Wrightsville Beach is a four-mile barrier island in New Hanover County, just east of Wilmington, with a permanent population of around 2,500 and a summer one many times that. It has been a resort for well over a century, and the story of how it got that way involves a trolley company, a pavilion so bright that sailors used it to navigate, and a resort that burned down after three summers.
We work on the island regularly, so this is the version we’ve picked up along the way — with sources at the end if you want to go further.
The first formal claim on this stretch of coast dates to 1725, when the Lords Proprietors granted Charles Harrison 640 acres near what’s now the Heide Trask Bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway.
For the next century and a half not much happened, mainly because getting there was difficult. The marshy area known as the Hammocks — today’s Harbor Island — could be reached on foot over a bridge. The beach itself could only be reached by boat. That single fact shaped everything: an island you had to sail to was never going to become a day-trip destination.
The first permanent building on the beach wasn’t a house or a hotel. In 1883 seven local men who liked to race boats founded the Carolina Yacht Club, now among the oldest yacht clubs in the country. It stood alone on the sand, reachable only by water.
Access arrived over the following decade. A post office called Wrightsville opened in 1881. Shell Road opened in 1887, shortening the trip from Wilmington. The town incorporated in 1899. The name honours Joshua G. Wright, a prominent Wilmington figure whose family held land nearby.
The person who changed the island’s trajectory most, though, was Hugh MacRae. By consolidating Wilmington’s electricity and transport under one company, MacRae could run a streetcar line out to the beach — and then had every commercial reason to give people something to ride it for.
What he built was Lumina, and it opened on 3 June 1905 at the end of the trolley line.
The logic was circular and rather brilliant. MacRae’s company sold electricity and ran the trolleys, so a spectacular electrically-lit pavilion at the end of the route advertised both at once. Over a thousand incandescent bulbs covered the building. It was bright enough that ships offshore reportedly used it as a navigation reference.
Inside, the ground floor held dressing rooms, refreshment stands, a bowling alley and a restaurant. The second floor was a dance hall with a balcony and a band shell. The third held a fifteen-foot promenade looking down over the dancing. Expansions in 1909 and 1913 took it to roughly 25,000 square feet. In the silent film era a screen was raised on pilings out on the sand so films could be watched from the beach.
Over the decades Lumina hosted Big Band acts, jazz musicians including Cab Calloway, later rock acts, and the Miss North Carolina pageant. One local account credits it as the birthplace of the shag in 1928.
What killed it was the car. Highway construction from the mid-1930s and a road bridge to the beach made the trolley redundant, and the last one ran in 1940. Once people could drive anywhere, a pavilion at the end of a streetcar line lost its reason to exist. Hurricane Hazel damaged the building in 1954. It limped on as a skating rink and then a bar, was condemned in 1972, and demolished in 1973. Condominiums stand there now.
The island’s most significant history is also its least visible.
In 1923 the Home Realty Company bought a 70-acre strip of sand at the northern end — then separated from Wrightsville Beach by Moore’s Inlet — and developed it as a beach resort for Black visitors, at a time when segregation closed almost every other stretch of Southern coast to them. It was advertised as a Negro Atlantic City. There was a pavilion, a bathhouse, concessions, boardwalks and a pier, and the main draw was the music, mostly jazz.
Getting there meant taking the streetcar to Harbor Island and then a ferry across the inlet, which ran several times a day. Visitors came from as far as New York and Alabama. Later that year five prominent Black businessmen formed the Shell Island Beach Resort Development Company with plans for hotels and restaurants.
It lasted three summers. In 1926 a series of fires destroyed every structure on the island. The cause was never established. Some accounts at the time and since have suggested arson by white residents angered by the resort’s success; local historians have also pointed out that investor interest had already been fading and that the fire proved convenient for the developers. The evidence doesn’t settle it either way.
Nothing was rebuilt. The land sat empty until 1965, when the Army Corps of Engineers closed Moore’s Inlet and Shell Island stopped being an island. Houses appeared from the late 1960s, Wrightsville Beach annexed the area in 1985 — and this time the development was for white residents.
Any history of a barrier island is partly a history of what the weather took away.
Hurricane Hazel in 1954 remains the only Category 4 storm on record to make landfall in North Carolina, and it did severe damage here. Bertha and Fran both struck in 1996. Florence came ashore near Wrightsville Beach in September 2018.
Johnnie Mercer’s Pier is the clearest illustration of the cycle. Built in 1937 as the Ocean View Pier — the third pier in the state — it was renamed when Johnnie Mercer bought it in 1939, and it has been destroyed and rebuilt more than once since. The current concrete structure exists because the wooden ones didn’t survive.
That rhythm of damage and rebuilding is why so much of the island’s building stock is newer than its history suggests, and why the surviving early cottages matter as much as they do.
The Wrightsville Beach Museum of History occupies the Myers Cottage, an early-20th-century beach house, and holds a model of Lumina along with exhibits on surfing, bathing suits and daily island life.
The museum also runs Loop Through History, a pop-up exhibit of twenty-five interpretive signs placed around the 2.45-mile Loop, the walking and running route locals use daily. It’s up several weekends a year and is the easiest way to take the history in without going indoors.
A state historical marker for Lumina stands on Waynick Boulevard between Nathan and Iula Streets. Several buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places, including the James D. and Frances Sprunt Cottage on North Lumina Avenue, built in 1937.
Wrightsville Beach covers about 2.27 square miles, roughly 1.4 of it land. The town is really three parts: the beach island itself, Harbor Island behind it across Banks Channel, and some commercial property on the mainland. Masonboro Inlet marks the southern end; Figure Eight Island lies to the north.
Sailing has been continuous since those 1883 regattas. Surfing arrived mid-century and stuck, and paddleboarding, kayaking and kiteboarding have joined it. Sea turtle nesting programmes and regular beach cleanups run through the season.
As part of the Wilmington film industry — Hollywood East — the island has appeared on screen plenty, most famously in Dawson’s Creek.
We’re a veteran and family owned junk removal company based in Wilmington, and Wrightsville Beach is part of our regular run. If you need a rental cleared between tenants, storm debris hauled, or salt-worn outdoor furniture taken away, see our junk removal in Wrightsville Beach page, or call us on 910-310-5115.