Crowd-funding effort hopes to keep this OBX museum open all year
Nellie Myrtle Pridgen’s store on the Beach Road in Nags Head has been closed for decades, but her remarkable collection of beach glass and odds and ends live in the Outer Banks Beachcomber Museum. These treasures the ocean washed ashore create a history of the Outer Banks like no other. In this piece for the Coastal Review Online, local writer Catherine Kozak does a beautiful job of sharing the museum’s story and the quest by owners to preserve it. A crowd-funding effort is scheduled to begin this winter to help to preserve the museum and it’s bounty in a slightly new space, and keep it open it year-round.
“NAGS HEAD – Never again will there be a beachcomber’s haul on the Outer Banks – or anywhere – to match what Nellie Myrtle Pridgen collected in a lifetime that straddled World War II and the banks’ nascent tourism industry. Her astonishing collection has been housed in a small museum inside the Mattie Midgette Store, where she had lived, but the building is rarely open to the public.
It’s past time to change that, say the proprietors of the Outer Banks Beachcomber Museum, who have recently launched a crowd-funding effort so the museum can be opened year-round. The goal is to purchase the undeveloped property behind the store and relocate the building and the 1933 family house farther from the beach. The site would also provide more parking for visitors, an issue that has stymied accessibility to the museum since it first opened 14 years ago, and opened sporadically since then.”
[box type=”info”] Want to see what all the fuss is about? The Outer Banks Beachcomber Museum will hold its annual Columbus Day weekend open house on October 8th, from 10 am -4 pm. Admission is free. The museum is at 4008 South Virginia Dare Trail in Nags Head.[/box]
[box type=”bio”] For decades the Outer Banks Beachcomber Museum has been a once a year event, but owners are hoping to change that as reported in the Coastal Review Online.[/box]