Comments from Roy Sawyer about Hurricane Barbara which destroyed Dutcher's Grocery in 1953 - The Dutchers were our next door neighbors, and I have fond memories of them.  The 1954 Dutcher Grocery building was an entirely new building.   The previous store was completely destroyed by Hurricane Barbara.  Barbara was not a particularly bad hurricane except that a tornado hit the Dutcher store, our house which stands just to the north (The Willis Gallop house, built 1917, my father bought it in 1943), and the tornado continued thru the woods, leveling trees to the ground and along the back road hit the home of an elderly black couple, Jonas & Elessie Bowser, and it leveled their 2-story house.  Mr. Charlie Wright drove thru the back road the next morning, noticed that Jonas' house was blown down, and he found them crouched in an outbuilding or shed.  They were surprised to see someone they knew because they thought the world had ended!  21 trees blew down in our yard, 42 widows were blown out in the house, all five chimneys were broken off, power lines were down in the front yard.  My father was at Buxton doing a quarterly visit to Estes White, who worked for Daddy's company, Home Security.  We had gone to bed, and the tornado struck around 9pm.  I was upstairs with my grandmother Sawyer, and my mother, her mother, and my sister were downstairs with Bob, Daddy's birddog.  I jumped out of bed, put on a pair of shorts, turned on the lights, and ran downstairs.  Everyone congregated in the hall by the front door.  Sheets of water were coming in the house--the windows do not have but 2 panes - top and bottom, so when one broke, the whole window was out.  My grandmothers nailed anything they could find to the windows, even took the oilcloth tablecloth from the kitchen table.  Surprisingly, we had electricity until the next morning.  We put on the front porch light, which lit up the front yard.  Power poles and lines were down in the front yard, trees were blocking the road.  Mama decided that we had to get out of the house because it was going to fall down, so out we all walked across the front yard to the Dutcher house and remained there until daybreak.  Power lines down in the yard, live, and we were out there walking in the rain!  Idiots!  An elderly neighbor who lived behind us and her middle aged son also came to the Dutcher house as did a black man, Jack Fisher, who lived in an old barbershop south of Forbes Rd.  The next morning, when Dutch and my grandmother Sawyer went out to survey the damage, they discovered that the Dutcher house had been moved about a foot off its foundation!  Telephones did not work.  The Coast Guard in Elizabeth City got word thru to my father in Buxton, and he came home the next day.  A housemover, Mr. Ferebee in Manteo, jacked up the Dutcher house and a new foundation had to be built, then the house was lowered down on its new foundation.  The tornado sounded like a locomotive, very deafening - I'll never forget that sound.  It was pretty terrifying.  I do not have a photo of the old store, which Daddy sold to the Dutchers.  It was a much larger building than the small one Dutch built in 1954.  The problem was that the post office was gone when the old store blew down.  Mr. Charlie Wright had a small trailer, which was basically a wagon with regular truck wheels and a small wooden structure built on the frame, which he moved down to the site, and Miss Frances used it for the post office until the old building could be cleared away and the new building built.  You will notice the iron bars at the windows of the store - they were salvaged from the old building.  The next day following the hurricane, Dutch and Miss Frances gave away everything perishable in the old store - ice cream, etc.  That was the best thing I remembered about the hurricane!