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Margaret Peele is 95 and doesn’t hesitate about revealing her age. She doesn’t mind telling you that she is the oldest woman in Hatteras village.

Miss Margaret was born in the village on Halloween in 1913.

This year on Halloween, her family and friends threw a party in honor of her birthday.

There were plenty of treats for all at the luncheon at the village’s Community Building.

The meeting room in the building was crowded with Miss Margaret’s children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, friends, and admirers.

A slide show of 71 family photos, gathered and prepared by grandson Justin Davis of Buxton, played on a big screen. The pictures told Miss Margaret’s story in photos from her childhood through the childhoods of her children and their children. There were snapshots, a portrait of five generations of Peeles, photos of Miss Margaret and her late husband Fulford, pictures from family weddings, and countless other birthday parties for the family’s matriarch.

Friends gathered around, while family members recited the names of people in the picture show, many of whom are now deceased. They shared memories of various occasions in the life of this old Hatteras family.

A long table was laden with good food, prepared by family members, who like Miss Margaret are known for their good cooking, and by many of her friends. There were platters of veggies and fruit; bowls of chicken, shrimp, and pasta salads; a crock pot of tangy hot meatballs; sausage balls and pigs in a blanket; various dips; plates of deviled eggs, and ham, pimiento cheese, and egg salad sandwiches.

Another table was covered with cakes and other sweets.

Miss Margaret sat at one corner of a long table, accepting the hugs and birthday wishes from family and friends.

She was fashionably attired in a long black skirt, black jacket, and stylish blouse. Her white hair, as always, was neatly coiffed.

Miss Margaret may be thinner and moving more slowly than she once did. But her sharp mind can still conjure up memories of her life on the island and the changes she has seen.

At one point, she noted that given the state of the economy, folks sometimes ask her about what life was like on Hatteras in the Great Depression.

“Down here in Hatteras,” she said, “we didn’t know we had a Depression. We didn’t have any money before and we didn’t then.”

And, she added, “I’m not worried about it this time.”

There was a photo session with Miss Margaret, and her children, and grandchildren, and other relatives.

Margaret and Fulford Peele had four children. Three of them are still living – Winona Burroughs, Barry Peele Sr., and Mona Walters. Their son, Shanklin, died in 2003. Most of the 10 grandchildren, and many of the 18 great-grandchildren were also at the party. And there is one great-great-grandchild.

“I just always wanted to be at her house,” Margie Easley, the oldest of Miss Margaret’s grandchildren, remembered. She always had treats, Margie said, like popsicles made in the old-fashioned metal molds and lots of cookies.

Peele family gatherings always included terrific meals, prepared by Miss Margaret. At one time, she prepared lunch every day for those who could attend, and there was always a big Sunday dinner.

“She cooked until just a few years ago,” said Margie. “We still have to have Sunday night supper, but we all pitch in now. It’s kind of scary. Without her, I don’t know if we will still do it.”

The birthday party ended with members of the choirs of Hatteras United Methodist Church and Our Lady of the Seas Catholic Church and Miss Margaret’s friends and family singing her favorite gospel songs. There was hardly a dry eye in the room when they got to “Amazing Grace.”

Though Miss Margaret doesn’t cook her famous fried fish or chicken or much of anything else anymore and she can’t drive around the village as she once did, her memories of her life in the village and of the changes she has seen on the island are as sharp as ever.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW SLIDESHOW

Following is a story I wrote about Miss Margaret’s amazing life that was first published in The Island Breeze in September, 1996.

LOOKING BACK: Margaret Peele’s memories of Life on Hatteras

By IRENE NOLAN

The old, island house that has been Margaret Peele's home for 58 years sits on the edge of a marsh near the end of Kohler Road in Hatteras village.

The house is older than that. It was built about 70 years ago by Miss Margaret's brother-in-law out on the shore of the Pamlico Sound. After his death, his widow sold the house to Miss Margaret and her late husband Fulford. They had it moved across the marsh, and she moved there as a young wife in 1938.

The house and Miss Margaret have much in common.

For one thing, their appearance belies their age.   The old house has been well cared for and updated. Today it's neat and tidy with old cedars on either side of the front walk and flowers on the porch. Inside, its old wood floors are clean and shiny from a refurbishing after Hurricane Emily. The kitchen has been modernized. The furnishings and appointments are comfortable and attractive.

Miss Margaret herself will be 83 years old on Halloween, though it would be hard to tell from her appearance or her manner. Her neatly coiffed hair is snowy white, but her step is still lively. She still drives her sedan around the village, does her own shopping, and cooks a big meal for family and friends each midday and Sunday after church.

And Miss Margaret and her old island house have both witnessed the enormous changes that have come to Hatteras village and the entire island over the past six decades.

