[soft piano music] - [Elizabeth] Coming up on "Best of Our State"... - [Morty] People says we have an accent.

Whether we do or not, I don't know.

- [Elizabeth] Let's listen to the distinctive and memorable Outer Banks brogue.

- You don't notice it, we don't.

See, we're isolated.

You oughta hear my grandmother.

[chuckles] - And all aboard for one of our state's beloved family traditions.

That's next on "Best of Our State."

We dip into treasured stories for a look at all the beauty and character of North Carolina.

Hello and welcome.

I'm Elizabeth Hudson, editor in chief of "Our State" magazine.

Reached only by boat, Ocracoke is a small island community located along our state's Outer Banks.

For the past 25 years, this NC State linguistics professor has made a pilgrimage to this isolated island to study and preserve its fading dialect.

- High tide on the south side.

Last night the water fired like moonshine.

No fish.

What do you suppose matter is our neck of the woods?

- Probably need something to talk about, huh?

[laughs] [voices chatter over each other] [lid thuds] - [Walt] When I got an opportunity to come to North Carolina, it was sort of like dying and coming to dialect heaven.

- And these Northerners come down here, and we take 'em in.

- I mean, there's no state richer in terms of dialect diversity in the United States, really because of the topography.

- High tide, what is it?

It's high tide.

- And the only thing I knowed about the mountains is what I read in "Foxfire."

I think we was all jelly-making dulcimer pluckers up here.

- [Walt] So, there's a lot of regional diversity from the historical immigration.

There's a lot of ethnic diversity with the American Indian.

[speaking foreign language] - [Walt] With Latino, with African American.

- Yeah, it's just like, "Oh, hi, how you doin', man?"

You know, until I get that vibe that you're loosed in, it's, "Yeah, well, what's up?"

- [Walt] And then there are cases of isolation.

- He'd get out there on a wooden box he made and pick an old banjo and sing.

And he was one of the first tourist attractions there was round around here.

- [Walt] So there are just a lot of ecological things, social things, migratory aspects, and the language is this sort of primary surface manifestation of that.

- You never had a squirrel?

- [Crew] No sir.

- You ain't never eat high on hog, son, unless you do that.

- [Teacher] What about turtles?

- This is our linguistics lab with students who are working on various projects.

This is our wonderful producers, Neil and Danika, who do the video productions.

If you go into an area and people talk differently, it's gonna be a topic of commentary.

And our job is to help people understand, why is it important to your culture?

Why is it important for a small community to hang on to a language as an index of that identity?

With an island like Ocracoke, one of the things that has always been associated with is the speech.

I went there years ago.

We visit as friends, we also reinterview people to see how the language changes in their lives.

- You look, this ain't no free ride if you gonna roll me, but you know how to work.

- [Walt] For example, I met Rex O'Neill.

- What actually is that?

A lot of people will look at me and say, "What the heck are you?

"Is that an Irish, English accent?"

- [Walt] He's a funny guy and we just kind of hit it off.

- And then I told him about the one time I lost me cap aboard his gap.

Now what do you think I find it?

I said to each Teach's hole, God bless me soul, but me brim was torn from around it!

[chuckles] - [Walt] Chester is from a long time family that goes back to Portsmouth.

So they've been there several hundred years.

So he is invaluable in terms of reconstructing what Ocracoke was like.

- Four pewter plates.

They dated 'em 79.

Couple people asked me, they wanted to buy 'em.

I said, "This is Ocracoke history.

"You can't, you can't sell-".

- You don't sell that.

- I ain't selling no Ocracoke history.

- [Walt] James Barry Gaskell and his son Morty.

- And then, we'll pull, pull the top.

- [Walt] Represent the old-time fishing community.

- And shake the crabs in there.

People says we have an accent.

Now whether we do or not, I don't know, but I do talk a little bit different.

[chuckles] - [Walt] People like James Barry and Chester and Rex really represent the authentic dialect.

- Some people say we talk funny.

I say, "Well, you do too."

