© May 27, 2007 | Last updated 11:07 PM May. 26
MANTEO - Michael Berry played in the sturdy little cookhouse when he was a boy.
It was in Rodanthe then, where the owner used it for storage. Berry knew it only as a place to play, a faded old building whose walls he once helped paint. Now he knows more.
He knows it was built in 1930, that it once sat perched on the beach six miles south of Oregon Inlet and that it was part of the Pea Island Life-Saving Station, the only one in the nation with an all-black crew.
His grandfather, M.M. Berry, served as a captain.