“I explore beauty with my camera. The photos show the journey” – Ken Buckner

All photos have titles in the white margins and Ken’s signature is printed in the image digitally.

A light gray mat is also printed around the white area.

All photos are signed and titled digitally and reproduced as high quality Giclées.

A grey mat is printed around the image. All prints fit standard frames.

Click here to buy a high quality Giclée Print at the Islands-Art.com website!

Islands Art features Giclée Prints by nationally renowned local nature photographer and artist, Ken Buckner, the books of Miller Pope (founder of The Winds Resort and Sea Trail Golf Resort), mystery novelist Tom Rieber and renowned local Romance Novelists Jacqueline DeGroot and Peggy Grich.

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Written by longtime locals and true insiders who offer personal and practical perspectives that readers trust.

The Insider’s Guide to NC’s Southern Coast & Wilmington takes you to the clean, quiet, family oriented beaches of North Carolina’s Southern Coast and introduces you to the intriguing city of Wilmington, including the historic downtown riverfront.

Regular Cover Price: $15.95

On Sale:

$9.95 Buy it at http://Islands-Art.com

While priced as low as $8.00, all prints are titled digitally and reproduced as high quality Giclées.

A light gray mat is also printed around the white area. All prints fit standard frame sizes found everywhere. Pricing is by frame size.

To view all of Miller’s prints and/or purchase these prints click here!

The first series Miller has released are nature and beach scenes.

Other series (to be released) include prints of his illustrations from his four pirate books and a selection of his retro/vintage art from the 19950s and 1960s.

Miller was recently the subject of a feature article in the January issue of Our State Magazine.

Miller Pope was born in South Carolina but spent most of his career during the “golden age of illustration” in the New York advertising and publishing arenas, after getting his start on the Marine Corps’ legendary Leatherneck magazine.

Miller studied figure drawing at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., at the Art Students League in New York City.

His works have appeared on novel covers and in major magazines. He was elected to the Society of Illustrators in 1957.

With his wife, Helen, he moved south in the 1970s and worked to develop The Winds Resort Beach Club and Sea Trail Plantation on the Southeastern North Carolina coast.

To view all of Miller Pope’s prints and/or purchase these prints click here!

Buy this book at:

http://Islands-Art.com

• Race for Riches: a history of the origins of piracy
• Greed and Gold: a pirate’s life aboard ship and in battle
• Tools of the Trade: weapons, vessels, and pirate culture
• Rogues and Raiders: profiles of pirates through history
• Other Pirates, Other Times: the past and future of piracy
• A Roster of Infamy: a list of pirates and their vessels

“The illustrations are incredible, from the actual pirates to their ships, battles, maps, tools of the trade and treasures. For every generations’ fascination with pirates and the exotic and exciting life they supposedly led, this book will satisfy that hunger for the actual and imagined part of pirate lore.

Miller Pope is as exceptional a writer as he is an illustrator, writing with the visual in mind, always crafting his words from an illustrators’ perspective and then backing that image up with the very picture the words so masterfully created.”

- Island Living Magazine

The Devil’s Parody is the second book in the Nick Thomas Mystery series. The first novel in the series The Nine Irony was published in 2009 and brought to life a cast of colorful characters that take you on a ride to remember.

The Devil’s Parody asks the question How Far Would You Go For $5,000,000.00? Lured by a five million dollar prize, six consummate gamblers; three men and three women, are trapped by their own greed and find themselves playing against each other for their lives in a deadly game of chance.

The Devil’s Parody is a gripping thriller that pits Nick against recluse sociopath, Sebastian Black, in the remote woods of Vermont where he is conducting a deadly experiment into the gambler’s mind. Are there lines they wouldn’t cross?

Tom Rieber’s third novel in the Nick Thomas Series, Backfire, is a thriller, set in Sunset Beach, North Carolina is already under pen.

$14.99 Devil’s Parody – Nick Thomas Mystery by Tom Rieber

Buy it now at Islands-Art.com

While priced as low as $8.00, all prints are titled digitally and reproduced as high quality Giclées.

A light gray mat is also printed around the white area. All prints fit standard frame sizes found everywhere. Pricing is by frame size.

To view all of Miller’s prints and/or purchase these prints click here!

The first series Miller has released were nature and beach scenes.

Other series now released include prints of his illustrations from his four pirate books and a selection of his retro/vintage art from the 19950s and 1960s.

