Sensibly shabby: White Lake's heyday of tour boats and water-ski shows has passed, but thousands still trek to a tiny corner of Bladen County every summer.

• Author: Mims, Bryan
• Position: TOWN SQUARE

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It's midafternoon and plenty hot. Teenage girls in bikinis saunter along Goldston's Pier as toddlers with water wings splash below. Two girls stroll by holding Styrofoam cups, stabbing the slushy contents with plastic spoons. They walk up to the pavilion, where dings and beeps drift through the arcade, past the Dairy Queen, and into our imagination.

This is a classic summertime beach scene, down to the happy sounds of a carousel. There it is, outside the pavilion, an Allan Herschell merry-go-round built in 1947 with steeds made not of metal or fiberglass but hand-carved wood. Even with the boardwalk, hot dogs and french fries at Goldston's Sandwich Shop, and the shops filled with wonderfully garish T-shirts, this beach isn't The Beach, less than 60 miles east. For generations of southeastern North Carolinians, it's like the pool at an oceanfront hotel. Why be satisfied with one body of water, when you can have two?

At this beach, the water is free of salt and jellyfish. Most of it is clear as a fountain, covering a little more than 2.5 square miles and reaching a depth of 12 feet. White Lake is technically not a lake but a Carolina bay marketed as the "Nation's Safest Beach." The sandy lake floor slopes gently, making no sudden drops, and there are no undercurrents that will drag you away or marine critters that will take a bite out of you. The last alligator, for what it's worth, was spotted and killed in 1956.

Surrounding the water is the town of White Lake, which has about 800 year-round residents but swells to 10,000 people on any given summer weekend. Dawn Maynard, executive director of the Elizabethtown-White Lake Area Chamber of Commerce, says 200,000 people visit the lake throughout the summer. It's an economic dynamo in Bladen County, where the biggest employer is the giant Smithfield Foods slaughterhouse in Tar Heel and the largest moneymaker is agriculture. In a state that ranks sixth nationally in blueberry production, Bladen ranks first among the 100 counties. All the summer lake lovers are a boon for mom-and-pop businesses in Elizabethtown, the county seat 7 miles away.

The lakeshore is ringed by cypress trees festooned with Spanish moss, and the town is chockablock with campgrounds, single-wide trailers, motels, cottages and houses. The median home value is $100,000, according to Berkshire Hathaway Home Services. One full-time lake dweller is Cathy Faircloth Kinlaw, who wrote White Lake: A Historical...