Brunswick Town: A City Burned by the British
Near Wilmington, North Carolina
About eighteen miles south of downtown, off a back road through Brunswick County pine barrens, the ghost of the colony's first real port city lies in the ground.
Brunswick Town was founded in seventeen twenty-six by Maurice Moore, one of the South Carolina planter families who colonized the lower Cape Fear. For fifty years it was one of the premier ports in the Carolinas. Colonial governors lived here. Ships called from Britain and the West Indies. The town had merchants, taverns, a courthouse, and Saint Philip's Church, whose brick walls still stand above the site today, three feet thick and twenty-five feet high, roofless and open to the sky.
In seventeen sixty-five and sixty-six Brunswick was the flash point for North Carolina's Stamp Act resistance. Armed colonists occupied Fort Johnston nearby and forced royal customs officials to swear they would not enforce the hated tax. The town was already practiced in defiance.
The British burned Brunswick Town to the ground in seventeen seventy-six, retaliating for North Carolina's Patriot resistance. The residents scattered. The town never recovered. Wilmington absorbed the trade and the population.
A century later, the Confederacy built Fort Anderson directly on top of the ruins, earthen gun batteries overlooking the Cape Fear to protect the river approaches to Wilmington. The fort fell in February eighteen sixty-five, about a month after Fort Fisher, as Union forces rolled north.
Archaeological excavations in the nineteen fifties and sixties uncovered the foundations of homes, businesses, and civic buildings. The site today is one of the most layered historic places on the North Carolina coast, a colonial port, a Revolutionary ruin, and a Civil War fortification all occupying the same ground. Walk it slowly.