I've got a car, you have a "car".

So what's the, you know?

[chuckles] - See we're isolated.

And everybody talked that same... You ought to hear my grandmother.

[laughs] - [Walt] One of the things about Ocracoke, because you can't get on there simply by driving.

the way of life is slightly different.

They became pretty dependent on the ways of the water.

As one person said, "Yeah, we had fish for breakfast, "fish for lunch and fish for dinner."

- In those days, everybody fished or had something to do with fishing, had something to do with the water.

Everybody had a boat, if not three or four.

- My daddy was a fisherman, he was also a carpenter.

So we'd go fishing in the morning do carpenter work all day and then come home in the evening and clean the fish and sell 'em to the restaurants.

- There was a net strung in the yard all the time.

Granddaddy would tell us, he says, "Listen here, "you got to mend some holes in those nets."

- See we, when we grew up, they had ponies.

We used to ride 'em and they still had cattle on the island.

Probably a hundred or 200 sheep used to roam the island.

- [Speaker] Before the ferries, there was a mail boat and a freight boat come to the village and that was basically all.

And my grandfather owned the boat, him and another guy who would leave around six o'clock in the morning and come back in around four o'clock in the evening and carry mail and passengers back and forth to Atlantic, only transportation to and from the village other than the freight boat.

- [Local] There was a Frazier Peel was a guy that started the Hatteras Ferry and he was a wooden ferry and it only took about four cars.

[soft piano music] - [Walt] What is very strong in the community, especially with the inundation of outsiders is who is a native?

Can you date your lineage back to the 1700's, 1800's?

Because, you're not authentic unless you can do that.

- It doesn't even matter if you're born on Ocracoke.

If you ain't got Ocracoke descendants in your family, you'll not be an Ocracker.

- Proud to being a native.

Well, I'm not even native because I was born in Beaufort, North Carolina, but I was brought back.

I was brought back two or three days later.

- Yeah.

[both laugh] - [Walt] What often happens in small island communities like Ocracoke or Harker's Island is because they're such a tight community- - [Farmer] What this sheriff grass is, is cutting's age.

- [Walt] They developed words.

- We call it a local term for it, it's called bull rushes.

- [Walt] And various terms.

- [Local] But, cutting's age is what it is.

- [Walt] And so that builds into the profile of the dialect.

- When the weather is beautiful, calm, not windy late in the day, it's sleek cam.

- That's why it was this morning sleek cam.

- [Walt] What's that?

- It was s sleek cam this morning when it was rough hour.

You'd be building a boat and if you didn't keep everything level on the bottom, another guy would walk up to you say, "Look here now, "you got that thing cattywampus!"

- Not level.

I mean, when I'm thinking cattywampus where something's just not right.

- Mean she was whomper jawed or whopper jawed, yeah.

- Across the beach, you're going right over to the ocean.

You go up the beach, you're going all the way to Manteo.

- Yeah - Catch the ferry.

You're up the beach.

- And going to Beaufort is down sound.

- [Walt] Ding bats are those people from outside who have no sense at all.

So that then became ding batters.

- That's what we call 'em, ding batters.

[laughs] - I use ding batter a lot.

I'm stuck behind a golf cart during the summer trying to get somewhere.

- [Walt] There's a sort of love/hate relationship with outsiders.

They love the fact that there's a tourist season.

They serve outsiders.

That's how they make their money.

But, they hate the fact that they take over the island.

They can't walk on the streets they usually walk on.

People are always asking them weird questions like "Where's the lighthouse?"

[laughs] You know, "Where's the ocean?"

I've had people from Ocracoke often say, "Oh when are we gonna get a hurricane, "so we can get rid of all these ding batterers?".

So it's considered to be a sign of weakness if a native leaves the island during a hurricane.

- 'Cause whenever else wants to leave, that's when we won't stay here, you know.

We gotta batten the hatches, you know, and there'll be like five or six families get together in one house and just ride the storm like.

- And just sit there and listen to the ocean roar.

It roared loud, real loud.

