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T

ake a boat down the South River and off to the left, on that eastern shore, you’ll see what was once the thriving town of Lukens. A century later, all that remains of the logging town is its cemetery.

Yet across the Neuse River, in Oriental, the memories and families live on. A yearly celebration of those families takes place this Sunday.

On the shore of the South River, the sign for the Lukens Cemetery. Some of the graves date to the 1800’s. The community that stood on that shore scattered in the 1940’s.

In the 1940’s the town of Lukens virtually disappeared as its families dispersed. Some went to other parts of Carteret County, while others crossed the Neuse to Pamlico County and Oriental. That Lukens diaspora has made many of those names — Mason, Pittman, Norman, Edwards, Hardy, and Tosto — familiar here.

Pittman, a Lukens family name that is seen often in the Lukens Cemetery and that lives on in Oriental.

Keeping that link alive is this Sunday’s Lukens Picnic. Now in its 24th year it has been organized by a group of people living in the town of South River — just across from Lukens. There’ll be a bring-your-own-picnic at South River’s Edwards Chapel FWB Church at 1p and then at 2p, a one-mile barge ride across the South River to the Lukens cemetery.

The boat dock at Lukens, just south of the cemetery. Across the river is the community of South River where the actual Lukens Picnic will take place on Sunday, before a barge will bring participants across the river to Lukens.

The first Lukens Picnic was held in 1987 as a way for folks to trace their ancestral roots to the isolated spot — no public roads go there — on the eastern shore of the South River. There, the Lukens Cemetery shows, people have lived — and died — since the 1800s.

Wooden markers, bearing the evidence of time, still mark some graves at the Lukens Cemetery.

Tom Tosto has been instrumental in organizing the annual picnic. It’s his barge that transports folks across the South River to visit the cemetery. Tosto says that the town took its name from the Philadelphia businessman, Lukens, who came to the area around 1912 and set up a logging operation that involved both sides of the South River — what became known as Lukens to the east and the present-day community of South River on the western shore.

Mason, one of the family names with strong ties to both Lukens and Oriental.

More on Lukens history and photos of the Lukens Cemetery, next page.

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In its heyday, Tom Tosto says, Lukens had 300 people.

But by mid-century, Lukens was no more, thanks to both the forces of nature and the pull of the wider world. Eloise Collins, who is also organizing this year’s Lukens Picnic, says the town’s demise started with the hurricane in 1933 which “took out half of the homes.” Eleven years later, the storm of 1944 came to Lukens and, as Collins puts it, “slammed it again.”

While the community has been gone for more than 60 years, families still tend to graves at the Lukens Cemetery.

The town sustained two other blows in the 1940’s as well. Eloise Collins says that young men who had never been away from Lukens, went off to fight in WWII and realized that “there was a world beyond.” Many who survived the war sought work and lives elsewhere and didn’t return. And then, Collins says, the Carteret County School system said it would no longer supply a teacher to the school in Lukens. For families with school aged children it was the final straw. Wanting an education for their children, they moved, either across the Neuse to Oriental or to Carteret and Pamlico Counties.

A Tosto gravestone in the Lukens Cemetery.

Collins says the last holdouts in Lukens were two older women who stayed after all the others left. Every day, they’d hoist a white flag, a signal to those on the other side of the South River, that was translated, Collins says, as “well, they’re okay.”

The school and post office and store and church of Lukens are long gone. The cemetery is all that remains. Tom Tosto says that people are still being buried there — own daughter was interred there last summer. It is Tosto’s barge that takes the people on that final South River voyage.

The Lukens Cemetery has become the final resting place for many, even after the town itself passed on.

Tosto remembers one in particular, for a man named Jimmy Pittman had grown up in Lukens but then moved, as many did to Oriental. When he died, his casket was taken by ferry and then land to the community of South River and there, loaded on to Tom Tosto’s barge. When the funeral was over, Tosto says, and the funeral procession made its way back across South River, a “school of porpoises played around the barge.”

The thought crossed his mind, Tom Tosto says, that just as the mourners “took an old fisherman back and paid our respects“the dolphins were like other “old fishermen, paying their respects.”

The Lukens Cemetery.

Tosto says that in past Lukens Picnics, 50 to 60 people have taken the barge ride to the cemetery. He says the event is open to the wider public and folks are welcome to come to the picnic and barge ride. The mile-long trip across the South River should take about 15 minutes he says. (If you’d like to sit for the ride, you’re advised to bring a chair as there is no seating on the barge.)

There is no organized tour as such of the cemetery, but Eloise Collins says some of the people taking part in the Lukens Picnic can answer questions from their own memory of Lukens or from stories handed down.

Some of the gravesites at the Lukens Cemetery date to the 1800’s.

The land route, from Oriental, after the Minnesott Ferry, is to take Hiway 101 east, past Parker Boatworks and the cement factory, where you take a left on to Laurel Road, then left on to Merrimon Road which you take for “10-12 miles” til you get to an intersection with the church. Bear right on to South River Road a few miles and then bear right again on to Big Creek Road which will lead to Tosto Road and Tom Tosto’s Landing and the barge ride.

Coming from Oriental by boat, the South River community can be accessed via the South River and then via Big Creek, the second creek on the right, marked by a red beacon. Tom Tosto says he has a small harbor past the ‘shell plant’ barges and can accommodate some boats there.

The Pittman family lived in the Lukens area for generations before decamping to Oriental.

A resident of the Lukens area born before it was even named Lukens. The cemetery itself is said to be 200 years old this year.

Posted Friday May 14, 2010 by Melinda Penkava