Cape Fear Lost

Progress is a contradictory term, one that inherently means an improvement of luxury and an advancement of technology, yet usually at the expense of a community’s identity, traditions, and history. Though many buildings survived Civil War skirmishes and Northern occupation during Reconstruction, these same structures did not escape the plans of ambitious entrepreneurs and thus disappeared from Wilmington’s landscape, only to be replaced, over time, by shopping plazas and nationally recognizable commercial facades. Cape Fear Lost celebrates places that have vanished from presentday Wilmington. In this volume of more than 200 photographs, you will be able to explore the Wilmington of a bygone era, one punctuated by unpaved tree-lined streets and architecturally diverse dwellings. As you thumb through these pages, you will experience firsthand the beauty of many former mansions scattered throughout the downtown area, familiar churches, civic buildings and schools that once dotted the cityscape, the many businesses that utilized the pedestrian, horse-and-wagon, and shipping traffic along Market Street, and the transformation of Wrightsville Beach and Carolina Beach from humble summer bungalows into major tourist retreats. These varied scenes allow you an extraordinary insight into this coastal community’s changing character over the past century and a half.