Where the Cape Fear Begins: Front Street and the River

You are standing at the edge of the Cape Fear River, and everything about this city flows from that dark water below.

Wilmington was incorporated in seventeen thirty-nine, though some sources say seventeen forty, named in honor of Spencer Compton, the Earl of Wilmington. It was an odd honor. Compton never set foot in North America. But the name stuck, and the city that grew along this riverfront became the most important port in colonial North Carolina.

The river itself goes by a name that sounds ominous, and the geography earned it. The shoals at Cape Fear's mouth were treacherous to sailors, shallow, unmarked, and unforgiving. Early European explorers probed this coastline repeatedly, beginning with Giovanni da Verrazano in fifteen twenty-four, but settlement required something those explorers lacked: the willingness to stay.

Permanent settlement came in seventeen twenty-six, when Maurice Moore and a group of powerful South Carolina planters laid out Brunswick Town about twelve miles downriver. Wilmington quickly grew to rival it. By seventeen forty-five, Wilmington had overtaken Brunswick as the dominant port, and by the eve of the Civil War it had grown into North Carolina's largest city, with nearly ten thousand residents and a thriving export economy built on naval stores, cotton, and timber.

That commerce flowed down this street. Front Street was once lined with merchant counting houses, warehouses, and ship chandlers. Tar, pitch, turpentine, and timber rolled off wagons and into holds. Cotton bales followed. The smell of pine resin hung in the salt air for two hundred years.

The city fell into decline in the mid-twentieth century as container shipping bypassed the old wharves. But the riverfront never fully died. What you see today, the Riverwalk, the restored Victorian storefronts, the drawbridge raising for pleasure craft, is the product of preservation work that began in the nineteen seventies and has been building ever since. The bones of the old port are still here. You just have to look past the craft beer and live music to find them.