Dawn didn’t break over Ocean Isle Beach on October 15, 1954, but waves did. They towered over the shore in the weak morning light, thundering onto the sand as if to herald the arrival of Hurricane Hazel. She blew into town on winds 140 miles an hour strong, riding a storm surge 18 feet high. To make matters worse, it was a full moon with the highest lunar tide of the year. The official report from the Weather Bureau in Raleigh said, “all traces of civilization on the immediate waterfront between the [South Carolina] state line and Cape Fear were practically annihilated.”

Those wind-driven waves, that nearly two-story storm surge, and the high tide conspired to erase communities along the coast. The water and wind chewed channels through the dunes, toppled century-old trees, and drove even the most seasoned watermen and coastal dwellers inside or inland for shelter and safety.

Less than a year after Hurricane Hazel devastated the coast, George Sloane II moved his family to Ocean Isle Beach. Photography courtesy of Cape Fear Museum of History and Science, Wilmington, NC

George Sloane II Photography courtesy of the Sloane Family

On Ocean Isle Beach, Hazel left little behind but bare ground and a strip of land almost completely devoid of life. Nevertheless, the barrier island beckoned to one intrepid couple. In June 1955, George Sloane II and his wife, Rae, decided to swap city life in Columbia, South Carolina, for a place that they’d help mold for generations.

“My father was offered a job selling real estate on Ocean Isle,” Debbie Sloane Smith recalls 70 years later. “He decided he wanted to live at the beach, so he moved us down here — him, my mother, and two toddlers — to an island with no bridge, no telephones, and not much more than a car ferry.”

The Sloanes gathered their two children, Tripp and Debbie, and headed for the coast, becoming the first — and, for 15 years, only — permanent year-round residents of Ocean Isle Beach.

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The barrier island had always been sparsely populated, but in the 1940s, Rae’s uncle, developer Odell Williamson, saw its potential as a vacation destination. Prior to Hazel, he’d begun buying tracts of land; afterward, he hired George to sell the lots. George and Rae saw their own opportunity and founded Sloane Realty a few years after arriving. In 1959, they opened the Ocean Isle Motel, occupying one wing of the seven-room property and renting the rest.

Tripp and Debbie grew up in the real estate and hospitality business, helping their mother around the motel when Rae was pregnant with their new baby sister. “My mother got so big she couldn’t fit in those little motel bathrooms, so she put me and Tripp to work cleaning,” Debbie says.

Debbie Sloane Smith is now mayor. photograph by MALLORY CASH

In those days, there was no one around but the Sloanes and some fishermen. The kids had the run of the island, and they spent their days searching the sand for treasures, climbing the dunes, swimming in the ocean, and fishing. Sometimes, fishing was more than just fun.

“Oh, Mama would send us out to go crabbing or to dig clams,” Debbie says. “If the mullet were running, she’d have us get a few for supper and we’d save the roe to have for breakfast.”

It was like Little House on the Prairie, island-style. “Looking back, we had nothing,” Debbie says. “It was fine when we were little, but when you got older, you saw it wasn’t really as fun as memory makes it seem.”

As the foraging, beach-wild Sloane kids started to realize the work of things, their world was changing. Sloane Realty was managing a roster of vacation properties that steadily grew as more houses were built. George and his brother-in-law opened an arcade with pool tables and pinball, and at ages 13 and 14, Debbie and Tripp ran it.

In 1959, Rae and George Sloane (bottom right) built the Ocean Isle Motel — the island’s first. When their kids (right) weren’t helping out around the motel, they were fishing, swimming, and roaming the beach. Photography courtesy of the Sloane Family

With age came more responsibility. Debbie was called into the real estate business, earning her license at age 17. “When I was in high school, my father died suddenly,” she says. “But by that time, I’d been sitting at his typewriter helping out for years. His eyesight was bad and he had me typing contracts. They were all fill-in-the-blank forms, so he’d sit beside me and dictate.”

