The Man Who Put the Outer Banks on the Map

Excerpted from the new book Aycock Brown on the Outer Banks. Published with permission of Arcadia Publishing. 

Imagine the Outer Banks with vast, beguiling, barren stretches of beach running for miles. 

Cottages on stilts here and there along a two-lane road by the sea. No TVs, few phones save for pay phones in their glass boxes in random parking lots. A handful of local grocery stores, not supermarkets. Mom-and-pop motels and just a few majestic hotels. And a few thousand visitors, mostly from the nearby coastal plain of North Carolina and the Tidewater region of Virginia, in a short summer season from Memorial Day to Labor Day, served by a few thousand locals along with summer help from high school and college kids. 

How did the Banks get from there to today, a coveted vacationland crowded with McMansions, upscale hotels and restaurants (one that even includes a spa), and endless entertainment for the more than 5 million visitors who spend more than $2 billion annually, coming in on the area’s approximately 37,000 permanent residents? From cottages renting for less than $100 a week to ones commanding up to $65,000 weekly? One man, all but forgotten, small of stature but gigantic of heart, almost single-handedly brought us here.

If you really want to know the Outer Banks, you might want to understand photographer Aycock Brown. He was the visionary who literally put the Banks on the map, as many have said. A native of the North Carolina mountains, he was, like so many Outer Bankers before him and so many to come, a transplant who found his true self on the Banks. 

He essentially taught himself his photographic and public relations skills, eventually playing a leading role—with his associate Sarah Alford Owens—in making the Outer Banks one of the most sought-after resort locations in the nation. From a darkroom in his Manteo home, his photos went far and wide, published in newspapers and magazines across the country. 

Aycock met his bride-to-be, Esther Styron, on an Ocracoke Island dock in the late 1920s. He married his hopes to hers and, ultimately, to those of their beloved Banks. Their dream lives on. Sure, there’s overdevelopment. But the water and beaches—the natural majesty that Aycock shot so well that their feeling crawls into your soul—live. “He was a man before his time, and he loved Dare County beyond anything,” said family friend Kathy Spencer. 

In the parallel time of the Banks, where some locals still speak in a wonderful brogue of Old England, Aycock is right there with us, a pied piper shooting and laughing. You’re here because of him. 

Mystic Sands

The Outer Banks blew Aycock away the first time he saw it, on Ocracoke, in 1928. Sand dancing in the screaming wind like banshees. The Atlantic pounding waves on the east and the Pamlico Sound on the west, whipping whitecaps, the breeze hard and smart and wet with the glorious salt spray, fishing boats out there bobbing and working. 

Aycock was 24 years old, whip-skinny tough, of medium height and 130 pounds on a good day, having rolled down from the mainland by way of a brief stint in New York City. He instinctively saw it all as photos, not realizing what it all might mean, just clicking away, digging his bony knees into the sand, and snapping away at this pioneer world few outsiders had seen. 

He was tapping into mystic sands. And a few years later, in the World War II days, courage. Just offshore, German submarines were torpedoing our ships. Aycock worked for the military in the grim job of identifying the bodies of U.S. servicemen, merchant mariners, and foreign sailors, later co-authoring a story about it headlined I Wore a Dead Man’s Hand. 

On Ocracoke he met Esther, the woman who would become his wife. The Styrons were an old family on the island. Aycock’s marriage to her bought him acceptance on the island. 

Aycock was an old-school romantic, fearless and funny but practical, too, one of those rare folk who find themselves at a turning point of history and run with it, a visionary, one able to convey the magic and mystery he was encountering. The magic surrounded him and seeped into his soul as he and Esther moved from Ocracoke to the southern North Carolina coast, then to Manteo. 

Aycock loved looking at the wild water and beaches. He knew and shot photos of one of the last witnesses of the 1903 Wright brothers’ flight. Years later, as he shot photos of soaring pelicans, he watched in awe as fighter jocks tore through the Outer Banks skies in their war birds, roaring out from their naval base in Virginia Beach to the Outer Banks in under five minutes, a car drive of an hour and a half on a good day. He intimately knew the old days on the Banks, when most locals still talked in the Old English brogue—“hoigh toide on the Sound soide”—in the enchanting parallel time. 

He was, in his own way, an anthropologist, chronicling a culture and way of life fast vanishing, a filter, a lens, a mirror, a closet intellectual with an impish sense of humor and never-ending wonder, almost childlike at times.

Pounding Out Press Releases

In 1952, Dare County established the Dare County Tourist Bureau with Aycock as the director. Before the bureau, Dare County’s towns had basically competed for tourism business in unorganized efforts. The county officials recognized that Aycock had done solid work in the Morehead City area and on Ocracoke.

They also knew his organizational skills weren’t the best but recognized that his visionary risk-taking, and his growing network of national contacts, might outweigh his organizational weakness. David Stick, one of the founders of the bureau, became one of Aycock’s biggest supporters and friends.

Aycock worked hard, and he was lucky, especially in his choice of his assistant, Sarah Owens. She was from an old-line Manteo family and helped secure his local contacts. She also had a knack for organization that Aycock lacked. 

