- It's a game of catch.
You toss the hoop back and forth using your sticks
to throw and catch the hoop and just
by crossing and sliding apart.
- [Narrator] More than a century and a half ago,
this farm on Roanoke Island, owned then
by the Etheridge family, might have had
a game of catch, or graces, being played in the yard,
but the family also had crops to tend and livestock.
His name is Charlie.
- [Man] Hey, Charlie.
Don't you mess up my lens.
- [Narrator] And there are always chores to do,
pretty much the same things
that still go on here every day.
- This is a type of rug called a toothbrush rug,
that's one of the names for it
and it would be from a toothbrush
where the bristles had come down,
or come off, and then you would file it down
and make the hole a little bigger
and that becomes your needle and you make a rug.
- There's always something you have to repair,
always something that breaks,
always something that you just have to make.
It's like, oh, we need that.
- [Narrator] Back in 1847, there was no
local hardware store, so in this historic working farm,
they continue to do things in the old fashioned ways.
Gene and Charlene Staples are the site managers
for Island Farm and they are totally immersed
into the 19th century mindset in a region
where the prominent history occurred centuries earlier
when the Lost Colonists arrived
and perished without a trace.
- And when the early colonists came,
they had not too much interaction with
that Native Americans, so they weren't introduced to corn.
They couldn't even grow a carb.
You could live off of bread and water,
but if you can't grow wheat to have flour to make bread,
but by this time, these families had figured out
how to make it here in this harsh environment.
- [Narrator] Gene and Charlene still work
the farm successfully, just like the Etheridges,
who prospered.
- And so we're portraying daily life here
as it was in the late 1840s, 1850s.
We have all the outbuildings they would have had,
have been reproduced.
We grow a lot of the same crops.
We have all the same livestock represented
that were recorded here by the 1850 census
of the United States.
- There's nothing roped off.
You can pick up things and touch things
and you don't get that too often
at a lot of living history sites,
so it almost feels like you're visiting family
or visiting a grandparent's farm
and that's what we want, we want people to feel
like that they have just come and stepped back in time,
but yet can interact with it.
- [Narrator] North Carolina has a rich history
and much of it happened within a few miles of this location.
It's possible to see and learn quite a bit
about the Outer Banks without traveling far from here,
but Island Farm is a worthwhile visit
to link it all together.
- You know, we have a live oak tree
that's estimated to be over 400 years old.
We're kind of a connecting rod between
the Lost Colony and the Wright Brothers,
the things that the Outer Banks are known for.
We have that tree that may have been alive here
when the Lost Colony was here and one of the grandsons
buried in the family graveyard was a witness
to the Wright Brothers flight.
We make it as close as possible
to stepping back into that time.
Seeing, feeling, and smelling, tasting in some cases,
exactly what it was really like to live on a farm
on Roanoke Island in the 1840s and 50s.
- [Deborah] Island Farm is located
at 1140 US Highway 64 just north of Manteo
on Roanoke Island and they're open
from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Tuesday
through Friday until November 30.
For more information, give them a call
at 252-473-6500 or go online to theislandfarm.com.