The history of the Corolla wild horses

Yes on lineage — and the interesting part of the answer is not the bloodline but what the county did with it. The horses are descendants of Spanish mustangs introduced to these islands centuries ago, but the modern herd exists because Currituck County decided, law by law, to treat them as wild animals worth protecting rather than strays worth removing. That decision is a fifty-year paper trail, and it is the best story on the beach.

The details

Start with the classification, because everything else stands on it. The county's own definition — Legally 'ferae naturae' - wild animals, not strays — describes an animal of the horse family, descended from Spanish mustangs brought here as domestic stock by sixteenth-century explorers, that has over time taken on the character of a wild animal. Ferae naturae: belonging to no one, wild in the legal sense. That single word choice is why the herd could be protected by ordinance rather than rounded up as loose livestock.

Then came the road. Until the mid-eighties, the route between Duck and Corolla was the 17-mile unpaved stretch before 1985 — unpaved, infrequently traveled, and effectively the herd's southern buffer. Paving changed the arithmetic in one season, and the cost arrived fast: 20 horses struck in the decade after paving — eleven struck and killed on Highway 12 between 1985 and 1989, twenty in the decade after paving.

The response was citizens first, county second. Local residents organized the Corolla Wild Horse Fund in 1989 — CWHF organized 1989, 501(c)(3) in 2001 — and the county answered the same year: Wild Horse Ordinance adopted 1989, the Wild Horse Ordinance that still governs every visitor's fifty feet. In 1994 the county and the Fund signed CWHF-County Management Agreement, 1994, and the ocean-to-sound fence went in at the North Beach access ramp that September — the beginning of a managed sanctuary rather than an open range.

The fences tell the rest. By 1997 the Fund had finished the southern sea-to-sound barrier and moved the herd north of it — South fence completed 1997 — with the northern fence standing near the Virginia line. The county's obligations are written down too: $700,000 fence/replacement funding carries the boundary fences and cattle guard on a twenty-year replacement cycle. Oversight belongs to a Six-member Wild Horse Advisory Board with a seat for the Fund, and the partners run wider still — USFWS + NCNERR are management partners, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the estuarine research reserve among them.

The story ends with a title. In June 2010 the General Assembly made the designation official: Colonial Spanish Mustang = NC State Horse, 2010 — the Colonial Spanish Mustang as the Official Horse of North Carolina, at the request of Currituck County schoolchildren who did the lobbying themselves. The descendants of Spanish Colonial stock, wild on a sand spit, written into state law by an elementary school class.

Mustangs first, county law second, state horse at last — and every chapter of it visible from the driver's seat of a truck on the four-wheel-drive beach.