After George died, Rae was left with the business. Debbie sits up a little straighter at the memory, matriarchal pride putting steel in her spine. “Until then, it had always been them with us kids providing some worthless help, of course. But Mom still insisted I go to college.”

Debbie left for school for a year but returned home most weekends to help her mother. She got married. Built a house in Wilmington. And made the daily drive down U.S. Highway 17 to work.

“We didn’t live in Wilmington six months before my mother enticed us away from the city with a piece of waterway property we could afford,” Debbie says. “So we moved down. Temporarily.” She chuckles. “Temporarily is a long time.”

• • •

Like her mother, Debbie, Whitney Sauls grew up in the real estate and hospitality business. Where Debbie cleaned motel rooms and ran an arcade, Whitney spent her formative years handing check-in packets to vacationers. Today, she’s general manager of Sloane Realty Vacations.

Whitney Sauls remembers serving as Sloane Realty’s “welcoming committee”: In the days before keyless entries, she’d greet each guest when they came to pick up the keys to their vacation rental. photograph by MALLORY CASH

“My brother and I, we were born and raised on the island, of course, and we were in the business early,” Whitney says. “If we weren’t giving out check-in packets at the front desk, we were in an office stuffing them. Mom would say, ‘We have 300 checking in this week,’ and my brother and I would just roll our eyes and get to work.”

The parallels between mother and daughter run deeper. “By the time I started first grade, I’d covered every inch of this island on bicycle or on foot,” Debbie says. “We had undeveloped land on the west end, so we’d play there, and as teenagers, we’d go four-wheeling down there or have little parties between the dunes.”

“Oh, my brother and friends and I would go out in the dunes, too,” Whitney says. “We’d take Mom’s Jeep for a joyride, and six months later she doesn’t understand why it’s completely corroded or suddenly pulls to the left. We thought we were being sneaky.”

“Mom taught me how to work. I learned this business like she did: from her mother and from the ground up.”

Teen shenanigans aside, Whitney and her brother, Charles Fox — now a custom home builder — turned out fine. And they know they owe a lot to their mother. “Probably the best lesson she taught me was how to work,” Whitney says. “I learned this business like she did: from her mother and from the ground up.”

Which is why Whitney’s twin daughters, Sloane and Sydney, have grown up at their mother’s feet, always involved in some aspect of the family hospitality holdings. They’ll graduate high school this year, and college is in their sights, but both have an interest in the business. Sloane’s the one who’s said it out loud: I want to be part of this.

This is a fourth generation of women building, leading, and guiding Ocean Isle Beach.

• • •

Debbie Sloane Smith is more than a lifer on Ocean Isle, and more than the second generation of women to head the Sloane Realty empire. She’s also been the mayor for 22 years.

“When my father passed, my parents had finally started to get their heads above water. I saw all these men come around trying to buy the businesses from Mom, treating her like some little woman who didn’t know better. But I saw her stand strong,” Debbie says. “I saw her turn down a six-figure offer because she said that money would only do us for a few years, but she knew she could build a real life if she stuck to the business and grew it.”

And she did. By the time Rae died in 2022 at age 92, the motel had been replaced with the 70-room Ocean Isle Inn. Today, Sloane Realty manages some 400 vacation and long-term rental properties in Ocean Isle Beach and Sunset Beach. Some are owned by the second or third generation of families that originally bought from Rae and George.

Today, Sloane Realty manages more than 400 properties in Brunswick County. photograph by MALLORY CASH

What Rae Sloane Cox established, Debbie Sloane Smith expanded, and Whitney Sauls continues to grow. And the memories that their family has made on the island — all those sunny days and starry nights — have multiplied as they welcome other families to Ocean Isle Beach, often reserving the same house for the same family over the same week, summer after summer.

“There’s a nostalgic charm along the whole of the Carolina coast that you don’t experience often today,” Debbie says. “Once people experience life here, it sets a hook in them. They want to come back, even if it’s for only a week.”