Miller was recently the subject of a feature article in the January issue of Our State Magazine.

Miller Pope was born in South Carolina but spent most of his career during the “golden age of illustration” in the New York advertising and publishing arenas, after getting his start on the Marine Corps’ legendary Leatherneck magazine.

Miller studied figure drawing at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., at the Art Students League in New York City.

His works have appeared on novel covers and in major magazines. He was elected to the Society of Illustrators in 1957.

With his wife, Helen, he moved south in the 1970s and worked to develop The Winds Resort Beach Club and Sea Trail Plantation on the Southeastern North Carolina coast.

To view all of Miller Pope’s prints and/or purchase these prints click here!

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He retired from the fast-paced New York life and moved to coastal Ocean Isle Beach where he opened The Winds Resort. He loves the coastal life but he still takes time to do his art, his life’s passion.

WRAL.com out of Raleigh has featured the advertising guru in an episode of The Tarheel Traveler, check out his interview on the link below and find out what it was like to be a real madman.

The tower also offers a safe haven for boaters and a helipad for use in medical emergencies. “Top-end” users could fly in for a week or weekend and enjoy a private fishing vacation according to Neal.

Neal also hopes to have a cell phone tower erected on the platform. Neal, 51, is a licensed pilot who had flown over the structure but had not yet set foot on it when he made the winning bid.

The tower is a modified 80-foot steel oil drilling platform and was used by the Coast Guard from 1966 until about eight years ago as an aid to navigation. The Coast Guard turned the nautical landmark over to the GSA to be sold when the introduction of GPS and buoys rendered the tower obsolete.

A federal General Services Administration spokesman said Neal was the only bidder for the modified 80-foot steel oil drilling platform when it was auctioned off in 2010.

The tower has two floors and 5,000 square feet of living space including five bedrooms, a kitchen, office, storage area, recreation area and toilet facilities.

Prior to beginning life on the tower Mr. Neal admitted to fishing only once in his life but had gained a love of the ocean from many flights taken along the Eastern Seaboard in his small private plane.

Neal currently has the tower accessible and hopes to be “fully functional” by 2012. We are not certain what conditions are at this time but they are taking reservations! Go here to make a reservation inquiry: http://www.fptower.com/inquiry.html

Now the story gets more interesting…Neal has written a book, or rather a software program born on the tower has written an ebook available for Kindle download at Amazon, “Hiding In Anonymity (HIA)”all proceeds are donated to the restoration efforts. Rather than trying to explain I offer this video for your consideration.. or in the words of The Twilight Zone “Submitted for Your Approval”…

Check out their website and facebook page to get a better idea of what’s going on!

http://www.fptower.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Frying-Pan-Shoals-Light-Station/121119241261861

Your favorite site CoastalNC.com has joined the facebook craze! On our facebook page you can find links to our articles, other sites and comments from some of our readers.

Be sure to ‘Like’ us on facebook – discover a whole new way to connect to the coastal way of life and get updates on fun and free stuff going on around town. Let us know what you like about Coastal NC!

Check out our facebook page!

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The following is from Wikipedia:

Robert E. Harrill or Robert Harrell, (February 2, 1893 – June 3, 1972), was known as “The Fort Fisher Hermit”. He became a hermit in 1955 at the age of 62 after a string of unsuccessful and unsatisfying jobs and a failed marriage. Harrill hitchhiked to Fort Fisher on the North Carolina Coast from Morganton, North Carolina, a distance of 260 miles. He had been committed to a mental hospital in Morganton by his in-laws, after his wife, Katie Hamrick, left him and asked for a divorce. Harrill apparently walked away from the hospital or made a key from an old spoon and used the key to escape the facility.

Harrill becomes the Hermit
The name “The Fort Fisher Hermit” came from Fort Fisher State Recreation Area, where he settled after leaving the mental institution in Morganton. Soon after arriving at Fort Fisher, Robert Harrill was arrested as a vagrant and sent to his hometown of Shelby by the sheriff’s department with the help of the Traveler’s Aide society. He returned the following summer and set up a simple home in an abandoned World War II era bunker near the Cape Fear River along a salt marsh. He was able to gather much of the food that he needed from the salt marsh and the nearby oyster beds. Harrill learned many of his survival skills from Empy Hewitt, a true hermit, who also lived in the salt marshes of the Fort Fisher area.

