Wilmington, N.C. -- It's a complete course in American history in one drive-to destination: Revolutionary War-era homes, a Civil War fort and World War II battleship.
Whatever period of American history is your passion, Wilmington has an attraction (or two) for you.
There's even something for those, including my teenage daughter, with historical interests that run more 1990s pop culture than 19th-century battle: Joey's rowboat from "Dawson's Creek" and the riverfront park where the boys from "One Tree Hill" played basketball.
Hollywood cool combines with historic Southern charm in Wilmington, where the Cape Fear River meets the Atlantic Ocean.
An important port city for more than two and a half centuries, Wilmington was once a Colonial capital and largest city in North Carolina. Now the state's eighth largest in population and two hours from Raleigh, Wilmington needs neither size nor government office buildings to give it cache: It has brick streets and century homes, the USS North Carolina and Fort Fisher -- not to mention frequent sightings of Robert Downey Jr., a park filled with carnivorous plants and some drop-dead gorgeous beaches.
My family spent a few days here on the way home from a vacation to nearby Myrtle Beach, S.C. It didn't take long to realize: Wilmington deserves a week all its own.
We got our bearings on a horse-drawn wagon tour, which took us on a loop through much of the city's downtown, one of the largest historic districts in the United States.
"Young parents love the brick streets," said guide Brian Matthews. "It keeps the speed down."
Matthews explained that the downtown area's historic charms weren't always so appreciated. "Thirty years ago, many of these houses were vacant," he said. Now, he said, they're all occupied -- and increasingly unaffordable.
The Historic Wilmington Foundation, founded in 1966, helped turn around the downtown district, buying and rehabbing houses in danger of demolition. It also created a special recognition program for owners of the oldest homes, offering plaques for sale that designate properties either greater than 75 years old (colored maroon) or more than a century old (black).
A bit of the home's history is sometimes included on the plaque, which makes it fun to stroll the streets and consider the folks who came before. "Woodrow Wilson is reputed to have been a guest," read one plaque near our bed-and-breakfast.
"This building was the residence of Edward Dudley, the first governor of North Carolina elected by the people in 1836," read another.
After the carriage tour, we meandered the Riverwalk, a mile-long boardwalk along the Cape Fear, which offers access to restaurants and shops, park benches and picnic tables.
The boardwalk stretches the length of downtown, a compact and walkable space, filled with tourists and office workers during the day and supplemented by students from the nearby University of North Carolina-Wilmington campus at night.
We browsed through the Cotton Exchange, a collection of historic buildings (including a former cotton exporter) that is now home to 25 shops; and the City Market, an old vegetable market now filled with T-shirts, handmade soap, jewelry and more.
Our souvenir allotments all spent, we had an even tougher choice to make: where to eat. With nearly 50 restaurants inside a five-block radius, we couldn't possibly try all the food worth sampling in this city.
Fortunately, we chose well, enjoying classic French fare at Caprice Bistro, a few steps from the riverfront.
Mansion tells a Civil War story
The next morning, it was decision time again: With time to tour just one historic home, I was divided: Revolutionary War era or Civil War?
A window atop the Civil War-era Bellamy Mansion frames a view of Wilmington's First Baptist Church.Bellamy, a secessionist, "wanted to build a big showplace of Southern historical wealth to stick it to the Yankees," said Don Behmer, a Pennsylvania transplant to Wilmington, who guided me through the massive home.
The Yankees, I think it's safe to say, got the last laugh.
The house is an impressive mix of Greek Revival meets Southern comfort: Corinthian columns combined with wraparound porch. Bellamy also was an early adopter of new technology, using gas chandeliers to light the house and a cistern and pump to distribute hot and cold water throughout the building.
Bellamy used dozens of free and enslaved black men and women to build the 22-room, 10,000-square-foot showpiece. Behind the house is a stark reminder of the true cost of construction: The two-story, all-brick building housed as many as nine slaves before the war (and servants afterward). The building is one of the few remaining urban slave quarters still standing in the United States.
Bellamy and his family lived in the house for just 18 months before they were forced to flee, in part because of the escalating Civil War. A bigger concern: a raging yellow-fever epidemic that was killing thousands in town.
The Bellamys returned in 1865 to find the Union Army occupying the house. Bellamy successfully sought a presidential pardon from Andrew Johnson before he could reclaim the property.
After the war, the Bellamy family remained in the house through 1946. A fire in the early 1970s extinguished talk of rehabilitation until the late 1990s, when the North Carolina Preservation Society took over the restoration and opened the home for tours.
(Left for my next visit: The Burgwin-Wright mansion, two blocks away, built in 1770 by John Burgwin, treasurer of the colony of Carolina. Eleven years later, it was taken over by Lord Charles Cornwallis, the British general accused of "losing America" during the Revolutionary War. Costumed interpreters offer guided tours of the Colonial-era home.)
