Wilmington, North Carolina, and the surrounding coastal areas are steeped in history. From the Historic Downtown of Wilmington, to the Fort Fisher State Historic Site near the mouth of the Cape Fear River, to the town of Southport located where the Cape Fear River meets the Atlantic Ocean there is a lot to discover.
I have always been fascinated with history, and I love when history has been preserved. I don’t believe a person can pick and choose what happened in the past, sweeping things under the rug that you don’t agree with. Those things can serve as a reminder to not let them happen again.
Some say “history is written by the winners”, which is true in many ways. But history is also written by the losers. A well rounded look at history acknowledges perspectives from all sides. You just have to look.
The Fort Fisher State Historic Site is one of those places. It was the largest and most important earthwork fort in the south, made primarily out of earth and sand. It kept the mouth of the Cape Fear River open for blockade runners smuggling in supplies to the Confederacy until the last couple of months of the Civil War.
The Union Army tried to take the fort on Dec. 24, 1864, but after two days of fighting, it concluded the fort was too strong and retreated. It came back on Jan. 12 for a battle that lasted 2.5 days. Federal ships bombarded the fort from both land and sea. More than 3.300 Union soldiers assaulted the land face of the fort on Jan 15, where fierce hand-to-hand combat ensued, ending with the Union taking over the fort. The last remaining supply route to Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was closed.
About 10% of the fort still stands, and the museum building also has items from the sunken blockade runners on exhibit. It is a fascinating look at how people tried to defend the life they wanted to live, though I myself, personally, am an abolitionist.
Because of Fort Fisher, a lot of pre-Civil War Wilmington remains in tact. The Confederate Army burned buildings containing munitions, tobacco and cotton before they left Wilmington to prevent the Union from getting the supplies. But homes and other buildings became Union outposts for the last couple of months of the war. The Historic Downtown has cobblestone streets, historical markers, historic homes with colored plaques that identify whether they are 75, 100, 150, or more than 200 years old. It is a wonderful area to investigate, or take a horse-drawn carriage where the driver points out different historical buildings along the way. I learned a lot.
Southport is an historic city across the water from Fort Fisher that developed around Fort Johnston on a stretch of land where the Cape Fear River meets the Atlantic Ocean. It was founded in 1792 as Smithville and renamed Southport in 1887. It was the Brunswick Count seat from 1808 until 1977.
I started in the Fort Johnston-Southport Museum and Visitor Center where I picked up a historic site map, which included old churches, the North Carolina Maritime Museum, the Old Brunswick County Jail, the Old Smithville Burying Ground, among other things. I walked a meditation labyrinth in an old church yard, stepped inside old jail cells, and spent a while in the old cemetery. I think that was my favorite part. Many of the graves were crypts above ground, and many of the family plots had some type of boundary marking the collective graves. Some of those were brick, some were fences, and some were steel poles stretched from one corner to another on top a block. Some headstones dated more than 200 years ago.
The history here in Wilmington is very different than the history in Minnesota, yet people are people where ever you go. It has been a privilege to take a walk into history.
