Holiday Traditions at Historic Whalehead

I often think of Wellhead as the Biltmore of Corolla, Biltmore of the Northern Outer Banks, and then of course there's also the Downton Abbey element.

Yes, our call

boxes.

The call boxes and the servants.

Yes.

But it sounds like the knights, the servants were a really important part of their lives.

Absolutely.

So, for example, Miss Rose, the cook, as we've mentioned, her husband, her and her husband owned a dairy farm across from the Knights Estate up in Rhode Island.

That's where they lived during the summer.

And her husband passed away during the Spanish flu epidemic.

So the Knights said, hey, we'll pay off your mortgage if you and your kids come work for us.

She took them up on the offer.

That's why the kitchen's pink in honor of Miss Rose, we say.

Mr. Knight taught all three of her children how to read and write and paid for them to go to the one room schoolhouse, which is back in operation as of 2012.

So it's really neat that not only did they value the servants, but the kids and their education as well.

Were there any Christmas traditions or decorations that were unique and specific to the Knights and that home?

Yes.

So Mr. Knight, he was a businessman.

I could go into how he made his money, but I'll save that for later.

Well, he really wanted to be an artist.

So all hunt clubs, essentially everywhere, but especially in the northern Outer Banks, they would keep track.

They had a logbook.

Who was there, what they would hunt, how much they would hunt, what the weather was like so that they knew if it was going to be a good day or not based off of the records.

Well, in Mr. Knight's logbook, at every holiday, he would draw a scene.

So we have special scenes.