Hutchinson Island

Alice Riley was Irish, and she was an indentured servant, which meant she traded years of her labor for the passage over.

She and another servant, a man named Richard White, were assigned to a settler named William Rise, who kept cattle out on Hutchinson Island, just across the river from town.

Wise was sick.

By most accounts, he needed help bathing, and one day in March, while the two servants were washing him, the story goes that White wrapped a neckerchief around Wise's throat and pulled, and Alice Riley held his head underwater until he stopped moving.

And one of the biggest infrastructure programs we have is our Chatham Area Transit.

We think we really need to have a very efficient, a very well-funded public transit system, and that does include our water ferries that provide reliable access to Hutchinson Island.

I think our chamber members should think about the public transit system here.

It's one system, but it's kind of made up of three buckets.

You mentioned the water ferries that, of course, carry our our visitors and workers and now residents over on Hutchinson Island back and forth across the river.

You've also got the downtown shuttle that moves people around downtown as well.

And then you've got the fixed route, the buses that run across the county to get people to work and to appointments and paratransit as well.