Excerpt from local history pdf:
The first place over the Pasquotank River bridge along our lane to the beach was our town’s own island. Incredible that we were driving upon it at all. What a task it had been in the early 1920s for Engineer McNutt and his men to take a long island bog like Machelhe and try to succeed at putting a concrete road overtop of a floating corduroy of logs—‘‘McNutt’s Floating Road sank more than it floated,’’ my aunt once told me. Another woman who had been but a girl during World War II remembered picnicking on the Pasquotank before crossing the bridge and enduring, though frightfully and queasily, the rippling unsteadiness and the underwater portions of the Floating Road. When, late in World War II, the state of North Carolina in the form of Engineer Ham Overman gave up on all that and brought in the big pumps and dredges, he and his men blew in a long mat of sand and laid atop it a tarmac road that worked. With Ham Overman’s highway coup, Machelhe Island became popularly known, then and now, as the Camden Causeway.