Chris Yeomans walks to the 10-by-10-foot shed in his backyard and grabs hold of the combination lock that secures the building. The stainless steel lock has lost its luster from the salt air, but the numbers remain legible. “This lock here was on my high school locker, and it still works. Isn’t that crazy?” Chris says. The retired educator and former school principal, born and raised on Harkers Island, swings open the doors to the shed and reaches into the dark, working a lawnmower into the light. He rolls the mower alongside an 18-foot boat and lifts it skyward toward the gunwale. Soon, he’ll head across Back Sound, the same waters his ancestors have plied for generations — he in an aluminum johnboat with a 70-horsepower Yamaha motor, they in wooden skiffs rigged with sailcloth.

Every five years, Chris Yeomans (right) — along with his wife, Kathy, and daughter Caroline — joins other Diamond City descendants to honor their ancestors. photograph by Baxter Miller

Chris is heading home to a place he’s never lived to care for a cemetery full of people he’s never known, but whose blood runs in his veins. He’s going to a place where wind and water rule. Where tide is the metronome by which the passing of time is measured. A world disciplined by nature and the elements. Chris is going home to Shackleford Banks.

• • •

In the early 1700s, John Shackleford acquired a stretch of barrier island that runs from modern-day Barden Inlet west to Beaufort Inlet. Over the next 175 years, the 3,000-some acres would transform from an unpopulated island blanketed by live oaks and eastern red cedars to a roughly nine-mile stretch of sand, home to a handful of communities of whalers and teachers, fishermen and storekeepers, boatbuilders and craftsmen.

The island, bordered by the Atlantic to the south and Back Sound to the north, was a natural location for a people whose livelihoods depended on the water. Fishermen had access to the bounty of the sound. Whalers could launch their boats on the ocean side. Boatbuilders and timbermen had an unspoiled maritime forest for raw material. Those early inhabitants called this place C’ae Banks, the origin of which is uncertain — perhaps associated with “cape” or the Spanish word el cayo, meaning a low, sandy island.

By the latter half of the 19th century, small settlements dotted C’ae Banks — among them Bells Island, Wade’s Shore, and Mullet Pond. Its easternmost end, just west of the Cape Lookout Lighthouse, was home to one of the largest communities along the Outer Banks: Diamond City.

Residents of Diamond City and other villages on Shackleford were isolated, but they were resourceful: They built, caught, or grew most everything they needed. photograph by Baxter Miller

Formerly known as Lookout Woods and renamed for the black diamonds painted on the Light Station, this community of nearly 500 Bankers carved out an isolated but vibrant existence in a harsh world of sun and sand. These families met their needs by their own hands. They built small homes of salvaged shipwreck timber and made door hinges from shark or porpoise skin. They stuffed their mattresses with dried seaweed and made lamps from conch shells fueled with oil rendered from whale blubber.

There was a schoolhouse that was in session a few months a year. The building doubled as a church on Sundays, hosting itinerant holy men of various denominations. Several stores peddled household goods and other essentials.

Sweet potato patches were planted beside sea oats. Cows and sheep grazed alongside the wild Banker ponies that had swum ashore decades or centuries before. Villagers plucked a harvest of oysters, clams, and muscadines from the coastal cornucopia.

Life on C’ae Banks was not easy, but it was home. Those bronze-faced souls, toughened by salt spray and sunburn, lived in partnership with the land and the water, and they built a bustling community. It would take far less time, however, for it to disappear in all but memory.

• • •

Chris eases the johnboat east past Mullet Pond, water lapping against the sides. As he nears Wade’s Shore, he points the bow landward toward a grove of twisted shrub oaks and dense yaupon until the boat comes to a stop, its bottom grinding dully against the sandy bottom of the sound. Perhaps his destination is instinctual, but the landmark skeleton of a giant live oak lies on the shoreline. A victim of erosion, its soil-bare roots and bleached branches are a reminder of the past and a harbinger of the future.

Chris stands, the small boat wobbling in the shallow water, and steps overboard. He lifts out the push mower, setting it above the tide line.

Chris Yeomans and fellow Diamond City descendant Heber Guthrie (left), a volunteer with the National Park Service, work to keep their ancestors’ memory alive. photograph by Baxter Miller

A few yards from the water, a barely discernible footpath cuts into the undergrowth. Chris pushes the mower through the sand and up to the overgrown entrance. A flock of gulls and a couple down the beach look on, dumbstruck. He adjusts the choke, rigged with a bungee cord, and pulls hard at the starter. It roars to life, sending the gulls scattering. He disappears into the woods, the rumble of the engine muffled by wax myrtle.

Chris has come to tend to the last cemetery on Shackleford because here, in this place of final repose, lies the only remaining sign of human life on the Banks.

• • •

Through the 19th century, a generally hospitable way of life hummed on along the Banks. Work, whaling, and worship passed the time. Families grew, boats were built, and countless pounds of fish caught. As the rest of the world was consumed with the advances of the second Industrial Revolution, the Banks remained largely isolated.

But little could prepare this clan of people, ever reliant on the natural resources around them, for the realities brought on by a series of storms in the 1890s. Without the benefit of long-range forecasting, the Bankers were struck without warning; with each new storm, flooding worsened and destruction mounted.

Murmurs had begun about beginning life anew across the sound. Those whispers turned to loud cries when, in August 1899, Mother Nature rendered her final judgment.

“The wind blew from the northeast at first and brought in tides from the sound … Suddenly the winds shifted to the southwest and again blew as hard or harder than before. With the southwest winds came the water from the ocean and the two waters met. This time, few, if any, homes were without water in them. When the storm ended, dead sheep and cattle were seen all over,” wrote the late Lillian Davis, whose mother lived on the Banks until she was 15.