- Every house then was low to the ground.

If the house was going to float off the blocks and you know, you could feed it lifting.

You had to hatchet in the house when you chopped the hole and the flooded to keep it on these pylons.

- Course, you had the storms that would come along with washy pots and you'd try or you try to handle it and you'd had to go chase 'em down after for a storm.

And sometimes you'd lose a bunch of them.

Take a big loss.

- [Walt] You know, I've been out fishing with some of these guys and I am amazed at their knowledge.

I'm actually in awe.

- [Fisher] We had a good life on the water.

In spring time, set 265, 300 crab pots out.

Flounder fishing with pound nets and stuff in the fall.

I enjoyed that.

- When you went and pulled them pots up, you had 25 or 30 crabs in there coming up out, outta that clear, crystal clear water.

It'll just give you tingles all over your body.

Just... [gulls caw] - [Walt] This strand of person is a sort of disappearing family, a disappearing persona.

So when you get a young person who's been to college who comes back and decides, I want to fish for a living, that's really today quite unusual.

- Yeah.

I think I have my first boat when I was like 10.

I've had my commercial fishing license since I was nine.

I'd been going with him probably since I could walk.

- As a matter of fact, one of the reasons that Morty, who was going to study Marine Biology, left marine biology is because his professors didn't know as much about the water as he did.

And so he went into History rather than Marine Biology.

So it's noteworthy how dedicated and committed some people are to sort of doing what they've done in the past and continuing that tradition.

[soft piano music] It is a very distinct culture still.

And one of the questions is has it lost some of its uniqueness if the young kids don't speak the dialect anymore?

[soft piano music] For the last 24 years, I've spent my spring break on Ocracoke.

If you could speak another language, what language would it be?

We developed a curriculum in which we teach the kids about their dialect heritage.

Original.

Good looking guy, huh?

About the dialects of North Carolina.

- Would you say that the brogue is a point of pride here in Ocracoke?

- [Student] I think so.

- [Students] Yeah.

- [Walt] So we have kids who are now in their thirties and for 24, years every kid in the school has gotten educated about their local dialect.

- So it's the same group of people.

Some came to Ocracoke and some went to the Appalachian Mountains and they have changed a lot over time to be so different.

So why do you think that might be?

[soft piano music] - So I just learned a new word.

You know what a gospel bird is, Sweets?

- [Guest] It's fried chicken every Sunday.

- - It's fried chicken every Sunday.

- [Diner] Every Sunday!

- For all of the students, for all of these wonderful people who tolerated my ignorance, the best friends I have.

Thanks guys.

- All right.

- [Friend] Right back at you.

- Don't forget to order gospel bird.

[group laughs] [soft piano music] Even today, a young person who speaks the Ocracoke brogue is an oddity, it's not the norm.

And so when you see that, then you can predict it probably in another generation it will be gone.

But, we hope that they'll always embrace this unique dialect that was a part of their heritage.

That's the way life is.

Things change and that's okay, but it's nice also to reflect on the things that made us unique.

- Time, we get too many more years, it'll be gone and maybe you'll have to find somewhere's else.

[all chuckle] [upbeat music] - All aboard!

[train hoots] - [Elizabeth] Just as families have done for generations in North Carolina, we are hopping aboard Tweetsie Railroad to learn how this wild west tourist destination, featuring two coal-fired steam locomotives became the first theme park in our state.

[bright music] [train hoots] - [Voiceover] The sound echoes through the hills, both familiar and comforting.

[train hoots] A steam engine chuffing its way through the North Carolina mountains, a relic from another time, given new life at one of our state's premier theme park attractions, Tweetsie Railroad.

[train hoots] [bluesy music] Tweetsie is one of those rare places you can go in the 21st century to see the real thing, a working steam engine and its train carrying passengers.

- All aboard!

- [Voiceover] Two steam engines, actually, the original 1917 Tweetsie and Johnny come lately track mate the, 1943 Yukon Queen both Baldwin locomotives designed for narrow gates tracks in mountainous terrain.