The Fort Fisher Hermit was not a hermit in the truest sense of the word. A hermit (from the Greek ?????? er?mos, signifying “desert”, “uninhabited”, hence “desert-dweller”) is a person who lives to some greater or lesser degree in seclusion and/or isolation from society. Harrill was far from isolated, and in fact had many visitors every year. His guest registry, a notebook held down by sea shells, recorded a total of over 100,000 visitors[2] from all fifty states and at least 20 foreign countries.

Harrill planted a vegetable garden to supplement his diet (what he grew and what he was able to gather in his surroundings). Visitors also provided the Fort Fisher Hermit with monetary donations that were placed in a frying pan that he left out for just such a purpose.

The Hermit becomes an attraction
Robert Harrill became the second greatest tourist attraction in the state of North Carolina, trailing only the USS North Carolina in number of visitors. Visitors to Carolina Beach, Kure Beach, Fort Fisher and Southport would routinely take time to visit the man living in the salt marshes. Many of them were simply curious, others were attracted to his wisdom and words, but others went out of their way to harass him or to try to steal his money. There were rumors that he had thousands of dollars hidden somewhere in his bunker. He was also arrested by the local authorities on charges of vagrancy. Each trip to court saw the Fort Fisher Hermit defending himself, most times successfully. A group of men who beat him up and stole his money were convicted on the strength of the hermit’s testimony against them, in a trial that saw the hermit serve as both lead prosecutor and star witness.

The Fort Fisher Hermit also attracted a large number of journalists to his bunker with his lifestyle and beliefs. He explained his popularity in the New Hanover Sun in 1968, ”
“
Everybody ought to be a hermit for a few minutes to an hour or so every 24 hours, to study, meditate, and commune with their creator…millions of people want to do just what I’m doing, but since it is much easier thought of than done, they subconsciously elect me to represent them, that’s why I’m successful…”

Robert Harrill greeted as many visitors as possible and agreed to pose with them in pictures for a small fee. The Hermit saw each visitor as an opportunity to spread his “common sense” beliefs.
Robert Harrill told his visitors that he was writing a book entitled “A Tyrant in Every Home”. His book was a byproduct of his previously stressful life: his mother and two brothers died of typhoid fever when he was a young boy, and his father remarried to a woman that Robert described as “the tyrant in my family. The Hermit’s troubled youth and equally troubling adulthood were the primary reasons that he “dropped out” of society nearly ten years before the hippie movement began in full force. Robert Harrill stated that he finally achieved the peace and happiness that he sought for so long. He enjoyed living with nature and said, “My life here goes up and down like the tides of this old sea out here… Only nature determines my existence.”

Death
The Fort Fisher Hermit died under “mysterious” circumstances in June 1972. His body was found by a group of teenage boys on an early Sunday morning. It was covered in sand, bloodied, covered in wounds and laid spread eagle on a pile of rubbish. Some people believed that he was killed by a group of rowdy rednecks, others believed that it was a prank gone horribly bad. The New Hanover County coroner ruled that the cause of death was a heart attack. Heart attack remains listed as the official cause of death and an official investigation into a possible murder has never been conducted.

Memorial and legacy
The story and legacy of Robert Harrill lives on today through the efforts of The Hermit Society, founded by Michael Edwards, Edward Harrill, Harry Warren, Gaile Welker and Vergie Harrill. The Fort Fisher Hermit Society was formed on February 2, 1993 (What would have been Robert’s 100th birthday) and has members in numerous states. The President and founder is Michael F. Edwards, currently of Satellite Beach, Florida. Since the passing of Edward Harrill, the son of the Hermit, members elected Fred Pickler, a former friend of the hermit, to fill the spot. In the spring of 2007, Pickler co-authored the book “Life and Times of the Fort Fisher Hermit, Through the Lens of Fred Pickler.”

The hermit bunker is still standing and can be reached from the Fort Fisher Hermit Trail at Fort Fisher State Recreation Area.

The Hermit Society and the “Friends of the Fort Fisher Hermit” work to continue telling his story and a film directed by Rob Hill, The Fort Fisher Hermit, was produced by Wilmington, North Carolina-based Common Sense Films partners Hill, Richard Sirianni and Scott R. Davis in 2004.

It has won numerous independent film making awards and airs on American Public Television on PBS. . The film was nominated for a 2007 Mid-South Regional Emmy Award.

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