed the American environmental movement, is remembered here; a reserve across the harbor carries her name. The scientific community around Beaufort continued to grow. Duke University opened its marine laboratory at Pivers Island in nineteen thirty-eight. The University of North Carolina later followed with a lab in Morehead City. The federal laboratory sits on Pivers Island, which was bought for four hundred dollars in nineteen oh one. Duke's lab went up beside it, with its first building finished by nineteen thirty-eight as a summer training and research facility, and the two still share the island. Duke's lab now has dormitory space for one hundred forty-two people. Across Taylor's Creek from the waterfront, the Rachel Carson Reserve covers twenty-three hundred fifteen acres of islands and marsh, including Carrot Island, Town Marsh, and Bird Shoal. You can reach it only by private boat or passenger ferry, and wild horses brought to the islands in the nineteen forties now roam there as a feral herd. What began at the Gibbs House on Front Street became one of the most concentrated clusters of marine research anywhere on the Atlantic coast.