Welcome to Hyde County

Hyde County, North Carolina.  It is probably one of the most beautiful places that you have never heard of, duck hunters and nature enthusiasts aside.  The county slogan is "The Road Less Traveled," which is as honest, and poetically appropriate, as any I have ever come across.  You might think that being home to the largest natural lake in North Carolina, Lake Mattamuskeet, that we would be a bustling resort area filled with tourists, vacation homes, and all the trappings that go along with serving the masses.  That may be the case on Ocracoke Island, an almost completely different world that happens to have found its way within our legal boundaries, but the mainland is a mix of farm fields, woods, and marsh, interspersed here and there with small hubs of civilization.  Hyde County has a population of 5,810  spread over 612 square miles, and about 1000 of those people live on Ocracoke Island.  That makes us the second least populated county in all of North Carolina, only being beat out for top honors by a few hundred people in our neighboring county of Tyrell.  We have no stoplights, no fast food restaurants, no Wal-marts, and that, in my humble opinion, made it one of the most perfect places in eastern North Carolina for my husband and I to pack up our (then) two little boys and put down roots.

In 2007, we fell in love with an 1800's farmhouse on the shores of Lake Mattamuskeet.  Our first architect said we were crazy, but we found another who could feel the heart of the house of much as we could.  After a year of watching the magic performed by craftsman Louis Chesnutt and his crew,  the neglected hunting camp was transformed to her former glory - a gentile, welcoming lady, cloaked with warm memories that hung about as thick and sweet as the perfume of gardenias.                   

We went from this . . .

to this.

There is something to be said for believing in your own vision. Now, five years and another little boy later, I have found that just raising my boys in the quiet of this peaceful place is not quite enough.  I want them to grow up with a sense of the land around them, to understand how these fragile ecosystems work together, and what our place is within them.  I want them to understand what it means to live sustainably - to nourish our environment as it nourishes us.  I want my boys to have their hands in the rich, black earth every spring and learn how to coax from it the food that sustains us throughout the rest of the year.  There are so many lessons to be learned, and I want to learn right there beside them.  My fondest wish is, as they build a bean trellis or thump on a ripe watermelon with their grandchildren, that they remember our days spent together, fingers black with soil.  That will be my legacy.  And thus, the Mattamuskeet Momma experiment was born.