Whalehead Club

The Whalehead Club was built because a woman was told she couldn't hunt. Edward Collings Knight Jr. and Marie Louise LeBel built the twenty-one-thousand-square-foot lodge on the Currituck Sound between 1922 and 1925 — three years and $385,000 of Art Nouveau on the Outer Banks — because Marie Louise was a sportswoman and the local hunt clubs were all male. The Knights called it Corolla Island; the name Whalehead came later, from the second owner, for the shape of the land.

The lodge is a period artifact that survived its era — the Art Nouveau details throughout, the duck-head door handles and the waterfowl motifs on the wainscoting, the bridge and the boathouse on the sound, the rooms built for a Philadelphia fortune's winter hunting. The Knights sold in 1936 when Edward's health failed; the Coast Guard took it for the war, then it was a boys' school, then the rocket-fuel testing site for the space program, then the developers. Currituck County bought it in 1992 to keep it from being lost — the shooting lodge that had been everything else was finally preserved as the thing it was built to be.

The restoration is the county's showpiece — the 1999-2002 work brought back the Nouveau interiors, and the Whalehead is the centerpiece of Currituck Heritage Park on the sound it was built to hunt. The lodge's period is the artifact: the early-twentieth-century hunting club preserved whole, the grandest of the ten that went up on the Currituck Banks in the waterfowl era.

The Whalehead is the archive's hunt-lodge file — the house a woman built because she wasn't allowed in the men's clubs, the Art Nouveau retreat on the sound that served as a bunker and a school and a test site before the county brought it back to the thing it was made for.