The original Tweetsie number 12 ran on the east Tennessee and Western North Carolina Railroad from Johnson City to Boone.

Locals called it Tweetsie because of the distinctive whistle that resounded cheerfully through the hollows and hills of the Blue Ridge.

- Tweetsie has a long history.

When it was an operating railroad, it goes back to the 1880s in this area.

Number 12 locomotives was built in 1917, but the Eastern State, Western North Carolina had 13 steam locomotives, number one through 14.

There was no number 13 and number 12 was the only one that survived the scrap heap.

- [Voiceover] Number 12 made its last run on the ET and WNC in 1949 as the old puffer bellies were being phased out in favor of modern diesel electric locomotives.

The 32 year old engine seemed destined for the scrapper's torch, like other steam engines on the ET and WNC, but eventually was purchased by two visionary North Carolina entrepreneurs, Grover Robbins Junior and Frank Coffey, who moved the engine and its cars to Boone.

- [Chris] Grover was an entrepreneur.

He had all sorts of, and what seems at the time, wacky ideas that he actually rather was able to carry out and one of 'em was Tweetsie railroad and people in the Boone/Brownwood area missed having the train come into Boone every day and the steam's going in there after 1940 and I think he just thought that it'd be neat to have a steam locomotive operating in the mountains again and that people could ride on and go through a scenic trip through the Blue Ridge Mountains.

- [Voiceover] So he acquired some land on the road to Blowing Rock and set about building his dream.

Tweetsie railroad opened to the public on July 4th, 1957, but it wasn't long before they recognized the need for a second steam engine.

And this time, Robbins had to look a lot farther from home.

- In 1959-60, steam locomotives were getting pretty rare.

They were all either scrapped or museum, but they found several operating steam locomotives in Alaska as part of the White Pass and Yukon Railroad.

- [Voiceover] Originally it was a freight line for gold ore, but during World War II, the army took over the line to haul military supplies from the Yukon to the port at Skagway, Alaska.

These locomotives had to run full out, much of the time in harsh weather.

Although number 12 did not go north, two of her sister engines, numbers 10 and 14 did, but were destroyed in a fire.

The engine that would in time live on as the Yukon Queen at Tweetsie Railroad was number 190, which had been ordered new by the military and shipped from Baldwin's factory in Philadelphia for service in the Yukon.

190 escaped the scrappers torch when the war was over and new-fangled diesels took the place of the loyal but outmoded steam engines.

- [Chris] Grover cut a deal to buy a steam locomotive from the White Pass in Yukon and brought it here in 1960.

- [Voiceover] It was a laborious journey for 190, first by barge from Alaska to Seattle and then overland the atop a railroad car to North Carolina, but the engine didn't have to do any of the work this time, just sit back and enjoy the ride, by truck finally, up the mountain from Hickory where she would join number 12 at Tweetsie.

- [Chris] After some flight modifications to make it a little more similar to the 12 in terms of silhouette, it was put in service at that time.

We've run both locomotives ever since.

[whistle blows] On average year we get anywhere from 200 to 250,000 visitors for the park and that's usually in the space of about 130 days.

So a lot has to go on in a brief period of time.

- [Voiceover] What summertime visitors don't see is all the work that happens around the place in the winter while the park is closed.

Tons of work goes on behind the scenes.

The off season is a busy time for this state-of-the-art repair shop.

This winter, Yukon Queen is getting repairs to its boiler.

- It has two inner shells.

It has a inner shell and an outer shell.

The water's in between it and that's how it makes steam.

The heat is on the inside of the inner shell, the firebox is, and these stay bolts hold the two sheets together and occasionally we'll have one broken.

The way we replace them, you take a torch and you cut it out back in there and you get pieces out mostly.

It's a threaded bolt, look similar to this.

This is a new one.

[tools grind] - [Voiceover] Nothing about repairing a steam engine is easy.

This job means squeezing yourself into the boiler as many times as it takes.

[clothing rustles] - [Frank] Okay, you watch and make sure I don't catch on fire.