The sandy lane that once ran past the house has been replaced by asphalt. Roads have brought more people, and tourists, and many goods that were once available only by freight boat from Washington or Elizabeth City. Bread can be bought in the grocery store now, and mothers no longer have to get up early in the morning to bake the bread before sending the children off to school.

Houses have sprung up everywhere along the edge of the marsh. The oil lamps that once gave the Peele family light have been replaced by electricity. The electricity brought wonderful conveniences for the family along the lane — first fans and then air conditioning, washing machines, radios and eventually television.

Two generations of island children have played in the yards along the lane, and now Miss Margaret can sit on the porch and watch a third generation — her great-grandchildren — playing there.

The house and Miss Margaret have weathered hurricanes and nor'easters and even a war that was fought within sight of the marsh.

Yes, Miss Margaret says in a conversation on a muggy summer afternoon, much has happened to her and to the village since she moved into the house.

She doesn't seem to mind too much.

"It's got to be better," she says. "People are making a much better living."

She likes such things as the roads and having electricity and automobiles. What she doesn't like are the summer crowds.

"I don't like it so crowded that you can't get out on the highway or get a cart at the grocery store. It used to be when you would go to the store or the post office, you would know everyone there."

Packed away in Miss Margaret's mind and in her photo albums are the memories of the way Hatteras used to be before roads and bridges brought so many visitors to the island and changed it forever.

Margaret Willis Peele was born on Halloween, 1913, in Hatteras village. She was the second of the four children born to Willie and May Austin Willis. Her father was in the Coast Guard, so the family enjoyed a somewhat better standard of living than their neighbors, most of whom were commercial fishermen in those days.

"We always had the food and clothes we needed," Miss Margaret says. "Of course, in those days, we didn't have that much."

When Miss Margaret was 10, her mother died and her life changed. Though her father hired a housekeeper, Margaret was still expected to help with the care and feeding of her three brothers — one older and two younger. When she was 13, her father remarried. His 19-year-old bride, Sue Burrus, was more like a sister to young Margaret. Sue didn't know much more about keeping house or raising children — she had three — than Margaret did.

Willie Willis' 30-year career with the Coast Guard took him to stations all up and down the Outer Banks — Durant, Cape Point, Oregon Inlet, Pea Island, Ocracoke, and Portsmouth.

The Willis family stayed in Hatteras village for all the tours, except Portsmouth and Ocracoke.

Miss Margaret was 13 when the family moved to Portsmouth Island for three years. Hatteras village was small at that time — about 1926 — but she remembers with a chuckle that Portsmouth Island made Hatteras look like a metropolis.

Portsmouth village, which has no permanent residents and is now part of the Cape Lookout National Seashore, was once the largest settlement on the Outer Banks. But for a number of reasons, the population dwindled over the years, and Miss Margaret thinks there were only about 100 people still there in 1926. Most were Coast Guard families.
The Willis family lived in a house near the old Coast Guard Station, which is still standing though the house is gone. Miss Margaret remembers that the family had a garden and raised chickens. There wasn't much for teen-agers to do there. She and her friends took walks and went to church, she says.

One of her favorite memories is of her picnic lunches.

"The Coast Guard had a dock. At low tide, the creek was full of big oysters. I'd take a sack of biscuits, sit on the dock, and have those oysters for my lunch."

There were two stores and a post office on the island then, and the schoolhouse, which is still standing, had just been completed. It was there that Miss Margaret finished seventh grade — and finished school as it turned out.

After Portsmouth, the Willises went back to Hatteras for a while, then to Ocracoke.
"It wasn't like it is now," Miss Margaret says. "At nine o'clock at night, you wouldn't see a light on in the village."

Miss Margaret intended to go back to school on Ocracoke. She set out to school on the first morning with an armload of books. But the school bell rang before she got there, and when she arrived, all the children were already in class. She lost her nerve and turned around and went back home.   That was the end of her formal education.

"My father was of the old school, anyway. He thought that girls didn't need an education."

Miss Margaret has many fond memories of the teen years that she spent in Hatteras village. In many ways, there was more for young people to do back then than there is now.

There was a dance hall and a movie theater. There was a pavilion out by the Atlantic View Hotel that was a favorite gathering spot for young people.

"There was a skating rink there," Miss Margaret remembers. "And they used to show movies. Those were the silent ones."

An off-island benefactor also built a Girls' Club for the villagers, which the young girls thought was pretty nifty.

"There were games there. And locker rooms. And a shower room. We didn't even have a shower in our house back then," Miss Margaret says.

General stores in the village had most everything a family needed and most other shopping was done from the Sears and Roebuck catalog. There was an occasional trip on a freight boat across the sound to Washington or Elizabeth City.

Miss Margaret doesn't want to tell any stories that would embarrass her children, but she did allow that she "liked to have a good time" and had a lot of boyfriends when she was a young woman.