After the storm of 1899, most C’ae Bankers picked up their houses and settled elsewhere. By 1902, little evidence of human life remained on Shackleford Banks. Photography courtesy of North Carolina County Photographic Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC Chapel Hill

The water overtook the land, ransacking everything in its path. Destruction was complete. Houses were washed off their foundations. Boats lay strewn in splinters. Gravestones were missing. Bones, once interred, were dispersed in the open.

Mother Nature’s gavel came down, and the land along Shackleford was sentenced. Barren sand replaced gardening plots, salt water infiltrated drinking wells, and slowly, what was left of the crops turned brown and brittle.

The storm of 1899 exiled the C’ae Bankers from their Eden. Families loaded what possessions remained onto wagons. The men began disassembling their homes. Built of salvaged timber and held together with pegs, each piece was loaded onto a sail skiff for reassembly on the other side. Some were cut in half; others were left whole and floated on boats joined side by side.

The diaspora fanned out some 16 miles. Some opted for the allure of the mainland, landing in Marshallberg or a pocket of Morehead City now known as the “Promise Land.” Others moved west and settled in a section of Bogue Banks now called Salter Path. But many migrated just across Back Sound to Harkers Island, a safer place on higher ground but within eyesight of their ancestral home. David Stick writes that after the storm, “there was hardly a week went by that some house wasn’t torn down at Diamond City, loaded on sailboats, and moved across the sound …” By 1902, Shackleford was nearly deserted.

• • •

Chris emerges from the maritime forest covered in dirt and bits of dried leaves. “I wanted the cemetery to look good for homecoming,” he says.

There is a reverence in his voice that cannot be learned or taught, only inherited. No matter where those original C’ae Bankers resettled, their spiritual connection to Shackleford remained steadfast, a silent pact between place and people that has been passed down through generations. It is this bond that descendants celebrate every five years at the Diamond City Homecoming.

Started in 1999 by a group of volunteers with Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center, the homecoming gathers the kinfolk of those who once called the Banks home. They anchor in the shallows near the west’rd end and wade toward the skeletal oak near the cemetery.

Last August, the Diamond City Homecoming brought together a group of more than a hundred. They assembled near the old live oak that marks the entrance to Wade’s Shore Cemetery on Shackleford Banks. photograph by Baxter Miller

The ceremony begins with singing “Precious Memories” and continues with prayers, hymns, and Scripture, punctuated by descendants reading poems and sharing memories. Quiet follows the last stanza of “In the Sweet By and By.” Then everyone, two by two, proceeds up the narrow path into the shady opening, where, for the service’s final rite, a wreath is laid in the last known cemetery on Shackleford.

In the somber moments between the singing and reading, it’s easy to imagine island children running through the sea oats, their mothers calling after them through open windows. In the stillness, you can smell mullet frying and shrimp stewing. On the horizon, you can see the silhouettes of men gathered on the beach as a whale breaches offshore. In this moment of celebration, you can feel a deep appreciation for the heritage and culture particular to this spit of sand.

Wreaths are laid on the graves of the last cemetery on Shackleford Banks. photograph by Baxter Miller

After the crowd departs, Chris turns to his daughter, Caroline, who was only 4 years old during the first homecoming in 1999. He points to a lichen-covered gravestone: “Here is your great-great-great-great-grandmother Serena, and there is your great-great-great-great-grandfather Joe Lane Lewis. He was one of the last, if not the last, to leave,” Chris reminds her. The marker of the Lewises’ 2-year-old son, Fernie, a few feet from their own, is a reminder of how challenging life on the Banks must have been.

Father and daughter stand silently at the foot of the gravestones, the high-pitched call of cicadas hanging in the humid August air. A verse on Serena’s epitaph reads, “… when’er I think of her so dear, I feel her angel spirit near.” Perhaps it’s Serena’s spirit they hear in the cicadas’ song.

• • •

Chris and his family are among the last to leave the cemetery. They wade back to their boat, their reflections rippling on the water. It’s a calm, cloudless day, and on their way back to Harkers Island, they ride east, following the ever-changing contour of Shackleford Banks.

After the migration, families remained connected to this place. For generations, they kept primitive camps along the shore, where they’d return for weeks at a time to fish, hunt, and reconnect with the past. The tradition continued until the mid-1980s, after the National Park Service took control of the property as part of Cape Lookout National Seashore. Though their cabins are gone, descendants return today and relish the isolation as their ancestors would have — wading, clamming, strolling the shell-studded shore.

As Chris tugs at the wheel of the boat and slows the throttle, he shares bits of history — where he used to play as a boy; the place where the old-timers would round up horses; the “lump” that was home to the Windsors, the sole Black family on the island; and the section of the beach where he took Caroline’s mother, Kathy, on one of their first dates. Kathy smiles at them from the stern.

There is no landmark to identify Diamond City, though. Much of the land where the village sat is now underwater. Following the Storm of 1933, the Atlantic Ocean sliced through the barrier island, separating Cape Lookout from Shackleford Banks. Today, Diamond City exists only as a memory, perpetuated by those who carry its DNA in their hearts.

Just like his ancestors 125 years before, Chris turns the boat toward Harkers Island as Shackleford Banks grows smaller behind him. “Diamond City is a place, but it’s also an emotion,” he says. “It’s a place you go back to in your mind, but can never go back to physically. It’s a feeling. It’s a being. It’s almost something you can’t describe.”