The decline of whaling in the mid-19th century pushed settlers from Cape Lookout's Diamond City westward into Bogue Banks. They built without deeds, fished for mullet that ran close to the shoreline, and wore a track from sound to ocean that passed in front of the Salter family's house. The path got a name, then the community did: Salter Path. In 1910, a Bostonian named John A. Royall bought 8,000 acres on the island. He gave the squatter families deeds where they had structures. Then, in 1917, he sold 2,000 acres to Alice Green Hoffman, whose niece Eleanor Butler Alexander later married Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Hoffman immediately sued the Salter Path residents because their cows kept wandering onto her estate. The court ruled the people could stay, but the cows could not graze on Hoffman land. Salter Path got its 81 acres collectively, with no individual titles. That ruling held until 1979, when a legal settlement finally let residents hold title to their own homes and let Carteret County collect taxes.

Elliott Coues spent two years on Bogue Banks from 1869 to 1870 as a US Army surgeon at Fort Macon. He was already on his way to becoming one of America's leading ornithologists, and the assignment turned out to be a gift. He studied the sea birds, marsh birds, and shore birds nesting on the dunes, noted lynx and mink in the maritime forest, and described what he saw as a coastal world scarcely touched by commercial fishing, much less by the tourism and real-estate development that would come later. His Bogue Banks essays became foundational texts in American natural history. Today Fort Macon State Park, with some of the highest sand dunes on the East Coast, is one of North Carolina's most-visited state parks.

NC-58 runs the length of the island, threading together its five main communities: Atlantic Beach on the eastern end, then Pine Knoll Shores, then the unincorporated Salter Path in the middle, then Indian Beach, then Emerald Isle on the western end. Two bridges connect the island to the mainland. The eastern one carries traffic from Morehead City into Atlantic Beach and is the busier route. The western bridge runs from Cape Carteret to Emerald Isle. There is no third option. Mile markers along NC-58 every half mile give locals their navigation system. Stores and commercial buildings cluster in the five communities; the spaces between are houses, rentals, and maritime forest of live oak, yaupon, and red cedar.

Surrounding the North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores is the Theodore Roosevelt Natural Area, 265 acres of state-protected maritime forest, one of the few of its kind left on the state's barrier islands. The aquarium itself is one of three operated by North Carolina and offers exhibits on aquatic life from the mountains to the ocean, with live dives in a Living Shipwreck exhibit. To the north lies Bogue Sound, part of the Intracoastal Waterway. To the south, Onslow Bay. To the east, Beaufort Inlet. To the west, Bogue Inlet. The island sits embraced by water on every compass point, and that's the geography that has shaped everything else: the whaling, the squatters, the cows, the cottages, the dunes.