Young couples in those days would go dancing, go for walks in the moonlight, and groups would go out to the beach, sit on a shipwreck that was out there and talk and sing songs.

Fulford Peele was a friend of Miss Margaret's brother. He was a few years older than she was.

"He was quiet and laid back," she says when she's asked why she chose him for her husband. "I weren't that quiet."

They were married in the parsonage of the Methodist Church on June 16, 1934. It was a small wedding — no reception and no honeymoon.

The young couple moved in with Fulford Peele's mother and sister, where they lived for four years until they bought their own house.

Fulford Peele, who died in May, was a fisherman in the early years of their marriage. Later, he ran freight boats and then spent 20 years as a captain on the ferry boats.
The early years were hard ones for the young family.

"Sometimes, fishing was slow, and sometimes it was real good," Miss Margaret says. "We had to live on what we made even when fishing was slow."

In those days, she says, there was no welfare safety net for families, no unemployment, no food stamps. Most families managed only because storekeepers gave them credit. The Peeles traded at Andrew Austin's store.

"He would carry the fishermen from year to year until they could pay their bill. I don't know how we would have made it otherwise."

Fulford and Margaret Peele had four children — Winona, Shankie, Barry, and Mona. Winona was born in the old Peele family home in Hatteras. Barry was born in a hospital across the sound in Washington, N.C. Mona was born at Miss Margaret's father's house and Shankie was born in the Peele house on Kohler Lane.

Shankie Peele was born on Jan. 21, 1942 during the early years of World War II when German U-boats were wreaking havoc on shipping just off the coast of the Outer Banks.

It was a "scary" time for the islanders, Miss Margaret says. The war was "right close" to Hatteras Island.

"It was bad the night that Shankie was born. There were two ships torpedoed off the beach. We heard it, and you could smell them burning."

Miss Margaret says that if she could go back to any period in her life she would choose those years that her children were young. She enjoyed those years, she says, although the life of a young wife and mother wasn't easy then.

When she was first married, Miss Margaret washed clothes in a tub with a washboard, as did women for many generations before her. In the late 1930s, Miss Margaret's brother-in-law, Frazier Peele, built a utility plant that brought electrical power to Hatteras village. After Shankie was born in 1942, Miss Margaret got a wringer washing machine from Sears.

And Miss Margaret remembers the days when a store-bought loaf of bread was a real luxury. For years, she got up early, got her children off to school, and began baking bread for the family. Meat was really rare in those days, she says, and the family ate mostly seafood.

For "years and years" — until the 1960s — the family didn't have a car. She depended on a friend to take her to the store or she walked. The store also had trucks that would deliver food.

Miss Margaret says she's seen some "mighty bad" storms in her years in the village. But she never had tide in her house until Hurricane Emily in 1993. She and her husband, who was ill at the time, sat in the house as the water came up to a foot or more inside the house. Miss Margaret says her son came to take them to higher ground and her son and grandson put up much of the furniture to save it.

She remembers the hurricane of 1933, which she says cut an inlet between Hatteras and Frisco and the fearsome storm of 1944 when the roof just about blew off the house. At the height of the storm, Fulford Peele took his wife and children to stay with his sister up the road.

When Miss Margaret's youngest child Mona was about 6, she went to work as a cook — first at Peele's restaurant (Now Sonny's) and later at the Atlantic View (now Rocco's).

"I still cook every day," Miss Margaret says proudly. "I cook a big meal in the middle of the day." Sometimes it's just her son Shankie for dinner and on other days she may set the table for 15 people.

She says that when she went to visit her daughter, Winona Burroughs, in Raleigh for a month this summer, her Hatteras family complained that they never saw each other.

"That's why I cook," she told them. "To keep you all together."

Except for Winona in Raleigh and Barry in Virginia Beach, much of the rest of Miss Margaret's family still lives on Hatteras Island. Shankie and his wife Donna, who own the Atlantic View motel, live next door. Daughter Mona Dickens is building a house just a few doors from her mother.

In addition, there are nine grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.

Miss Margaret credits having all those youngsters around her with keeping her young. She never smoked or drank and she says she's been "blessed" with good health.

These days, in addition to cooking and helping out with grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Miss Margaret reads and does crossword puzzles. She still does sewing and mending for the family, visits with friends, and is a member of the Methodist Church.

And some evenings, she'll sit on the porch of her old island house, sewing. Kohler Drive is still a quiet street by most city standards, but the traffic by Miss Margaret's front door was almost unimaginable when she moved into the house almost 60 years ago.
As for the future, she's not sure Hatteras can get that much bigger.

She remembers the day that there wasn't a single house on the beach from Frisco all the way through Hatteras village. Now she says the oceanfront is just about all filled up.