WWII battleship holds sailors' memories
A
small fishing boat on the Cape Fear River is dwarfed by the USS North
Carolina, a World War II battleship that is now a museum.The USS North Carolina, the most highly decorated battleship of World War II, was slated to be sold for scrap in the late 1950s when a grass-roots effort in Wilmington brought the ship back to her namesake state.
The North Carolina, now permanently moored in the Cape Fear River across from downtown, participated in every major naval offensive in the Pacific during World War II, and helped establish the role of battleships as protectors of aircraft carriers.
Nicknamed the Showboat by veteran journalist Walter Winchell, the ship was designed to house 1,800 men but held as many as 2,300 by war's end. She was hit by enemy fire only once, in September 1942, when a Japanese torpedo slammed into her hull.
Veterans of the U.S. Navy -- and there appeared to be many poking around the ship the day of our tour -- probably have their own reasons for visiting.
For the rest of us: This is an eye-opening reminder of the sacrifices made by the men and women in uniform during wartime.
"Can you imagine being stuck on this ship for months at a time?" I asked my husband as we climbed up and down the narrow staircases; took a seat on a metal bunk, stacked five high; and tried to channel the heat of the engine room, which sometimes reached a scorching 135 degrees.
The short answer: no.
As we toured parts of nine levels of the ship, we read excerpts of interviews and diary entries from the men who served (diaries were prohibited, though that rule apparently was regularly broken).
Their words brought this 729-foot-long hunk of metal to life:
"I went in the Navy weighing 135 or 140 pounds. I came out weighing 225," wrote one. "I loved SOS. Beef on toast."
Not everyone had words of praise for the kitchen staff: "You had to watch to make sure they didn't put gravy on your ice cream," wrote one.
Walking around the deck underscored the seriousness of what was at stake for the men aboard.
My daughters were all smiles as they climbed behind a couple of the 40mm gun mounts and pretended to fire, as their father snapped their photos.
Nearby, an electrician's mate wrote these words on Sept. 15, 1942: "We have been torpedoed. Will write later. I hope."
Five men were killed that day.
On location in Wilmywood
Fortunately, Wilmington's history isn't always so deadly serious. In recent years, it has been downright entertaining.
In 1984, producer Dino De Laurentiis opened a movie studio here, lured both by the region's diverse scenery and its nonunion labor force. Over the years, hundreds of movies and TV shows have been filmed here, earning the town the nicknames of Hollywood East and (my favorite) Wilmywood. Among the credits: "Divine Sisters of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," "Sleeping With the Enemy," "Nights in Rodanthe" and "The Secret Life of Bees"
But the town's screen credits are perhaps best defined by a couple of teen-angst-filled TV dramas, "Dawson's Creek," which aired from 1998 to 2003, and "One Tree Hill,"
"We lost our 15-year run of teenage anxiety," quipped Mike Hartley, who goes by the name of Spiel Stevenburg when he's leading walking tours of film and TV sites throughout downtown. "Iron Man 3 arrived just in time."
Since "One Tree Hill" finished filming, tours of the EUE/Screen Gem Studios complex have been discontinued -- so my older daughter and I signed up for the Hollywood Location Walk guided by Hartley, a Lakewood native who migrated south in the early 1980s to launch an acting career.
Hartley, an extra in numerous films, also teaches children's acting classes -- and entertains groups of tourists with anecdotes about visiting stars, revealing to our group, for example, where we might catch Downey having lunch (though, sigh, we never did see him), or how "One Tree Hill" star and teen heartthrob Chad Michael Murray refused to sign autographs.
He took us past the alley where Mandy Moore tells Shane West she's dying in "A Walk to Remember," the restaurant where the Ya-Yas drug Sandra Bullock so they can take her home to her mother in "The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," and the bar that houses the rowboat that is Katie Holmes' chief mode of transportation in "Dawson's Creek."
Hartley quips that among the long list of movies shot in Wilmington, two are conspicuously absent: both "Cape Fear" movies (the 1962 version with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum and the 1991 remake with Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte). "That would be too obvious," he joked. "They were made in Florida."
He also lamented: "We're Hollywood East, and we don't have a single movie theater downtown."
And while a movie theater would be nice, downtown does have five venues for live performances, including majestic Thalian Hall, built in 1858 and home to music, theater and dance shows, as well as the occasional art house film (oddly, it also doubles as City Hall); and the 50-seat Red Barn Studio Theatre, founded in 2007 by veteran actress Linda Lavin, who moved to Wilmington in the 1990s after filming a movie here.
Given the choice of seeing Lavin, Aniston or Downey on the big screen or in person, I'd take in person.
It would be my chance to see history in the making -- in a town that's been making history for what seems like forever.
No comments:
Post a Comment