The Cornwallis House: Burgwin-Wright and the Revolutionary War
Near Wilmington, North Carolina
The Burgwin-Wright House on Third Street is one of the oldest surviving colonial-era homes in Wilmington, built in seventeen seventy. It sits on a foundation that tells you something about how colonial towns worked: the original walls belonged to Wilmington's first city jail, built in seventeen forty-four. When merchant and colonial treasurer John Burgwin commissioned his townhouse, he simply built it on top.
Burgwin was a complex figure. He was prominent enough to serve as private secretary to a royal governor, but when the Revolution came, he spent years in England, and under a North Carolina law of seventeen seventy-seven his property was subject to confiscation.
The house earned its nickname, the Cornwallis House, in seventeen eighty-one. The British occupied Wilmington near the end of the war, and Lord Cornwallis himself used the house as his headquarters for a matter of weeks. Local accounts describe lavish officers' dinners within these walls while the war ground toward its conclusion at Yorktown.
The Revolutionary story in Wilmington was more than Cornwallis, though. The Cape Fear region had been an early flash point. In seventeen sixty-five, when the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act, Wilmington's Sons of Liberty organized one of the most effective resistance campaigns in the colonies. Led by figures like Cornelius Harnett, who would later be called the Samuel Adams of North Carolina, a crowd of nearly four hundred colonists surrounded the stamp distributor at his inn and forced his resignation. Armed colonists then seized the customs house at Brunswick Town and extracted sworn oaths from royal officials that they would not enforce the act. North Carolina became one of the colonies where the Stamp Act was never successfully enforced. That success, many historians argue, encouraged Parliament to repeal the act in March seventeen sixty-six.
The Burgwin-Wright House is open to the public and still carries the original jail cell walls in its sub-basement. History in this city layers that deep.
