The City That Kept Being Built: Wilmington's Historic District

Wilmington's historic district covers more than two hundred thirty blocks of downtown, making it one of the largest urban historic districts in North Carolina. Walking it is an education in American architectural history because nearly every major style of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is represented here, and much of it is intact.

The Federal-style buildings of the early eighteen hundreds give way to Greek Revival, then Italianate, then the elaborate Victorian ornament of the gilded age, then Colonial Revival. The sequence is legible because Wilmington kept building. Unlike cities that were destroyed by fire, flood, or urban renewal, Wilmington accumulated its history in layers. What looks like a charming eccentricity of preservation is actually the record of two centuries of continuous civic ambition.

The Latimer House, built in eighteen fifty-two, is a fine Italianate example with decorative brackets and floor-to-ceiling windows. The Bellamy Mansion, covered elsewhere on this tour, anchors the antebellum end. On the northern edge of the district, Victorian cottages from the eighteen eighties and nineties crowd together, each one a small monument to the prosperity the railroad briefly generated.

The preservation movement that saved these blocks began in earnest in the nineteen seventies, when the city, like most American downtowns of that era, faced demolition pressure and population loss. The Historic Wilmington Foundation and the city's historic preservation commission pushed back, designating the district on the National Register of Historic Places and establishing design review standards that have held the line ever since.

What you see driving these streets is the residue of every era Wilmington lived through. The booms and the collapses, the cotton money and the railroad money and the film money, and the long argument about who this city is for and who gets to tell its story.