- [Worker] Right.

[torch billows] [machine drills] - [Voiceover] While in the shop, 190 is also having her front wheels turned on this massive antique lathe.

A template is used to reshape each wheel so it fits more snugly on the track.

- We turn them as soon as they need it.

We don't over-wear 'em.

This is the second time we've done these in the last 12 years.

Ready?

[bluesy music] - [Voiceover] Another annual maintenance job is inspection, refurbishment or replacement if necessary.

- [Frank] That'll work for now.

- [Voiceover] Of each rail car's two sets of wheels, called trucks in railroad talk.

[bluesy music] In this shop, each person may have something particular they're good at, but all get to pitch in on just about everything at Tweetsie from time to time.

- The guys in here, they have a lot of skills altogether.

It's just not one skill.

We have carpenters in the shop, we have plumbers in the shop, we do all the maintenance on the rides.

The chair lift, Ferris wheel.

A lot of people want to be a train engineer, but it's a very hard job, you know.

[chuckles] - [Voiceover] Meanwhile, the engine's wheels are ready to be reinstalled, which requires a fair chunk of heavy lifting.

[cheery guitar music] [cheery guitar music continues] - All right, hold it right there.

- [Voiceover] A section of track underneath the engine has been removed to get access to the wheels.

Now, it's put back so the engine can roll out when repairs are complete.

The only way to get parts for old steam engines is to make 'em yourself.

- We make just about every piece of the train here in this shop.

- [Voiceover] And they make parts for other steam engines all over the world.

- [Rick] We're actually the sole source for Crown locomotive, train parts.

- [Voiceover] Antique parts made on antique machines.

That's the way it's done working on this railroad.

[bell rings] And then, it's time to fire 'em up and roll 'em out for a new season.

The same crew that maintains the engines during the winter becomes the train's operators, as Tweetsie comes alive again for visitors.

[train hoots] - [Voiceover] Some people might be reliving a childhood visit to Tweetsie, others may feel a nostalgia for the old West or maybe have a love of old steam trains.

Whatever it is, people just keep coming back to Tweetsie.

[upbeat guitar music] - We're preserving steam history here at Tweetsie Railroad every day for people to see and experience.

You know, we're creating history here at the same time.

The park's been here for 52 years now, so we have a longer operating history here as Tweetsie Railroad the theme park than the railroad had as an operating railroad.

- [Voiceover] And the power of those haunting whistles [train whistles] is still there.

[train chugs] [bright country music] [bright country music continues] - Thank you for joining us for "The Best of Our State".

We've enjoyed sharing North Carolina's stories with you.

We'll see you next time.

- Hey, where you guys from, Australia?

Where are you all from, Australia?

Say, "Naw, we're not from Australia.

"We're from a little, old island "off the coast of North Carolina, Ocracoke.".

- It was a big deal for us to go down to Beaufort and Motoring City just to go to Rosie's.

They don't even have 'em anymore I don't think.

Do they?

- And me and Ronnie we went out one Thanksgiving night and we gigged 1,100 and some pound of flounder apiece.

He had 1,100 and some pound in his boat, I had 1,100 and some pound in my boat in one night's time, the boat was just about sunk when we came in the next morning.

1,100 and some pounds of flounder that we've speared.

But it had to be slick cam for it, you know, you gotta had to have a slick cam night to do it 'cause there's no ripples on the water, you can see the fish laying on the bottom and they schooled up getting, they move out the inlet.

And you get a slick cam night and you just wait for that slick cam night and usually in October and end of October, 1st November, that's when you get 'em.

- That's, what they call a red knot, that is around here the nickname we used to call 'em, red brass.

- I've done quite a bit of traveling and it's still better than any place I've found.

You know what I mean?

As far as up and dying, I mean, got a beautiful places out there but still can't be home sweet home, you know?

Here, you know, that's for sure.

[bright guitar music] ♪ ♪ - More information about "Our State" magazine is available at ourstate.com or 1-800-948-1409.