Ocracoke Island blends old traditions, community spirit, and a steady flow of visitors, while retaining an atmosphere of solitude, especially in the off-season. Reachable only by ferry, private plane, or private boat, the island is largely part of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, with only the village excluded from this undeveloped barrier island landscape. Originally called Pilot Town, Ocracoke stood at the gateway to Ocracoke Inlet, an important colonial shipping point where early inhabitants worked as mariners, piloting vessels to mainland ports and transferring cargo from large schooners to smaller boats able to navigate Pamlico Sound. The island’s famous horses, descended from Spanish mustangs washed ashore in 16th- and 17th-century shipwrecks, once roamed wild and were rounded up each Fourth of July for gelding, branding, and breaking in a cherished social gathering; they later served as transportation, pulled carts, and patrolled beaches at lifesaving stations. In 1954, Ocracoke Boy Scout Troop 290 became the nation’s only mounted scout troop, and in 1959 the National Park Service took over care of the horses after road paving endangered them. For generations, guiding duck hunters and charter fishing on Pamlico Sound and the nearby Gulf Stream shaped island life, while the Ocracoke Working Watermen’s Association, founded in 2006, has worked to preserve the livelihoods of fishermen, clammers, crabbers, and oystermen as commercial fishing has become more regulated since the shift from subsistence to commercial fishing after World War II. The mailboat Aleta linked Ocracoke with Atlantic in Carteret County during the 1940s and 1950s, carrying mail, passengers, and groceries on trips that could last up to 10 hours. During World War II, after the British HMT Bedfordshire was torpedoed by a German U-boat in May 1942, four sailors whose bodies washed ashore were buried in a plot donated to Britain by Ocracoke residents, and a memorial ceremony is still held each May. Community traditions remain strong in the island’s Independence Day celebration, with fireworks, bonfires, square dancing, fig cakes, sand sculptures, and a parade of decorated golf carts, cars, and boats. Ferry service between Hatteras and Ocracoke began in 1950 under Frazier Peele, expanded from a single shad boat deck carrying one car to carrying three or four vehicles, and became a free state service in 1957. The white Ocracoke Lighthouse, built in 1823, stands 75 feet tall as the second-oldest operating lighthouse in the country, and the island’s history continues to be preserved and shared through the Ocracoke Preservation Society Museum in the David Williams House, home of the first chief of the U.S. Lifesaving Station.