His tiny office was in downtown Manteo near the corner of Budleigh Street and U.S. 64 and next to The Coastland Times. His desk was shaded by old-school venetian blinds, cluttered with hundreds of files bulging with negatives. Aycock would sit at his typewriter every day, pounding out press releases, ashes dropping from chain-smoked cigarettes. Owens, 30 years younger, was always nearby, matching him cigarette for cigarette. 

Aycock taught himself photography. He knew he had to do the office work, but he was most comfortable cruising the Outer Banks coastline, stopping often to talk to his many friends and snap photos. The North Carolina coast runs for about 300 miles, the largest segment being the 200 miles of the Outer Banks, from the Virginia border north through Hatteras and Ocracoke, before the southern coast of the state begins. N.C. 12 closely parallels the Outer Banks beach line, the closest thing North Carolina has to an oceanfront highway.

Aycock was determined to make the Outer Banks the most sought-after part of his state’s coast. He fell in love with that region and the people who lived and worked on it. 

Aycock knew that tourism could help them. Up and down the East Coast there were better shooters and better writers than Aycock. He wasn’t an artist and never claimed to be. But he was tireless, fast, creative, and, yes, gimmicky with his shots, charming newspaper and magazine friends to take his photos and stories nationwide. 

Aycock’s work was paying off. By the 1960s, the Dare County population of 7,500 year-round residents was swelling to 50,000 in the summer, bringing in tens of thousands of dollars. 

First in Flight

Aycock always remained keenly aware of the Outer Banks’ unique place in American history. The bookends: the Lost Colony of 1587 [the English settlers who mysteriously disappeared] and the first powered flight, by the Wright brothers, on December 17, 1903. Aycock spent thousands of hours shooting photos of the outdoor drama based on the Lost Colony and chronicling, through his photos, the commemoration of that first flight. 

In the 1960s, Aycock photographed astronaut John Glenn visiting the Wright Memorial near Kitty Hawk soon after Glenn’s orbit of the Earth. Then there is Aycock’s iconic shot of the crescent moon rising above the memorial during the first moon landing in 1969. Outer Banks author R. Wayne Gray wrote: “With a portable radio in hand, he snapped the shot at the exact moment when man first set foot on the moon.”

On November 16, 1972, Dare County surprised Aycock with a day named for him. David Stick praised his friend’s work and included one solemn note, based on some of his chats with Aycock: “What have we really wrought, and are we, in the process of publicizing and building on the Outer Banks, are we going to end up destroying the very thing that we were attracted to in the beginning?” 

Aycock kept working on his rapidly changing Outer Banks. The rumrunners and moonshiners he had seen almost 50 years before had been replaced by maritime drug smugglers, some of them local, hauling in loads of marijuana from overseas to unload on trucks pulled up in secret spots by the sounds or the thousands of canals leading into the sounds. Smugglers coming in off the ocean, facing federal boats coming for them, routinely dumped their bales of pot into the sea. A popular T-shirt of the 1980s had a painting of a couple of bales with “Save the Bales” underneath the picture, a takeoff on the environmentalists’ slogan of “Save the Whales.”

Aycock died on April 13, 1984, at the age of 79 in his Manteo house on Sir Walter Raleigh Street. 

Secret No More

“The Outer Banks of North Carolina used to be a vacation traveler’s secret,” The Insiders’ Guide to North Carolina’s Outer Banks reported in the early 1980s. “Many Tarheels and Virginians knew of its getaway, restorative pleasures, but invitations to Nags Head cottages were reserved only for special friends and family.” The guide noted that the Banks “attract over a million visitors each year.” That number would multiply in the ensuing decades.

In the early 1980s, there was hoopla in the Outer Banks real estate world when the first oceanfront cottage, offered by Joe Lamb Jr. & Associates, broke the $1,000-a-week rental mark for the summer. Now, that cottage rents for almost $11,000 on its biggest week. One of the Banks’ top weekly rentals, in Kill Devil Hills, gets $65,000 a week in prime summer season. Many Outer Bankers, longtime residents and seasonal ones, curse the overdevelopment, even while being happy with their chunk of sand and with some of them selling more of it to newcomers at constantly rising prices.

Toward the end of his life, Aycock half-joked that the overdevelopment was his fault. Affordable housing for everyone from restaurant staff to teachers to doctors is a huge problem. Dare County’s permanent population of about 37,000 residents swells to about 225,000 to 300,000 from June through August. 

Old-timers and newcomers curse the traffic jams and growing stream of visitors and new residents, as if they could somehow put the genie that Aycock unleashed back in the bottle. Nostalgia rages for “the good old days,” with that nostalgia, depending on whom you talk to, surfing a sliding scale from the 1950s to the 1980s.

That magic can never be recouped. But much of it remains, in the sands by the ocean and the sounds, the dolphins playing just offshore and the families frolicking in the sand. These scenes and many others are timeless.

They are classic, set in drifting sand by Aycock, who might have known that constants would remain in the dreamscape he introduced to the world. In Kill Devil Hills, there is a road named for Aycock. It leads from the Beach Road and doglegs across the bypass to Kitty Hawk Bay, past new cottages and old, a microcosm of the Banks culture Aycock knew so well.